[Footnote A: Vernet was the artist whose sea-ports of France still decorate the Louvre. He was marine painter to Louis XV. and grandfather of the celebrated Horace Vernet, whose recent death has deprived France of her best painter of battle-scenes.--ED.] There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies of antiquity. Then the ideal presence or the imaginative existence prevails, by its perpetual associations, or as the late Dr. Brown has, perhaps, more distinctly termed them, _suggestions._ "In contemplating antiquity, the mind itself becomes antique," was finely observed by Livy, long ere our philosophy of the mind existed as a system. This rapture, or sensation of deep study, has been described by one whose imagination had strayed into the occult learning of antiquity, and in the hymns of Orpheus it seemed to him that he had lifted the veil from Nature. His feelings were associated with her loneliness. I translate his words:--"When I took these dark mystical hymns into my hands, I appeared as it were to be descending into an abyss of the mysteries of venerable antiquity; at that moment, the world in silence and the stars and moon only, watching me." This enthusiasm is confirmed by Mr. Mathias, who applies this description to his own emotions on his first opening the manuscript volumes of the poet Gray on the philosophy of Plato; "and many a learned man," he adds, "will acknowledge as his own the feelings of this animated scholar." Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, our Imagination is touched by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great people. The classical author of Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his recollections. Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippodromes, and public and private edifices, he, as it were, held an interior converse with the manes of those who seemed hovering about the capital of the old world; as if he had been a citizen of ancient Rome travelling in the modern. So men of genius have roved amid the awful ruins till the ideal presence has fondly built up the city anew, and have become Romans in the Rome of two thousand years past. POMPONOIUS LETUS, who devoted his life to this study, was constantly seen wandering amidst the vestiges of this "throne of the world." There, in many a reverie, as his eye rested on the mutilated arch and the broken column, abstracted and immovable, he dropped tears in the ideal presence of Rome and of the Romans.[A] Another enthusiast of this class was BOSIUS, who sought beneath Rome for another Rome, in those catacombs built by the early Christians for their asylum and their sepulchre. His work of "Roma Sotteranea" is the production of a subterraneous life, passed in fervent and perilous labours. Taking with him a hermit's meal for the week, this new Pliny often descended into the bowels of the earth, by lamp-light, clearing away