There is, I think, no city in the world where Pilate's question, "What is truth?" would be so hard to answer as in Rome. In addition to the ordinary difficulties which everywhere beset the path of the foreigner in search of knowledge, there are a number of obstacles peculiar and special to Rome alone. The whole policy of the government is directed towards maintaining the country in a state of isolation, towards drawing, in fact, a moral _cordon sanitaire_ round the Papal dominions. Indeed, if one lived long in Rome, one would get to doubt the reality of anything. When I last came to Rome straight from Tuscany, seething in the turmoil of its new- bought liberties, I could hardly believe that only six months ago there had been war in Italy within two hundred miles from the Papal city, that the fate of Italy still hung trembling in the balance, and that the chief province of the country was still in open revolt against its rulers. There was no sign, no trace, scarce a symptom even of what had passed or was passing in the world without. We all seemed spellbound in a dull, dead, dreary circle. There were no advertisements in the streets, except of devotional works for the coming season of Lent; no pamphlets or books placed in the booksellers' windows, which by their titles even implied the existence of the war and the revolution; no prints for sale of the scenes of the campaign, or the popular heroes of the day. This was the normal state of Rome, such as I had seen it in former years. Later on, indeed, either the force of events, or a change in the counsels of the Vatican, induced the Papacy to drop the defensive passive attitude which constituted its real strength, and to adopt an active offensive policy, which served rather to show the greatness of the dreaded danger than to avert its occurrence. Still the increased animation, though perceptible enough to a Roman, appeared to a stranger but a step above absolute stagnation. I never could get over my astonishment at our utter ignorance of what went on around and amongst us. About the state of affairs in our two neighbouring countries, whether in free Tuscany or in despotic Naples, we were entirely in the dark. What little news we got was derived from chance reports of stray travellers, or from the French and English newspapers. The _Giornale di Roma_ gave us now and then a damnatory paragraph about the Tuscan Government, from which, out of a mass of vituperation, we could pick up an odd fact or so; but during the first four months of this year, throughout which period I perused the _Giornale_ pretty carefully, I do not remember to have seen a single allusion, good, bad or indifferent, to the kingdom of Naples. The Tuscan papers were naturally enough forbidden, as are almost all the journals of the free Italian states, and could only be obtained by private hands. The Neapolitan Gazette, the _Monitore del Regno delle Due Sicilie_, was never