Under the high ground still held in place by a great retaining wall were grottos beautifully decorated by stucco and painting and icy cold even in summer. In the woods, where the Italian pastime of snaring birds was carefully provided for, there were accommodations for every kind of animal, and everywhere there were fountains, marble seats, and antique garden statuary. Louis XIV, for whom careful plans of the villa were drawn, wisely made no attempt to copy the enchanted palace of Italy. Versailles makes up in size for the beauty of color, architecture, vegetation, and art treasures here formed into one beautiful whole by Pope Julius III. The shape of the Villa Giulia is significant. It is a series of gardens, loggias, and courts, one enclosing the other, each richer in ornamentation, more ravishing in beauty than the last, until finally the heart of the creation is reached, and the “secret fountain” of the Acqua Vergine is discovered flowing out of the shadow and from a hidden source into a sunlit Nymphæum of marvellous beauty and again mysteriously disappearing into the shadow. The Fountain of the Virgins, as it came to be called, was felt by its creator, Amannati, to be beyond the power of description. Writing to a friend in Padua, soon after Pope Julius’s death, he describes the entire villa in extraordinary detail, noting the attitude even of many of the statues; but when, after pages of description, he has brought his reader to the lowest court of all, his pen fails him and he says that unless he can paint a picture of this court and fountain he will never be able to give his friend “any conception of this, the loveliest, richest, and most marvellous place in the entire creation.” Amannati saw it in its first splendor. The caryatides were perfect, white, and gleaming, and perhaps beautiful. The niches round about were filled with marble boys carrying urns upon their shoulders from which the water was poured into the semicircular stream at their feet. It is impossible to tell from the description of the old pictures what, if any, statue filled the central niche behind the virgins. At present the niche holds a great white marble swan, now almost hidden by fern, from whose bill the water trickles into the black pool beneath. The pavement, made of every conceivable kind of marble, glowed like a jewel. The balustrade above held graceful statues and on either side of the court just above stood a great plane-tree, giving delicious verdure and shade. Then, as now, the water came from large reservoirs hidden beneath the upper terrace to the east of the fountain; then, as now, it was carried off over gentle, rough-paved inclines; then, as now, it fell steeply into a subterranean cavern--the entire construction producing waves of cool air and a ripple and murmur of water exquisitely refreshing to both eye and ear. It is almost necessary to forgive Pope Julius his attack upon the aqueduct. Never before or since has the Acqua Vergine received such