the willow for eighteen centuries. Beneath the dark shadow of the Vatican do they ever think of the sunny and vine-clad hills of their Palestine? I spent days not a few in the saloons of the Vatican. Into these noble chambers,--six thousand in number, it is said,--have been gathered all the masterpieces of ancient art which have been dug up from the ruins of villas, and temples, and basilicas, where they had lain buried for ages. Of course, I enter on no description of these. Let me only remark, that though I had seen hundreds of copies of some of these sculptures,--the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, for instance,--no copy I had ever seen had given me any but the faintest idea of the transcendent beauty and power of the originals. The artist, I found, had flung into them, without the slightest exaggeration of feature, a tremendous energy, an intense life, which perhaps no coming age will ever equal, and certainly none surpass. What a sublime, thrilling, ever-acting tragedy, for instance, is the Laocoon group! But from these efforts of a genius long since passed from the earth, I pass to one who represents in his living person a more tragical drama than any depicted in marble in the halls of the Vatican. One day as I was wandering through these apartments, the rumour ran through them that the Pope was going out to take an airing. I immediately ran down to the piazza, where I found a rather shabby coach with red wheels, to which were yoked four coal-black horses, with a very fat coachman on the box, in antique livery, and two postilions astride the horses, waiting for Pius. Some half-dozen of the _guardia nobile_, mounted on black horses, were in attendance; and, loitering at the bottom of the stairs, were the stately forms of the Swiss guards, with their shining halberds, and their quaint striped dress of yellow and purple. I had often heard of the Pope in the symbols of the Apocalypse, and in the pages of history as the antichrist; and now I was to see him with the eye in the person of Pio Nono. After waiting ten minutes or so, the folding doors in an upper gallery of the piazza were thrown open, and I could see a head covered with a white skull-cap,--the Popes never wear a wig,--passing along the corridor, just visible above the stone ballustrade. In a minute the Pope had descended the stairs, and was advancing along the open pavement to his carriage. The Swiss guard stood to their halberds. A Frenchman and his lady,--the same, if I mistake not, whom I had seen on the Scala Santa,--spreading his white handkerchief on the causeway, uncovered and dropped on his knees; a row of German students in red gowns went down in like manner; a score or so of wretched-looking old men, who were digging up the grass in the piazza, formed a prostrate group in the middle; and a little knot of Englishmen,--some four of us only,--stood erect at about six yards from the line of the procession.