ne Museum
remains a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures,
of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can be
definite about some such delightful presence as that old River dozing
over his fountain in the little cold court you see first and last as you
come and go, it is more than your reader, if he is as wise as you wish
him, can ask of you. I have been wondering whether he could profitably
ask of me some record of my experiences in the official and scientific
company with which I was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I
should have to offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of
objects printed one upon another and hardly separable in their
succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us
with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would
not obey Michelangelo when he bade it "Go," not because it was not
lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon
sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their
vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof of the museum.
There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders
of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden
spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara
Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and
filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and
not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which
the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double
stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their
municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the
Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present
company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the
conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from
the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After
this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn,
and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset
light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus's
marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.

In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader
ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the
dictat