. I look upon that man as little better than a Vandal in
taste,--one from whom "knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out."
Take another modern instance: substitute for the tiled roofs of Rome,
now so gray, tumbled, and picturesque with their myriad lichens, the
cold, clean slate of New York, or the glittering zinc of Paris,--should
we gain or lose? The Rue de Rivoli is long, white, and uniform,--all new
and all clean; but there is no more harmony and melody in it than in the
"damnable iteration" of a single note; and even Time will be puzzled
to make it picturesque, or half as interesting as those old houses
displaced in the back streets for its building, which had sprouted up
here and there, according to the various whims of the various builders.
Those were taken down because they were dirty, narrow, unsightly. These
are thought elegant and clean. Clean they certainly are; and they have
one other merit,--that of being as monotonously regular as the military
despotism they represent. But I prefer individuality, freedom, and
variety, for my own part. The narrow, uneven, huddled Corso, with here
a noble palace, and there a quaint passage, or archway, or shop,--the
buildings now high, now low, but all barnacled over with balconies,--is
far more interesting than the unmeaning uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli.
So, too, there are those among us who have the bad taste to think it a
desecration in Louis Napoleon to have scraped the stained and venerable
old Notre Dame into cleanliness. The Romantic will not consort with the
Monotonous,--Nature is not neat,--Poetry is not formal,--and Rome is not
clean.

These thoughts, or ghosts of thoughts, flitted through my mind, as the
carriage was passing along the narrow, dirty streets, and brought with
them after-trains of reflection. There may be, I thought, among the
thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the
common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as
special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many
things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy
their notice, might be interesting. Every ruin has had its score of
_immortelles_ hung upon it. The soil has been almost overworked by
antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but
the antique brick a prize. Poets and sentimentalists have described to
death what the antiquaries have left;--some have done their work so
well