oo is on a noble hill. What a daily excitement such a view,
taken at every step! life is worth ten times as much in a city so
situated. Perugia is full, overflowing, with the treasures of early
art. I saw them so rapidly it seems now as if in a trance, yet
certainly with a profit, a manifold gain, such as Mahomet thought he
gained from his five minutes' visits to other spheres. Here are two
portraits of Raphael as a youth: it is touching to see what effect
this angel had upon all that surrounded him from the very first.

Florence! I was there a month, and in a sense saw Florence: that is to
say, I took an inventory of what is to be seen there, and not without
great intellectual profit. There is too much that is really admirable
in art,--the nature of its growth lies before you too clearly to be
evaded. Of such things more elsewhere.

I do not like Florence as I do cities more purely Italian. The natural
character is ironed out here, and done up in a French pattern; yet
there is no French vivacity, nor Italian either. The Grand Duke--more
and more agitated by the position in which he finds himself between
the influence of the Pope and that of Austria--keeps imploring and
commanding his people to keep still, and they _are_ still and glum
as death. This is all on the outside; within, Tuscany burns. Private
culture has not been in vain, and there is, in a large circle, mental
preparation for a very different state of things from the present,
with an ardent desire to diffuse the same amid the people at large.
The sovereign has been obliged for the present to give more liberty to
the press, and there is an immediate rush of thought to the new vent;
if it is kept open a few months, the effect on the body of the people
cannot fail to be great. I intended to have translated some passages
from the programme of the _Patria_, one of the papers newly started
at Florence, but time fails. One of the articles in the same number by
Lambruschini, on the duties of the clergy at this juncture, contains
views as liberal as can be found in print anywhere in the world. More
of these things when I return to Rome in the autumn, when I hope to
find a little leisure to think over what I have seen, and, if found
worthy, to put the result in writing.

I visited the studios of our sculptors; Greenough has in clay a David
which promises high beauty and nobleness, a bass-relief, full of grace
and tender expression; he is also modelling a head of Nap