artist.  Thrift and exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque.  To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new.  Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, or clinging and making a home in the clefts and crevices of decay, were to be smoothed to a complete level, and whitewashed over into one uniform and monotonous tint.  What a gain in cleanliness! what a loss in beauty!  One old wall like this I remember on the road from Grotta Ferrata to Frascati, which was to my eyes a constant delight.  One day the owner took it into his head to whitewash it all over,—­to clean it, as some would say.  I look upon that man as little better than a Vandal in taste,—­one from whom “knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out.”  Take another modern instance:  substitute for the tiled roofs of Rome, now so gray, tumbled, and picturesque with their myriad lichens, the cold, clean slate of New York, or the glittering zinc of Paris,—­should we gain or lose?  The Rue de Rivoli is long, white, and uniform,—­all new and all clean; but there is no more harmony and melody in it than in the “damnable iteration” of a single note; and even Time will be puzzled to make it picturesque, or half as interesting as those old houses displaced in the back streets for its building, which had sprouted up here and there, according to the various whims of the various builders.  Those were taken down because they were dirty, narrow, unsightly.  These are thought elegant and clean.  Clean they certainly are; and they have one other merit,—­that of being as monotonously regular as the military despotism they represent.  But I prefer individuality, freedom, and variety, for my own part.  The narrow, uneven, huddled Corso, with here a noble palace, and there a quaint passage, or archway, or shop,—­the buildings now high, now low, but all barnacled over with balconies,—­is far more interesting than the unmeaning uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli.  So, too, there are those among us who have the bad taste to think it a desecration in Louis Napoleon to have scraped the stained and venerable old Notre Dame into cleanliness.  The Romantic will not consort with the Monotonous,—­Nature is not neat,—­Poetry is not formal,—­and Rome is not clean.