d Mignonette,
on their breast, and the chaplet of wilding shrubs upon their
brows, give them a charm in the most common-place observation. With
me, truant as I have been to the Classic page, it seemed a natural
process of my desultory mind, to revert from a contemplation of
such pensive dreamy realities of waking enjoyment as I have
described, to visions, startling in their august grandeur, of the
everlasting past,--visions of their great Architect, Aurelian; of
their greater Restorer, Belisarius!

"These monstrous walls! I cannot divest myself of a certain awe and
fascination, as if of a supernatural appearance, which attracts and
detains me about them; not even the Colosseum more. There seems
something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their
unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless
towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's
journey--and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied
with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative
atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has
now abandoned them for miles. It is as though one should wrap a
triumphal robe about a corpse, or place a giant's helmet upon a
skeleton's skull. It is no poetical figure to look upon them as an
eternal satire upon the great littleness of empire. The melancholy
pride of their dimensions needs not the hollow wind, which howls
around their towers, or the wondering sun, which lingers over their
shrubby ramparts, to proclaim in the ears of thrones and senates
the warning of Rome's ambition, the moral of Rome's downfall! It is
but a poor recompense to their present unhonoured solitude, that
their melancholy battlements are emblazed at intervals with the
pontifical escutcheons. Those triple tiaras and cross keys, so
perpetually recurring, do not half so much consecrate as they are
themselves consecrated by the lonely bulwarks of this desolated
city of the Caesars!"

THE VILLA BORGHESE.

"With the exception of an ostentatious parade of paltry equipages,
tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic
attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for
monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some
haunted place, it appears to be belo