by the modern spade) packed, sent off, made presents of, sold to all
the churches and convents of Christendom; bits of bones in cotton
wool, with faded labels, in glass cases, such as we see in sacristies,
&c., or enclosed in glories of enamel and gold!

But all gone, gone, those poor humble inhabitants, who were so anxious
to be entire for the resurrection of the body!--patrician ladies,
slaves, soldiers, eunuchs, theologians--all gone piecemeal all over
the distant earth! the corridors swept and empty, the pigeon-holes
with only a little brown cocoa-like dust!

It was raining all day, dull, dismal. Yet coming out of that place,
out of that brown crumbly darkness, what was not the interest of the
wet grey sky! How great the beauty, the movements of the lazy clouds!
How complex and lovely the bare lane of wattled dry reeds--the
ineffable exquisiteness of patches of green corn, of a few scant pink
blossoms, of the shoots of elder! I remember the solemnity of the
subterranean tombs at Perugia; the grisliness of the Beauchamp crypt
at Warwick. But these catacombs, emptiness, desolation and that old
brown lilacky, crumbly Roman earth, in which no plough need move nor
spade,--that _terriccio_, that pot-mould of the past.

_March_ 16.

V.

THE RIONE MONTI.

Yesterday, in gusty weather, wandered round muddy streets of Rione
Monti, and entered some churches. S.S. Cosmae Damiano in Forum: it has
got lost, so to speak, in the excavations, and you seek it through
blind alleys and a long dark passage--a dirty, tawdry church, with a
few frowsy, sluttish people; and behind the ballroom chandeliers above
the altar, a Ravenna apse, gold and blue; and lambs in procession on a
green ground.

Then S. Pietro in Vincoli, which has a delightful position, with its
big palm and tower and a certain Romantic Catherine Sforza character;
also, what always refreshes me in Rome, its early Renaissance
character, before Jesuits, &c. &c., an imported thing from Tuscany,
and the fact of the tomb of the Pollajuolos! Michel Angelo's _Moses_
somehow belongs to Rome--has Rome's grandeur, emphasis, and Rome's
theatrical quality. All round are buried seventeenth-century prelates.
Cinthio Aldobrandini, &c., setting forth glories, but with skeletons
as supporters!

Decidedly Rome was never more Roman than at present--the pulling down
and building and excavating, the inappropriate jostlings of time and
character merely add to the eternal qua