splendor
of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich
carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries
(among which the tapestry copies of Raphael's cartoons, woven at
Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder);
and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which
caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow
and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay,
they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the
usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery,
from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there
was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern
landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its
unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan
duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures
were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a
hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked
with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a
hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It
occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and
flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the
earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level
with the second floor, on which they stood.

After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled
apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco,
and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony
overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after
a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and
was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all
found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see
them in that cartoon of Raphael, "The Healing of the Lame Man at the
Beautiful Gate of the Temple"; and here once stood the jolly dukes and
the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode
the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the
city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in
weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees.
The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian
baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to ca