gallery of inscriptions again; and after a little more wandering, I made
my way out of the palace. . . . .

Yesterday I went out betimes, and strayed through some portion of ancient
Rome, to the Column of Trajan, to the Forum, thence along the Appian Way;
after which I lost myself among the intricacies of the streets, and
finally came out at the bridge of St. Angelo. The first observation
which a stranger is led to make, in the neighborhood of Roman ruins, is
that the inhabitants seem to be strangely addicted to the washing of
clothes; for all the precincts of Trajan's Forum, and of the Roman Forum,
and wherever else an iron railing affords opportunity to hang them, were
whitened with sheets, and other linen and cotton, drying in the sun. It
must be that washerwomen burrow among the old temples. The second
observation is not quite so favorable to the cleanly character of the
modern Romans; indeed, it is so very unfavorable, that I hardly know how
to express it. But the fact is, that, through the Forum, . . . . and
anywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well
to your steps. . . . . If you tread beneath the triumphal arch of Titus
or Constantine, you had better look downward than upward, whatever be the
merit of the sculptures aloft. . . . .

After a while the visitant finds himself getting accustomed to this
horrible state of things; and the associations of moral sublimity and
beauty seem to throw a veil over the physical meannesses to which I
allude. Perhaps there is something in the mind of the people of these
countries that enables them quite to dissever small ugliness from great
sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St.
Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden
confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament them with cheap
little colored prints of the crucifixion; they hang tin hearts and other