ruins cast their shadows at my feet, walked and discoursed Cicero and the philosophers, Brutus and the patriots, Catiline and the conspirators, Augustus and the scholars and poets, and the great stranger in Rome, St. Paul, gazing at the false altars, and burning in his heart to reveal to them the "unknown God." What men have crossed the shadows of these very columns! and what thoughts, that have moved the world, have been born beneath them! The Barberini palace contains three or four masterpieces of painting. The most celebrated is the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The melancholy and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told in a variety of ways, and is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw her on her way to execution, and has painted her as she was dressed, in the gray habit and head-dress made by her own hands, and finished but an hour before she put it on. There are engravings and copies of the picture all over the world, but none that I have seen give any idea of the excessive gentleness and serenity of the countenance. The eyes retain traces of weeping, but the child-like mouth, the soft, girlish lines of features that look as if they never had worn more than the one expression of youthfulness and affection, are all in repose, and the head is turned over the shoulder with as simple a sweetness as if she had but looked back to say a good-night before going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like what she was--one of the firmest and boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After murdering her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by confession, and was only moved from her constancy, at last, by the agonies of her younger brother on the rack. Who would read capabilities like these, in these heavenly and child-like features? I have tried to purchase the life of the Cenci, in vain. A bookseller told me to-day, that it was a forbidden book, on account of its reflections upon the pope. Immense interest was made for the poor girl, but, it is said, the papal treasury ran low, and if she was pardoned, the large possessions of the Cenci family could not have been confiscated. The gallery contains also, a delicious picture of the Fornarina by Raphael himself, and a portrait of Giorgione's mistress, as a Carthaginian slave, the same head multiplied so often in his and Titian's pictures. The original of the admirable picture of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, is also here. A copy of it is in the gallery of Florence.