Besides, the Stuarts consoled themselves at the sight of Rome; they were but one slight accident the more in those vast fragments, a small shattered column raised in the midst of a great burial-ground of ruins. Their House, in disappearing from the world, enjoyed yet this further comfort: it saw the fall of old Europe; the fatality clinging to the Stuarts dragged other kings with them to the dust, among whom was Louis XVI., whose grandfather had refused an asylum to the descendant of Charles I.[645], and Charles X. has died in exile at the age of the Cardinal of York, and his son and his grandson are wanderers on the face of the earth! Lalande's[646] Journey in Italy, in 1765 and 1766, remains the best and the most exact as regards the Rome of the arts and of antiquities: "I like to read the historians and poets," he says, "but one could not read them with more pleasure than when treading the soil which bore them, climbing the hills they describe, and watching the flow of the rivers they have sung." That is not so bad for an astronomer who used to eat spiders. Duclos[647], who is almost as lean and dry as Lalande, makes this shrewd observation: "The plays of the different nations give a fairly correct image of their manners. Harlequin, the valet and the principal character in the Italian comedies, is always represented with a great desire for eating, which comes from an habitual need. Our own comedy valets are commonly drunkards, which may imply debauchery, but not penury." The declamatory admiration of Dupaty[648] offers no compensation for the aridity of Duclos and Lalande; still it makes one feel the presence of Rome; one feels by reflex that eloquence of descriptive style is born under the breath of Rousseau, _spiraculum vitæ._ Dupaty approaches the new school which was soon to substitute sentimentality, obscurity and mannerism for the truthfulness, clarity and naturalness of Voltaire. Nevertheless, across his affected jargon, Dupaty observes correctly; he explains the patience of the people of Rome through the age of their successive pontiffs: "A pope," he says, "is always to them a dying king[649]." Dupaty sees night approach at the Villa Borghese: "There remains but one ray of day... it is expiring on the brow of that Venus[650]." Would the poets of our day say better? He takes leave of Tivoli: "Adieu, thou valley!... I am a stranger; I do not inhabit your beautiful Italy; I shall never behold you more: but perhaps my children, some at least of my children, will come to visit you one day; appear but as charming in their eyes as you have to their father[651]." "Some of the children" of the scholar and poet have visited Rome, and they could have seen the last ray of sunlight expire on the brow of the Venus Genitrix of Dupaty[652]. [Sidenote: Dupaty, Goethe.]