treach'rous smiled,
And of green griefs and sorrows wild,
Resuscitates the pain."

THE VILLA ALBANI.

An Italian villa is like any other Italian belle; we would rather pay
either a morning visit than summer and winter with them; both dress
themselves out for strangers, and often at the expense of their
rightful owners. An Italian villa is very charming for a brief spring,
malarious in summer and autumn, and incommodiously furnished for every
season. _Comfort_ makes but slow progress abroad, and has not yet
found its way into Italy at all; neither into her dictionaries as a
_name_, nor into her dwellings as a _thing_. What should we,
ease-loving English, think of a house, which, lined with marbles and
frescoes, carpeted with mosaics and adorned with statues, offered
nothing but niches and marble curule chairs to write on and to sit in?
Yet such is the general scheme and internal arrangement throughout
most villas in Italy; for as to the prime of the house, the _piano
nobile, that_ belongs as by prescriptive right to the Caesars, being
indeed only fitted for impassive marble and bronze emperors:--while
the over-hospitable entertainer of these august guests is content to
stow away himself and family in apartments which are frequently little
better than our offices for menials, in which his few articles of
rococo furniture, of all sorts and sizes, are crazy, cumbersome,
undusted, and ill-matched; in short, more like the promiscuous
contents of some inferior broker's shop, than the elegant
_ameublement_ we might have expected to correspond to the profusion of
objects of _vertu_ which grace the principal show-rooms of the
mansion. At home, we may differ in our notions about comfort in the
details, but there are certain conditions which are rightly held
essential to its possible existence; and if "the cold neat parlour,
and the gay glazed bed," have their admirers, it is because
cleanliness and neatness are two of them: but in Italy we look in vain
for either, and there is nothing to compensate their absence. Few
Englishmen could engage in literary labour in the fireless,
ill-furnished rooms which throughout Italy are a matter of course;
where carpets, curtains, or an easy chair, are unknown luxuries; and
into which, entering by various ill-placed and worse fitting windows
and doors, confluent draughts catch you in all directions, turning the
_sanctum_ of study into a perfect Temple of the Winds! Yet, to so