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This morning we heard mass at the Pope’s Chapel; the service was read by Cardinal Fesche, and the venerable old pope himself, robed and mitred en grand costume, was present.  No females are allowed to enter without veils, and we were very ungallantly shut up behind a sort of grating, where, though we had a tolerable view of the ceremonial going forward, it was scarcely possible for us to be seen.  Cardinal Gonsalvi sat so near us, that I had leisure and opportunity to contemplate the fine intellectual head and acute features of this remarkable man.  I thought his countenance had something of the Wellesley cast.

The Pope’s Chapel is decorated in the most exquisite taste; splendid at once and chaste.  There are no colours—­the whole interior being white and gold.

At an unfortunate moment, Lady Morgan’s ludicrous description of the twisting and untwisting of the Cardinal’s tails came across me, and made me smile very mal a-propos:  it is certainly from the life.  Whenever this lively and clever woman describes what she has actually seen with her own eyes, she is as accurately true as she is witty and entertaining.  Her sketches after nature are admirable; but her observations and inferences are coloured by her peculiar and rather unfeminine habits of thinking.  I never read her “Italy” till the other day, when L., whose valet had contrived to smuggle it into Rome, offered to lend it to me.  It is one of the books most rigorously proscribed here; and if the Padre Anfossi or any of his satellites had discovered it in my hands, I should assuredly have been fined in a sum beyond what I should have liked to pay.

We concluded the morning at St. Peter’s, where we arrived in time for the anthem.

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23.—­Our visit to the Barberini palace to-day was solely to view the famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci.  Her appalling story is still as fresh in remembrance here, and her name and fate as familiar in the mouths of every class, as if instead of two centuries, she had lived two days ago.  In spite of the innumerable copies and prints I have seen, I was more struck than I can express by the dying beauty of the Cenci.  In the face the expression of heart-sinking anguish and terror is just not too strong, leaving the loveliness of the countenance unimpaired; and there is a woe-begone negligence in the streaming hair and loose drapery which adds to its deep pathos.  It is consistent too with the circumstances under which the picture is traditionally said to have been painted—­that is, in the interval between her torture and her execution.

A little daughter of the Princess Barberini was seated in the same room, knitting.  She was a beautiful little creature; and as my eye glanced from her to the picture and back again, I fancied I could trace a strong family resemblance; particularly about the eyes, and the very peculiar mouth.  I turned back to ask her whether she had ever been told that she was like that picture? pointing to Cenci.  She shook back her long curls, and answered with a blush and a smile, “Yes, often."[H]