ater than that with
which we look at Rome, where Augustus was reigning when He saw the day,
whose birthplace is separated but by a hill or two from the awful gates
of Jerusalem. Who that has beheld both can forget that first aspect of
either? At the end of years the emotion occasioned by the sight still
thrills in your memory, and it smites you as at the moment when you
first viewed it.

The business of the present novel, however, lies neither with priest nor
pagan, but with Mr. Clive Newcome, and his affairs and his companions at
this period of his life. Nor, if the gracious reader expects to hear of
cardinals in scarlet, and noble Roman princes and princesses, will he
find such in this history. The only noble Roman into whose mansion our
friend got admission was the Prince Polonia, whose footmen wear the
liveries of the English royal family, who gives gentlemen and even
painters cash upon good letters of credit; and, once or twice in a
season, opens his transtiberine palace and treats his customers to a
ball. Our friend Clive used jocularly to say, he believed there were no
Romans. There were priests in portentous hats; there were friars with
shaven crowns; there were the sham peasantry, who dressed themselves out
in masquerade costumes, with bagpipe and goatskin, with crossed leggings
and scarlet petticoats, who let themselves out to artists at so many
pauls per sitting; but he never passed a Roman's door except to buy a
cigar or to purchase a handkerchief. Thither, as elsewhere, we carry
our insular habits with us. We have a little England at Paris, a little
England at Munich, Dresden, everywhere. Our friend is an Englishman, and
did at Rome as the English do.

There was the polite English society, the society that flocks to see
the Colosseum lighted up with blue fire, that flocks to the Vatican
to behold the statues by torchlight, that hustles into the churches on
public festivals in black veils and deputy-lieutenants' uniforms, and
stares, and talks, and uses opera-glasses while the pontiffs of the
Roman Church are performing its ancient rites, and the crowds of
faithful are kneeling round the altars; the society which gives its
balls and dinners, has its scandal and bickerings, its aristocrats,
parvenus, toadies imported from Belgravia; has its club, its hunt,
and its Hyde Park on the Pincio: and there is the other little English
world, the broad-hatted, long-bearded, velvet-jacketed, jovial colony
of the artis