These thoughts, or ghosts of thoughts, flitted through my mind, as the carriage was passing along the narrow, dirty streets, and brought with them after-trains of reflection.  There may be, I thought, among the thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy their notice, might be interesting.  Every ruin has had its score of immortelles hung upon it.  The soil has been almost overworked by antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but the antique brick a prize.  Poets and sentimentalists have described to death what the antiquaries have left;—­some have done their work so well that nothing remains to be done after them.  Everybody has an herbarium of dried flowers from all the celebrated sites, and a table made from bits of marble collected in the ruined villas.  Every Englishman carries a Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step.  Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped, from the Dying Gladiator, with his “young barbarians all at play,” and all that, down to the Beatrice Cenci, the Madame Tonson of the shops, that haunts one everywhere with her white turban and red eyes.  All the public and private life and history of the ancient Romans, from Romulus to Constantine and Julian the Apostle, (as he is sometimes called,) is properly well known.  But the common life of the modern Romans, the games, customs, habits of the people, the everyday of To-day, has been only touched upon here and there,—­sometimes with spirit and accuracy, as by Charles McFarlane, sometimes with great grace, as by Hans Christian Andersen, and sometimes with great ignorance, as by Miss Waldie.  This is the subject, however, which has specially interested me, and a life of several years in Rome has enabled me to observe many things which do not strike the hurried traveller, and to correct many false notions in regard to the people and place.  To a stranger, a first impression is apt to be a false impression; and it constantly happens to me to hear my own countrymen work out the falsest conclusions from the slightest premises, and settle the character and deserts of the Italians, all of whom they mass together in a lump, after they have been just long enough on the soil to travel from Civita Vecchia to Rome under the charge of a courier, when they know just enough of the language to ask for a coachman when they want a spoon, and when they have made the respectable acquaintance, beside their courier, of a few porters, a few beggars, a few shopkeepers, and the padrone of the apartment they hire.