In Italy, more than in any other part of the world, the life of the present rests upon the strata of successive past lives. And although Bizet was no student, carrying in his knapsack a superfluity of culture, this place appealed to him from the moment that he came to it, and the memory of it lingered long in after days. The villa itself was a revelation to him. The masterpiece of Renaissance façade over which the artist would seem to have exhausted a veritable mine of Greek and Roman bas-reliefs; the garden with its lawns surrounded by hedges breast-high, trimmed to the evenness of a stone-wall; the green alleys overshadowed by ilex trees; the marble statues looking forlornly regretful at Time's defacing treatment; the terrace with its oaks gnarled and twisted with age; the fountains; the roses; the flower-beds; and in the distance, "over the dumb Campagna-sea," the hills melting into light under the evening sky--all these made an _intaglio_ upon him such as was not readily to be effaced, and which he learned to love. Perhaps because, after all, Italy is even more the land of beauty than of what is venerable in art, he did not feel the want of what Mr. Symonds calls the "mythopoeic sense." It is a land ever young, in spite of age. Its monuments, assertive as they are, so blend with the landscape, are so in harmony with the surroundings, that the yawning gulf of years that would separate us from them is made to vanish, and they come to live with us. And the place was teeming with tradition. From the time, 1540, when it had been designed by Hannibal Lippi for Cardinal Ricci, passing thence into the hands of Alexandro de' Medici, and later into those of Leo XI., it had been the home of art; and then, on its acquisition by the French Academy in 1804, it became the home of artists. Here had lived and worked and dreamed David, Ingres, Delaroche, Vernet, Hérold, Benoist, Halévy, Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod, and the minor host of them. In truth the list awed Bizet not a little, and had he needed an incentive here it was. For the rest, he was supremely content. As a _pensionnaire_ of the Academy he had two hundred francs a month, and he apportioned them in this wise: _Nourriture_, 75fr.; _vin_, 25fr.; _retenue_, 25fr.; _location de piano_, 15fr.; _blanchissage_, 5fr.; _bois_, _chandelles_, _timbre-poste_, _&c._, 10fr.; _gants_, 5fr.; _perte sur le change de la monnaie,_ 5fr. Even then he wrote: "I have more than thirty francs _pour faire le grand garçon_." In another letter he says: "I seem to cling to Rome more than ever. The longer I know it, the more I love it. Everything is so beautiful. Each street--even the filthiest of them--has its own charm for me. And perhaps what is most astonishing of all, is that those very things which startled me most on my arrival, have now become a part of and necessary to my very existence--the madonnas with their little lamps at every corner; the linen hanging out to dry from the windows; the