"These monstrous walls! I cannot divest myself of a certain awe and fascination, as if of a supernatural appearance, which attracts and detains me about them; not even the Colosseum more. There seems something so ghastly, so spectral, in the mockery of their unnecessary circuit, their impregnable strength, their countless towers, arrogating to themselves the circumference of a day's journey--and all for what? To guard a city, which, once dropsied with grandeur, has now shrunk with the disease into comparative atrophy; a city, which, having boastfully demanded their aid, has now abandoned them for miles. It is as though one should wrap a triumphal robe about a corpse, or place a giant's helmet upon a skeleton's skull. It is no poetical figure to look upon them as an eternal satire upon the great littleness of empire. The melancholy pride of their dimensions needs not the hollow wind, which howls around their towers, or the wondering sun, which lingers over their shrubby ramparts, to proclaim in the ears of thrones and senates the warning of Rome's ambition, the moral of Rome's downfall! It is but a poor recompense to their present unhonoured solitude, that their melancholy battlements are emblazed at intervals with the pontifical escutcheons. Those triple tiaras and cross keys, so perpetually recurring, do not half so much consecrate as they are themselves consecrated by the lonely bulwarks of this desolated city of the Caesars!" THE VILLA BORGHESE. "With the exception of an ostentatious parade of paltry equipages, tarnished liveries, and wretched horses on the Corso, and a frantic attempt at an opera, Rome, in May, is a picturesque receptacle for monks, and goatherds, and nightingales, and bells. Like some haunted place, it appears to be beloved and frequented only by the apparitions of an obsolete race. Yet many minds will find it infinitely more congenial thus, than amidst all the popular splendours of its holy week. "Her tranquillity, nay, her very desolation, is enchanting. The summer's-day circuit of the Seven Hills seems all your own. You wander whither you will, meeting few, and disturbed by none. In short, the very antiquity of the place is one perpetual novelty, and its grave monotony a serene recreation. I write this in the Villa Borghese, beneath groves of acacias, redolent with odours, and booming with myriads of bees, the yellow hay in aromatic quiles, pitched like pavilions below the old red walls of Rome, and nightingales and blackbirds contending in gushes of ecstatic song!