When Mr. Gray (as the poet loved to be
called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in May, 1740, the
Villa d'Este by no means shared the honors of the cataracts, and Mr.
Gray seems not to have thought it worth seriously describing in his
letter to Mr. West, but mocks the casino with a playful mention before
proceeding to speak fully, if still playfully, of the great attraction
of Tivoli: "Dame Nature . . . has built here three or four little
mountains and laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain
others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal into which
she has put a little river of hers called the Anio, . . . which she has
no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles down a declivity
fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to shatters, and is
converted into a shower of rain, where the sun forms many a bow--red,
green, blue, and yellow. . . . By this time it has divided itself, being
crossed and opposed by the rocks, into four several streams, each of
which, in emulation of the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it
does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you
have at one view all these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and
little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one
(that which forms the extremity of the half-circle's horns) is seated
the town itself.
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