estibule were covered with
inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety
of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and
we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality
were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P---- had
collected into earthen _amphorae_ the ashes of the most famous men of
ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their
number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was
conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne
in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the
thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the
cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.

We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by
the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons
of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our
sepulchral shelter.

Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden
already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping
statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we
reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key
to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and
in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on
reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site
of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps
through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a
yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from
masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in
spite of Signor P----, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather.
The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality
gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were
come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and
hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian,
lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went
before.

We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the
guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino's
time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect
grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P---- with Latin
inscriptions.