ingle newspaper is now published in Rome, but I have heard it
inquired for or mentioned but once since I came here, and then by a
Scotchman studying Italian. It is ultra-despotic in its spirit, and
would not be tolerated if it were not. It is a small, coarsely printed
sheet, in good part devoted to Church news, giving great prominence to
the progress of conversion from the English to the Romish communion.
There are very few foreign journals taken or read in the Roman States.
Lynn or Poughkeepsie probably, Newark or New-Haven certainly, buys and
reads more newspapers than the entire Three Millions of People who
inhabit the Papal States. I could not learn to relish such a state of
things. I have just paid $3.70 (more than half of it to our American
Consul) for the privilege of leaving the dominions of His Holiness, and
shall speedily profit by the gracious permission.

XXVII.

CENTRAL ITALY--FLORENCE.

BOLOGNA, July 6, 1851.

"See Naples and die!" says the proverb: but I am in no hurry to "shuffle
off this mortal coil," and rather weary of seeing. I think I should have
found a few choice friends in Naples, but my time is limited, and the
traveling through Southern Italy neither pleasant nor expeditious. Of
Vesuvius in its milder moods I never had a high opinion; and, though I
should have liked to tread the unburied streets of Pompeii, yet Rome has
nearly surfeited me with ruins. So I shortened my tour in Italy by
cutting off the farther end of it, and turned my face obliquely homeward
from the Eternal City. What has the world to show of by-gone glory and
grandeur which she cannot at least equal?

Let no one be sanguine as to his good resolutions. I as firmly resolved,
when I first shook from my feet the dust of Civita Vecchia, that I never
again would enter its gates, as I ever did to do or forbear any act
whatever. But, after a tedious and ineffectual attempt to make up a
party of Americans to come through from Rome to Florence direct, I was
at last obliged to knock under. All the seats by Diligence or Mail on
that route were taken ahead for a longer time than I could afford to
wait; and offers to fill an extra coach if the proprietors would send
one were utterly unavailing. Such a thing as Enterprise is utterly
unknown south of Genoa, and the idea of any obligation on the part of
proprietors of stage-lines to make extra efforts to accommodate an extra
number of passengers is so queer that I doubt wheth