that I am accumulating a certain kind of wealth which may be useful to me hereafter. The condition and character of the people also interest me much, and I think that my understanding of European politics will be much clearer than before my visit to Europe. To understand properly, however, requires time and thought and the power of dissociating real from accidental causes. I wish to see well what I see at all--and, if possible, would like to visit Germany, France, and England before coming home.” The social life of Rome in the English and American circles engaged the travellers, and Lowell made his début as an actor. Private theatricals,” he writes his father, 1 February, 1852, “are all the rage now in Rome. There are three companies. I have an engagement in one of them under the management of Mr. Black, who has erected a pretty enough little theatre in the Palazzo Cini, where he has apartments,--or an apartment, as they would say here. We gave our first representation last Thursday night to a select audience of English and Americans. Our play was a portion of Midsummer Night’s Dream, including part of the fairy scenes, and the whole of the interlude of the clowns. In this interlude, I was the star, having the part of Bottom assigned to me. On the morning of Thursday, I wrote a prologue of some thirty lines which I recited to open the performances. This, to me, was the plum of the evening’s entertainment. In the first place, I do not think that the audience had any idea that I was a prologue at all, till I had got nearly through; for I was obliged to speak it in the costume of Bottom, not having time to dress in the interval between the prologue and my first appearance in character. But even if they guessed what I was about, it never entered their heads that it was intended to be funny till about the middle, when a particularly well-defined pun touched off a series of laughter-explosions which kept going off at intervals during the rest of my recitation, as the train ran along from one mind to another. It was exceedingly diverting to me, for, knowing the requisitions of a prologue, I had written it down to the meanest capacity, and all the jokes were _a-b-abs_. I was very much struck with the difference between an English and an American audience. The minds of our countrymen are infinitely quicker both in perception and conception, and I am certain my prologue would have set a room full of them in roars of laughter.” The list of persons who engaged in these private theatricals is an interesting one. Mr. Charles C. Black, to whom Lowell refers, was the begetter of the entertainment, and with him were W. W. Story, Charles Hemans, Shakespeare Wood, W. Temple, J. Hayllar, and T. Crawford. There were two different representations of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Lowell wrote two separate prologues. The first began:--