On the other hand, I cannot help adding that educated society shares to a certain extent the prejudice of the rabble, since it shares their pleasures. The boxes are always full when Shakespeare is on the bill, and last night the play was well received; the disgusting jokes and the extravagant ravings duly listened to and applauded by men, women, lawyers, merchants, lords, and sailors. One and all they seemed to breathe with delight the obnoxious vapours of that earth which is made up of the remains of corpses. Compare this deliberate brutality, which educated men have tried to justify in books, with the mildness of the penal laws and the real executions, and explain it if you can! As for me, I will not visit the playhouse again until the question is solved. HERR MÜLLER _Letter from Sir Richard C---- to his Cousin_ ROME, _January 4, 1787_. I have been here a fortnight and have been able more or less to look round. I wrote a long letter to Horace yesterday in which I described at great length the journey from Venice, so I will not repeat to you what I have already written to him. Rome is a great deal altered since I was here last, ten years ago. It is being spoilt, and such damage as the Goths and Vandals left undone is now being accomplished by the modern architects. I am afraid that by the time the next generation is grown up the beautiful Rome that we have known and loved will have entirely disappeared, and that when our sons and daughters make the pilgrimage which we looked upon as the reward of our studies and the greatest privilege of our youth, they will find a new city, elegant no doubt, and not without grandeur, but devoid of that special charm, that rare and solemn dignity, which clothed the city as we knew it. Of course, certain of the monuments and works of art will always remain, and nothing can prevent Nature from performing her careless miracles. No defacing hand will be allowed to touch the trees that grow in the Coliseum, or to desecrate the verdure and the luxuriant vegetation which is allowed to run riot in the baths of Caracalla. Again, no modern artist will be allowed to lay hands on the grassy Forum, or to intrude upon the Gardens of the Borghese Palace which remind one of the fabled meadows and parterres of Elysium. But it is in the body of the city that the barbarians of the present day are allowed to commit their impious sacrilege, and it is not only a melancholy and bitter task to trace the remains of antiquity in the Rome of to-day, but it is even difficult to recognize in what now exists the city as she was when we were last here together.