ing them with provisions is intrusted to one man, and if any of them has occasion to call in a physician, he remains immured along with the holy brethren till their deliberations are concluded. The present Pope was chosen after the assembly had sat only nine-and-twenty days! which is considered a very short period. On the other side of the street is the Holy Staircase, twenty-seven steps of white marble, which are reputed to have belonged to the palace of Pilate, and which our Lord is said to have ascended. The original stairs are so much worn with use, that it has been thought advisable to overlay them with a coating of wood, so that the faithful, as they climb up on their knees, do not touch them at all, but have only a peep at them through an interstice, which is left in the front of each step. But as I did not imagine that they would bring me any nearer to paradise, I did not give myself the trouble to ascend. Rome was so much quieter now than it had been during the holy week, that I could scarcely believe myself to be in the same town. 24th. Visited the Sciarra Palace; the collection of paintings not large, but several pieces very good, particularly the Modesty and Vanity of Leonardo da Vinci, and the Madalena delle Radice of Guido. Thence I went to the Pantheon, or Temple of all the Gods. This noble structure is better preserved than any other of ancient Rome. The entrance is by an immense portico, supported by sixteen magnificent columns, 42 feet in height, and each one entire piece of oriental granite. The interior is a rotunda of 150 feet in diameter, surmounted by a dome, which has a large aperture at the top for the admission of light, and the sides are ornamented with fourteen beautiful Corinthian columns, and incrusted with precious marbles, which have received so little injury from the lapse of time, that it is difficult to believe them ancient. The bronze which formerly covered the beams of the ceiling, and many of the busts and statues which filled the niches, are now lost or removed to other places; but the interior is still splendid, more so than any other of the antiquities of Rome; and even if all its ornaments were taken away, its form would remain a very model of beauty. Thence to the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, the walls of which are entirely covered with frescoes by the first masters. The most celebrated of these is the Last Judgment, by Michael Angelo; but I cannot say that I much admired it. The principal figure, that of Jesus Christ, and the attitude in which he is pronouncing sentence on the damned, are certainly any thing else than pleasing, perhaps they are not even fine. Thence to St. Peter's, the wonders of which are inexhaustible. Here I was not a little amused to see a monument to the memory of James III., King of England! and his two sons, the last of the unfortunate family of the Stuarts. I never knew before that my country reckoned among her sovereigns a third James; two of them were enough in all conscience! but the Roman court did not scruple to acknowledge that title which England refused. The monument is beautifully executed by Canova. There is in the cathedral another monument by this immortal artist which delighted me extremely. It is that of Pope Clement XIII. The figure of the Pontiff himself, who is in the attitude of prayer, seems done to the life; the two female figures below of Faith and the Angel of Death are exquisitely fine, and the Lions at the bottom, one couchant and the other sleeping, are justly considered the most perfect works of the kind which the chisel of modern times has produced. During this visit to St. Peter's I also descended into the Crypt, or subterranean part of the church, immediately under the centre; but there is here nothing particularly deserv 1 ing of notice, unless any one has the curiosity to see the precise spot where the body of the chief Apostle is said to be interred, though the priest who conducted me allowed that no one had ever seen it! This being one of the two days of the week (Mondays and Thursdays) on which the Vatican is opened to the public, I repaired thither at two o'clock, and went through the whole suite of rooms which are appropriated to the reception of antiquities. Of this magnificent collection I shall not attempt to give any detailed account, for it would require many pages, I might say many volumes, to describe what it took me two hours to see. The pain depicted in the countenance of Laocoon and his children is every thing that the chisel could make it, and the Apollo seems actually to see the arrow which he has shot from his bow. The floors of many of the apartments are laid with ancient tesselated pavements, of which the colours are scarcely dimmed by the lapse of ages: in some are placed immense baths, vases, and sarcophagi, and in others, cinerary urns and candelabra of the most elegant forms imaginable. Nor let me omit to mention, that there are a few modern works which are not disgraced by the company in which they appear. There is a Perseus and two Boxers, by Canova, which are first rate; and a frieze in basso-relievo, by Massimiliani, in the Hall of Nilus, which pleased me more than almost any thing else in the whole collection. I am very fond of bassorelievo. It admits of a combination of figures which, in statuary, is seldom attempted; and the very smallness of the proportions in which this work is generally executed, adds to the beauty of the forms. I know nothing more elegant than the Bacchantes, which are represented in the Hall of Nilus; and if their merit be somewhat diminished, their beauty is not, by their being mere copies of antiques which were too much injured to be put up. After I had gone through the antiques and the statuary I visited the collection of paintings, which, though not extensive, is very choice--the principal being the Transfiguration, by Raphael-a noble picture certainly. This artist seems, more than any other, to have adhered to nature-graceful and beautiful nature, but still nature. 25th. Set out at six in the morning, with two friends, in a carriage which we had hired for the day to go to Tivoli, which is about eighteen miles distant from Rome. The country, for the first fifteen miles, is totally bare of trees, and appears to be ill cultivated. At the Ponte Lucano we passed the tomb of Marcus Plautus Lucanus, which was, no doubt, originally, a very handsome structure; a round tower, very much resembling that erected to Cecilia Metella. Within two miles of Tivoli we turned a short distance out of our way to see Adrian's Villa. When complete it was of amazing extent, and contained entertaining-rooms, baths, a library, a theatre, a temple, a lake to sail upon, barracks for the Prætorian guards-every thing, in short, which could ensure the safety or contribute to the pleasure of its imperial master. The remains are very considerable; but after having seen Pompeii, I could not take much interest in them. Tivoli, anciently Tibur, is situated on the side of one of the first ranges of hills which occur after the champaigne country in which Rome is placed, and on this account, as well as that of its natural and artificial beauties, it has always been a favourite resort of the Romans. Mecenas, Marcus Brutus, Cassius, Sallust, Horace, and Propertius, had all country-houses there, and it still continues to be the Richmond of the metropolis. Its chief beauties are the falls of the Præceps Anio, now the Teverone. The principal of these we did not see to advantage, as it was undergoing repair; for it is, in a great measure, artificial, the stream being pent up in order to supply some water-works. The smaller fall, a short way below, is extremely fine. The water dashes down from a tremendous height in the midst of the most beautiful accompaniments of rock and wood, and part is thrown back again into the air in the form of mist, which rises as high as the fall itself. The elegant little temple of Vesta stands on the opposite rock, and the spot is altogether very picturesque. But with the rest of the scenery at Tivoli I was disappointed. It is spoiled by that most miserable of all trees, the olive, with its stiff contour and its pale green leaf; and when the eye is diverted from the mountain it finds nothing but the solitary dome of St. Peter's to interest it in the immense tract of flat land which stretches out to the southward and westward. The spot where Horace's villa stood is still pointed out, and opposite to it, on the other side of the valley, was that of Mecenas, of which enough remains to shew what a magnificent man he was. 26th. I employed the greater part of this day in visiting palaces, in company with a fellow-traveller; and if any who read this shall ever happen to be at Rome in hot weather, I cannot wish them a greater treat than to gain admittance, as I did, into the Café of the Villa Albani, or to wander in the deep embosomed alleys and impenetrable shades of the Borghese Park. This day, as I was searching for the manufacture of mosaics in the place where it was marked on my map, just to the south of St. Peter's, I entered the gateway of a large building, with a court in the centre, and was not a little startled when the door-keeper told me that that was the Inquisition. There was no guard stationed there, and the lower windows only were barricadoed with iron; * but the very name of the place was sufficient to rouse all my feelings of compassion for the poor wretches confined in its dungeons, few of whom ever come out when they once get in. I am told, that when a man has incurred the censures of this court, he is fetched away from his home in a carriage, in which there is an officer of justice and two friars, and that they carry him off to prison without saying a word. I asked a man, "How many prisoners there were in the Inquisition." He replied, with a significant smile, "No one knows that, Sir." The number, probably, is not very great, for the terrors of this court are now much softened; but the existence of so dangerous an instrument of tyranny as this is always to be deprecated, especially during such a pontificate as the present. Leo XII. is certainly not famed for his liberality of sentiment-witness his conduct towards the Jews, whom he has strictly confined to one quarter of the city; his bull against the Bible Society; and the displeasure which he has expressed at the number of English who come to Rome, and whom he dreads on account of the influx of liberal ideas which they necessarily occasion. His Holiness is not popular with any party. The licentious hate him on account of the strictness of his police, which takes cognizance of the actions even of private life; they who elected him, because, perhaps, they were over-persuaded, and he was a sickly man who (as they thought) would soon die off and make room for a successor, are disappointed that he has lived so long; and they, again, who chose him because they expected him to do good, are equally disappointed that he has done so little. So that the poor Pope has no mercy from any one, and all regret the good days of his predecessor, Pius VII. * I was afterwards told that the apartments for the prisoners are not towards the street, but to the back. The manufacture of mosaics was formerly here, but it is now removed to a suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Vatican: Monday 28th. This morning I went to the Vatican Library, the books and manuscripts of which are only shewn from nine to twelve o'clock in the forenoon. On requesting the priest, who was in attendance as librarian, to shew me the celebrated manuscript of the New Testament which is here preserved, he immediately sent one of his attendants to fetch it, and I had the very great pleasure of examining this most precious relic for the space of an hour. It is an immensely thick quarto of 1500 pages, numbered on the back 1209, and in the inside is carefully noted the date when it was recovered from the Royal Library at Paris, to which it had been carried away by the French under Napoleon. The leaves are of parchment; each page is occupied by three parallel columns of the text, and the writing is in uncial letters of the size and shape of those which I here insert, and which I copied as exactly as I could at the time: ΠΟΛΙΝΕΙΣΓΗΝΡΑME+ The ink is somewhat faded, but I did not find much difficulty in making out the words after a little practice, and particularly with the assistance of a modern printed edition, which the librarian kindly procured for me. From a cursory survey of the table of contents, the volume appeared to contain the whole of the Old Testament; and there is the whole of the New, except the Epistles of Paul to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. The books of the latter are in the following order: the four Gospels, the Acts, the Epistle of James, 1st and 2d of Peter, 1st, 2d and 3d of John, Jude, Romans, 1st and 2d of Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and 2d of Thessalonians, Hebrews, Revelation. The whole volume is written in the same hand, except that the first forty-five and part of the forty-sixth chapter of Genesis, half of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the whole of Revelation, are supplied in a smaller and more modern character. It was a great disappointment to me that I could not find the first Epistle to Timothy; for, as I imagined at the time, the discussion about the reading of ὡς or Θεος, in ch. iii. 16, hinges chiefly on what is found in this manuscript. The desired epistle, however, was not to be found either in the table of contents in a modern hand at the beginning, or in the volume itself, which I carefully examined. Though I was disappointed in not finding the Epistle to Timothy, I was more fortunate in my reference to two other passages, the true reading of which has been much disputed. In 1 John v. 7, the reading is, (as Griesbach has it in his corrected text,) Ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν ὁι μαρτυροῦντες, το πνευμα, και το ὕδωρ, και το αἷμα· και δι τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν ἐισιν. With respect to this passage, indeed, there is not a doubt remaining in the mind of any learned and candid man, that the text of our Bibles has been interpolated; but in the other, which I examined, Acts xx. 28, I found the common reading Θεοῦ, and not κυριοῦ. * It may be necessary to explain to some of the readers of the Repository, that uncial letters are those of a large size and square form, as distinguished from the smaller and rounder character of the more modern Greek. The manuscripts written in the uncial character are more valuable than the others, as being more ancient; for none of them are of a later date than the ninth or tenth century, and the Vatican manuscript is supposed to be of the fourth or fifth. † Πολιν ἐις γῆν Ῥαμε. These words are the first line of the original part of the manuscript. They occur in the LXX., in Gen. xlvi. 28, 'Paus being part of the word 'Ῥαμεσσῆ. Either through my fault or that of the engraver, the tail of the P'in the fac-simile has got a twist which it ought not to have. I was very loath to quit the treasures of the Vatican, but having obtained permission to see Cardinal Fesche's Gallery, and the hour specified being noon, I was obliged to take my departure. This collection of paintings is the best worth seeing of any in Rome, not, perhaps, so extensive as one or two others, but more choice. The Cardinal is a connoisseur, and has several persons constantly employed in keeping his pictures in order. But few of them are indifferent, and some are exquisitely fine. But I must confess, that I was still more delighted with one which I saw immediately afterwards in the Capitol, namely, the Persian Sybil by Guercino. This is, to my eye, of all the lovely pictures which I have seen in this metropolis of the arts, by far the most lovely. There is a spirit in the expression, and a brilliancy in the colouring, which are beyond all praise. It is worth while to come some hundred miles to see such beautiful things as this. As this was the last day on which the Vatican would be open before my departure from Rome, I took a carriage, after dinner, and went to it again, with the intention of seeing the principal curiosities for which I had not yet found time. My first object was the Library, the apartments of which are open to the public on Mondays and Thursdays nearly the whole day, though the books and manuscripts can only be seen from nine to twelve. The principal apartment, the Great Hall, was built by Pope Sixtus V., but his successors have made so many additions, that the suite of rooms is now more like a little town than any thing else. To give an idea of their extent, it may be mentioned, that the two galleries which branch off to the right and left from the end of the Hall, are, both together, 1200 feet long. The treasures of the Library consist of 30,000 manuscripts, and 80,000 printed volumes. Of these, the manuscripts and the more ancient of the printed works are deposited in close presses round the sides of the rooms, the more modern works in glass cases, and, above these, the walls and ceilings are painted in fresco by Zuccari, Guido, Mengs, and other artists, in a style of richness and of beauty, against which no other complaint can be made except that it is too splendid. This whole suite of apartments is kept in the most beautiful order, and is truly worthy of the Pontifical Palace. There were some other rooms appropriated to the reception of books which I did not see. My last visit this day was to four rooms in the Vatican, which go under the name of the Stanze di Rafaello, because they were painted in fresco by that divine artist and his scholars. I was the most struck with that painting which represents the battle between the armies of Constantine and Maxentius on the banks of the Tiber, A. D. 312. How grand must this picture have been when it first came from the hands of the artist in all the freshness of its original beauty! But it is now sadly defaced by the injuries of time, and by the smoke made in these rooms by the German soldiers, when Rome was taken by assault A. D. 1528. The same observation applies even more strongly to the celebrated School of Athens, of which the colours are now quite dim and lifeless; and this misfortune is rendered greater by the want of a good light, the windows in this and one or two of the other rooms being too low to display paintings to advantage. Still, dimmed and faded as they are, connoisseurs continue to resort to these inimitable productions as a very storehouse of the arts; and the number of easels and of platforms which belong to the artists who are taking copies, clearly demonstrates the high estimation in which they are held. 19th. Visited the Mosaic manufacture in the Vatican. Each of the artists had an oil-painting before him which he was copying, by fixing small pieces of a coloured substance resembling earthenware, by means of a kind : |