The walk through the Museum is certainly one of the most wonderful in the world. There are more masterpieces, perhaps, in Florence; possibly objects of greater value may be accumulated in the British Museum; but nowhere in the world are statues and antiquities so well arranged as in the Vatican, and perhaps the orderly beauty of arrangement has as much to do as anything else with the charm which pervades the whole. One is brought into direct communication with Rome at its best, brilliant with the last reflections of Hellenic light; and again one is brought into contact with Rome at its worst, and beyond its worst, in its decay and destruction. Amid the ruin, too, there is the visible sign of a new growth in the beginnings of Christianity, from which a new power, a new history, a new literature and a new art were to spring up and blossom, and in the rude sculpture of the Shepherd, the Lamb and the Fishes lies the origin of Michelangelo's 'Moses' and 'Pieta.' There, too, one may read, as in a book, the whole history of death in Rome, graven in the long lines of ancient inscriptions, the tale of death when there was no hope, and its story when hope had begun in the belief in the resurrection of the dead. There the sadness of the sorrowing Roman contrasts with the gentle hopefulness of the bereaved Christian, and the sentiment and sentimentality of mankind during the greatest of the world's developments are told in the very words which men and women dictated to the stone-cutter. To those who can read the inscriptions the impression of direct communication with antiquity is very strong. For those who cannot there is still a special charm in the long succession of corridors, in the occasional glimpses of the gardens, in the magnificence of the decorations, as well as in the statues and fragments which line the endless straight walls. One returns at last to the outer chambers, one lingers here and there, to look again at something one has liked, and in the end one goes out remembering the place rather than the objects it contains, and desiring to return again for the sake of the whole sensation one has had rather than for any defined purpose.