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We were soon under way, after our "stirrup cup" of "cafe nero," and my fellow passenger in the coupé, an Italian from Foligno, began to complain of the inn where we had passed the night, saying that in his room there was no comb. "No what?" asked I, in surprise, thinking my ears must have led me astray in the foreign tongue. "No comb," repeated he, passing his fingers through his hair in expressive illustration. Was there any in your room?" he then inquired, and seemed greatly surprised on being told that I usually carried my own. If this had occurred in America to a British traveler, how eagerly he would have paraded it as a national peculiarity.

At Arezzo we stopped to visit the Cathedral, which crowns a height in the centre of the town. A fine level lawn surrounds it, and it stands on a terrace of twenty steps. When you first enter it, the solemn darkness makes every thing invisible except the richly stained win dows, one of which, representing the calling of Matthew, is so beautiful that Vasari says, "It cannot be considered glass, but rather something rained down from heaven for the consolation of man."

Farther on is Cortona, with its citadel on the very top of a high and steep mountain, like all the old Etruscan cities, which always seek a commanding, instead of a convenient location. Its tow ers, churches and houses, run down the slope of the hill, lifting up their jagged outlines against the sky with wonderful picturesqueness of effect.

We soon reached the Papal Frontier, where a small fee passed our luggage without trouble. Our passports were all en régle, and our detention was therefore very brief. In full view of the station is Lake Thrasymene, beside which the Roman army was entrapped and slaughtered by Hannibal. The road passes over the battle ground in the very track of the Roman Consul. You enter a narrow marshy pass with the lake on your right, and a range of hills on your left. Beyond this you see the hills leave the lake with a broad sweep, and then return to it.

again at its farther end, enclosing a horseshoe-shaped plain. Hannibal enticed the Consul into the plain through the pass, which he then guarded with his cavalry, and thus secured the Roman army in a complete trap. His troops were on three sides of them, and the lake on the fourth. The Carthaginians then rushed upon the ensnared Romans in front, in rear, and on flank. So desperate was the conflict that an earthquake shook the plain beneath the armies, without their consciousness, and "it rolled unheededly away.” But the Romans were finally overpowered with such slaughter that a brook which then ran with blood, still retains, after two thousand years, a name commemorative of the day,

• And Sanguinetto tells ye where the dead, Made the earth wet, and turned the unwil ling waters red.'

Passignano lies in the jaws of the pass at the other end of the plain and on the shores of the lake. We there passed the night without a visit from any of the ancient Roman ghosts. If they ever returned to these scenes, twenty centuries have effectually laid their perturbed spirits.

The silver sheet of the lake was bathed in the brilliant moonlight, and its calm placidity seemed to ignore any sympathy of nature with man.

Perugia is another Etruscan city crowning a hill, up which the carriage needs to be drawn by oxen. With only 18,000 inhabitants it bas one hundred churches and fifty monasteries! It was the seat of the devotional school of which Pietro Perugino was at the head, and which was so perfected by his scholar Raphael. Many of Perugino's works are here shown, all simple, graceful, and sweet, like the first manner of Raphael. But the boast of the place is the "Staffa Madonna," still possessed by the family for whom it was painted by Raphael, as was the original agreement for it, until lately lost. The picture has a grand saloon devoted to it, though it is only twice as large as your hand. The Madonna, with the child Jesus in her arms, is reading with meek eyes in a book on which the child lays his finger with a grace beyond mortal nature. The exceeding beauty of the composition may seem less wonderful, when we remember that in Perugia a painter of such a subject ought to be especially inspired, since in its Cathedral is shown the Madonna's wedding ring! Foligno received us the third night.

All the rooms of the inn were in connected suites of half a dozen, and the waiter could not understand why the ladies of the party should object to pass through the gentlemen's bed-chambers to get to their own. "Are you not all in company?" he asked, with great wonder at such absurd scruples. This knotty point being at length arranged by separating husband and wife, &c., we started the next morning at two hours before sunrise, so as to reach Terni in time to see the falls. As day was breaking, we passed the "Temple of Clitumnus," of small and delicate proportion, but the brook at its foot looked more like a ditch than like Childe Harold's

"Mirror and bath for Beauty's youngest daughter."

Spoleto gave us an uneatable breakfast. Our only consolation was to admire the famous aqueduct which connects the isolated hill on which the city stands, with a neighboring range. It is supported by ten pointed arches, two hundred and sixty six feet high; double the elevation of the Croton bridge of which we feel so justly proud, though this was erected twelve hundred years ago. Oxen are next needed for the ascent of Monte Somma. The descent is equally steep but much wilder, and the ravine was once infested by banditti, who have now degenerated into beggars. At last we reached the broad and fertile plain of Terni, and immediately hastened to the famous cascades, about five miles distant. You ap proach by a road which follows a broad valley, through which runs the water which has just made the headlong leap. Before reaching the falls, the hills approach each other and form a narrow rocky pass; beyond it they spread out again with a circular sweep into a huge amphitheatre, into which, at its farther end, leaps the river Velino. It first rushes in rapids through a narrow channel in the rocks; then, as it approaches the verge of the precipice, it seems to hang back, and to shrink from the terrible depth but the waters from behind urge it on, and at last it falls slowly and deliberately in a mass of foam into which it had been lashed by its course, narrow at its top, but spreading out as it descends, like the giant emerging from his casket in the Arabian tale. This leap is of five hundred feet, and when it strikes the rocky bottom of the gulf, it rushes on in rapids and cascades till it reaches the

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Nar, and imparts to that quiet current something of its own fury. The rocky glen, the luxuriant foliage, and every other accessory, combine to make the cascade of Terni perfectly beautiful, but its greatest enemy is the description in Childe Harold, which so infinitely exaggerates its sublimity that the predominant sensation of the visitor is that of disappointment. Byron's "Roar of waters, from the headlong height," roars you as gently as any sucking dove;" his Fall of water, rapid as the light," is a deliberate descent, requiring five seconds to fall five hundred feet, while "light" in that time would travel just a million of miles; and his Hell of waters!" is only a very pretty cascade. Poets need not be so mathematically accurate, but they should at least avoid such extravagant exaggeration as makes the reality of the object which they wish to elevate, ridiculous by comparison with their own grand description. What more could Byron have said of Niagara ?

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It is remarkable that two of the finest cascades in Europe should be artificial; this one at Terni, and that at Tivoli ; a river, in both cases, being diverted from its course. The present one was formed, to drain the plains above it, by Curius Dentatus, B.C. 251, and Cicero conducted lawsuits about this very stream. Various changes have been made for the improvement of the channel, and it assumed its present place in 1785. The most accurate measurements of the height of the falls give fifty feet for the upper rapids; 550 for the perpendicular fall; and two hundred and forty feet for the lowest one; making in all eight hundred and forty feet.

The next day, while walking in advance of the carriage, I overtook a party of vine dressers, trudging along towards Rome, with their bundles on their backs, and their shoes in their hands, like the Irish reapers in England. I entered into conversation with them, and was agreeably surprised to find that they were from the Republic of San Marino. This miniature state, about four miles square, with a population of 7,000, and an army of forty men, has retained its independence while all the rest of Italy has been enslaved by a succession of masters. When these sturdy peasants told me their country, I exclaimed "Then you are freemen!" They raised their heads with proud complacency, and replied, "Yes, yes, we are all free!" They were on

their way to Rome to get work during the approaching winter, when their hilly vineyards would be covered with snow. They expected to walk their two hundred and fifty miles in a week, and after working in Rome four months, and earning a few dollars for their families, they would return home at Easter. I introduced myself to them as a fellow-republican, and they seemed highly delighted to see a stranger from the far-off America.

Narni is a curious old town built on the brow of a precipice, so as to save the expense of a wall on that side. The walls of the grey houses continue upward against the face of the rock, so that it is hard to tell where one ends, and the other begins. Half way down the precipice a hermitage has been carved out of the rock, and in it lives a monk vowed never to return to the world. A narrow path, by which the faithful can bring him food, zig-zags down to his hole.

From Narni the road passes up a narrow rugged valley, with wild and magnificent views at every turn. As it nears Otricoli it seems to be running out to the end of a promontory, while far, far below, is a sea of verdure, undulating over the low hills, but showing bare rocks in the ravines. Immediately in front is Otricoli on its rocky peak, looking itself like some more regular pavement of the same material, and beyond rises Mount Soracte, which you at once recognize from Byron's graphic picture of how its ridge From out the plain, Heaves like a long swept wave about to break,

And on the curl hangs pausing.'

No one who has ever seen the waves rolling in upon a sea-beach, can fail to appreciate the wonderful similarity of the brow of this mountain, notwithstanding it was never remarked before Childe Harold gave it such eloquent expression.

Civita Castellana is next seen beside a deep ravine crossed by a fine modern bridge. Then comes Nepi, where we slept for the last time before entering Rome. Beyond it the road traverses a barren and desolate region, strewn with volcanic rocks, spotted with stagnant pools where once were craters, without a house or tree, and inhabited only by a few herdsmen in goatskin leggins and sheepskin coats, tending the half starved cattle, which pick up a scanty sustenance from the brown herbage and tufts of briars, which are now the only productions of the once fertile and populous Roman Campagna. At La Storta we found ourselves within ten miles of Rome, a seemingly incredible dream of delight.It was the twenty-fifth of November, "Evacuation day" in the city of New York, which was then doubtless echoing with the firing of cannon, the ringing of bells, and the other popular expressions of joy. Here on the contrary the Campagna was overspread by a death-like silence, unbroken, except by the sound of our carriage wheels, till we were aroused from our sympathetic lethargy by the sudden shout from the postillion of "ROMA! ROMA!"

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MODERN CRITICISM.-GEORGE SAND.

THERE are few things more remarkable, there is none more reprehensible, in the present advanced state of a philosophical criticism, than a certain quaint character of bigotry without faith, austerity without conscience, and science without system. The critic, who in his life may disregard, or in his heart despise the established forms of religion and morality, will yet not scruple, in judging a writer who speculates freely upon either, to constitute himself champion of every prejudice, however besotted, entertained upon them by the multitude. This, to be sure, is often done also with the best faith imaginable; for too often the critic is but one of the multitude. But these, though a mischief, do not rise to the dignity in evil, of the critics and cases we propose to consider. Even where the inconsequence noted is fairly chargeable, it, no doubt, sometimes proceeds from our human infirmity, that source of common incongruity between opinion and conduct; but oftener, we fear, from motives of personal bias or popular captivation. In all these cases, however, the difference is merely relative to the critic, and is only that between presumptuous ignorance, culpable inadvertency, and selfish hypocrisy. The critical principle proceeded upon being in all the same, the public effect in all must be equally pernicious. In subjects, indeed, which are susceptible of only moral evidence and certitude, and which, moreover, address themselves largely to the imagination, these personal delinquencies may be accounted for, and perhaps, charitably, extenuated. But what is to be thought of deliberately torturing or evading the legitimate deductions of science, and denouncing those who consistently adhere to them, when ever such deductions tend to cross the commonly crude or conventional limits of the popular sentiment?

Thus, in this" enlightened age" of ours, (as our predecessors too have, immemorially, been wont to distinguish theirs,) do we still find every new, or as the invidious term is "bold" thought, upon certain subjects, condemned with a peremptoriness, perhaps pardonable in the earnest, uninformed illiberality of the past, but which is utterly incompatible with modern principles, and above all, with mo

dern pretensions, and seems almost incredible in persons who make it a (just, indeed, but not here a due) pride to have rid themselves of the prejudices of the "dark ages." What they appear to have done is, to renounce the extenuations, while they retain the errors, of ignorance and bigotry. Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Universal Toleration, Eternal Truth-these noble and only saving principles are, indeed, now-a-days more loudly and lavishly professed; and this is something gained. But is not the religious or social innovator still denounced

if not as formerly to physical-to what is more cruel perhaps, a moral torture? And in this condemnation by the critic, is not the principle the same as that of the Inquisitor, with the aggravation of inconsistency? The one admits the right, of which he punishes the exercise. The other punished, but he fairly prohibited, all examination or contestation of the established creeds and conceptions.

It is not contended that a certain degree of deference to the general opinion of mankind as a criterion of truth is to be refused, or is, in fact, dispensable. Such opinion is undoubtedly evidence. But it is only evidence; and evidence by no means to be taken for conclusive. It is farther to be allowed that, to perform any act of judgment, there must be a principle, a rule of some sort, a medium of comparison, admitted or established. So that if the critic be at all to express a judgment of the book he reviews, the abuse complained of would seem to be more or less unavoidable. Is it then, in strictness, the province of the critic to investigate, to decide?-for into this, mainly, the question seems to resolve itself. The writer for his own part, from the inconvenience suggested, among others, inclines, against the general usage, to believe it is not. The effectual exclusion of an abuse that renders criticism a nuisance would seem to confine the latter to the task of analysis and exposition. Or if the critic may pretend to decide, under any circumstances, it should be simply by reference to the most approved opinions on the particular subject--recognizing them as opinions, not dogmatically erecting these, any more than his own, into peremptory principles. The proper functions of the review

er, then, seem to be expository, not judicial. He reports, but does not (that is, should not) decree. He should confine himself to the book, especially, not concerning himself about the author; he should declare his opinions upon any new views it may present (if he declare them at all) not only with the reference just alluded to, to existing evidence, but also with a reservation for future: as the lawyers express it, he should keep within the record, and only pronounce de bene esse. For this view and this practice, accordingly, there are illustrious authorities. We will mention only Cicero, among the ancients, in the Tusculan Questions, and Bayle, among the moderns, in several articles of his incomparable Dictionary. The critic should, in his chair, be an accademic or a sceptic.

But erroneous as the prevailing system of criticism appears to be in principle, the practical abuse of it transcends all proportion with the theoretical error. Let us briefly consider the case and some of its consequences, in the twofold aspect of injustice to the author and detriment to the public.

A book, be it ever so unexceptionable, so excellent in all the rest, is yet held to be contaminated by a few pages or a few passages which chance to be obnoxious -not so often to some received axiom of general truth and morality—as to the particular or peculiar "principles" (as he calls them) of the critic and his coterie or communion. The whole is denounced without discrimination and without reserve. Strange reasoning! As if good, any more than gold, were to be found in the productions of man or even of nature, unmixed with the dross of evil! As if it were not the constant task and the meritorious trial assigned for man upon earth, to accomplish, or at least to endeavor, this separation! The proceeding in itself is sufficiently unfair and unjust to the author. But it seems to us no small aggravation of the injury it inflicts to find oneself judged, in the abstract subjects of Religion, Morals or Politics, by the necessarily crude notions of the multitude, or by the more contemptible cant and common-place of its interested, or echoing oracles. The law is bad. But the tribunal is worse-which, like most tribunals, is cruel in proportion as its rules are frivolous and its authority doubtful, and which, less equitable than some misinterpreters of Virgil would make the infernal one of

Rhadamanthus, refuses the culprit a hearing even after he is punished.

But mark its bearing-much the more important consideration-on the interests, on the advancement of general knowledge.

This system would, of course, arrest all progress for the future. By the same reason it would have prevented all the improvement of the past. It would preclude from us, at this moment, much that the "ignorant" fanaticism of the "dark ages" (in this matter, however, more discriminating and liberal than the "philosophic” criticism of the present) has left, has preserv ed to us, though not unmutilated. Under its sweeping proscription, most of the precious remnants of ancient literature should have perished with the strains of Alcmaon, Sappho, Mymnermus and others, by the sacrilegious hand of some self-constituted protector of the public morals and religion. And in our own day, the volu minous treasures of Gibbon must have been sacrificed to their companionship with the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters.

Again, suppose a book of the sort in question-a book, we mean, of conscientious and ratiocinative inquiry-could, in the present day especially, prove really

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dangerous," (a proposition we engage to disprove, to demonstration) should its truths also and if it have none it is innocuous without a censor-should its truths be proscribed with the errors, the offences? No, certainly. Such a principle must be unsound, for it involves the absurdity of proscribing every thing in nature. What is there, we repeat it, in nature physical or moral, that, practically, in the concrete, is entirely unmixed with evil? The evil we indeed affect to separate by giving it the denomination of abuse. But though the name be changed the thing remains, we presume, no less the same.

What we choose to term the "abuse" is as necessary an effect, proceeds from as natural a property, of the thing as does the use. The notion that there are things which are absolutely and intrinsically good, and evil only by accident or perversion, belongs to a superstitious faith or a shallow philosophy. It is sometimes no more than a mere verbal illusion, proceeding upon a distinction always more or less arbitrary and, often, perhaps unreal. Metaphysically considered, Good and Evil, Virtue and Vice, are not natural entities, are not specific attributes; they have no individual existence save in the terms of language, or in

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