The pillars, the statues, the bas-reliefs of ancient Rome, are so lavished in the churches of the modern city, that there is one (St Agnes) where bas-reliefs, turned, serve for the steps of a stair-case, without any one having taken the trouble to examine what they represented. What an astonishing aspect would ancient Rome offer now, if the marble pillars and the statues had been left in the same place where they were found! The ancient city would still have remained standing almost entire--but would the men of our day dare to walk in it? The palaces of the great lords are extremely vast, of an architecture often very fine, and always imposing: but the interior ornaments are rarely tasteful; we do not find in them even an idea of those elegant apartments which the finished enjoyments of social life have given rise to elsewhere. These vast abodes of the Roman princes are empty and silent; the lazy inhabitants of these superb palaces retire into a few small chambers unperceived, and leave strangers to survey their magnificent galleries where the finest pictures of the age of Leo X. are collected together. The great Roman lords of the present day, are as unacquainted with the pompous luxury of their ancestors, as these ancestors themselves were with the austere virtues of the Roman republic. The country houses convey still more the idea of this solitude, of this indifference of the possessors in the midst of the most admirable abodes in the world. People may walk in these immense gardens without suspecting that they have a master. The grass grows in the middle of the walks, and in these very walks are trees fantastically cut according to the ancient taste that prevailed in France.--What a singular whimsicality is this neglect of the necessary, and affectation of the useless!--But one is often surprised at Rome, and in the greater part of the other cities of Italy, at the taste of the Italians for extravagant ornaments,--they who have incessantly before their eyes the noble simplicity of the antique. They love what is brilliant, much better than what is elegant and commodious. They have in every instance, the advantages and the inconveniences of not living habitually in society. Their luxury is rather that of the imagination, than the luxury of actual enjoyment;--isolated as they are among themselves, they cannot dread the spirit of ridicule, which seldom penetrates at Rome into domestic secrecy; and often, in contrasting the interior with the exterior of their palaces, one would say, that the greater part of the Italian nobility arrange their dwellings more to dazzle the passers-by than to receive their friends.