re the name of a young girl,
an only child, who died at sixteen, and "left her parents
disconsolate:" 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 c