as base to a mediaeval
tomb. Impressions? Scarcely. My mind seems like an old blotting-book,
full of fragments of sentences, of words suggesting something, which
refuses to absorb any more ink.

How I had forgotten them, and how well I know them, these little
details out of the past! the darkish sponge-like holes in the
travertine, the reversed capital on the Trinita dei Monti steps, the
caryatides of the Stanza dell' Incendio, the scowl or smirk of the
Emperors and philosophers at the Capitol: a hundred details. I seem to
have been looking at nothing else these fifteen years, during which
they have all been absolutely forgotten.

The very Campagna to-day, driving out beyond Cecilia Metella, little
as I knew it before, seems quite familiar, leaves no impression. Yes,
the fences tied like that with reeds, overtopped by sprouting elders,
the fat weeds on wall and tomb, the undulations of sere green plain,
the white snow-masses floating, as it were, in the blue of the sky;
the straddling bits of aqueduct, the lumps of masonry. Am I utterly
and for ever spoilt for this? Has it given me so much that it can
never give me any more?--that the sight of Arezzo and its towers
beneath the blueness and the snow of Falterona, the green marshy
valley, with the full Tiber issuing from beneath the last Umbrian
Mountains, seemed so much more poignant than all this. Is it possible
that Rome in three days can give me nothing more vivid and heady than
the thought of that sarcophagus, let into the wall of the Ara Coeli,
its satyrs and cupids and grapes and peacocks surmounted by the mosaic
crosses, the mediaeval inscriptions of Dominus Pandulphus Sabelli?

ROME, _February_ 1888.

II.

A PONTIFICAL MASS AT THE SIXTINE CHAPEL.

I never knew so many hours pass so pleasantly as in this tribune,
surrounded by those whispering, elbowing, plunging, veiled women in
black, under the wall painted with Perugino's Charge of St. Peter, and
dadoed with imitation Spanish leather, superb gold and blue scrolls of
Rhodian pomegranate pattern and Della Rovere shields with the
oak-tree.

My first impression is of the magnificence of all these costumes, the
Swiss with their halberts, the Knights of Malta, the Chamberlains like
so many Rubenses or Frans Halses, the Prelates and cardinals, each
with his little train of purple priestlets; particularly of the
perfection in wearing these clothes, something analogous to the
brownish depth of the purp