And yet it was a lovely scene, and a moment of sweet and calm enjoyment, as three young people sat together on the lower step of a terrace near Vigevano, with a fountain gushing and murmuring some twenty feet above, and a beautiful garden filled with mulberry-trees and vines, and some oranges, not very luxuriant, but diffusing a pleasant but languid odour round. The eye wandered over the shrubs and trees to the lands watered by the Ticino on its way to Pavia; and beyond, in the evening light, long lines of undulating country were marked out in the deep blue tints peculiar to the distant scenery of Italy. The terrace, below which the three were seated, was long and wide, and rising therefrom, near the centre, was one face of a villa, built in a style of which few specimens remain. The taste and genius of Palladio had not yet given to the villa-architecture of Lombardy that lightness and grace which formed the characteristic of a new style of art. There was something, at that time, in every country-house of Italy of the heavy, massive repulsiveness of the old castello. But yet the dawn of a better epoch was apparent, in the works of Andrea Palladio's great master, Trissino; and in the very villa of which I speak, though here and there a strong, tall tower was apparent, and the basement story contained stone enough to have built a score of modern houses, much ornament of a light and graceful character had been lavished upon the whole building, as if to conceal that it was constructed for defence as well as enjoyment. Indeed, as is generally the case, there was a certain harmony between the times and state of society and the constructions of the period. The Italian smiled, and revelled, and feasted, and called in music, and song, and poetry, to cover over the dangers, and the griefs, and the terrors of every day; and the palace in the city, or the villa in the country, was often as richly decorated as if its massy inner walls were never intended to preserve the life and fortune of its owner from the hands of rude assailants, nor its halls ever to witness deeds of horror and cruelty within their dark recesses.