hable, though he has lost all character as a public censor.
The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone,
but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art
to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to
full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that
statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination.

XI.

Regarding the face of Pompey's statue in the Spada Palace, I was more
struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I
had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be
found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South
than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern
Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with
producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a
republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character
as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and
creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the
same boundless and unscrupulous ambition.

XII.

When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates
the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded--the
sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping,
in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the
columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually
renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your
consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I
would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored
as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and
said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place
some centuries ago, "They have robbed us of every thing" (_Ci hanno
levato tutto_); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he
had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.

What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had
given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood
almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their
supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy
faces!

XIII.

Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known
so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the
Immaculate Conception, the Ar