perfection, and is really a very great drawback to the pleasure of travelling in France. The moment we stop anywhere, out comes a fellow with his leathern apron, and goes poking and prying about the carriage, in hopes of finding some job to do; and they all do their work so ill, that they generally never fail to find something left for them by their predecessors' clumsiness. Again I have been struck with the total absence of all gentlemen, and of all persons of the education and feelings of gentlemen. I am afraid that the bulk of the people are sadly ignorant and unprincipled, and then liberty and equality are but evils. A little less aristocracy in our country, and a little more here, would seem a desirable improvement; there seem great elements of good amongst the people here,great courtesy and kindness, with all their cheating and unreasonableness. May He, who only can, turn the hearts of this people, and of all other people to the knowledge and love of Himself in His Son, in whom there is neither Englishman or Frenchman, any more than Jew or Greek, but Christ is all and in all! And may He keep alive in me the spirit of charity, to judge favourably and feel kindly towards those amongst whom I am travelling; inasmuch as Christ died for them as well as for us, and they too call themselves after His name.

Approach to Rome, April, 1827.

3. When we turned the summit and opened on the view of the other side, it might be called the first approach to Rome. At the distance of more than forty miles, it was of course impossible to see the town, and besides the distance was hazy; but we were looking on the scene of the Roman History; we were standing on the outward edge of the frame of the great picture, and, though the features of it were not to be traced distinctly, yet we had the consciousness that there they were before us. Here too, we first saw the Mediterranean; the Alban Hills, I think, in

VOL. II.

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the remote distance, and just beneath us, on the left, Soracte, an outlier of the Apennines, which has got to the right bank of the Tiber, and stands out by itself most magnificently. Close under us in front, was the Ciminian Lake, the crater of an extinct volcano, surrounded, as they all are, with their basin of wooded hills, and lying like a beautiful mirror stretched out before us. Then there was the grand beauty of Italian scenery, the depth of the valleys, and the endless variety of the mountain outline, and the towns perched up on the mountain summits, and this now seen under a mottled sky which threw an ever varying shadow and light over the valley beneath, and all the freshness of the young spring. We descended along one of the rims of this lake to Ronciglione, and from thence, still descending on the whole, to Monterossi. Here the famous Campagna begins, and it certainly is one of the most striking tracts of country I ever beheld. It is by no means a perfect flat, except between Rome and the sea; but rather like the Bagshot Heath country-ridges of hills with intermediate valleys, and the road often running between high steep banks, and sometimes crossing sluggish streams sunk in a deep bed. All these banks were overgrown with the broom, now in full flower; and the same plant was luxuriant everywhere. There seemed no apparent reason why the country should be so desolate; the grass was growing richly everywhere, there was no marsh anywhere visible, but all looked as fresh and healthy as any of our chalk downs in England. But it is a wide wilderness; no villages, scarcely any houses, and here and there a lonely ruin of a single square tower, which I suppose used to serve as strongholds for men and cattle in the plundering warfare of the middle ages. It was after crowning the top of one of these lines of hills, a little on the Roman side of Baccano, at five minutes after six, according to my watch, that we had the first view of Rome itself. I expected to see St. Peter's rising above the line of the ho

rizon as York Minster does, but instead of that, it was within the horizon, and so was much less conspicuous, and, only a part of the dome being visible from the nature of the ground, it looked mean and stumpy. Nothing else marked the site of the city, but the trees of the gardens about it, sunk by the distance into one dark mass, and the number of white villas, specking the opposite bank of the Tiber for some little distance above the town, and then suddenly ceasing. But the whole scene that burst upon our view, when taken in all its parts, was most interesting. Full in front rose the Alban hills, the white villas on their sides distinctly visible even at that distance, which was more than thirty miles. On the left were the Apennines, and Tivoli was distinctly to be seen on the summit of its mountain, on one of the lowest and nearest points of the chain. On the right and all before us lay the Campagna, whose perfectly level outline was succeeded by that of the sea, which was scarcely more so. It began now to get dark, and, as there is hardly any twilight, it was dark soon after we left La Storta, the last post before you enter Rome. The air blew fresh and cool, and we had a pleasant drive over the remaining part of the Campagna till we descended into the valley of the Tiber, and crossed it by the Milvian bridge. About two miles further on we reached the walls of Rome, and entered by the Porta del Popolo.

4.

...

Rome, April, 1827.

After dinner Bunsen called for us in his carriage and took us to his house first on the Capitol, the different windows of which command the different views of ancient and modern Rome. Never shall I forget the view of the former; we looked down on the Forum, and just opposite were the Palatine and the Aventine, with the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars on the one, and houses intermixed with gardens on the other. The mass of the Colosseum rose beyond the Forum, and, beyond all, the wide plain of the Campagna to the sea. On the left rose the Alban

hills bright in the setting sun, which played full upon Frascati and Albano, and the trees which edge the lake; and further away in the distance, it lit up the old town of Lavicum. Then we descended into the Forum, the light fast fading away and throwing a kindred soberness over the scene of ruin. The soil has risen from rubbish at least fifteen feet, so that no wonder that the hills look lower than they used to do, having been never very considerable at the first. There it was,-one scene of desolation, from the massy foundation-stones of the Capitoline Temple, which were laid by Tarquinius the Proud, to a single pillar erected in honour of Phocas, the Eastern Emperor, in the fifth century. What the fragments of pillars belonged to, perhaps we never can know; but that I think matters little. I care not whether it was a temple of Jupiter Stator, or the Basilica Julia, but one knows that one is on the ground of the Forum, under the Capitol, the place where the tribes assembled, and the orators spoke; the scene, in short, of all the internal struggles of the Roman people. We passed on to the Arch of Titus. Amongst the reliefs, there is the figure of a man bearing the golden candlestick from the Temple of Jerusalem as one of the spoils of the triumph. Yet He who abandoned His visible and local Temple to the hands of the heathen for the sins of His nominal worshippers, has taken to Him His great power and has gotten Him glory by destroying the idols of Rome as He had done the idols of Babylon; and the golden candlestick burns and shall burn with an everlasting light, while the enemies of His holy name, Babylon, Rome, or the carcase of sin in every land, which the eagles of His wrath will surely find out, perish for ever from before Him. We returned to our inn to dress, and then went again to Bunsen's evening party. We came home about eleven; I wrote some Journal, and went to bed soon after twelve. Such was my first day in Rome; and if I were to leave it to-morrow, I should think that one day was well worth the journey. But you cannot tell how poor all the objects of

the north of Italy seem in comparison with what I find here; I do not mean as to scenery or actual beauty, but in interest. When I leave Rome I could willingly sleep all the way to Laleham; that so I might bring hone my recollection of this place "unmixed with baser matter."

5.

May 2, 1827.

After dinner we started again in our carriage to the Ponte Molle, about two miles out of Rome. All the way the road runs under a steep and cliffy bank, which is the continuation of the Collis Hortulorum in Rome itself, and which turns off at the Ponte Molle, and forms the boundary of the Tiber for some way to the northward, the cliffs, however, being succeeded by grass slopes. On the right bank, after crossing the Ponte Molle, the road which we followed ran south-west towards St. Peter's and the Vatican, between the Tiber and the Monte Mario. The Monte Mario is the highest point of the same line of hills, of which the Vatican and Janiculum form parts; it is a line intersected with many valleys of denudation, making several curves, and as it were little bays and creeks in it, like the hills on the right bank of the Thames behind Chertsey, which coming forward at St. Anne's, fall back in a very irregular line behind Stroud and Thorpe Green, and then come forward again with a higher and steeper side close to the Thames at Cooper's Hill. The Monte Mario is like Cooper's Hill, the highest, boldest, and most prominent part of the line; it is about the height and steepness too of Cooper's Hill, and has the Tiber just at the foot of it like the Thames at Anchorwick. To keep up the resemblance, there is a sort of terrace at the top of the Monte Mario planted with cypresses, and a villa, though dilapidated, crowns the summit, as also at our old friend above Egham. Here we stood on a most delicious evening, the ilex and the gum-cistus in great profusion about us, the slope below full of olives and vines, the cypress over our heads, and before our eyes all that one has ever read