William Rufus designed to build a palace
so huge, that Westminster Hall, the first
instalment thereof, was to be but one of the
bed-rooms. Luckily, the state of the civil
list, and Sir Walter Tyrell's pointed behaviour
to the king in the New Forest, nipped the
grand design in the bud. Louis Quatorze
had Versailles, the Abencerrages their
Alhambra, the gloomy Philip his palatial
gridiron, the Escurial; but we can forgive the
first for the Grandes Eaux, the second for the
Court of Lions, the third for the pictures of
Titian and Velasquez. Frederic had his
Sans-Souci, Leo his Loggie and Stanze,
Napoleon his dream of a completed Louvre,
never realised; even our third William took
pleasure in enlarging Kensington, and making
it square and Dutch, and formal like himself.
But there was, it must be owned, something
regal, and noble, and dignified in most of
these architectural madnesses. When a king
raves it should be in his robe and diadem,
with gold for straw, and his sceptre for a
bauble. But did ever a petty German princelet
in his hunting-lodge—did ever a petty
Indian nawaub in his zenana—did ever a
Dutch burgher in his linsey-woolsey frenzy for
a lusthaus—did ever an impoverished Italian
marchese, in the palazzo he began to build
through pride, and left unfinished through
bankruptcy—did ever a retired English
hatter, going mad, as it is the traditional wont
of hatters to do, and running up a brick
Folly, in three storeys, with a balcony and a
belvedere—did ever any maniac in bricks and
mortar perpetrate one tithe of the folly and
extravagance that are manifested in every
inch of this egregious potato-blight of a
building on the S.?

I mind the time (a child) I used to gaze on
the place with reverent curiosity. A king
lived there then—a placid, white-headed
sovereign, in a blue body-coat with brass
buttons, and who had formerly been in the
naval service. He played quiet rubbers at
whist at night, while his royal partner and
the ladies of the household worked in Berlin
wool. It was rumoured that he could
himself play on the flute prettily. He had a
quiet decorous court. He used to drive out
peaceably, without any unnecessary fuss, and
was not unfrequently to be found on the
beach, bargaining with little boys for models
of ships, or with mariners for conchological
specimens of appalling and weird appearance.
He was popular, but suspected by the genteel
classes of a tendency to radicalism and
economy, which caused him to be slightly
depreciated in the higher circles. His name
was William. But the great king who dwelt
at Capri (and had made it), and who had
been dead some years before I came to
wot of the palace, was not William. A
loftier sounding name had he. He was
Georgius Optimus—George the great, the
magnificent, the good—who had raised Capri
from its mean state as a fishing-village to
the exalted rank of the queen of watering-
places.

So I moralised at Capri. George had gone
the way even that royal venison must go;
William, he is dead too; and we have
another sovereign who loves not the wicked
gimcrack. She would have pulled the bauble
down had not the bold burghers of Capri
stept in alarmed and bought it for fifty
thousand pieces of gold. They have turned
the place now to all manners of wonderful
and incongruous uses. They have
concerts there, balls where ladies can dance
without having first been presented at
court, and lords in blue ribbons are never
to be seen. They have exhibitions of pictures
and photographs. They have a circus there;
yes, a circus where spotted horses dance,
and M. Desarais' dogs and monkeys bark and
chatter, and Mr. Merryman, with his painted
face, tumbles in the sawdust! Pale men in
spectacles come from Clapham to Capri to
lecture on the Od. Force. I have seen there,
myself, exhibiting two wretched black
deformities of children—the Caribbean twins,
or some such monstrosities—hawked round
the room by a garrulous showman. I do not
despair of seeing, some day, at the gate of
the Pagoda a Beefeater inviting the
bystanders to walk in and see the Podasokus,
or Oozly Bird, which digs a hole in the sand
with his beak, and whistles through the nape
of his neck. The parochial authorities have
offices in the Pagoda, where they give out
quartern loaves and orders of relief, and pass
destitute hop-pickers to Ireland. The sentry-
boxes, in front of which brocaded hussars
used to pace, keeping watch and ward over
the sovereign within, are boarded up.
Irreverent boys have chalked denunciations of
the Pope, and libels on the police authorities,
on the boards. They have quartered militia-
men in the riding-school, that stately expanse
where all the king's satin-skinned horses used
to be exercised by the king's scarlet-coated
grooms. They have substituted a railing for
the wall that used to veil the mysteries of
Capri from the vulgar, and now every fly-
man on the S. can see the palace in its
entirety. They have thrown open the
gardens, and the rustic seats are now the resting-
places of nursery-maids and valetudinarians,
while the wheels of patent perambulators
and the heels of the shoes of plebeian
children, craunch the gravel which once
resounded with the tread of kings and princes,
duchesses and ministers of state. Placards
relative to the concerts and balls, the dogs
and monkeys, and the twins, the Courier of
St. Petersburg, and the next rate of
twopence in the pound, flank the portals where
yeomen of the guard have stood. They have
dismantled the great entrance-gate, and it is
as free of ingress to the pauper as all doors
are to death. I remember when I used to
regard that gate with awe and wonder, and
watch the royal carriage, with its brilliant