"Going to the church of St. Philip this morning, I encountered an old man sitting on the pavement, supplicating for alms in heart-rending tones. He could not have been less than eighty years of age, and his long locks, of silvery whiteness, strayed thinly over his shrivelled neck. His eyes were out,--those pure messengers of thought no longer twinkled in their spheres,--but he still turned the orbless sockets to each passer, imploring charity in the name of Him whose crucified image he grasped in his attenuated fingers. I was touched by the spectacle, and as I approached to drop my dole into his hand, I noticed a brass plate hanging on his threadbare garment, the inscription on which denoted that this mendicant had been regularly examined by the police, and had taken out his license to beg! What a source this from which to derive public revenue! What a commentary on the nature of government in this oppressed country! What a contrast it suggested, in turning my thoughts to my own land, where government is the people's choice, the rulers their servants, and laws nothing more than recorded public opinion! "On entering the church of St. Philip, I found before an altar blazing with lights and enveloped in clouds of incense a priest performing the impressive service of the Catholic Church. But the thing that struck me was the democratic spirit which seemed to govern the congregation in their public worship. I saw kneeling and mingling in prayer the sumptuously clad and the ragged, the clean and the unclean, the prince and the beggar. On the pavement at a little distance from me lay extended a strapping mendicant, reduced in point of clothing almost to the condition of Lear's 'unaccommodated man,' and groaning out his prayers in tones that sounded more like curses than supplications, while at his side, with graceful mien and placid brow, knelt a Sardinian sylph, looking more like an angel interceding for the prostrate wretch than a being of kindred nature asking mercy for herself. "The museum of Turin is of great extent, and contains vast apartments devoted to natural history, mineralogy, and other sciences. There are here, besides, some rare specimens of antique Greek and Egyptian sculpture. The finest collection of paintings is in the palace of the duchess, among them pictures by Vandyke, Rubens, Teniers, Murillo, and other 'approved good masters.' I was much struck with a full equestrian portrait of his present majesty Charles Albert, by Horace Vernet. Vernet is one of the very few whose horses _live_ on the canvas. The one to which I now allude is not only exhibited in all his fair proportions, with muscles, thews, and sinews that seem swelling with life, but actual, not counterfeit, spirit shines in the sparkle of his eye and is seen in the breath of his distended nostrils.