I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we
went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in
the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily
accepted the present as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the
weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden
that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying
plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it
was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it. The truth
is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that
belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else,
wounds one's vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner's
rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it,
when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement
and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning
magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom
we attribute every fine and endearing quality.
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