The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us.  The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent.  The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth.  He had two leading ideas:  one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest of boys.  With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did not much trouble himself.  He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey.  As to the great bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.

I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it.  But I recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance.  At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression.

The vastness of St. Peter’s itself is best felt in looking down upon the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in comparing one’s own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring mosaics.  But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without or within.

VI.

In Rome one’s fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification and surprise.  I thought that American travellers were by no means the most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the Eternal City.  A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind.  For example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswuerdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation.  They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino’s “Aurora.”  Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed us to the top