believe, the tomb of the founder. I have not seen, nor expect to see,
anything else so entirely and satisfactorily finished as this small oval
church; and I only wish I could pack it in a large box, and send it home.

I must not forget that, on our way from the Barberini Palace, we stopped
an instant to look at the house, at the corner of the street of the four
fountains, where Milton was a guest while in Rome. He seems quite a man
of our own day, seen so nearly at the hither extremity of the vista
through which we look back, from the epoch of railways to that of the
oldest Egyptian obelisk. The house (it was then occupied by the Cardinal
Barberini) looks as if it might have been built within the present
century; for mediaeval houses in Rome do not assume the aspect of
antiquity; perhaps because the Italian style of architecture, or
something similar, is the one more generally in vogue in most cities.


February 21st.--This morning I took my way through the Porta del Popolo,
intending to spend the forenoon in the Campagna; but, getting weary of
the straight, uninteresting street that runs out of the gate, I turned
aside from it, and soon found myself on the shores of the Tiber. It
looked, as usual, like a saturated solution of yellow mud, and eddied
hastily along between deep banks of clay, and over a clay bed, in which
doubtless are hidden many a richer treasure than we now possess. The
French once proposed to draw off the river, for the purpose of recovering
all the sunken statues and relics; but the Romans made strenuous
objection, on account of the increased virulence of malaria which would
probably result. I saw a man on the immediate shore of the river, fifty
feet or so beneath the bank on which I stood, sitting patiently, with an
angling rod; and I waited to see what he might catch. Two other persons
likewise sat down to watch him; but he caught nothing so long as I