rejected, division is called for—and noisily carried.
Round the corner comes clattering the ready
barouche—the sun shines out brightly—close
the door and steps with the crack of a rifle—
and away! But whitherward? The fashionable
poet of this Eternal City sings of his pet days,
which he would note with a white mark. But
how distinguish where all are white? Shall I
take that fair sunshiny morning—when the newness
was on all things, and everything was a
surprise—when we rolled away through the
fresh and balmy Roman air and the sunlight,
making for the famous church of Santa Maria
Maggiore? What a quaint odd effect, as we
coast by those low-lying grounds, hedged in with
every-day houses, where are the rusty arches and
trios of pillars strewn up and down in a lonely
fashion, to have pointed out to you carelessly
with the driver's whip three or four stories of
copper-coloured arcades so familiar as the
Coliseum. Stop, coachman! the famous building
to be dismissed thus lightly, where the martyrs
—But it is a good mile away out of the road,
signor, and, besides, is mapped out for another
day. It seems to me a fairy church, and I look
at it with a delight almost childish. We have to
do with the wildernesses of pillars, and the flat
roof laid on them all a sheet of dull Eastern
gold, and the quaint crusted mosaics like a
crystallised rockery, and the cooling breezes that
blow acceptably among the marble trees.

Or it may be that we are standing in that
mall of the Capitol—where is the most mournful
statue in the world, the Dying Gladiator.
The Eternal City has many caskets, and many
precious things in every casket, and yet I
know not if this poor drooping figure, all
browned and discoloured, and wrung with an
unutterable suffering, be not the most unique
and touching of all its treasures. I know not
how much of this sad effect must be placed to
the account of the tawny colouring, and to the
absence of the smug spotlessness and dainty
cleanliness of newer marble. That strange
tone lends a sort of warmth, suggests life and
flesh and blood, and pleads powerfully for Mr.
Gibson's colour creed.

Or else, we skim down the long Vatican
galleries, where there is crowded a whole population
of men, and women, and animals—in stone.
I should not like to be alone with such company
towards the small hours. I stand in especial
awe of those grim philosophers in the marble
togas. What wicked-looking fellows to meet
trooping it along, like Don Giovanni Commendatori!
But, oh, for Socrates, wisest of men,
to have been this snub-nosed, negro-lipped,
degraded-looking thing! very swinish, precisely
the face that would rob a church—rather a
temple—of his time. The Greeks must surely
have been tired, not of hearing him called Just,
but of those revolting lineaments which, besides,
suggest to me strongly the cheeks of
Edmund Gibbon, author of the Decline and
Fall of this very city. The emperors are
delightful. We look for a row of heads on the
old hackneyed classical lines—the frown, the
straight nose, the regular mouth, and the laurel
wreath so irritating to the tender skin. Instead,
a row of most comically modern visages, of
ordinary unclassical street faces, such as, if we
passed to the irreverence of decorating with
hats and collars Byronic, we would encounter
at a hundred crossings betwixt Oxford-street
and Temple-bar. Trajan has positively the
roguish leer of a French old gentleman sitting
in the Palais Royal garden, and looking after
the passing Bonnes. Some, traditionally
regarded as The Monsters, turn out surprisingly
gentlemanlike and of refined manners, whom
you would be rather pleased to see taking your
wife down to dinner.

Or shall we present ourselves at that daily
levee which the famous Apollo, the " far-darting,"
holds in his little temple all to himself?
Is it heresy to hint that he is a little too
dandified, too much of the fashionable exquisite—a
statue of the Beau Monde? I can fancy him the
Duca di Belvedera, with a soft lisp, and giving
you that disengaged finger; as compared with
the poor brown statue crushed down and just
giving up the ghost, it is as Saint James to
Saint Giles. I can forgive that profane party of
three, bursting with irreverent laughter in the
sacred presence; and I can have indulgence for
the black-haired sparkling English lady who is
declaiming (mock heroically) out of her scarlet
manual the appropriate versicles selected there.
There is an Eternal Murray as well as an Eternal
City. In another little temple of his own, Laocoon
struggles ineffectually with his snakes, and
the marble boxers of Canova square at each
other fiercely, for a stone champion's belt.

A dip again into the balmy Roman air, and
we are in the brighter streets. As the black
ball ascends slowly from the high eerie where
the famous Jesuit Secchi sits and hunts down
planets, the boom of the French cannon is borne
to us, and lets the city know it is noon. And
that token of dipping brings to my mind that,
at the last corner, I have been rubbing my eyes
and putting it to myself seriously, was I in a
dream? For I have seen, actually seen and felt,
a familiar sponge bath, the Englishman's sponge
bath, set out for sale! I have heard of an English
gentleman taking one of these engines with
him over the whole country. By some, it was
taken for a musical instrument of the gong
order: by others, to be an enlarged tea-tray!

Into bright Conduit-street again, or "Veer
Kondotty," which reads like Dutch, but is no
more than the broad British ring for " Via de
Condotti." The witching hour of lunch draws
on, and it is full time to pass reverently into
the tabernacle of the " traitor" Spillman—
"traiteur" he chooses to call himself.
Unapproachable artist, and immortal chef! It is
held currently, I believe, that he is to the full
as much one of the glories of an Eternal City as
the Forum, Baths of Titus, Saint Peter's, or other
monument. The " traitor" affects the solid, the
substantial, and goes straight home to British
hearts. It is rumoured that the traitor's balance
(pecuniary, not physical) is something to make