are antique; the latter appears of Adrian's | time. Among the paintings may be distinguished: St. John Baptist drinking at a spring, by Michelangelo di Caravaggio; the Ascension, Garofolo's chef-d'œuvre; the Guardian angel, by Pietro of Cortona; a superb Flagellation, by Guercino; a Christ dead, foreshortened. by Agostino Carraccio; a Poet sitting before a Satyr, by Salvator Rosa, probably an allusion to his satires, as the head of the poet is his portrait; a Magdalen, by Spagnoletto.

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The Ghigi library, rich in manuscripts and fine editions, was founded by Pope Alexander VII., a man of meagre character, described in the manner of Pascal and Molière by Cardinal de Retz,' but an elegant poet, a passionate lover of antiquity, and deserving high elogiums for his patronage of letters. "Now the tastes of the pope are known," wrote a contemporary, all the prelates rivalise each other in discovering manuscripts." One of these manuscripts, perhaps sought after with a view to personal advancement, is the Daniel of the Septuagint, unique. A Dionysius of Halicarnassus seems of the ninth century. The Chronicles of St. Benedict and St. An drew; a collection of the Capitularies, an inedited Chronicle of Mount Soracle, are other important historical manuscripts. A Missal, of 1450, has some large miniatures representing divers subjects of Sacred History, in excellent taste. A fine folio parchment volume, ornamented with fanciful figures dated 1490, and containing masses and motetti composed in France by French and Dutch musicians,would be interesting for the history of music. A note at the beginning, in the handwriting of Alexander VII, then Cardinal Ghigi, certifies that this music, intended for Spain, is very good: Stimata molto buona. French music, on the decline from Henry IV., crushed under the sarcasms of Rousseau, had great celebrity through

See in book V. of his Memoirs the comic relation of his conference with this pope.

* Being informed, on his first journey to Castel Gandolfo, that a peasant had defaced an antique temple, and its fine mosaics, which he had chanced to discover, and that on the advice of a monk of Saint Augustine who told him that those things were the works of the devil, he sent the peasant to the gallies, not knowing how to punish the frate, who was nevertheless the true culprit.

out Europe in the fifteenth and first years of the sixteenth century. Our romances and songs (le canzonette alla francese) were imitated and even copied by the Italians. It is really curious now to see that Italy then borrowed from our music all that was più molle, più delicato,4 in its own. But it appears by the collection in the Ghigi library, that not only were sentimental and elegant airs imported from France, but even grave and perhaps scientific music, more than fifty years prior to the compositions of Palestrino, pupil of a Flemish master and chief of the Italian school, from which period modern music seems to date. A remarkable letter from Henry VIII. to the Count Palatine requests him to show Luther no mercy. A great number of German and Latin letters by Melancthon have not all been published. Some sketches of sonnets by Tasso are as full of corrections as his other manuscripts. An inedited treatise on the Primacy of Saint Peter, by Francis de Sales, canonised by Alexander VII., seemed to me, on a cursory perusal, an ingenious and eloquent production. An autograph drawing of Bernini's relates to the embellishment of Saint Peter's. Twenty volumes of original documents respecting the peace of Westphalia might be advantageously made use of in remodelling some portions of P. Bougeant's History. In short, the Ghigi Library is one of those historical treasures so frequently met with in Italy, and especially at Rome, which, if diligently studied, would be of great service in the rectification of facts and the discovery of truth. Among the printed books, there is a Rationale of Durand. A Polyglot of Paris recalls a singular typographical forgery: some Dutch printers came to Rome in 1666, and changing the frontispiece and dedication of the book, which bears the above date, they offered it to Alexander VII., as if issued from their press; but the trick was soon discovered.

3 "Ora che il genio del papa è fatto pubblico, tutti i prelati fanno aile pugna qua per buscar manoscritti." Let. from Ottavio Falconieri to Magalotti. 1665. Lettere d' uom, ill. t. I, p. 123.

4 See this passage of the discourse of Ludovico Zoccolo sulle ragioni del numero del verso italiano: "La musica più molle, più delicata, che non soleva costumarsi fra noi Italiani, fece gli anni addietro passaggio da Francia in Italia.”

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passions, and violences, seemed to have undertaken romance: at the present day history and romance are equally past, and some few old dowagers alone kept up, without much honour, the scandal of the old Italian manners.

The immense palace of Venice, of Giuliano da Majano's architecture, has been the summer residence of several popes, of the proud duke of Ferrara, Borso d'Este, with a suite of five hundred gentlemen clothed in gold and silver brocade, silk, and velvet, and, for one month, of the young and chivalrous king of France Charles VIII., who, when going to Naples, seems almost to have reigned there and governed the eternal city. This kind of battlemented fortress, simple, solid, and severe in its architecture, built with the stones and materials of the Coliseum, with a fine church and an elegant interior portico, is by moonlight of a superb, majestic effect. The republic of Venice received this palace from Pope Pius IV., because that power was the first to admit the council of Trent. Long abandoned and left to decay, it was carefully repaired in part by Count A*****, Austrian ambassador, who for several years displayed the noblest and most cordial hospitality there. Countess A***** added an infinite charm to the brilliancy of these fêtes, and the politeness, attractions, and virtues of that accomplished lady are one of the reminiscences of Rome.

The Mattei villa, on Mount Coelius, the property of the prince of the Peace, has some paintings of the Spanish school. Two great pedestals, covered with inscriptions by the fifth cohort of the Vigiles, prove that the barracks of these firemen of Rome was near. A hermes has supplied authentic busts of Socrates and Seneca, sages widely different, who ought not to be thus associated the former, true, sublime; the latter, ingenious and false, and who is indebted to this recent discovery for his delivery from the mean countenance attributed to him on the authority of the celebrated apocryphal bronze in the museum of Naples. The long-neglected gardens have been replanted, but in a petty style. The view of the Aventine, ever the same, is admirable.

CHAPTER XXXII.

The vast and naked Colonna palace dates from the illustrious Martin V. The gallery is one of the (Colonna). first in Rome. The following are remarkable: the superb portraits of Luther and Calvin, by Titian; a Portrait, by Paolo Veronese, wonderfully true in colouring; four Portraits united, by Giorgione, no less admirable; Shepherds sleeping, of a delicacy not always found in Poussin's paintings; a good Holy Family, by Andrea del Sarto. In the garden, the two fine fragments of a wellexecuted antique frontispiece are said, with equal improbability, to proceed from a temple of the Sun or a temple of Health. What powerful mechanical means must not the ancients have possessed to raise and fix such an entablature!

The piazza of Monte Cavallo, on the Quirinal, agreeably situated, ornamented with handsome edifices, and a charming fountain, is more particularly embellished by its superb colosses of Castor and Pollux, according to the most likely conjecture, chefs-d'œuvre of the Greek chisel in the golden age of antique statuary, but, despite the Latin inscription, neither by Phidias nor Praxiteles. Canova, who from his first arrival at Rome had made an especial study of these colosses and was never weary of admiring their noble simplicity, artless grandeur, and anatomical precision, shrewdly remarked the vicious restoration of the two groups: the horse and esquire must have been originally placed almost facing and on the same line, in order to produce unity of disposition.

The pontifical palace, begun in 157 by Gregory XIII. and not completed-till the last century, is now appropriated to the conclaves. It appears to have no painting of the first order. The pretty chapel, painted in fresco by Guido, has an Annunciation at the high altar, also by him, and highly extolled. The stuccos of a wainscot, representing Alexander at Babylon, are by Thorwaldsen; the clever sculptor of Carrara, Tinelli, had represented, under the French adminis

tration, the Triumph of Trajan, since cbanged into that of Constantine. In the garden, the little casino has a View of the piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore and another of the Piazza of Monte Cavallo, by Pannini, executed with great talent.

The great palace of the Consulta, by Fuga, is disposed with extreme ingenuity.

The vast Rospigliosi palace, begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, on the designs of Flaminio Ponzio, and erected on the Thermæ of Constantine, was purchased of the Bentivoglio family by Mazarin, to be made the palace of France; it remained so until 1704, and the obscure father of the cardinal, Pietro, died there in the year 1654, at the age of seventy-eight. Saint-Simon mentions the malicious wit of the Roman journalists, who inserted the following announcement: "We learn from our Parisian correspondence that the Signor Pietro Mazarini, father of the cardinal of that name, died in this city of Rome, on, etc." With the exception of the beautiful Aurora, Guido's most celebrated work, perhaps imitated from an antique bassorelievo in a cloister of Saint Paul's, but apparently not superior to his chapel of Saint Dominick at Bologna, which is spoken of much less, the Rospigliosi palace has no remarkable painting; several pictures even, most of the Rubens, for instance, and a Holy Family, attributed to Raphael, are only copies. The great painting of Adam and Eve in Paradise is most certainly in Domenichino's earlier style.

The Albani palace, of Domenico Fontana's architecture, presents little but the wrecks of its rich library and gallery. The latter has scarcely anything but a Christ by Rubens, and designs by Giulio Romano.

The fountain de' Termini, of Domenico Fontana's architecture, one of the four principal fountains in Rome, but without effect or picturesque, has inspired Tasso with some tine octaves.' Before Sixtus V., water drawn from wells, and put in casks, was carried to Rome on beasts of burden, and sold. The tribune Rienzi was son of one of these water-sellers. Sixtus V. employed

1 See ante, book VIII, ch. vi.

"Acque, che per camin chiuso e profundo."

the ancient aqueducts to convey the water, called from his name Acqua Felice, which is the same as the Alexandrine, brought to Rome by Alexander Severus. Amid the ruins or resurrection of the eternal city, the water alone remains perfectly antique. The ridiculous colossal Moses of the fountain, by a sculptor in earthenware of the seventeenth century, Prospero of Brescia, given by some simpleton travellers for the Moses of Michael Angelo, has the air of a Silenus standing erect, in costume, and able to walk straight. The author, urged on by the impetuous Sixtus V., had sculptured his marble on the spot, without making a model; he died of grief at the mockery and contempt showered on his work. The two lions. of black basalt and beautiful Egyptian workmanship, were obtained from the Pantheon; they are an allusion to the arms of Sixtus, and would be worthy of a better place; their hieroglyphics, curious in an historical point of view, mark the epoch of King Nectanebus and the middle of the fourth century before the Christian era.

The Salaria gate, substituted by Honorius for the Colline gate, by which the Gauls had entered Rome, seems a fatal entry, which has in all ages been the weak side of Rome: Annibal intended, but was prevented by hurricanes, to attack it on this side, where Alaric and his Goths afterwards made their irruption.

I obtained the favour of visiting the impenetrable Ludovisi villa, consisting of three fine casinos thrown picturesquely into the midst of a large garden laid out by Lenôtre. Some few of the sculptures are in the first rank of antique chefs-d'œuvre; namely: the statue of Apollo, exceedingly well preserved; the superb head of Juno, the finest Juno known; the famous Mars in repose, restored by Bernini; a pretended Agrippina, perfect in drapery; the group said to be the young Papirius discovering the secret of the senate to his mother, but which is more probably Orestes recognising Electra, a Greek work by Menelaus, son of Stephanus, according to the inscription; the celebrated group of Arria and Pœtus, which is supposed, from the nudity of the persons unusual

Rime. Part. Ita.“ Alle acque felici condotte in Roma da SS. Sisto V."