recollect
particularly a line he puts in the mouth of Scipio, when he is endeavouring
to persuade Massinissa to resist the allurements and blandishments of love:

Che cor di donne e laberinto, in quale
Facil si perde l'intelletto umano.

This drama he divided into three acts, and on its termination he improvised
a poem in _terza rima_ on the subject of the contest of Ajax and Ulysses
for the armour of Achilles.

Wonderful, however, as this act of improvising may appear, it is not
perhaps so much so as the mathematical faculty of a youth of eight years of
age, Yorkshireman by birth, who has lately exhibited his talent for
arithmetical calculation _improvised_ in England and who in a few seconds,
from mental calculation, could give the cube root of a number containing
fifteen or sixteen figures.

Is not all this a confirmation of Doctor Gall's theory on craniology? viz.,
that our faculties depend on the organisation of the scull. I think I have
seen this frequently exemplified at Eton. I have known a boy who could not
compose a verse, make a considerable figure in arithmetic and geometry; and
another, who could write Latin verse with almost Ovidian elegance, and yet
could not work the simplest question in vulgar fractions. Indeed, I think
there seems little doubt that we are born with dispositions and
propensities, which may be developed and encouraged, or damped and checked
altogether by education.

I have become acquainted with several families at Rome, so that I am at no
loss where to spend my evenings. Music is the never failing resource for
those with whom the spirit of conversation fails. The society at Rome is
perfectly free from etiquette or _gene_. When once presented to a family
you may enter their house every evening without invitation, make your bow
to the master and mistress of the house, enter into conversation or not as
you please. You may absent yourself for weeks together from these
_conversazioni_, and nobody will on your re-appearance enquire where you
have been or what you have been doing. In short, in the intercourse with
Roman society, you meet with great affability, sometimes a little _ennui_,
but no _commerage_. The _avvocati_ may be said to form almost exclusively
the middling class in Rome, and they educate their families very
respectably. This class was much caressed by the French Government during
the time that Rome was annexed to the French Empire, and most of the
employes of the Gove