In the last room are two of the most celebrated pictures in Rome. The first is by Leonardo da Vinci, and represents Vanity and Modesty, by two females standing together in conversation--one a handsome, gay, volatile looking creature, covered with ornaments, and listening unwillingly to what seems a lecture from the other, upon her foibles. The face of the other is a heavenly conception of woman--earnest, delicate, and lovely--the idea one forms to himself, before intercourse with the world, gives him a distaste for its purity. The moral lesson of the picture is more forcible than language. The painter deserved to have died, as he did, in the arms of an emperor. The other picture represents two gamblers cheating a youth, a very striking picture of nature. It is common from the engravings. On the opposite side of the room, is a very expressive picture, by Schidone. On the ruins of an old tomb stands a skull, beneath which is written--"_I, too, was of Arcadia_;" and, at a little distance, gazing at it in attitudes of earnest reflection, stand two shepherds, struck simultaneously with the moral. It is a poetical thought, and wrought out with great truth and skill. * * * * * Our eyes aching and our attention exhausted with pictures, we drove from the Sciarra to the ruined palaces of the Cesars. Here, on an eminence above the Tiber, with the Forum beneath us on one side, the Coliseum on the other, and all the towers and spires of modern and Catholic Rome arising on her many hills beyond, we seated ourselves on fragments of marble, half buried in the grass, and mused away the hours till sunset. On this spot Romulus founded Rome. The princely Augustus, in the last days of her glory, laid here the foundations of his imperial palace, which, continued by Caligula and Tiberius, and completed by Domitian, covered the hill, like a small city. It was a labyrinth of temples, baths, pavilions, fountains, and gardens, with a large theatre at the western extremity; and adjoining the temple of Apollo, was a library filled with the best authors, and ornamented with a colossal bronze statue of Apollo, "of excellent Etruscan workmanship." "Statues of the fifty daughters of Danaus Siuramdert surrounded the portico" (of this same temple), "and opposite them were equestrian statues of their husbands." About a hundred years ago, accident discovered, in the gardens buried in rubbish, a magnificent hall, two hundred feet in length and one hundred and thirty-two in breadth, supposed to have been built by Domitian. It was richly ornamented with statues, and columns of precious marbles, and near it were baths in excellent preservation. "But," says Stark, "immense and superb as was this first-built palace of the Cesars, Nero, whose extravagance and passion for architecture knew no limits, thought it much too small for him, and extended its edifices and gardens from the Palatine to the Esquiline. After the destruction of the whole, by