knowledge which I gain from every look at the natural landscape. Then, poetically, Pompeii is to me, as I always thought it would be, no more than Pompeii; that is, it is a place utterly unpoetical. An Osco-Roman town, with some touches of Greek corruption,-a town of the eighth century of Rome, marked by no single noble recollection, nor having-like the polygonal walls of Ciolano-the marks of a remote antiquity and a pure state of society. There is only the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorized to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of Pompeii; it is not a peculiar monument of God's judgments, it is the mummy of a man of no worth or dignity,-solemn, no doubt, as every thing is which brings life and death into such close connexion, but with no proper and peculiar solemnity, like places rich in their own proper interest, or sharing in the general interest of a remote antiquity, or an uncorrupted state of society. The towns of the Ciolano are like the tomb of a child,-Pompeii is like that of Lord Chesterfield.

July 20, 1840.

12. Rieti is so screened by the thousand elms to which its vines are trained, that you hardly can see the town till you are in it. It stands in the midst of the "Rosea Rura," this marvellous plain of the Velinus, a far fairer than the Thessalian Tempe. Immediately above it are some of the rocky but exquisitely soft hills of the country,-so soft and sweet that they are like the green hills round Como, or the delicate screen of the head of Derwentwater; the Apennines have lost all their harsher and keep only their finer features-their infinite beauty of outline, and the endless enwrappings of their combes, their cliffs, and their woods. But here is water everywhere, which gives a universal freshness to every thing. Rieti, I see, stands just at an opening of the hills, so that you may catch its towers

on the sky between them. We have crossed the Velino to its left bank, just below its confluence with the Torrano, the ancient Tereno, as I believe, up whose valley we have just been looking, and see it covered with corn, standing in shocks, but not carried. It has been often a very striking sight to see the little camp of stacks raised round a farm-house, and to see multitudes of people assembled, threshing their corn, or treading it out with mules' or horses' feet. Still the towns stand nobly on the mountains. Behold Grecio before us,-two church towers, and the round towers of its old bastions, and the line of its houses on the edge of one cliff, and with other cliffs rising behind it. The road has chosen to go up a shoulder of hill on the left of the valley, for no other visible reason than to give travellers a station like the Bowness Terrace, from which they might have a general view over it. It is really like "the garden of the Lord," and the "Seraph guard" might keep their watch on the summit of the opposite mountains, which, seen under the morning sun, are invested in a haze of heavenly light, as if shrouding a more than earthly glory. Truly may one feel with Von Canitz, that if the glory of God's perishable works be so great, what must be the glory of the imperishable,—what infinitely more, of Him who is the author of both! And if I feel thrilling through me the sense of this outward beauty -innocent, indeed, yet necessarily unconscious,—what is the sense one ought to have of moral beauty,—of God the Holy Spirit's creation,-of humbleness and truth, and self-devotion and love. Much more beautiful, because made truly after God's image, are the forms and colours of kind and wise and holy thoughts, and words, and actions; more truly beautiful is one hour of old Mrs. Price's patient waiting for the Lord's time, and her cheerful and kind interest in us all, feeling as if she owed us any

a See the story and poem in Serm. vol. iv. note B.

An old woman in the Almshouses at Rugby, alluded to in vol. i. p. 218. vol. ii. P. 326.

thing, than this glorious valley of the Velinus. For this will pass away, and that will not pass away: but that is not the great point;-believe with Aristotle that this should abide, and that should perish; still there is the moral beauty, an inherent excellence which the natural beauty cannot have; for the moral beauty is actually, so to speak, God, and not merely His work; His living and conscious ministers and servants are-it is permitted us to say so-the temples of which the light is God Himself.

Banks of the Metaurus, July 21, 1840.

13. "Livy says, 'the farther Hasdrubal got from the sea, the steeper became the banks of the river.' We noticed some steep banks, but probably they were much higher twenty-three centuries ago; for all rivers have a tendency to raise themselves, from accumulations of gravel, &c. : the windings of the stream, also, would be much more as Livy describes them, in the natural state of the river. The present aspect of this tract of country is the result of 2,000 years of civilization, and would be very different in those times. There would be much of natural forest remaining, the only cultivation being the square patches of the Roman messores, and these only on the best land. The whole plain would look wild, like a new and halfsettled country. One of the greatest physical changes on the earth is produced by the extermination of carnivorous animals; for then the graminivorous become so numerous as to eat up all the young trees, so that the forests rapidly diminish, except those trees which they do not eat, as pines and firs."

July 23, 1840.

14. Between Faenza and Imola, just now, I saw a large building standing back from the road, on the right, with two places somewhat like lodges in front, on the road side. On one of them was the inscription, " Labor omnia vicit,” and the lines about iron working, ending "Argutæ lamina serræ." On the other were Horace's lines about drinking,

without fear of "insanæ leges." Therefore, I suppose that these buildings were an iron foundry, and a public or café; but the classical inscriptions seemed to me characteristic of that foolery of classicalism which marks the Italians, and infects those with us who are called "elegant scholars." It appears to me that in Christian Europe the only book from which quotations are always natural and good as inscriptions for all sorts of places, is the Bible; because every calling of life has its serious side, if it be not sinful; and a quotation from the Bible relating to it, is taking it on this serious side, which is at once a true side, and a most important one. But iron foundries and publics have no connexion with mere book literature, which, to the people concerned most with either, is a thing utterly uncongenial. And inscriptions on such places should be for those who most frequent them: a literary man writing up something upon them, for other literary men to read, is like the impertinence of two scholars talking to each other in Latin at a coach dinner.

15....

Bologna, July 23, 1840.

And now this is the last night, I trust, in which I shall sleep in the Pope's dominions; for it is impossible not to be sickened with a government such as this, which discharges no one function decently. The ignorance of the people is prodigious, how can it be otherwise? The booksellers' shops sad to behold, the very opposite of that scribe, instructed to the kingdom of God, who was to bring out of his treasures things new and old, these scribes, not of the kingdom of God, bring out of their treasures nothing good, either new or old, but the mere rubbish of the past and the present. Other governments may see an able and energetic sovereign arise, to whom God may give a long reign, so that what he began in youth, he may live to complete in old age. But here every reign must be short; for every sovereign comes to the throne an old man, and with no better education than

that of a priest. Where, then, can there be hope under such a system, so contrived as it should seem for every evil end, and so necessarily exclusive of good? I could muse long and deeply on the state of this country, but it is not my business; neither do I see, humanly speaking, one gleam of hope. "1517," said Niebuhr, "must precede 1688;" but where are the symptoms of 1517 here? And if one evil spirit be cast out, there are but seven others yet more evil, if it may be, ready to enter. Wherefore, I have no sympathy with the so-called Liberal party here any more than has Bunsen. They are but types of the counter evil of Popery,—that is, of Jacobinism. The two are obverse and reverse of the coin,-the imprinting of one type on the one side, necessarily brings out the other on the other side; and so in a perpetual series; for [Newmanism] leads to [Socialism], and [Socialism] leads to [Newmanism],-the eternal oscillations of the drunken mima,—the varying vices and vileness of the slave, and the slave broken loose. "Half of our virtue," says Homer," is torn away when a man becomes a slave," and the other half goes when he becomes a slave broken loose. Wherefore, may God grant us freedom from all idolatry, whether of flesh or of spirit; that fearing Him and loving Him, we may fear and bow down before no idol, and never worshipping what ought not to be worshipped, may so escape the other evil of not worshipping what ought to be worshipped. Good night, my darlings.

July 24, 1840.

16. As we are going through this miserable state of Modena, it makes me feel most strongly what it is to be insoθέρας πολέως πολίτης. What earthly thing could induce me to change the condition of an English private gentleman

"He fears God thoroughly, and he fears neither man nor Devil beside," was his characteristic description of a thoroughly courageous man.