_10th._ Our drive this morning from St. Goar to Bingen was cold and rainy, and the Lurley rocks, and the wild and rugged banks of the Rhine between St. Goar and Oberwesel, looked more than usually dreary, the few vines and the little vegetation that appear upon them in summer not having yet begun to shoot. We quitted the banks of the Rhine at Bingen, and struck across the country through a fine rich plain stretching almost as far as the eye can reach, and every here and there diversified by low hills, to Mayence. Ingelheim, one of the numerous residences of Charlemagne, and where that monarch once had a magnificent palace, is now a little insignificant borough, and the palace with its hundred columns from Rome or Ravenna, has vanished, or nearly so, for the slight remains that are still standing, shew but little of former grandeur. At Mayence our passports were demanded at the first of the numerous draw-bridges, and quickly _visé'd_. Sir Humphry determined upon spending the night here, as I knew that the accommodations at the Roman Emperor were much better than any he would find at Oppenheim or Worms, which latter town we could not have reached till the night had set in, and Sir Humphry does not like to travel after sunset. The streets of this ancient town are for the most part narrow, dark, and dirty, with the exception of the chief street running from the upper part of the town towards the Rhine, called _die grosse bleiche_, the great bleaching place, and which is a broad and handsome street. The whole appearance of the town, the old _dom_ or cathedral, with its heavy towers and light pinnacles of red stone; its brazen gates, still bearing the marks of the balls of the celebrated siege in 1792; the many magnificent houses, often uninhabited or turned into shops and _cafés_; the vast but ruinous palace of red sand-stone on the Rhine; the few inhabitants one meets with in the streets,--the officers and soldiers of the different regiments in garrison of course excepted,--plainly tell the stranger that Mayence has no longer any pretension to the splendour it owned under the rule of the Ecclesiastical Princes, it being then the second ecclesiastical town in Germany; or even during its occupation by the French, who, wherever they went, were sure to carry with them life and spirit. As it has changed for the worse, so may it again change for the better, and who can say that it may not in a few lustres more again flourish as a frontier fortress of France.