nd expenditures we who visit Rome share the benefit, and it is
but the simplest justice that we should contribute to defray the cost,
especially when we know that every dollar so paid would be expended in
continuing these excavations, &c., and in completing the galleries and
other modern structures which are already so peerless. Rome is too
commonly regarded as only a ruin, or, more strictly, as deriving all its
eminence from the Past, while in fact it has more inestimable treasures,
the product of our own century, our own day, than any other city, and I
suspect nearly as many as all the rest of the world. Even the Vatican is
still unfinished; workmen were busy in it to-day, laying additional
floors of variegated marble, putting up new book-cases, &c., none of
them restorations, but all extensions of the Library, which, apart from
the value of its books and manuscripts, is a unique and masterly
exposition of ancient and modern Art. Here are single Vases, Tables,
Frescoes, &c., which would be the pride of any other city: one large
vase of Malachite, a present to Pius IX. from the Russian Autocrat, and
unequaled out of Russia, if in the world. I should judge that
three-fourths of the Frescoes which nearly cover the walls and ceiling
of the fifteen or twenty large halls devoted to the Library are less
than two centuries old. This part of the Vatican is approached through a
magnificent corridor, probably five hundred feet long, with an arched
ceiling entirely inlaid with beautiful Mosaic, and the same is
continued through another gallery some two hundred feet long, which
leads at right angles from this to another wing of the edifice; but the
corridor leading down this wing, and facing that first named, has a
naked, barren-looking ceiling, evidently waiting to be similarly inlaid
when time and means shall permit. This is but a specimen of what is
purposed throughout; and if the money which visitors leave in Rome
could, in some small part at least, be devoted to these works, instead
of being frittered away vexatiously and uselessly on petty extortioners,
official and unofficial, the change would be a very great improvement.
It does seem a shame that, where so much is necessarily expended, so
little of it should be devoted to those still progressing works, from
which are derived all this instruction and intellectual enjoyment.

Here let me say one word in justice to the princely families of Rome,
whose palaces and immense colle