igned within. The
old Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative value
of the floor--the real economy there was, in the production of rich
interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they
trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness;
but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a
piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old
age. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little
cedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant
Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to
Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber,
curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion,
still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of
Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old
Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the [20] thing, as it
seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of
which it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine golden
laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus
also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white
pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed
windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape--the
pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the
purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble
going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark
headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer
nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of
the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.

Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral
or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the
whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar
sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the
deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can
give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them--the
"subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many a
Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter,
still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21] such
considerations regarding them do