l built and adorned with similar if not equal
disregard of cost. A modest, graceful monument to Christopher Columbus,
the Genoese discoverer of America, was one of the first structures that
met my eye on entering the city, and an eating-house in the square of
the chief theater is styled "Cafe Restaurant a l'Immortel Chr. Columbo,"
or something very near that. I never before saw so many admirable
specimens of costly and graceful architecture as have arrested my
attention in wandering through the streets of Genoa. At least half the
houses were constructed for the private residences of "merchant princes"
in the palmy days of "Genoa the Superb," and their wealth would seem to
have been practically boundless. The "Hotel de Londres," in which I
write, was originally a convent, and no house in New-York can vie with
it in the massiveness of its walls, the hight of its ceilings, &c. My
bed-room, appropriately furnished, would shame almost any American
parlor or drawing-room. All around me testifies of the greatness that
has been; who shall say that it is not soon to return? The narrow
streets (very few of them passable by carriages) and uneven ground-plot
are the chief drawbacks on this magnificence; but the city rises so
regularly and gracefully from the harbor as to seem like a glorious
amphitheater, and the inequality, so wearisome to the legs, is a beauty
and a pleasure to the eye. It gives, besides, opportunity for the finest
Architectural triumphs. The Carignani Church is approached by a massive
bridge thrown across a ravine, from which you look down on the tops of
seven-story houses, and I walked this morning in a public garden which
looks down into a private one some sixty feet below it. The
perpendicular stone wall which separates these gardens is at least five
feet thick at the top, and must have cost an immense sum; but in fact
the whole city has been three times completely walled in, and the latest
and most extensive of these walls is still in good condition, and was
successfully defended by Massena in the siege of 1800, until Famine
compelled him to surrender. May that stand recorded to the end of human
history as the last siege of Genoa!

XXII.

[This letter, written and mailed at Leghorn on the 24th, has never come
to hand, having been entrusted to the tender mercies of the _French_
mail which was to leave Leghorn next day by steamer for Marseilles, and
thence be taken, via Paris, to Havre, and by steamsh