ts, who have their own feasts, haunts, and amusements by the
side of their aristocratic compatriots, with whom but few of them have
the honour to mingle.

J. J. and Clive engaged pleasant lofty apartments in the Via Gregoriana.
Generations of painters had occupied these chambers and gone their way.
The windows of their painting-room looked into a quaint old garden,
where there were ancient statues of the Imperial time, a babbling
fountain and noble orange-trees with broad clustering leaves and golden
balls of fruit, glorious to look upon. Their walks abroad were endlessly
pleasant and delightful. In every street there were scores of pictures
of the graceful characteristic Italian life, which our painters seem one
and all to reject, preferring to depict their quack brigands, contadini,
pifferari, and the like, because Thompson painted them before Jones, and
Jones before Thompson, and so on, backwards into time. There were
the children at play, the women huddled round the steps of the open
doorways, in the kindly Roman winter; grim, portentous old hags, such as
Michael Angelo painted, draped in majestic raggery; mothers and swarming
bambins; slouching countrymen, dark of beard and noble of countenance,
posed in superb attitudes, lazy, tattered, and majestic. There came the
red troops, the black troops, the blue troops of the army of priests;
the snuffy regiments of Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French
abbes; my lord the bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen);
my lord the cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three,
footmen behind him;--flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed
by the costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious
emblazonments of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came out of
the pantomime too, and was about to turn into something else. So it is,
that what is grand to some persons' eyes appears grotesque to others;
and for certain sceptical persons, that step, which we have heard of,
between the sublime and the ridiculous, is not visible.

"I wish it were not so," writes Clive, in one of the letters wherein he
used to pour his full heart out in those days. "I see these people at
their devotions, and envy them their rapture. A friend, who belongs to
the old religion, took me, last week, into a church where the Virgin
lately appeared in person to a Jewish gentleman, flashed down upon
him from heaven in light and splendour celestial, and, of course,