the rooms are constructed: in its centre is a simply elegant cistern. It is evident that the inhabitants lived chiefly in the open air, and even received their friends there. Nothing can give a more luxurious idea of life than a climate which throws man into the bosom of nature. Society must have meant something very different in such habits from what it is where the cold confines men within doors. We better appreciate the dialogues of Plato, while beholding the porticos beneath which the ancients passed half of their day. They were incessantly animated by the beauteous sky. Social order, they conceived, was not the barren combination of fraud and force, but a happy union of institutions that excite the faculties, and develop the mind, making man's object the perfection of himself and his fellow-creatures. Antiquity inspires insatiable curiosity. The learned, employed solely on collections of names, which they call history, were surely devoid of all imagination. But to penetrate the past, interrogate the human heart through many ages; to seize on a fact in a word, and on the manners or character of a nation in a fact; to re-enter the most distant time, in order to conceive how the earth looked in its youth, and in what way men supported the life which civilization has since rendered so complicated; this were a continual effort of imagination, whose guesses discover secrets that study and reflection cannot reveal. Such occupation was particularly attractive to Nevil, who often told Corinne that, if he had not nobler interests to serve in his own land, he could not endure to live away from this. We should, at least, regret the glory we cannot obtain. Forgetfulness alone degrades the soul, which can ever take refuge in the past, when deprived of a present purpose.