is easy enough to live among them, and there is much
to amuse and even interest a spectator; but the native existence of the
place is now thin and hollow, and there is a stamp of littleness, and
childish poverty of taste, upon all the great Christian buildings I have
seen here,--not excepting St. Peter's; which is crammed with bits of
colored marble and gilding, and Gog-and-Magog colossal statues of saints
(looking prodigiously small), and mosaics from the worst pictures in
Rome; and has altogether, with most imposing size and lavish splendor,
a tang of Guildhall finery about it that contrasts oddly with the
melancholy vastness and simplicity of the Ancient Monuments, though
these have not the Athenian elegance. I recur perpetually to the
galleries of Sculpture in the Vatican, and to the Frescos of Raffael
and Michael Angelo, of inexhaustible beauty and greatness, and to
the general aspect of the City and the Country round it, as the most
impressive scene on earth. But the Modern City, with its churches,
palaces, priests and beggars, is far from sublime."

Of about the same date, here is another paragraph worth inserting:
"Gladstone has three little agate crosses which he will give you for my
little girls. Calvert bought them, as a present, for 'the bodies,'
at Martigny in Switzerland, and I have had no earlier opportunity
of sending them. Will you despatch them to Hastings when you have an
opportunity? I have not yet seen Gladstone's _Church and State_; but as
there is a copy in Rome, I hope soon to lay hands on it. I saw yesterday
in the _Times_ a furious, and I am sorry to say, most absurd attack on
him and it, and the new Oxonian school."

"_February 28th, 1839_.--There is among the people plenty of squalid
misery; though not nearly so much as, they say, exists in Ireland; and
here there is a certain freedom and freshness of manners, a dash of
Southern enjoyment in the condition of the meanest and most miserable.
There is, I suppose, as little as well can be of conscience or
artificial cultivation of any kind; but there is not the affectation of
a virtue which they do not possess, nor any feeling of being despised
for the want of it; and where life generally is so inert, except as to
its passions and material wants, there is not the bitter consciousness
of having been beaten by the more prosperous, in a race which the
greater number have never thought of running. Among the laboring poor of
Rome, a bribe will buy a