After driving round the piazza, we adjourned to a balcony which had been hired for us overlooking the Tiber, and exactly opposite to the Castle of St. Angelo.  Hence we commanded a view of the fireworks, which were truly superb, but made me so nervous and giddy with noise and light and wonder, that I was rejoiced when all was over.  A flight of a thousand sky-rockets sent up at once, blotting the stars and the moonlight—­dazzling our eyes, stunning our ears, and amazing all our senses together, concluded the Holy Week at Rome.

To-morrow morning we start for Florence, and to-night I close this second volume of my Diary.  Thanks to my little ingenious Frenchmen in the Via Santa Croce, I have procured a lock for a third volume, almost equal to my patent Bramah in point of security, though very unlike it in every other respect.

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Viterbo, April 9.—­“In every bosom Italy is the second country in the world, the surest proof that it is in reality the first.”

This elegant and just observation occurs, I think, in Arthur Young’s travels; I am not sure I quote the words correctly, but the sense will come home to every cultivated mind with the force of a proverbial truism.

One leaves Naples as a man parts with an enchanting mistress, and Rome as we would bid adieu to an old and dear-loved friend.  I love it, and grieve to leave it for its own sake; it is painful to quit a place where we leave behind us many whom we love and regret; and almost or quite as painful, I think, to quit a place in which we leave behind us no one to regret, or think of us more; a feeling like this mingled with the sorrow with which I bade adieu to Rome this morning.

Our journey has been fatiguing, triste, and tedious.

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Radicofani, 10th.—­I could almost regret at this moment that I am past the age of romance, for I am in a fine situation for mysterious and imaginary horrors, could I but feel again as I did at gay sixteen; but, alas! ces beaux jours sont passes! and here I am on the top of a dreary black mountain, in a rambling old inn which looks like a ci-devant hospital or dismantled barracks, in a bed-room which resembles one of the wards of a poor-house, one little corner lighted by my lamp, and the other three parts all lost in black ominous darkness; while a tempest rages without as if it would break in the rattling casements, and burst the roof over our heads; and yet, insensible that I am!  I can calmly take up my pen to amuse myself by scribbling, since sleep is impossible.  I can look round my vast and solitary room without fancying a ghost or an assassin in every corner, and listen to the raving and lamenting of the storm, without imagining I hear in every gust the shrieks of wailing spirits, or the groans of murdered travellers; only wishing that the wind were rather less cold, or my fire a little brighter, or my dormitory less infinitely spacious; for at present its boundaries are invisible.