the home process! It is not a rush in, in desperation, a duck in agony, and a dressing in ague, but a delicious lounge, associated with all the enjoyments of scenery and society. The temperature of the sea is just sufficiently below that of the air to invigorate without chilling, like the tone of a company that stimulates without exhausting you. It is, besides, indescribably pleasant to meet with a pastime so suggestive of new themes of talk. Instead of the tiresome and trite topics of ballet and balls, and dress and diamonds, your conversation smacks of salt water, and every allusion "hath suffered a sea change." Instead of a compliment to your dancing, the flattery is now on your diving; and he who once offered his arm to conduct you to the "buffet," now proposes his company to swim out to a lifebuoy! And now let me get back to land once more, and you will begin to fancy that your correspondent is Undine herself in disguise. I was very sorry to leave Spezia, since I was just becoming an excellent swimmer. Indeed, the surgeon of an American frigate assured me that he thought "I had been raised in the Sandwich Islands,"--a compliment which, of course, I felt bound to accept in the sense that most flattered me. We passed through Carrara, stopping only to visit one or two of the studios. They had not much to interest us, the artists being for the most part copyists, and their works usually busts; busts being now the same passion with our travelling countrymen as once were oil portraits. The consequence is that every sculptor's shelves are loaded with thin-lipped, grim-visaged English women, and triple-chinned, apoplectic-looking aldermen, that contrast very unfavorably with the clean-cut brows and sharply chiselled features of classic antiquity. The English are an eminently good-looking race of people, seen in their proper costume of broadcloth and velvet. They are manly and womanly. The native characteristics of boldness, decision, and highhearted honesty are conspicuous in all their traits; nor is there any deficiency in the qualities of tenderness and gentleness. But with all this, when they take off their neckcloths, they make but very indifferent Romans; and he who looked a gentleman in his shirt-collar becomes, what James would call, "an arrant snob" when seen in a toga. And yet they _will_ do it! They have a notion that the Anglo-Saxon can do anything,--and so he can, perhaps,--the difference being whether he can _look_ the character he knows so well how to _act_.