poetic treatment. Nothing remains of this beauty but the water and the masonry. Pope Julius was hardly buried before the spoliation of his villa began. Like the Pope’s beautiful resting-place behind the public fountain, the Nymphæum has endured three centuries of vile usage and neglect. Nowhere in Rome is it more necessary to use imagination than in the Villa Giulia. The visitor should descend into the lowest court on a day of brilliant sunshine and, standing before the Fountain of the Virgins, replace for himself the lost lustre of the columns, the whiteness of the balustrades, the rich coloring of mural paintings and stucco, and the gleam of antique statuary. He should see the flickering shadows cast by the great plane-trees across the marble pavement, and hear the birds twittering or calling from the aviaries which were in the loggia wall above the river-gods. He must fancy the fitful music of stringed instruments, the perfume from the orange groves drifting over the garden walls where sat the monkeys and brilliant tropical birds. He must feel the languid stir or deep repose of long, indolent, luxurious summer days, and through it all, he must be conscious of the water. Only so will he be able to form some adequate conception of what the “secret fountain” must have been in the days of Pope Julius III. The highest charm of the beautiful creation lay in its presentation of contrast translated into a medium suitable to every sense. It was an age of contrast, sharp and constant. No feature in the crowded Italian life of those two centuries is so striking as this. Fame and obloquy; triumphant health and the lazar-house; honor and exile; the luxury of an Agostino Chigi and the squalor of the beggar at his doors; compassion and fiendish cruelty, young Cardinal Borromeo’s sanctity on the one hand, and on the other unblushing licentiousness; beauty to which all but divine honors were paid, and hideous deformity; these lay open to the eye on every side. There seemed to be no transition. The “secret fountain,” with its light and shade, its rest and motion, sound and silence, its art and nature, was the poetic expression of life as it was known by the men for whom it was created. The records of those days are never free from blood, and at least one assassination is connected with the building of this house of mirth. Baronino, an associate of Vignola and Amannati, leaving the villa with a friend on a certain evening, was set upon as he turned into the Via Flaminia and stabbed to death. The angle in the walls made by the public fountain and the fact that it was a natural place for loiterers probably suggested the choice of the spot. The assassin’s identity was either never discovered or never revealed and the crime went unpunished, for Cellini was not the only lucky rascal. Artists especially carried their lives in their hands, and genius was as open to violence as it was to fame.