The Dorian palace calls however, and people must give way to things where the miraculous powers of Benvenuto Garofani are concerned; where Lodovico Caracci exhibits a testa del redentore beyond all praise, uniting every excellence, and expressing every perfection; where, in the deluge represented by Bonati, one sees the eagle drooping from a weight of rain, majestic in his distress, and looking up to the luminous part of the picture as if hoping to discover some ray of that sun he never shall see again.  How characteristic! how tasteful is the expression!  The famous Virgin and Child too, so often engraved and copied.

I will run away from this Doria; it is too full of beauty—­it dazzles:  and I will let them shew the pale green Gaspar Pouffins, so valuable, so curious, to whom they please, while Nature and Claude content my fancy and fill up every idea.

At the Colonna palace what have I remarked?  That it possesses the gayest gallery belonging to any subject upon earth:  one hundred and thirty-nine feet long, thirty-four broad, and seventy high:  profusely ornamented with pillars, pictures, statues, to a degree of magnificence difficult to express.  The Herodias here by Guido, is the perfection of dancing grace.  No Frenchman enters the room that does not bear testimony to its peculiar excellence.  But here’s Guercino’s sweet returning Prodigal, and here is a Madonna disperata bursting as from a cavern to embrace the body of her dead son and saviour.—­Such a sky too!  But it is treating too theatrically a subject which impresses one more at last in the simple Pieta[AI] d’Annibale Caracci at Palazzo Doria.

[Footnote AI:  The Christ in his mother’s lap, after crucifixion, is always called in Italy a Pieta.]

One wonderfully-imagined picture by Andrea Sacchi, of Cain flying from the sight of his murdered brother, shall alone detain me from mentioning here at Rome what certainly would never have been thought on by Englishmen had it remained at Windsor; no other than our old King Charles’s cabinet, sold to the Colonna family by Cromwell, and set about in the old-fashioned way with gems, cameos, &c. one of which has been stolen.

And now to the Borghese, which I am told is for a time to finish my fatigues, as after three days more we go to Naples.  News perfectly agreeable to me, who never have been well here for two hours together.

All the great churches remain yet unvisited:  they are to be taken at our return in spring; mean while I will go see Mons Sacer in spite of connoisseurship, though the place it seems is nothing, and the prospect from it dull; but it produces thoughts, or what is next to thought,—­recollection of books read, and events related in one’s early youth, when names and stories make impression on a mind not yet hardened by age, or contracted by necessary duty, so as no longer to receive with equal relish the tales of other times. The lake too, with the floating