BONCONVENTO ACQUAPENDENTE.

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supper on the table-six very social companions, your cabriolet friends are two French artists on their way to study at Rome. They are both pensioners of the govern ment, each having gained the annual prize at the Academy in his separate branch of art, which entitles him to five years' support in Italy. They are full of enthusiasm, and converse with all the amusing vivacity of their nation. The Academy of France send out in this manner five young men annually, who have gained the prizes for painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and engraving.

This is the place where Henry the Seventh was poisoned by a monk, on his way to Rome. The drug was given to him in the communion-cup. The "Ave-Marie was ringing when we drove into town, and I left the carriage and followed the crowd, in the hope of finding an old church, where the crime might have been committed. But the priest was mumbling the service in a new chapel, which no romance that I could summon would picture as the scene of a tragedy.

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Acquapendente.While the dirty custom-house officer is deciphering our passports, in a hole a dog would live in unwillingly, I take out my pencil to mark once more the pleasure I have received from the exquisite scenery of this place. The wild rocks enclosing the little narrow valley below, the waterfalls, the town on its airy perch above, the just starting vegetation of spring, the roads lined with snow-drops, crocuses, and violets, have renewed, in a tenfold degree, the delight with which I saw this romantic spot on my former journey to Rome.

We crossed the mountain of Radicofani yesterday, in so thick a mist that I could not even distinguish the ruin of the old castle towering into the clouds above. The wild, half-naked people thronged about us as before, and I gave another paul to the old beggar with whom I became acquainted by Mr. Cole's graphic sketch. The winter had, apparently, gone hard with him. He was scarce able to come to the carriage-window, and coughed so hollowly that I thought he had nearly begged his last pittance.

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Bolsena. We have walked in advance of the vetturino

along the borders of this lovely and beautiful lake till we are tired. Our artists have taken off their coats with the heat, and sit, a quarter of a mile further on, pointing in every direction at these unparalleled views. The water is as still as a mirror, with a soft mist on its face, and the water-fowl in thousands are diving and floating within gun-shot of us. An afternoon in June could not be more summer-1 er-like, and this, to a lover of soft climate, is no trifling pleasure.

A mile behind us lies the town, the seat of ancient Volscinium, the capital of the Volscians. The country about is one quarry of ruins, mouldering away in the moss. Nobody can live in health in the neighbourhood, and the poor pale wretches who call it a home are in melancholy contrast to the smiling paradise about them. Before us, in the bosom of the lake, lie two green islands-those which Pliny records to have floated in his time; and one of which, Martana, a small conical isle, was the scene of the murder of the queen of the Goths by her cousin Theodotus. She was taken there and strangled. It is difficult to imagine, with such a sea of sunshine around and over it, that it was ever any thing but a spot of delight.

The whole neighbourhood is covered with rotten trunks of trees-a thing which at first surprised me in a country where wood is so economised. It is accounted for in the French guide-book of one of our party by the fact, that the chestnut woods of Bolsena are considered sacred by the people from their antiquity, and are never cut. The trees have ripened, and fallen, and rotted thus for centuries— one cause, perhaps, of the deadly change in the air.

The vetturino comes lumbering up, and I must pocket my pencil and remount.

LETTER VI.

MONTEFIASCONE ANECDOTE OF THE WINE-VITERBO - -MOUNT CIMINO-TRADITION-VIEW OF ST. PETER'S ENTRANCE INTC ROME A STRANGER'S IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITY.

MONTEFIASCONE.-We have stopped for the night at the hotel of this place, so renowned for its wine-the remnant

of a bottle of which stands, at this moment, twinkling between me and my French companions. The ladies of our party have gone to bed, and left us in the room where sat Jean Defoucris, the merry German monk, who died of excess in drinking the same liquor that flashes through this straw-covered flask. The story is told more fully in the French guide-books. A prelate of Augsbourg, on a pilgrimage to Rome, sent forward his servant with orders to mark every tavern where the wine was good with the word est, in large letters of chalk. On arriving at this hotel, the monk saw the signal thrice written over the door-Est! Est! Est! He put up his mule, and drank of Montefiascone till he died. His servant wrote this epitaph, which is still seen in the church of St. Florian :

"Propter nimium est, est,
Dominus meus mortuus est !"

Est, Est, Est! is the motto upon the sign of the hotel to this day.

In wandering about Viterbo in search of amusement, while the horses were baiting, I stumbled upon the shop of an antiquary. After looking over his medals, Etruscan vases, cameos, &c., a very interesting collection, I inquired into the state of trade for such things in Viterbo. He was a cadaverous, melancholy-looking old man, with his pockets worn quite out with the habit of thrusting his hands into them, and about his mouth and eye there was the proper virtuoso expression of inquisitiveness and discrimination. He kept also a small café adjoining his shop, into which we passed as he shrugged his shoulders at my question. I had wondered to find a vender of costly curiosities in a town of such poverty, and I was not surprised at the sad fortunes which had followed upon his enterprise. They were a base herd, he said of the people, utterly ignorant of the value of the precious objects he had for sale, and he had been compelled to open a café and degrade himself by waiting on them for a contemptible craize worth of coffee, while his lovely antiquities lay unappreciated within. The old gentleman was eloquent upon his misfortunes. He had not been long in trade, and had collected his museum

originally for his own amusement. He was an odd specimen, in a small way, of a man who was quite above his sphere, and suffered for his superiority. I bought a pretty intaglio, and bade him farewell, after an hour's acquaintance, with quite the feeling of a friend.

Mount Cimino rose before us soon after leaving Viterbo, and we walked up most of the long and gentle ascent, inhaling the odour of the spicy plants for which it is famous, and looking out sharply for the brigands with which it is always infested. English carriages are constantly robbed on this part of the route, of late. The robbers are met usually in parties of ten and twelve, and a week before we passed, Lady B (the widow of an English nobleman,) was stopped and plundered in broad mid-day. The excessive distress among the peasantry of these misgoverned states accounts for these things, and one only wonders why there is not even more robbing among such a starving population. This mountain, by the way, and the pretty lake below it, are spoken of in the Æneid :-" Cimini cum monte locum," &c. There is an ancient tradition, that in the crescent-shaped valley which the lake fills, there was formerly a city which was overwhelmed by the rise of the water; and certain authors state that, when the lake is clear, the ruins are still to be seen at the bottom.

The sun rose upon us as we reached the mountain above Baccano, on the sixth day of our journey; and, by its clear golden flood, we saw the dome of St. Peter's, at the distance of sixteen miles, towering amidst the Campagna in all its majestic beauty. We descended into the vast plain, and traversed its gentle undulations for two or three hours. With the forenoon well advanced, we turned into the valley of the Tiber, and saw the home of Raphael—a noble chateau on the side of a hill near the river; and, in the little plain between, the first peach-trees we had seen, in full blossom. The tomb of Nero is on one side of the road, before crossing the Tiber, and on the other a newly-painted and staring restaurant, where the modern Roman cockneys drive for punch and ices. The bridge of Pontemolle, by which we passed into the immediate suburb of Rome, was

the ancient Pons Emilius, and here Cicero arrested the conspirators on their way to join Catiline in his camp. It was on the same bridge, too, that Constantine saw his famous vision, and gained his victory over the tyrant Maxentius.

Two miles over the Via Flaminia, between garden-walls that were ornamented with sculpture and inscription in the time of Augustus, brought us to the Porta del Popolo. The square within this noble gate is modern, but very imposing. Two streets diverge before you, as far away as you can see into the heart of the city; a magnificent fountain sends up its waters in the centre; the façades of two handsome churches face you as you enter; and on the right and left are gardens and palaces of princely splendour. Gay and sumptuous equipages cross it in every direction, driving out to the Villa Borghese, and up to the Pincian mount; the splendid troops of the Pope are on guard; and the busy and stirring population of modern Rome swell out to its limit like the ebb and flow of the sea. All this disappoints while it impresses the stranger. He has come to Rome but it was old Rome that he had pictured to his fancy. The Forum; the ruins of her temples; the palaces of her emperors; the homes of her orators, poets, and patriots; the majestic relics of the once mistress of the world, are the features in his anticipation. But he enters by a modern gate to a modern square, and pays his modern coin to a whiskered officer of customs; and in the place of a venerable Belisarius begging an obolus in classic Latin, he is beset by a troop of lusty and filthy lazzaroni intreating for a baioch in the name of the Madonna, and in effeminate Italian. He drives down the Corso, and reads nothing but French signs, and sees all the familiar wares of his own country exposed for sale; and every other person on the pavé is an Englishman with a narrow-rimmed hat and whalebone stick; and within an hour, at the Dogana, where his baggage is turned inside out by a snuffy old man who speaks French, and a reception at an hotel where the porter addresses him in his own language, whatever it may be, he goes to bed under Parisian curtains, and tries to dream of the Rome he could not realise while awake.