re double
casements are fixed during eight months out of the year.

HOUNDS AND HORSES AT ROME.

ENGLISH KENNEL.

"The Dog-Star rages!"--POPE.

To do at Rome as the Romans do, is an adage which we English can no
longer apply to our proceedings in that city; we now reverse this, and
carrying thither our games, field-sports, and other whimsies, not only
practise these ourselves, but would impose them upon her senate and
people; for a senate she still has, and the Romans take a strange
pleasure in exhibiting, on state occasions, the well-known letters,
which tell of formerly allied, but long since departed glories. What
would her ancient senate, the stern descendants of the wolf-nursed
twins--

"Curius quid sentit, et ambo Scipiadae?--"

have said to the subserviency of their present _mis_-representatives,
who go forth, not to give races, but to witness the feats of barbarian
jockeyship, on a turf that once resounded only to the hoofs of their own
favourite racers;

"Whose easy triumph and transcendant speed
Palm after palm proclaimed; whilst Victory,
In the horse circus, stood exulting by."[31]

If the senator Damisippus once received such a castigation at the hands
of the bard of Aquinum, for merely driving his own phaeton at noon, and
for nodding _varmintly_ to a friend as he passed, how would that poet's
indignation or muse--

"Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum--"

have dealt with you, Princes Borghese and Cesarini, Doria and Colonna,
who, changing your long robes for the scarlet jacket, (worse than any
_Trechidipna_), have learned to vie with each other in acquiring a
field-note, of which Alaric had been proud, to strive for precedence in
a fox-hunt, and to glory more in winning his brush, than ever did your
ancestors on wresting a trophy from the Sicambri. But, thanks to Popes
who have wisely prohibited satirists and satire, ye are free to follow,
unscathed by the Iambic muse, this or any other pastime you please,
however unsuited in character to the dignity of your descent. To one
merely paying a transitory visit to Rome in the grand tour of twenty
years ago, it might not have occurred as a likely contingency that a
pack of English fox-hounds should be one day kennelled close up to her
gates; but to him who witnessed the sporting monomania of some of our
countrymen, and the difficulty they found (having nothing else to
_kill_) in killing _time_, it would never have seemed imp