moment, one escapes from the present to the past, and becomes a boy over again.

22d. Excursion to Tivoli.-We rose before the sun, and reached Tivoli to breakfast.-The morning was beautiful-and the morning is the spring of the day, when all nature is fresh and joyous, and man is fresh to enjoy it. It is the custom of the Cicerone to lead you a long round of some miles, to see the cascatelle, and other things which are not worth seeing; and I regretted that I had not rather remained the whole morning in the charming environs of the temple of Vesta.

The great cascade is artificial-the work of Bernini; but I perfer much the natural fall which the waters have worked for themselves through the fissures of the rock; which is seen with such admirable effect from the hollow cavern called Grotto of Neptune. A pretty and intricate shrubbery covers the precipice, through which a path has been cut to enable you to descend to this spot; and I have seldom looked upon a scene which unites at once so much of the sublime and the beautiful; --but I will not attempt to describe it. A cascade is one of those things that bids defiance to the pen or the pencil; for the noise and the motion, which

constitute, in fact, almost all that is grand and graceful in a real waterfall, are lost in a picture; and when these are taken away, what remains— but an unseemly patch of white paint? If the imagination is to supply the loss, it might as well represent the whole scene.

Horace may well be justified for his partiality to the præceps Anio et Tiburni lucus. It is an exquisite spot; and well calculated to suggest the idea of a retreat from the world, with the calm pleasures of a life of rural retirement:

Tibur Argeo positum colono

Sit meæ sedes utinam senectæ !

Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum

Militiæque !

It was in the scenery of Tivoli that Claude delighted to study nature; and in most of his landscapes there may be traced some features of the soft and beautiful combinations of the elements of landscape, which the scenery of Tivoli affords in such abundance. But the pictures of Claude represent nature rather as she might be, than as she is. His pictures are poetic nature; nature abstracted from all local defects;-by which I mean, that though all the separate features of his pic

tures are true to nature, yet that he has compounded them in a manner, to form a general whole such as will never be found existing together in a real landscape. Thus he has done in landscape, what the Greek artists have done in sculpture, who, from the separate excellences of different individuals, have combined perfect figures, far superior in grace and beauty to any single living model.

23d.

Visited the Lunatic Asylum.-I should have been inclined to suppose, in a country where the natives display so much vivacity and energy in the ordinary and healthy state of their minds, that their mad-houses would have exhibited a strange scene of violent excitement. But I was surprised to find every thing calm and tranquil. There were no raving patients; and only two whom it was necessary to confine, by a slight chain, to the wall of their apartment. I was much struck by the appearance and expression of two unfortunates labouring under the most opposite symptoms.-The one was a captain in the army, who had been driven mad by jealousy.He was walking up and down a long room, with a quick and agitated step, and, I was told, he had been occupied in the same way for ten years; ex

cept during the few hours of sleep. He seemed, to be suffering the pains of the damned, as they have been described to proceed from the worm that never dieth. The other was a melancholy maniac, lying in the sun; so utterly lost in vacancy, that I endeavoured in vain to rouse him from his reverie. He had a cast of countenance so cynic, that he might have furnished a painter with an admirable study for a Diogenes.

24th. The politicians of Rome look to the future with gloomy apprehension. The general opinion seems to be, that the temporal power of the Pope will end with Pius VII.; and that Austria will lay her paw upon the ecclesiastical dominions.

Connected as the House of Austria is with the reigning families of Tuscany and Naples, such an attempt might have little opposition to fear in the rest of Italy; and indeed as to the Papal States, even if there were any national feeling to keep them together, which I believe there is not, the people seem too much disposed to rely upon the interposition of miraculous assistance from above, to do any thing for themselves.

When the French were advancing in 1798how was it that the Papal Government prepared

to resist them? By a levy en masse? No-but by a procession of three of the most sacred relics in the possession of the church. These relics were-Il Santo Volto, a miraculous portrait of the Saviour; and a Santa Maria, a portrait of the Virgin, supposed also to be painted by supernatural agency;-and the chains which St. Peter wore in prison, from which the angel liberated him.

This procession was attended by nearly the whole population of Rome, comprehending all ranks and ages and sexes, the greater part of them bare-footed-Satisfied with this, they remained in a state of inactivity, in the hope that Heaven would interpose in their favour, by some miraculous manifestation of its power. Such is ever the effect of superstition, which substitutes rites for duties, and teaches men to build their hopes of divine favour upon any other rather than the only true and rational foundation of such hopes the faithful and exemplary discharge of their own duties.

The Italians now make a triumphant appeal to the late restoration of the Pope, as a visible interference of Providence, which ought to convince a heretic that it is decreed by the counsels of