“Every Englishman,” says this gentleman, “carries a Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step. Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped, from the Dying Gladiator, with his ‘young barbarians all at play,’ down to the Beatrice Cenci, the Madame Touson of the shops, that haunts one everywhere with her white turban and red eyes. Every ruin has had its score of _immortelles_ hung upon it. The soil has been almost overworked by antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but the antique brick a prize. Poets and sentimentalists have described to death what the antiquaries have left, and some have done their work so well that nothing remains to be done after them. All the public and private life of the ancient Romans, from Romulus to Constantine, is perfectly well known. But the common life of the modern Romans—the games, customs, and habits of the people—the everyday of to-day—has been only touched upon here and there,—sometimes with spirit and accuracy, as by Charles M‘Farlane; sometimes with grace, as by Hans Christian Andersen; and sometimes with great ignorance, as by Jones, Brown, and Robinson, who see through the eyes of their courier and the spectacles of their prejudices. There may be, among the thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy their notice, might be interesting.”