behind you on the left the huge castle refusing to be comforted by the moonlight, with its triumphant archangel just alighting on its summit. Another sharp turn to the left, and you are in a black slit of street again, which at last, after half a mile of unsavoriness, becomes the Corso, the main street of modern Rome. And everything thus far is palpably modern, especially the Hotel d’Angleterre, at which we presently alight. Next day we remove to lodgings already engaged for us by F. Boott, near the Pincio, in the highest part of the city. Here we manage to be comfortable through a month of never-ceasing rain. Then it clears, and we have a month of cloudless sunshine, with roses blooming in the gardens and daisies in the fields. To-day is the first rainy day, and I devote it to you.” The Lowells had their quarters at Capo le Case, No. 68, on the third _piano_, and were surrounded by a few English and American friends. Mr. and Mrs. Story were not in Rome when they first arrived, but joined them in about a fortnight, when the rains had ceased at last and so permitted walks in the Campagna. The first part of their stay had been dreary enough, and drew from Lowell the whimsical remark: “Sometimes as I look from the Pincian, I think that the best thing about [modern Rome] is that the hills look like Brighton.” And Mrs. Lowell draws a humorous picture of her husband, and their half homesick feelings, when she writes: “Through Mr. Black we have the English journals and papers, and it really gives me a little home feeling when I see a bundle of _Examiners_ and _Athenæums_ brought in just as they used to be from Mr. Wells’s, and see James selecting his cigar with particular satisfaction and giving the fire an express arrangement, and then drawing up his chair to it and putting his feet on the fender, beginning to read.”