because these long arcades of verdure, these close walls of laurel, pervious to the air, but impervious to the sunshine, these broad umbrageous avenues and marble terraces, these paved grottoes and ever trickling fountains, these gods and nymphs, and urns and sarcophagi, meeting us at every turn with some classical or poetical association, harmonize with the climate and the country, and the minds of the people; and are comfortable and consistent as a well carpeted drawing-room and a warm chimney-corner would be in England?

“But it is all so artificial and unnatural”—­Agreed;—­so are our yellow unsheltered gravel walks, meandering through smooth shaven lawns, which have no other beauty than that of being dry when every other place is wet; our shapeless flower-beds so elaborately irregular, our clumps and dots of trees, and dwarfish shrubberies.  I have seen some over-dressed grounds and gardens in England, the perpetrations of Capability Brown and his imitators, the landscape gardeners, quite as bad as any thing I see here, only in a different style, and certainly more adapted to England and English taste.  I must confess, that in these enchanting gardens of the Villa Pamfili, a little less “ingenuity and artifice” would be better.  I hate mere tricks and gimcrackery, of which there are a few instances, such as their hydraulic music, jets-d’eau—­water-works that play occasionally to the astonishment of children and the profit of the gardeners—­but how different, after all, are these Italia gardens to the miserable grandeur, and senseless, tasteless parade of Versailles!

In these gardens an interesting discovery has just been made; an extensive burial place, or columbarium, in singular preservation.  The skeletons and ashes have not been removed.  Some of the tombs are painted in fresco, others floored with very pretty mosaic.  The disposition of the urns is curious:  they are imbedded in the masonry of the wall with moveable lids.  On a tile I found the name of Sextus Pompeius, in letters beautifully formed, and deeply and distinctly cut, and an inscription which I was not Latinist enough to translate accurately, but from which it appears that these columbaria belonged to a branch of the Pompey family.

27.—­To-day, after English chapel, I look a walk to the San Gregorio, on the other side of the Palatine, which since I first came to Rome has been to me a favourite and chosen spot.  I sat down on the steps of the church to rest, and enjoy at leisure the fine view of the hill and ruins opposite.  Arches on arches, a wilderness of desolation! and mingled with massive fragments of the halls and towers of the Caesars, were young shrubs just putting on their brightest green, and the almond-trees covered with their gay blossoms, and the cloudless and resplendent skies bending over all.