but he pillories a Frenchman who ventures to despise it. The confident Gaul had just come up from Naples, and was asked if he had seen the grand old temples at Pæstum. “_Oui, monsieur_,” was his answer, “_j’ai vu le Peste. C’est un pays détestable; c’est comme la Campagne de Rome_.” Detestable enough, no doubt, says Story, after the fine military landscape that surrounds Paris; “where low bounding hills are flattened like earthworks and bastions, and stiff formal poplars are drawn up in squares and columns on the wide parade of its level and monotonous plains. It is also a peculiarity of the Frenchman that he underrates everybody and everything except himself and his country.” Mr Story is too much in love with the Campagna not to be jealous of its fame. It is quite certain that, with many, this is not so good as it deserves. People who have not explored it are apt to picture it to themselves as a desolate tract, affording pasturage but little wood, and exhaling fever from every cleft in its soil. When once they have driven and ridden or walked (for much cannot be done on wheels) over its varied and picturesque surface, and seen it in the fresh springtime, when its green copses and hedges scent the air, and its sward is diapered with wild-flowers innumerable, many of which are amongst the choice ones of our English gardens, they are lost in astonishment at the beauty of the tract that surrounds Rome. Our own original notion of the Campagna was based on a picture of a dreary expanse, over which the first shades of night were spreading, chasing thence the last deep red glow of sunset; whilst in the centre of the melancholy, treeless plain, a peasant lad, in goat-skin breeks and elf-locks, and suffering, apparently, under a severe attack of jaundice, tended a herd of pallid cattle, which gave one the idea of having just risen from the straw of sickness in some bovine fever hospital. How different this unprepossessing picture was from the reality need not be told to any who have taken the trouble to visit the vicinity of Rome, instead of limiting their daily exercise (as some of the visitors to that city most unwisely, both as regards health and enjoyment, are prone to do) to the small but agreeable garden on the Pincian Hill, and to the more extensive and certainly most delightful grounds of the Villas Borghese, Doria Pamphili, Albani, and other residences of the Roman princes. It would be tedious to enumerate even the half of the charming rides which are to be had within twenty miles of Rome, and which, it must be owned, the younger portion of the floating British population, both male and female, generally make the most of during the early spring months, much more to their own pleasure and benefit than to those of the unfortunate hacks the Roman livery-stable keepers annually provide for the use of the _forestieri_. A regard for truth compels us also to declare that it is not the male