The Barberini palace, whither I carried a distracting tooth-ach, amused even that torture by the variety of its wonders.  The sleeping faun, praised on from century to century, and never yet praised enough; so drunk, so fast asleep, so like a human body!  Modesty reproving Vanity, by Leonardo da Vinci, so totally beyond my expectation or comprehension, great! wise! and fine!  Raphael’s Mistress, painted by himself, and copied by Julio Romano; this picture gives little satisfaction though except from curiosity gratified, the woman is too coarse.  Guido’s Magdalen up stairs, the famous Magdalen, effacing every beauty, of softness mingled with distress.  A St. John too, by dear Guercino, transcendent! but such was my anguish the very rooms turned round:  I must come again when less ill I believe.

Nothing can equal the nastiness at one’s entrance to this magazine of perfection:  but the Roman nobles are not disgusted with all sorts of scents it is plain; these are not what we should call perfumes indeed, but certainly odori:  of the same nature as those one is obliged to wade through before Trajan’s Pillar can be climbed.

That the general appearance of a city which contains such treasures should be mean and disgusting, while one literally often walks upon granite, and tramples red porphyry under one’s feet, is one of the greatest wonders to me, in a town of which the wonders seem innumerable:  that it should be nasty beyond all telling, all endurance, with such perennial streams of the purest water liberally dispersed, and triumphantly scattered all over it, is another unfathomable wonder:  that so many poor should be suffered to beg in the streets, when not a hand can be got to work in the fields, and that those poor should be permitted to exhibit sights of deformity and degradations of our species to me unseen till now, at the most solemn moments, and in churches where silver and gold, and richly-arrayed priests, scarcely suffice to call off attention from their squallid miseries, I do not try to comprehend.  That the palaces which taste and expence combine to decorate should look quietly on, while common passengers use their noble vestibules, nay flairs, for every nauseous purpose; that princes whose incomes equal those of our Dukes of Bedford and Marlborough, should suffer their servants to dress other men’s dinners for hire, or lend out their equipages for a day’s pleasuring, and hang wet rags out of their palace windows to dry, as at the mean habitation of a pauper; while looking in at those very windows, nothing is to be seen but proofs of opulence, and scenes of splendour, I will not undertake to explain; sure I am, that whoever knows Rome, will not condemn this ebauche of it.

When I spoke of their beggars, many not unlike Salvator Rosa’s Job at the Santa Croce palace, I ought not to have omitted their eloquence, and various talents.  We talked to a lame man one day at our own door, whose account of his illness would not have disgraced a medical professor; so judicious were his sentiments, so scientific was his discourse.  The accent here too is perfectly pleasing, intelligible, and expressive; and I like their cantilena vastly.