But he must have meant this for
a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees
overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from
running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues,
broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and
fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes
crowding the space beneath; of fragmentary gods or giants half hid in
the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently done
for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might have been
expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If there was design in
the treatment of the propitious ground, self-shaped to an irregular
amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and the cultiavted tourist of our day
may reasonably please himself with the belief that he is having a better
time there than the academic Roman of the sixteenth century.
Academic it all is, however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I
have so signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am
going to let a far politer observer celebate the beauties of the other
supreme interest of Tivoli.
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