an's Sacred and Profane Love
puzzles me completely: I neither understand the name nor the intention
of the picture. It is evidently allegorical: but an allegory very
clumsily expressed. The aspect of Sacred Love would answer just as
well for Profane Love. What is that little cupid about, who is groping
in the cistern behind? why does Profane Love wear gloves? The picture,
though so provokingly obscure in its subject, is most divinely
painted. The three Graces by the same master is also here; two heads
by Giorgione, distinguished by all his peculiar depth of character and
sentiment, some exquisite Albanos; one of Raffaelle's finest
portraits--and in short, an endless variety of excellence. I feel my
taste become more and more fastidious every day.

* * * * *

This morning we heard mass at the Pope's Chapel; the service was read
by Cardinal Fesche, and the venerable old pope himself, robed and
mitred _en grand costume_, was present. No females are allowed to
enter without veils, and we were very ungallantly shut up behind a
sort of grating, where, though we had a tolerable view of the
ceremonial going forward, it was scarcely possible for us to be seen.
Cardinal Gonsalvi sat so near us, that I had leisure and opportunity
to contemplate the fine intellectual head and acute features of this
remarkable man. I thought his countenance had something of the
Wellesley cast.

The Pope's Chapel is decorated in the most exquisite taste; splendid
at once and chaste. There are no colours--the whole interior being
white and gold.

At an unfortunate moment, Lady Morgan's ludicrous description of the
twisting and untwisting of the Cardinal's tails came across me, and
made me smile very _mal a-propos_: it is certainly from the life.
Whenever this lively and clever woman describes what she has actually
seen with her own eyes, she is as accurately true as she is witty and
entertaining. Her sketches after nature are admirable; but her
observations and inferences are coloured by her peculiar and rather
unfeminine habits of thinking. I never read her "_Italy_" till the
other day, when L., whose valet had contrived to smuggle it into Rome,
offered to lend it to me. It is one of the books most rigorously
proscribed here; and if the Padre Anfossi or any of his satellites had
discovered it in my hands, I should assuredly have been fined in a sum
beyond what I should have liked to pay.

We concluded the morning