e
embowered in verdure. The little garden of Santa Sabina, the birthplace
of the Dominican order, is closed on all sides and affords no view: it
slumbers in quiescence, warm and perfumed by its orange-trees, amongst
which that planted by St. Dominic stands huge and gnarled but still laden
with ripe fruit. At the adjoining Priorato, however, the garden, perched
high above the Tiber, overlooks a vast expanse, with the river and the
buildings on either bank as far as the summit of the Janiculum. And in
these gardens of Rome Pierre ever found the same clipped box-shrubs, the
same eucalypti with white trunks and pale leaves long like hair, the same
ilex-trees squat and dusky, the same giant pines, the same black
cypresses, the same marbles whitening amidst tufts of roses, and the same
fountains gurgling under mantling ivy. Never did he enjoy more gentle,
sorrow-tinged delight than at the Villa of Pope Julius, where all the
life of a gay and sensual period is suggested by the semi-circular
porticus opening on the gardens, a porticus decorated with paintings,
golden trellis-work laden with flowers, amidst which flutter flights of
smiling Cupids. Then, on the evening when he returned from the Farnesina,
he declared that he had brought all the dead soul of ancient Rome away
with him, and it was not the paintings executed after Raffaelle's designs
that had touched him, it was rather the pretty hall on the river side
decorated in soft blue and pink and lilac, with an art devoid of genius
yet so charming and so Roman; and in particular it was the abandoned
garden once stretching down to the Tiber, and now shut off from it by the
new quay, and presenting an aspect of woeful desolation, ravaged, bossy
and weedy like a cemetery, albeit the golden fruit of orange and citron
tree still ripened there.

And for the last time a shock came to Pierre's heart on the lovely
evening when he visited the Villa Medici. There he was on French soil.*
And again what a marvellous garden he found with box-plants, and pines,
and avenues full of magnificence and charm! What a refuge for antique
reverie was that wood of ilex-trees, so old and so sombre, where the sun
in declining cast fiery gleams of red gold amidst the sheeny bronze of
the foliage. You ascend by endless steps, and from the crowning belvedere
on high you embrace all Rome at a glance as though by opening your arms
you could seize it in its entirety. From the villa's dining-room,
decorated