Facing the museum would be the palace of the
Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present
company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the
conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from
the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After
this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn,
and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset
light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Sep-timius Severus's
marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.
In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader
ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the
dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or with-otit
to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be,
beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the
presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled
around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the
private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he
can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic
archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long,
velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly
rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.
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