Scarce had Dupaty left Rome when Goethe came to take his place[653]. Did the president of the Parliament of Bordeaux ever hear speak of Goethe? And nevertheless the name of Goethe lives on this earth whence that of Dupaty has vanished. It is not that I love the mighty genius of Germany; I have little sympathy for the poet of matter: I feel Schiller, I understand Goethe. There may be great beauties in the enthusiasm which Goethe experiences in Rome for Jupiter: excellent critics think so; but I prefer the God of the Cross to the God of Olympus. I look in vain for the author of _Werther_ along the banks of the Tiber; I find him only in this phrase: "My present life is as it were a dream of youth; we shall see if I am fated to enjoy it, or to recognise that this too is vain, as so many others have been." When Napoleon's eagle allowed Rome to escape from its claws, she fell back into the bosom of her peaceful pastors: then Byron appeared at the crumbling walls of the Cæsars[654]; he flung his distressed imagination over so many ruins, like a mourning cloak. Rome, thou hadst a name, he gave thee another; that name will cling to thee; he called thee: "The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago[655]." After that last storm of poetry, Byron was not long in dying[656]. I might have seen Byron at Geneva, and I did not see him; I might have seen Goethe at Weimar, and I did not see him; but I saw Madame de Staël die, who, disdaining to live beyond her youth, passed swiftly to the Capitol with Corinne: imperishable names, illustrious ashes, which have associated themselves with the name and the ashes of the Eternal City[657]. Thus have the changes in manners and persons proceeded from century to century in Italy; but the great transformation has been worked, above all, by our two occupations of Rome. The "Roman Republic," established under the influence of the Directorate, ridiculous as it was with its two "consuls" and its "lictors" (scurvy _facchini_ taken from the populace), for all that, made excellent innovations in the civil laws: it was from the prefectures, invented by that "Roman Republic," that Bonaparte borrowed the institution of his own prefects. [Sidenote: The "Roman Republic."]