The Musaeum Clementinum is altogether such though, that these singularly excellent productions of art are only proper and well-adapted ornaments of a gallery, so stately as, on the other hand, that noble edifice seems but the due repository of such inhabitants.  Never were place and decorations so adapted:  never perhaps was so refined a taste engaged on subjects so worthy its exertion.  The statues are disposed with a propriety that charms one; the situation of the pillars so contrived, the colours of them so chosen to carry the eye forward—­not fatigue it; the rooms so illuminated:  Hagley park is not laid out with more judicious attention to diversify, and relieve with various objects a mind delighting in the contemplation of ornamented nature; than is the Pope’s Musaeum calculated to enchain admiration, and fix it in those apartments where sublimity and beauty have established their residence; and those would be worse than Goths, who could think of moving even an old torso from the place where Pius Sextus has commanded it to remain.

The other parts of this prodigious structure would take up one’s life almost to see completely, to remember distinctly, and to describe accurately.  When the reader recollects that St. Peter’s, with all its appurtenances, palace, library, musaeum, every thing that we include in the word Vatican, is said by the Romans to occupy an equal quantity of space, to that covered by the city of Turin:  the assertion need not any longer be thought hyperbolical.

I will say no more about it till at our return from Naples we visit all the churches.

Vopiscus said, that the statues in his time at Rome out-numbered the people; and I trust the remark is now almost doubly true, as every day and hour digs up dead worthies, and the unwholesome weather must surely send many of the living ones to their ancestors:  upon the whole, the men and women of Porphyry, &c. please me best, as they do not handle long knives to so good an effect as the others do, “qui aime bien a s’egorger encore[Footnote:  Who have still a taste to be cut-throats.]," says a French gentleman of them the other day.  There is however an air of cheerfulness in the streets at a night among the poor, who fry fish, and eat roots, sausages, &c. as they walk about gaily enough, and though they quarrel too often, never get drunk at least.

The two houses belonging to the Borghese family shall conclude my first journey to Rome, and with that the first volume of my observations and reflexions.

Their town palace is a suite of rooms constructed like those at Wanstead exactly; and where you turn at the end to come back by another suite, you find two alabaster fountains of superior beauty, and two glass lustres made in London, but never wiped since they left Fleet-street certainly.  They do not however want cleaning as the fountains do; which, by the extraordinary use made of them, give the whole palace an offensive smell.