work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their close, rose only
some thirty or forty feet from the ground--only high enough, indeed, to
join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which pierced them on two
facades. There must have been barracks near; for on the sward, under the
walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers were practicing the
bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the point. "_Ein, zwei,
drei,--vorwaerts! Ein, zwei, drei,--ruckwaerts_!" snarled the drill-
sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers--who may have soon
afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the more effectively for
that day's training--stooped, writhed, and leaped obedient. I, who had
already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall bearing the name of
Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the military performance on
that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting from the gondola, to get by
the soldiers without being forced back at the padded point of a pole, and
offered no audible objection to their presence.

So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel to
the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly
sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew from
their arches, and hung down like the "overwhelming brows" of age. Within,
at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of stone, and
here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic caryatides,
that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight for their
gentle beauty--and everywhere the unnamable filth with which ruin is
always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque and
historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the senses
and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this incurable
_porcheria_, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such
desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner,
where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space about