the admiration of all the rest of Italy. In
the great building containing all the Works of Art, and a Library
of 150,000 volumes, I asked for the best existing Book (a German one
published ten years ago) on the Statues in that very Collection; and,
after a rabble of clerks and custodes, got up to a dirty priest, who
bowing to the ground regretted 'they did not possess it,' but at last
remembered that 'they _had_ entered into negotiations on the subject,
which as yet had been unsuccessful.'--The favorite device on the walls
at Naples is a vermilion Picture of a Male and Female Soul respectively
up to the waist (the waist of a _soul_) in fire, and an Angel above
each, watering the sufferers from a watering-pot. This is intended
to gain alms for Masses. The same populace sit for hours on the Mole,
listening to rhapsodists who recite Ariosto. I have seen I think five of
them all within a hundred yards of each other, and some sets of fiddlers
to boot. Yet there are few parts of the world where I have seen less
laughter than there. The Miracle of Januarius's Blood is, on the whole,
my most curious experience. The furious entreaties, shrieks and sobs, of
a set of old women, yelling till the Miracle was successfully performed,
are things never to be forgotten.

"I spent three weeks in this most glittering of countries, and saw most
of the usual wonders,--the Paestan Temples being to me much the most
valuable. But Pompeii and all that it has yielded, especially the Fresco
Paintings, have also an infinite interest. When one considers that this
prodigious series of beautiful designs supplied the place of our common
room-papers,--the wealth of poetic imagery among the Ancients, and the
corresponding traditional variety and elegance of pictorial treatment,
seem equally remarkable. The Greek and Latin Books do not give one quite
so fully this sort of impression; because they afford no direct measure
of the extent of their own diffusion. But these are ornaments from the
smaller class of decent houses in a little Country Town; and the greater
number of them, by the slightness of the execution, show very clearly
that they were adapted to ordinary taste, and done by mere artisans.
In general clearness, symmetry and simplicity of feeling, I cannot say
that, on the whole, the works of Raffaelle equal them; though of course
he has endless beauties such as we could not find unless in the great
original works from which these sketches at Pompe