Valmontone, on the road from Naples to Rome, is a strange but enchanting spot, enveloped in shade, with magnificent rocks (agglomerated volcanic ashes) hollowed into caverns, which afford coolness in this burning climate, and where an incredible number of nightingales make the whole air musical. The little town rose picturesquely on its rocky pedestal, with a large building like a monastery inhabited by myriads of swallows, darting in and out at its sashless windows. A solitary guardian eyed us through a door a-jar, but did not come out, while we went round the church, and admired some good pictures remaining on its walls. The stillness of death prevailed in the town--a sort of unburied Pompeii through its narrow lanes, up and down zig-zag stairs cut in the rock, we sauntered alone, and the noise of our iron-shod heels on the pavement, was the only sound we heard. The rich abbey, it was evident, had formerly fed the town clustering round it, the inhabitants of which cultivated its vast domains under a paternal administration. These domains, it was also evident, had passed into the hands of upstart speculators, strangers to the people, and indifferent to their welfare, who did not even know how to make their wealth productive to themselves.--_Simond's Tour._ * * * * * ENGLISH AND FRENCH MURDERS. When will the French nation be able to afford a Thurtell--a man who could turn his pistol round in his _friend's_ brains; not in any insane paroxysm of jealousy, or hatred, or revenge, but merely to ascertain _satisfactorily_ that he had completely effected his business--who could then walk in to his supper of pork chops, with the same composure as if he had come from giving a feed of oats to his horse--a clever and acute man, too, without any stupid insensibility of mind--a man who, when seized and put on his trial, gets off by heart a long and eloquent speech, full of the most solemn and false asseverations of his innocence; not that he clung with desperate eagerness to the hope of escaping, but that, as there was a chance, it was prudent not to throw it away--who, when condemned displayed neither terror nor indifference, neither exquisite sensibility nor sullen brutality, and at the last swung out of life from the gallows with the settled air of a man who feels he has lost the game at which he played, and that he may as well pay the stake calmly? There was a true British composure about the unutterable atrocity of this villain--murderer he was, and a most detestable murderer too--but his character belongs to our country as fully as that of our heroes. Hunt and Probert were pitiful wretches, fit for the Bicêtre. Doubtless the agony of Hunt's feelings until his reprieve came, would, if properly divided into chapters, make a good romance.--_Blackwood's Mag._ * * * * * PETROLEUM.