I have read again my Letter to M. de Fontanes on Rome, written five and twenty years ago, and I confess that I have found it so exact that it would be impossible for me to take away or add a word to it. A foreign company has come this winter (1829) to propose to clear the Roman Campagna: ah, gentlemen, spare us your cottages and your English gardens on the Janiculum! If ever they were to disfigure the waste lands against which the ploughshare of Cincinnatus struck, on which all the grasses bend before the breath of the centuries, I should fly Rome, never to set foot in it again. Go to drag your improved ploughs elsewhere; here the earth grows and must grow only tombs. The cardinals have closed their ears to the calculations of the commercial adventurers hastening to demolish the ruins of Tusculum, which they mistake for the castles of aristocrats: they would have made lime with the marble of the sarcophagus of Æmilius Paulus, even as they have made water-shoots with the lead of the coffins of our ancestors. The Sacred College clings to the past; besides, it has been proved, to the great confusion of the economists, that the Roman Campagna paid the owners five per cent, as pasture-land and that it would not yield more than one and a half in corn. It is not through idleness, but through practical interest, that the cultivator of the plains gives the preference to _pastorizia_ over _maggesi._ The produce of an acre in the Roman territory is almost equal to the produce of the same measure in the best French departments: to convince one's self of that, one has but to read the work of Monsignore Nicolaï[668]. * I have told you that, at first, I had a sense of weariness, at the commencement of my second journey to Rome, and that I ended by recovering under the influence of the ruins and the sun. I was still under my first impression when, on the 3rd of November 1828, I wrote to M. Villemain: