mood, will find her indifferent or unresponsive.

The noblest view of the Campagna that I was permitted to enjoy, was from the terrace of the Villa d' Este, near Tivoli. I had gone with a charming party of friends to spend the day at the ancient Tibur, and we had employed the time in making the circuit of the musical Cascatelles and dining under the shadow of the Sibyls Temple, exquisite temple, bad dinner, delicious day, and so we came in the afternoon to climb up the mouldy hanging gardens of the aristocratic Villa d'Este, taking all manner of liberties with the dilapidated Tritons of the broken fountains, and filling the silent grass grown walks with the echoes of unfamiliar laughter. When we reached the lofty terrace, where the visitor looks down many hundred feet upon the open country, the sun was streaming across the Campagna in horizontal shafts of light which broke against the hill sides around us in shattered splendour. The chilliness of evening warned us it was time to return, but still we lingered, as under the spell of enchantment. The Campagna darkened from orange to purple, and from purple to a dusky brown, as the sun stooped nearer to the Mediterranean, his Classic Thetis, and finally sank into her breast, and over the monotonous waste, one single object stood against the sky-it was the dome of St. Peter's-its strange and portentous grandeur looming out of a region of shadows, remote, mysterious, and lone. The Campagna and St. Peter's thus became fixed upon the memory together for all time.

Two or three mornings in the Vatican, among the statues, induced me to think that in the course of as many months a lover of sculpture might by diligent study acquire a creditable knowledge of its contents. Fearing that my own impressions would be weakened by a divided admiration among many objects, upon entering the first gallery I walked on, looking neither to the right nor to the left, like the princess in the Arabian story, on her way to the golden fountain, until I reached the little apartment of the Belvedere, which is glorified by the Apollo. Until

we have a new coinage of superlatives, I am sure I shall never be able to speak of this statue properly. To say that it is the very perfection of manly strength and beauty is nothing-it is action, life, grace, music, perfume in stone, it illuminates the cabinet in which it stands, as a lamp lights up a shrine, and brings the Apollo of the ancient mythology before the mind's eye, as the old poets saw him when he walked in the dim forests, and the recesses of the mountain became dædal in the radiance of his flashing locks. Some of the critics have contended that it is in his character as a medical man, that Apollo is here represented coming into Athens at the time of the great plague—and one might fancy that before his bright footsteps, the abhorred shapes of disease and death would flee away, and that his benign presence would shed joy and health and happiness around. The pose of the figure, so familiar to every reader, gives to it the air of motion, and like some other statues, it inspires you with the idea that it may step off from its pedestal, but unlike all others I have seen, it imparts also the confidence that when arrested it will assume an attitude of equal power and grace and animation.

I have nothing more to say of statues, or paintings, or buildings in Rome, though I shall ever retain distinct and pleasurable recollections of many-of the rosy Aurora in the Rospigliosa, of the sweet Beatrice Cenci, of the truthful and impressive Dying Gladiator, of the grand Moses by Michael Angelo, of the awful figures in the Last Judgment, of the majestic groups in the School of Athens, and of the celestial glory of the Transfiguration-and of many churches and places that the reader will visit when he goes to Rome, after the manner of all men who make the pilgrimage. He will drive, too, without the walls to the English burying ground, where the roses are growing from the dust of Keats and Shelley, and he must not omit to make the tour of the grounds of the Villa Borghese whose long vistas of shade and glorious expanse of turf, have suffered in no degree from that republican violence which defaced the ornaments of the main

avenues and broke the basins of the fountains. Before this spoliation, the Villa Borghese was the darling show-place of Rome, but it may be doubted whether, in its mournful decay, the general aspect of the spot does not better consort with the peculiar beauty of desolation that belong to the Eternal City, than if it still displayed the careful hand of the arborculturist. One subject, however, is so closely connected with Rome, and associates itself so intimately with all that the memory retains of Rome's past and present grandeur, that silence concerning it would be unpardonable. It is the Roman flea. I have read Eothen and have never visited the East, but I am incredulous of the superior vivacity and muscularity of the oriental flea, and feel satisfied that great injushas been done to the Roman insect, by the gifted author of that charming work, who does not introduce it at all in his account of the Congress of Fleas at Jerusalem.

The flea of Rome is as much an institution of the country as the Papacy, and, in spite of the magnificent climax of Mr. Macaulay concerning the duration of the Holy See, I believe will survive it. The

flea attends you everywhere, and enters into your enjoyment of every object in Rome. It skips about in St. Peter's, having ample room there for the exercise of all its energies. It awaits you in the Vatican and is roused to unusual activity by the fumes of the incense in the Sistine Chapel. You have disagreeable interviews with it in St. John Lateran and it lies perdu in the Barberini Palace. Almost all your examinations of works of art are affected more or less by the intervention of fleas, until you wonder if the ancestors of these pests bit Cicero as he stood thundering against Verres, or if like atra cura in the ode of Horace, they mounted behind Augustus as he rode forth in the market-place. In vain shall you try to escape the Roman flea, or to prevent its escaping you. It proceeds by forced marches, and as Napoleon suddenly came down upon the Austrians in one place when they had just before felt his attack in another, so this pulicose enemy will astonish you by a fire in the rear immediately after you have been made quite cer

tain of his operations in a totally different quarter. And there is no such vis a tergo as his bite. You are not left in even momentary doubt of what the force isit is your favorite flea-you recognize him at once, as you do Carlo Dolce or Spagnoletto, by his style. Spagnoletto, is, perhaps, the better illustration, because he loved to paint St. Sebastian transfixed with arrows, and the poisoned barb of the foe might well recall the fine agony of that youthful martyrdom. I used to conjecture how the inhabitants of Rome could ever become accustomed to the constant annoyance, but I learned from an acute observer of Roman life and manners, that they actually learned in time to find a pleasant excitement in the bite, and that to live without fleas would probably be to them an insipid and spiritless existence.

If the stranger could habituate himself into indifference to these vermin, I should think Rome the most delightful place of residence on earth. The repose of the city and its isolation from the great, throbbing, active world of Europe and America, render it especially attractive to the quiet, meditative thinker, who has no great projects of ambition to work out, and an easy competency in his affairs. The stagnation which gathers under the chair of St. Peters, is favorable in a high degree to the studies which the memorials around him would invite the temporary resident to pursue, and I think it may fairly admit of a doubt whether under any other government, the Rome of the past could be contemplated to such advantage. A liberal government, stimulating the energies of the people, and giving freedom of thought and opinion to all over whom it extended, would no doubt work an important change in the aspects of the city,-it would make the Campagna wave with golden harvests, and cause the banks of the Tiber to resound with the hum of industry, but the clash of engines would jar upon the eloquent silence, and the hand of improvement would only mar the beautiful ruin. I saw the Pope performing High Mass, in person, in the Sistine Chapel, and an old gentleman of milder, more benevolent features is not to be found among Raphael's portraits.

We hold it for a self-evident proposition that Great Men are always small. In other words, greatness of mind and size of body are incompatible conditions.

Does the reader doubt it? then will we undertake to prove our assertion, and to convince him clearly, unless he be a tall, large, portly (not to say porky) individual, that history, science and every day observation go to confirm the correctness of our opinion.

We are astonished that no one has before this taken up the subject. If for no other reason, it should be done to encourage the many small men who live on earth, cheering them with the knowledge of the vast intellectual statue attained by men of like size with themselves, and also to abate the pride, if not the stature of the sons of Anark, and keep them from looking down on men of lower height.

Our purpose is to place things and persons on a proper level; to raise the low, to pull down the high; at once to level up and to level down.

We wish to show how much men, take them all in all, are upon an equality, and how little cause of complaint even the shortest man has when compared with a six or seven footer.

We shall prove how incomparably superior the man of brevity is to the man of longitude; and while making the one feel as though he had been stretched to a higher standard, we shall cause the other to shrink down, becoming smaller by degrees and beautifully less, until he is almost hidden in his own boots.

If the advantages of shortness were enumerated they would fill a volume, and not a short one either.

Indeed, so well known and highly esteemed are those advatages, that men have received their name and designation from no other thing than this of being small. And let the reader take notice, that these names are the most ancient and therefore the most honorable; for man was first distinguished from his fellow man by some personal peculiarity, and named ac

cording to it; after this, came those names which are derived from occupations, of which the numerous family of Smiths are an illustration. After these, as men became more compactly settled in communities and nations, came those names, last given, and strange to say most honored by some, we mean names derived from places and possessions, as Percy, Beverly, De Wilton, &c., &c., &c. These have usurped most of the titles of honor; indeed we have Dukes of such a place, Counts of such another, Knights of this Manor and Squires of that one. They have conquered and driven away the first; the law of primogeniture not holding good in relation to names.

Or rather the good old Saxon terms to designate men, the Strong, the Wise, the Unready, &c., were as much subdued and deprived of place and power by the Norman names, as were their possessors of their native land. Indeed these Norman Baron, like other sailors, had no specific or peculiar names, but bore any title that came to hand; and not only robbed others of their lands but even committed larceny on their names also. Landing first in France, they stole the country along the coast, managed to make the French king give them what they already had in possession, and which he, seeing it could not be recovered, generously permitted them to keep. A rough sea captain, who had probably been known as Jack or Bill, or possibly by some sea nickname, seizing on certain castles and lands, very soon adopted a title from his possession and became the Sire Jean De Neville, or Duke Guillanme De Percy and so on. The sons followed the father's example, and when Duke William attacked the Saxons, he found a number of these young fellows ready to fight hard for name and fortune, ready to take the lands and assume the designation, only transforming it into Norman French, of all the wealthy men of England.

Thus was the change brought about; grand larceny was committed upon the