ed its dusky hue for a warmer tint; statues that had been
doing sentinel all the winter without relief, now seem to bend
delighted over fragrant flower-beds, and enjoy the spring. Two high
shrubs in flower (_Metresiglias_) hoist from opposite beds, the one
its _white_, the other its _red_ banner. Two of the _Muses_, the
_Speciosa_ and _Paravisogna_, or bread-tree plant, were raising their
light spiry trunks out of a _corbeille_ taller than a life-guardsman.
They want no hothouse in Naples:--would you shade your face from the
sun, an elsewhere exotic, the Brazilian _Camarotta_ at your feet,
furnishes you with a _screen_. The _white flocks_ of the _Acacia
verticillata_ are peeping out from the ranks of those small
_triangular leaves_, which are so singularly attached, without stalks,
by one of these angles to the stem. Amidst these pleasant perfumes
camphor would be unwelcome, but there is the _laurel_ that yields it.
_Fennel_ has here become a tree, in which, like the _mustard_ of the
Gospels, the fowls of the air may lodge; we are dwarfs beside it!
Three kinds of the soft, slimy Mallow of the Marsh are here so much
WOODY and so tall, that we must pick their flowers on tiptoe. The
_flattened disk_ of the sky-blue _Nana arborea_ contrasts with the
_Betula sanguinea_, glowing deeply in the flower-bed of many
lighter-coloured petals; the sweet-scented _African laurel_ grows
against the long-leafed Babylonian willow, which _susurrates_
droopingly over your head, as if it were "by _the waters of Babylon_."
The fountains, with their _hydrophilous_ tribes, add to the charm; and
many a beautiful _Launaria aquatica_ had already buoyed himself up on
his large _cordate leaves_ on the surface of the _tazza_, and was
filling his vegetable skin with water. All these beauties and
peculiarities, a mere scantling of the whole of the Villa Reale,
escape the lounger, and the nurserymaids, and children, and those of
either sex who have appointments to keep, or to look out for; and the
soldiers, and the police, and the Neapolitan nobility and gentry, and
the pickpockets, and others:--to the nurseryman and botanist, things
not to be forgotten; and at present the weather is not too hot to
interfere with their enjoyment.

SERVI DI PENA.

At Castel Nuovo, a penal settlement of Naples, we held conversation
with a man sentenced to the galleys, and wearing, accordingly, a
_yellow_ jacket; but yellow is not here, as at Leghorn, the deepest
dye.