and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the statues that had
lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly
whitewashed their statues, and there was a horrible primness about certain
of the well-kept gardens which offended me. Most of the houses were not
large, but there was here and there a palace as grand as any in the city.
Such was the great villa of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every
way superb, with two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a
gravel walk, over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a
mile before it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a clean-
shaven old canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a book
under his arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so
venerably picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had
known, when I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its
cellar to the chapel,--wherein, when you get half way, your light goes
out, and you consequently never reach the chapel.

This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent
country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely any
addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated
Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice
and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found
expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed
away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees, bullied
and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn to come
upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and patches. How can
you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of eighteenth-century
corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world without digging up old
putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt if you will care to know
much of the way in which the noble owner of such a villa ascended the
Brenta at the season of the _villeggiatura_ in his great gilded