Since Evelyn’s time eight generations have also found these pleasure-grounds delightful. As full of memories as of fragrance, these gardens convey a sense of human life once lived among them and now forever gone, which is as poignant as the smell of the boxwood hedges in the hot sunshine. The Villa Borghese has pre-eminently this subtle quality, and therefore it has become the loveliest as well as the best beloved of all Roman villas; and it is precisely because it is a Roman garden that its memories are so compelling. The men and women who have walked in these long avenues and lingered about these fountains have been the aristocracy of mankind. England, France, and Germany come here to gather memories of their great men. Statues to Goethe and Victor Hugo are not needed. Hugo and Goethe and many more of these noble ghosts come back, together with a long line of splendid popes and brilliant cardinals, to haunt the sun-warmed yet shadowy places, never jostling or disturbing the living but felt by the living in some strange and undefinable way. [Illustration: The Fountain of the Amorini.] These groves and fountains have been the setting for many scenes in Life’s dramas. There has been a Napoleonic interlude with dancing, masquerading, and somewhat boisterous merrymaking; and here, amid the loveliness of an alien civilization, began the last act in the tragedy of the Stuart Kings. The son of the exiled James II of England lived and died in Rome, and his children--Prince Charlie and the little Duke of York--played beneath these trees, as scores of other brothers of less fateful history have played before and since.[K] Here they came every morning with their fowling-pieces. High-spirited English lads, they made of the Italian groves a Sherwood Forest of their own. It was a far cry at that time to Culloden, and a long way to the cathedral of Frascati, where the younger brother was to read the funeral service over the elder. Time means so little in Rome that here in the villa where the Stuart Princes played, the “adventure of the ’45” seems to have happened only yesterday. The villa is at its loveliest in May and October. On every Thursday and Sunday of this latter month it used to be the custom for the Prince Borghese to receive all Rome within his gates. Forty to fifty thousand people would sometimes come to these garden-parties, all classes mingling yet preserving their identity with the admirable dignity and self-respect of the Romans. The young Princess Gwendolin Borghese was seen for the last time at one of these great fêtes. Her saintly young spirit adds a breath as of incense to the Borghese gardens, and it is more easy to think of her presence here than among the ponderous marbles of the Borghese Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore where she lies buried.