another elegant and simple monument bore the name of a young painter of genius and promise, and was erected “by his companions and fellow students as a testimony of their affectionate admiration and regret.”  This part of old Rome is beautiful beyond description, and has a wild, desolate, and poetical grandeur, which affects the imagination like a dream.—­The very air disposes one to reverie.  I am not surprised that Poussin, Claude, and Salvator Rosa made this part of Rome a favourite haunt, and studied here their finest effects of colour, and their grandest combinations of landscape.  I saw a young artist seated on a pile of ruins with his sketch book open on his knee, and his pencil in his hand—­during the whole time we were there he never changed his attitude, nor put his pencil to the paper, but remained leaning on his elbow, like one lost in ecstasy.

Jan 5.—­To-day we drove through the quarter of the Jews, called the Ghetta degli Ebrei.  It is a long street enclosed at each end with a strong iron gate, which is locked by the police at a certain hour every evening (I believe at ten o’clock); and any Jew found without its precincts after that time, is liable to punishment and a heavy fine.  The street is narrow and dirty, the houses wretched and ruinous, and the appearance of the inhabitants squalid, filthy, and miserable—­on the whole, it was a painful scene, and one I should have avoided, had I followed my own inclinations.  If this specimen of the effects of superstition and ignorance was depressing, the next was not less ridiculous.  We drove to the Lateran:  I had frequently visited this noble Basilica before, but on the present occasion we were to go over it in form, with the usual torments of laquais and ciceroni.  I saw nothing new but the cloisters, which remain exactly as in the time of Constantine.  They are in the very vilest style of architecture, and decorated with Mosaic in a very elaborate manner:  but what most amused us was the collection of relics, said to have been brought by Constantine from the Holy Land, and which our cicerone exhibited with a sneering solemnity which made it very doubtful whether he believed himself in their miraculous sanctity.  Here is the stone on which the cock was perched when it crowed to St. Peter, and a pillar from the Temple of Jerusalem, split asunder at the time of the crucifixion; it looks as if it had been sawed very accurately in half from top to bottom; but this of course only renders it more miraculous.  Here is also the column in front of Pilate’s house, to which our Saviour was bound, and the very well where he met the woman of Samaria.  All these, and various other relics, supposed to be consecrated by our Saviour’s Passion, are carelessly thrown into the cloisters—­not so the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, which are considered as the chief treasures in the Lateran, and are deposited in the body of the church in a rich shrine.  The beautiful sarcophagus of red porphyry,