IMPBESSIONS OF ROME 253 



His general impressions appear most clearly from the 

 following. 



To Brian Hodgson 



April 10, 1881. 



We have been now for the best part of a fortnight in this 

 august city, and I know you will be kindly glad to hear of 

 our impressions thereupon. 



I can easily give my wife's ; she would prefer green fields 

 and flowers and insects a thousand times over to the Ruins, 

 Sculptures, Pictures and Churches with which this place is 

 stuffed and loaded. Our two excursions from Rome to 

 Tivoli, and to Albano and Frascati charmed her, and the 

 air and the woods and flowers were to me too a relief after 

 so thorough a drenching with sightseeing as the ' necessities ' 

 of travel here impose on one. Then too the finding Mr. 

 and Mrs. Morgan here has been a great relief and pleasure, 

 and they have been most kind to us. 



Rome as a city of ruins is to me very disappointing, 

 so few of these are in an intelligible state of preservation, 

 and such as there are are representative of people and 

 events separated by such a vast interval of time or inter - 

 calcated one with the other so abruptly that they appear to 

 have no more in common than the fossils of widely separated 

 geological beds whose strata had been faulted and dislocated. 

 Here you have something of the Caesars', at the next turn 

 something of Constantine's, with perhaps a monument of 

 the Kingly period opposite it, then a vestige of the Republic, 

 then of the Volscians and the Goths — and so forth, to which 

 you have to add the memorials innumerable of that compli- 

 cated era when Heathendom and Christendom took it turn 

 about to vex history. One heartily wishes that some one of 

 those masters of Rome had destroyed every vestige of his 

 predecessors' works, or else let them all alone ! As it is, what 

 little History of Rome I had is reduced to the ruinous state 

 in which I find the memorials of it ; and the objective 

 vestiges of events not worth recording, take a firmer hold on 

 the memory than the written records of world -disturbing 

 events which have left no visible evidence of their identity 

 or effects. I spent hours in the Palace of the Caesars, and 

 as many in Hadrian's Villa, and I declare that if you were 

 to change their positions and take me blindfold to either, I 



