"Consider that you are sent to... Greece, where politeness, learning and even agriculture itself are supposed to have taken their first rise.... Revere the gods their founders, their ancient glory and even that very antiquity itself which, venerable in men, is sacred in States. Honour them therefore for their deeds of old renown, nay, their very legendary traditions. Grant to every one his full dignities, privileges, yes, and the indulgence of his very vanity. Remember it was from this nation we derived our laws; that she did not receive ours by conquest, but gave us hers by favour. Remember, it is Athens to which you go; it is Lacedæmon you govern; and to deprive such a people of the declining shadow, the remaining name of liberty would be cruel, inhuman, barbarous[137]." When Pliny wrote those noble and touching words to Maximus, did he know that he was drawing up instructions for peoples, then barbarian, that would one day come to hold sway over the ruins of Rome? I shall soon be leaving Rome, and I hope to return. I once more love passionately this Rome so sad and so beautiful: I shall have a panorama on the Capitol, where the Prussian Minister will give up to me the little Caffarelli Palace; at Sant' Onofrio I have set up another retreat. Pending my departure and my return, I never cease wandering in the Campagna; there is no little road, running between two hedges, that I do not know better than the Combourg lanes. From the top of the Monte Mario and the surrounding hills, I discover the horizon of the sea in the direction of Ostia; I take my rest under the light and crumbling porticoes of the Villa Madama. In these architectural remains changed into farms, I often find only a timid young girl, startled and agile as her goats. When I go out by the Porta Pia, I walk to the Ponte Lamentano over the Teverone; I admire, as I pass St Agnes', a Head of Christ by Michael Angelo, which keeps watch over the almost abandoned convent. The master-pieces of the great masters thus strewn through the desert fill the soul with profound melancholy. It distresses me that they should have collected the Roman pictures in a museum; I should have much preferred to go along the slopes of the Janiculum, under the fall of the Aqua Paola, across the solitary Via delle Fomaci, to seek the _Transfiguration_ in the Recollect Monastery of San Pietro in Montorio. When one looks at the place once occupied, on the high altar of the church, by the ornament of Raphael's funeral, one's heart is struck and saddened. [Sidenote: Walks in Rome.] Beyond the Ponte Lamentano, yellow pasture-lands stretch to the left to the Tiber; the river which bathed the gardens of Horace here flows unknown. Following the high road, you find the pavement of the ancient Via Tiburtina. I there this year saw the first swallow arrive.