It is impossible to deny that, except in hotels which are cosmopolitan, and adapted to the many wants of the rich English, life in Italy is hard business enough for the inexperienced traveller, who knows the strange country into which he has suddenly dropped rather by means of poetical legends than by the facts of actual existence. A country of vineyards and orange-groves, of everlasting verdure and sunshine, is indeed, in its way, a true enough description of one aspect of that many-sided country: but these words of course convey no intimation of the terrors of an Italian palace in the depth of winter, where everything is stone-cold, and the possibilities of artificial warmth are of the most limited description; where the idea of doors and windows closely fitting has never entered the primitive mind, and where the cardinal virtue of patience and endurance of necessary evils wraps the contented native sufferer like the cloak which he hugs round him. Yet, notwithstanding, even Lauderdale relaxed out of the settled gloom on his face when he went to the window of the great bare sitting-room, and gazed out upon the grand expanse of the Campagna, lighted up with morning sunshine. The silence of that depopulated plain, with its pathetic bits of ruin here and there--ruins, to be sure, identified and written down in books, but speaking for themselves with a more woeful and suggestive voice than can be uttered by any mere historical associations, through the very depths of their dumbness and loss of all distinction--went to the spectator’s heart. What they were or had been, what human hands had erected, or human hearts rejoiced in them, these lingering remains had ceased to tell; and it was only with that vagueness which is sadder than any story that they indicated a former forgotten existence, a past too far away to be deciphered now.