St. Peter's. You proceed for some miles along a gradual descent without any object of much interest, pass the Tiber and the gate Del Popolo, and you are in Rome. When there, go any where but to Franks's Hotel, and get a lodging, if possible, on the Via Gregoriana, which overlooks the town, and where you can feast the eye and indulge in sentiment, without being poisoned by bad air. The house of Salvator Rosa is at present let out in lodgings. I have now lived twice in houses occupied by celebrated men, once in a house that had belonged to Milton, and now in this, and find to my mortification that imagination is entirely a thing imaginary, and has nothing to do with matter of fact, history, or the senses. To see an object of thought or fancy is just as impossible as to feel a sound or hear a smell.

CHAPTER XIX.

"As London is to the meanest country town, so is Rome to every other city in the world."

So said an old friend of mine, and I believed him till I saw it. This is not the Rome I expected to see. No one from being in it would know he was in the place that had been twice mistress of the world. I do not understand how Nicolas Poussin could tell, taking up a handful of earth, that it was " a part of the ETERNAL CITY." In Oxford an air of learning breathes from the very walls: halls and colleges meet your eye in every direction; you cannot for a moment forget where you are. In London there is a look of wealth and populousness which is to be found nowhere else. In Rome you are for the most part lost in a mass of tawdry, fulsome common-places. It is not the contrast of pig-styes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity, with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modern-built houses, that seem in search of an owner. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds grow

ing under an imperial arch offend me not; but what has a green-grocer's stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber's sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome? No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter's is not equal to St. Paul's: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I thought that here were works immoveable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not, or only what I had seen before in different ways: the Stanzas of Raphael are faded, or no better than the prints; and the mind of Michael Angelo's figures, of which no traces are to be found in the copies, is equally absent from the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Rome is great only in ruins: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine fully answered my expectations; and an air breathes round her stately avenues, serene, blissful, like the mingled breath of spring and winter, betwixt life and death, betwixt hope and despair. The country about Rome is cheerless and barren. There is little verdure, nor are any trees planted, on account of their bad effects on the air. Happy climate! in which shade and sunshine are alike fatal. The Jews (I may add while I think of it) are shut up here in a quarter by themselves. I see no reason

for it. It is a distinction not worth the making. There was a talk (it being Anno Santo) of shutting them up for the whole of the present year. A soldier stands at the gate, to tell you that this is the Jews' quarter, and to take any thing you choose to give him for this piece of Christian information. A Catholic church stands outside their prison, with a Crucifixion painted on it as a frontispiece, where they are obliged to hear a sermon in behalf of the truth of the Christian religion every Good Friday. On the same day they used to make them run races in the Corso, for the amusement of the rabble (high and low)—now they are compelled to provide horses for the same purpose. Owing to the politeness of the age, they no longer burn them as of yore, and that is something. Religious zeal, like all other things, grows old and feeble. They treat the Jews in this manner at Rome (as a local courtesy to St. Peter), and yet they compliment us on our increasing liberality to the Irish Catholics. The Protestant chapel here stands outside the walls, while there is a British monument to the memory of the Stuarts, inside of St. Peter's; the tombs in the English buryingground were destroyed and defaced not long ago; yet this did not prevent the Prince Regent from exchanging portraits with the Pope and his Ministers!" Oh! liberalism-lovely liberalism!" as Mr. Blackwood would say.

From the window of the house where I lodge, I have a view of the whole city at once: nay, I can see

St. Peter's as I lie in bed of a morning. The town is an immense mass of solid stone-buildings, streets, palaces, and churches; but it has not the beauty of the environs of Florence, nor the splendid background of Turin, nor does it present any highly picturesque or commanding points of view like Edinburgh. The pleasantest walks I know are round the Via Sistina, and along the Via di Quattro-Fontane-they overlook Rome from the North-East on to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, and of St. John Lateran, towards the gate leading to Naples. As we loiter on, our attention was caught by an open greensward to the left, with foot-paths, and a ruined wall and gardens on each side. A carriage stood in the road just by, and a gentleman and lady, with a little child, had got out of it to walk. A soldier and a girl were seen talking together further on, and a herd of cattle were feeding at their leisure on the yielding turf, The day was close and dry-not a breath stirred. All was calm and silent. It had been cold when we set out, but here the air was softof an Elysian temperature, as if the winds did not dare to visit the sanctuaries of the dead too roughly. The daisy sprung beneath our feet-the fruit-trees blossomed within the nodding arches. On one side were seen the hills of Albano, on the other the Claudian gate; and close by was Nero's Golden House, where there were seventy thousand statues and pillars, of marble and of silver, and where senates kneeled, and myriads shouted in honour of a frail mortal, as of a God.