‘_Rome._――… I should like to be back at the election much; _sed fata vetant_. Being abroad is a most unsatisfactory thing, and the idleness of it deteriorating. I shall connect very few pleasing associations with this winter, and I don’t think I shall come home much wiser than I went. The only μάθησις on which I can put my hand, as having resulted from my travels is, that the whole Christian system all over Europe “_tendit visibiliter ad non esse_.”[110] The same process which is going on in England and France is taking its course everywhere else; and the clergy in these Catholic countries seem as completely to have lost their influence, and to submit as tamely to the State, as ever we can do in England…. Egesta … by good luck we have been able to see, though we were obliged to abandon the rest of our Sicilian expedition. It is the most strangely romantic place I ever saw or conceived.[111] It is no use attempting to describe it, except that the ruins of the city stand on the top of a very high hill, precipitous on three sides, and very steep on the other, literally towering up to heaven, with scarcely a mule-track leading to it, and all round the appearance of an interminable solitude. After going some miles through a wild uninhabited country, you approach it by winding up a zigzag path cut in the face of what looks a perpendicular and inaccessible rock, and, till you have got some way up, it wears so little the appearance of a track, that without guides no one would venture on. At the top the old walls of the town can be distinctly traced, where one would think that mortal foot had never or rarely been, and numbers of tooled stones [are] scattered in all directions, evidently the remains of well-finished buildings. Here and there is a broken arch which makes one fancy the remains to be Roman, and in the most conspicuous place a fine theatre, nearly perfect. When you come to the ascent on the opposite side, you all at once see the Temple, in what seems a plain at the bottom, with its pediments and all its columns perfect, and only differing from what it was at first in the deep rich colouring of the weather-stains. When we saw it there was a large encampment of shepherds in the front of it, with their wolf-dogs and wild Salvator-like dresses; and, by-the-by, as we found afterwards, with no great objection to lead Salvator-like lives; for when by some accident we were separated from one another, they got round [Newman] shouting “_Date moneta!_” and, he thinks, would certainly have taken it by force, except for a man with a gun who is placed there by Government, as _custode_ of the Temple, and who came up when the others were getting most troublesome. On getting close to the Temple, we found that it stands on the brink of a precipitous ravine 200 or 300 feet deep, which gives a grandeur to the whole scene even beyond what it gets from the mountains and the solitude. Compared with Egesta, Pæstum is a poor concern, and so is Naples when compared