x stories besides the attics; and is pierced with no less than 1700
windows. Its stair, the very perfection of that sort of construction,
is vast in all its dimensions, and so very easy, that you look down
from its summit admiring, with untried lungs, the enormous height you
have reached. It starts double from the ground, and twenty persons
might ascent either branch abreast, and meet one another at the spot
where it begins to return upon itself; so that the noble octagonal
landing above finds itself just over the starting-place below. From
this post four large windows command four spacious courts, and the
simple construction of this gigantic edifice stands unveiled. You now
begin your journey through vast, lofty, magnificently marbled, and
very ill-furnished apartments, of which, before you have completed the
half circuit of a single floor, you are heartily tired, for, beyond
the architecture, there is nothing to see. The commonest broker's shop
would furnish better pictures. Boar-hunts of course, to represent how
Neapolitan kings kill boars at Portici, and shoot wild-ducks on the
_Lago di Fusina_. There is also an ample historical fresco on the
ceiling of the antechamber to the throne-room, on which Murat _had_
caused to be represented some notable _charge_ where he proved
victorious; but after he was shot, Ferdinand, with great taste,
judgment, and good feeling, _erased_, _interpolated_, and _altered_
the picture into a harmless battle of Trojans against Greeks, or some
such thing! The palace has two theatres and a chapel; and you must
change your conductor four times if you would be led through the
whole. For this enormous edifice boasts of only twelve servants, at
eleven dollars a-month from the privy purse. Caserta, which, even in
its present imperfect state, has cost 7,000,000 scudi, is raised
amidst a swarm of paupers, who are permitted to besiege the stranger,
and impede his progress, with an importunity such as could be shown by
none but men on the eve of famishing. We _never_ saw such a population
of beggars as those which infest the walls of this most sumptuous
palace and its park--but the park is a park indeed! It may have
something of the formality of Versailles or Chantilly; but its leading
features are essentially English; its thickets and copses abound in
hares and pheasants. The ilex attains twice the height we remember to
have seen it reach elsewhere. Its islands and fishponds, its kitchen
and flower-g