This is the language of foreign inhabitants of Rome of the old stamp,--estimable people, and sincere believers, who have gone on year after year witnessing the ceremonies of St. Peter's, and the _Fête des Oignons_ in the St. John Lateran, till they have acquired an ecclesiastical turn of thought and expression, a habit of seeing things through the spectacles of the Sacred College, and a faith which has no sympathy with the outer world. I do not share their opinions, and I have never found their advice particularly useful; but they interest me, I like them, and I sincerely pity them. Who can tell what events they are destined to witness in their time? Who can foresee the spectacles which the future reserves for them, and the changes that their habits will be made to undergo by the Italian revolution? Already their hearing is distracted by the locomotives that rush between Rome and Frascati; already the shriek of the steam-blast daily and nightly hisses insolently at the respectable comedy of the past between Rome and Civita Vecchia. Steamboats, another engine of disorder, furnish the bi-weekly means of an invasion of the most dangerous character. Those dozens of travellers who throng the streets and the squares are about as much like our good old foreign tourists, as the barbarians of Attila were like the worthy Spaniard who came to Rome on purpose to see Titus Livius. Examine them carefully; they are of every possible condition; for now that travelling costs next to nothing, everybody is able to afford himself a sight of Rome. Briefless barristers, physicians without practice, office-clerks, poor students, apprentices, and shop-boys drop down like hail on the Eternal City, for the sake of saying that they have taken the Communion in it. The Holy Week brings every year a swarm of these locusts. Their entire _impedimenta_ consist of a carpet-bag and an umbrella, and of course they put up at a hotel. In fact hotels have been built on purpose to receive them. When everybody hired houses, there was no need of hotels. The 'Minerva' is the type of the modern Roman caravansary. Your bed is charged half-a-crown per night; you dine in a refectory with a traveller at each elbow. The character of the travelling class which invades Rome about Easter is illustrated by the conversation which you hear going on around you at the _table d'hôte_ of the 'Minerva.' The following is a specimen:-- One says triumphantly, "I have _done_ two museums, three galleries, and four ruins, to-day." "I stuck to the churches," says another, "I had floored seventeen by one o'clock." "The deuce you had! You keep the game alive." "Yes, I want to have a whole day left for the suburbs." "Oh, burn the suburbs! I've got no time to see them." If I have a day to spare, I must devote it to _buying chaplets_."[5] "I suppose you've seen the Villa Borghese?" "Oh yes, I consider that in the city, although it is in fact outside the walls."