traversed, the
ruins of some of the stately edifices once so abundant here, and the
mile-stones. There is not even one tavern of the half dozen pretenders
to the name between Civita Vecchia and Rome which would be considered
tolerable in the least civilized portion of Arkansas or Texas.

Half way to Rome, the road strikes off from the sea, and there is
henceforth more cultivation, more grain, better crops (though all this
land produces excellently both of Wheat and Barley, and of Indian Corn
also where the cultivation is not utterly suicidal), but still there are
very few houses and those generally poor, the wretchedest caricatures of
taverns on one of the great highways of the world, no gardens nor other
evidences of aspiration for comfort and natural beauty, few and ragged
trees, and the very few inhabitants are so squalid, so abject, so
beggarly, that it seems a pity they were not fewer. And this state
continues, except that the grain-crops grow larger and better, up to
within a mile or two of the gates of Rome, which thus seems another
Palmyra in the Desert, only that this is a desert of man's making. I
presume the twenty-five or thirty miles at this end is unhealthy, even
for natives, but it surely need not be so. All this Campagna, with the
more pestilent Pontine Marshes on the south, which are now scourging
Rome with their deadly malaria and threaten to render it ultimately
uninhabitable, were once salubrious and delightful, and might readily be
made so again. If they were in England, Old or New, near a city of the
size of this, they would be trenched, dyked, drained, and reconverted
into gardens, orchards and model-farms within two years, and covered
with dwellings, mansions, country-seats, and a busy, energetic, thrifty
population before 1860. A tenth part of the energy and devotedness
displayed in the attempts to wrest Jerusalem from the Infidels would
rescue Rome from a fate not less appalling.

We ought by contract to have arrived here at half past six last evening;
we actually reached the gates at half past eight or a little later.
There our Passports were taken from us, and carried into the proper
office; but word came back that all was not right; we must go in
personally. We did so, and found that what was wanted to make all right
was money. There was not the smallest pretext for this--no Barbary
pirate ever had less--as we were not to get our Passports, but must wait
their approval by a higher authorit