Yet I find that it is quite out of the question to know Italy; to say anything of her that is full and sweet, so as to convey any idea of her spirit, without long residence, and residence in the districts untouched by the scorch and dust of foreign invasion (the invasion of the dilettanti I mean), and without an intimacy of feeling, an abandonment to the spirit of the place, impossible to most Americans.  They retain too much, of their English blood; and the travelling English, as a class, seem to me the most unseeing of all possible animals.  There are exceptions; for instance, the perceptions and pictures of Browning seem as delicate and just here on the spot as they did at a distance; but, take them as a class, they have the vulgar familiarity of Mrs. Trollope without her vivacity, the cockneyism of Dickens without his graphic power and love of the odd corners of human nature.  I admired the English at home in their island; I admired their honor, truth, practical intelligence, persistent power.  But they do not look well in Italy; they are not the figures for this landscape.  I am indignant at the contempt they have presumed to express for the faults of our semi-barbarous state.  What is the vulgarity expressed in our tobacco-chewing, and way of eating eggs, compared to that which elbows the Greek marbles, guide-book in hand,—­chatters and sneers through the Miserere of the Sistine Chapel, beneath the very glance of Michel Angelo’s Sibyls,—­praises St. Peter’s as “nice”—­talks of “managing” the Colosseum by moonlight,—­and snatches “bits” for a “sketch” from the sublime silence of the Campagna.

Yet I was again reconciled with them, the other day, in visiting the studio of Macdonald.  There I found a complete gallery of the aristocracy of England; for each lord and lady who visits Rome considers it a part of the ceremony to sit to him for a bust.  And what a fine race! how worthy the marble! what heads of orators, statesmen, gentlemen! of women chaste, grave, resolute, and tender!  Unfortunately, they do not look as well in flesh and blood; then they show the habitual coldness of their temperament, the habitual subservience to frivolous conventionalities.  They need some great occasion, some exciting crisis, in order to make them look as free and dignified as these busts; yet is the beauty there, though, imprisoned, and clouded, and such a crisis would show us more then one Boadicea, more than one Alfred.  Tenerani has just completed a statue which is highly-spoken of; it is called the Angel of the Resurrection.  I was not so fortunate as to find it in his studio.  In that of Wolff I saw a Diana, ordered by the Emperor of Russia.  It is modern and sentimental; as different from, the antique Diana as the trance of a novel-read young lady of our day from the thrill with which the ancient shepherds deprecated the magic pervasions of Hecate, but very beautiful and exquisitely wrought.  He has also lately finished the Four Seasons, represented as children.  Of these, Winter is graceful and charming.