were lord of this vast, melancholy, romantic pile, the natural scene of some stately poem, the fitting frame of some picture like Millais' pathetic "Huguenot Lover," the sure source of an inspiration lofty, noble, vague, and richly proportioned. Everything is on a scale of magnificence, such as suggests only extravagance to our dwarfed notions of the proprieties of life; a modern visitor feels a pigmy in those vast, re-echoing halls; he almost expects some Brobdingnag halberdier in cloth of gold and scarlet to catch him up by the hair as some insect curiosity, or at least to order him out as an impertinent intruder; the great marble staircase seems to be alive with the shades of the noble throngs who, in Spanish doublets, jewelled _toques_, needle-like swords, and stiff neck-ruffs, used to parade the courtly scene--in fact, he finds himself utterly overwhelmed by the phantoms of a greatness that is dead; swamped by the flood of modern days that has brought in a generation of monkeys to consume their lives in efforts to fill the place of a generation of lions. Again, the traveller may find other sights among the villas of the Lake of Como--less pleasant sights, too, and jarring on the artist's sense of fitness; as, for instance, when he finds a wealthy and prosaic _paterfamilias_, of the class who do not know and care less what antiquity means--unless it may mean shabbiness--established in placid and ludicrous possession of some stately abode such as we have named. Of course, this unappreciative being, with his robust wife and chubby olive-branches, is of the great, dominant, self-sufficient Anglo-Saxon race, with its grand physical contempt of everything that is foreign, but its keen national determination to take timely advantage of everything that is cheap. He may be from our own or the other of the Atlantic shores; from the cotton-mills of England or the oil-wells of America; but he will invariably be a man of prosaic and practical tendencies, quite impervious to the romance of his new home, but perfectly alive to its value as a good speculation and an economical venture. You will never find an artist or a scholar thus established; _they_ will be penned up in a white-washed room of some peasant's cottage, or, if lucky members of their craft, in the "best room" of the _Signor Curato's_ little presbytery. They, too, are on the lookout for cheap lodgings; but what is cheap to the careful millionaire is the height of impossible extravagance to the gifted brain-worker. And for our part, if we had to share the home of either of these two classes of lake tourists, we should much prefer a shake-down at the white-washed cottage, with the human counterweight of the artist, than the surroundings of marble halls, spacious, deserted gardens, and ghost-haunted staircases, if balanced by the incongruous presence of the prosperous family before mentioned. What poetic justice is it which sternly forbids the tenantship of such abodes to be interchanged?