aunt it in a Blind Man's Holiday!"

My frien's, I 've talked nigh on to long enough.
I hain't no call to bore ye coz ye 're tough;
My lungs are sound, an' our own v'ice delights
Our ears, but even kebbigeheads hez rights.
It 's the las' time thet I shell e'er address ye,
But you 'll soon fin' some new tormentor: bless ye!

QUESTION OF MONUMENTS.

In the beautiful life which the English-speaking foreigners lead at
Rome, the great sensations are purely aesthetic. To people who know one
another so familiarly as must the members of a community united in a
strange land by the ties of alien race, language, and religion, there
cannot, of course, be wanting the little excitements of personal gossip
and scandal; but even these have generally an innocent, artistic flavor,
and it is ladies' statues, not reputations, which suffer,--gentlemen's
pictures, not characters, which are called into question; while the
events which interest the whole community are altogether different from
those which move us at home. In the Capital of the Past, people meeting
at the _cafe_, or at the tea-tables of lady-acquaintance, speak, before
falling upon the works of absent friends, concerning the antique jewel
which Castellani lately bought of a peasant, and intends to reproduce,
for the delight of all who can afford to love the quaint and exquisite
forms of the ancient workers in gems and gold; or they talk of that
famous statue of the young Hercules, dug up by the lucky proprietor, who
received from the Pope a marquisate, and forgiveness of all his debts,
in return for his gift of the gilded treasure. At the worst these happy
children of art, and their cousins the connoisseurs, (every
English-speaking foreigner in Rome is of one class or the other,) are
only drawn from the debate of such themes by some dramatic aspect of the
picturesque Roman politics: a scene between the French commandant and
Antonelli, or the arrest of a restaurateur for giving his guests white
turnips, red beets, and green beans in the same revolutionary plate; or
the like incident.

At home, here, in the multiplicity of our rude affairs, by what widely
different events and topics are we excited to talk! It must be some
occurrence of very terrible, vile, or grotesque effect that can take our
minds from our business. We discuss the ghastly particulars of a
steamboat explosion, or the evidence in a trial for murder; or if the
chief magistrate a