with Palermo. ‘But Rome is the place, after all, where there is most to astonish one, and [it is] of all ages, even the present. I don’t know that I take much interest in the relics of the Empire, magnificent as they are, although there is something sentimental in seeing (as one literally may), the cows and oxen _Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis_. But the thing which most takes possession of one’s mind is the entire absorption of the old Roman splendour in an unthought-of system: to see their columns, and marbles, and bronzes, which had been brought together at such an immense cost, all diverted from their first objects, and taken up by Christianity: St. Peter and St. Paul standing at the top of Trajan’s and Antonine’s columns, and St. Peter buried in the Circus of Nero, with all the splendour of Rome concentrated in his mausoleum. The immense quantity of rare marbles, which are the chief ornament of the Churches here, could scarcely have been collected except by the centre of an universal Empire, which had not only unlimited wealth at its command, but access to almost every country; and now one sees all this dedicated to the Martyrs. Before I came here I had no idea of the effect of coloured stone in architecture; but the use Michael Angelo has made of it in St. Peter’s shows one at once how entirely that style is designed with reference to it, and how absurd it was in Sir C. Wren to copy the form when he could copy nothing more. The coloured part so completely disconnects itself from the rest, and forms such an elegant and decided relief to it, that the two seem like independent designs that do not interfere. The plain stone-work has all the simplicity of a Grecian temple, and the marbles set it off just as a fine scene or a glowing sky would. I observe that the awkwardness of mixing up arched and unarched architecture is thus entirely avoided, as all the arched work is coloured, and the lines of the uncoloured part are all either horizontal or perpendicular. So Michael Angelo adds his testimony to my theory about Gothic architecture. ‘As to Raphael’s pictures, I have not had time to study them with attention. The most celebrated of them, especially your friend Heliodorus, are so damaged or dirty that one cannot see them distinctly except close; they say we should use an opera-glass. All that the painters say of Raphael tends to exalt him as a poet and a man of genius, but rather at the expense of his technical skill; he and Michael Angelo seem, by what they say, to be counterparts. But I wish I could hope to form an opinion of my own about it.