buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings in
Rome, except St Peter's and the Colosseum, both of which lie away from
the town. Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the wall,
bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from time to
time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down endless
hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches
innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants, soldiers,
priests, and beggars, you journey onwards for two miles or so; you have
got at last to the modern quarter, where hotels are found, and where the
English congregate. There in the "Corso," and in one or two streets
leading out of it, there are foot-pavements, lamps at night, and windows
to the shops. A fair sprinkling of second-rate equipages roll by you,
bearing the Roman ladies, with their gaudy dresses, ill-assorted colours,
and their heavy, handsome, sensual features. The young Italian nobles,
with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly. The peasants
are few in number now, but the soldiers and priests and beggars are never
wanting. These streets and shops, brilliant though they seem by contrast
with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be third-rate ones in
any other European capital, and will not detain you long. On again by
the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows day and night
through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps more, and then
you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed piazzas; on again,
between high walls, along roads leading through desolate ruin-covered
vineyards, and you are come to another gate. The French sentinels are
changing guard. The dreary Campagna lies before you, and you have passed
through Rome.

And when our stroll was over, that sceptic and incurious fellow-traveller
of mine would surely turn to take a last look at the dark heap of roofs
and chimney-pots and domes, which lies mouldering in the valley at his