h we now see in Rome having been dug up at that period;
and among the ilexes of the Ludovisi and Albani gardens, among the laurels
and rough grass of the Vatican hill, porticoes were being built, and
long galleries and temple-like places, where a whole people of marble
might live among the newly-found mosaics and carved altars and vases.
Moreover, there was at that time in Rome a thing of which there is now
less in Rome than anywhere, perhaps, in the world--a thing for which
English and Germans came expressly to Italy: there was music. A large
proportion of the best new operas were always brought out in Rome--always
four or five new ones in each season; and the young singers from the
conservatorios of Naples came to the ecclesiastical city, where no
actresses were suffered, to begin their career in the hoop skirts and
stomachers, and powdered _toupes_ with which the eighteenth century was
wont to conceive the heroines of ancient Greece and Rome. The bride of
Charles Edward was herself a tolerable musician, and she had a taste for
painting and sculpture which developed into a perfect passion in
after life; so, with respect to art, there was plenty to amuse her.

It was different with regard to society. By insisting upon royal honours
such as had been enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal Court,
anxious to keep on good terms with England, absolutely refused to give
him, the Pretender had virtually cut himself and his wife out of all
Roman society; for he would not know the nobles on a footing of equality,
and they, on the other hand, dared know him on no other. The great
entertainments in the palaces where Charles Edward had so often danced,
the admired of all beholders, in his boyhood, were not for the Count and
Countess of Albany. There remained the theatres and public balls, to
which the Pretender conducted his wife with the assiduity of a man
immensely vain of having on his arm a woman far too young and too pretty
for his deserts. And, besides this, there was a certain amount of vague,
shifting foreign society, nobles on the loose, and young men on their
grand tour, who mostly considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or
at least a seemingly accidental meeting and introduction in the lobby of
a theatre or the garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of their
sight-seeing. Such people as these were the guests of the Palazzo Muti;
and, together with a few Jacobite hangers-on, constituted the fluctuating
littl