is much more picturesque.  A spinning wheel is very convenient it must be allowed, but the distaff and spindle are much more picturesque.  A snug English villa with its shaven lawn, its neat shrubbery, and its park, is a delightful thing—­an Italian villa is probably far less comfortable, but with its vineyards, its gardens, its fountains, and statutes, is far more picturesque.  A laundry-maid at her wash-tub, immersed in soap-suds, is a vulgar idea, though our clothes may be the better for it.  I shall never forget the group of women I saw at Terracina washing their linen in a bubbling brook as clear as crystal, which rushed from the mountains to the sea—­there were twenty of them at least grouped with the most graceful effect, some standing up to the mid-leg in the stream, others spreading the linen on the sunny bank, some, flinging back their long hair, stood shading their brows with their hands and gazing on us as we passed:  it was a scene for a poet, or a painter, or a melo-drama.  An English garden, adorned at every turn with statues of the heathen deities (although they were all but personifications of the various attributes of nature,) would be ridiculous.  Setting aside the injury they must sustain from our damp, variable climate, they would be out of keeping with all around; here it is altogether different; the very air of Italy is embued with the spirit of ancient mythology; and though “the fair humanities of old religion,” the Nymphs, the Fauns, the Dryads be banished from their haunts and live no longer in the faith of reason, yet still, whithersoever we turn, some statue, some temple in ruins, some fragment of an altar, some inscription half effaced, some name half-barbarized, recalls to the fancy those forms of light, of beauty, of majesty, which poetry created to people scenes for which mere humanity was not in itself half pure enough, fair enough, bright enough.

What can be more grand than a noble forest of English oak? or more beautiful than a grove of beeches and elms, clothed in their rich autumnal tints? or more delicious than the apple orchard in full bloom? but it is true, notwithstanding, that the olive, and cypress, and cedar, the orange and the citron, the fig and the pomegranate, the myrtle and the vine, convey a different and more luxuriant feeling to the mind; and are associated with ideas which give to the landscape they adorn a character more delightfully, more poetically picturesque.

When at Lord Grosvenor’s or Lord Stafford’s I have been seated opposite to some beautiful Italian landscape, a Claude or a Poussin, with a hill crowned with olives, a ruined temple, a group of peasants seated on a fallen column, or dancing to the pipe and the guitar, and over all the crimson glow of evening, or the violet tints of morning, I have exclaimed with others, “How lovely! how picturesque, how very poetical!” No one thought of saying “How natural!” because it is a style of nature