steps of pilgrims like myself, covers the dominie's ashes. There is a rude figure carved upon it, at whose feet I traced out the cabalistic words, "Est, Est, Est." The remainder of the inscription was illegible by the flickering light of the sexton's lantern. At Baccano I first caught sight of the dome of Saint Peter's. We had entered the desolate Campagna; we passed the Tomb of Nero,-we approached the Eternal City; but no sound of active life-no thronging crowds-no hum of busy men announced that we were near the gates of Rome. All was silence, solitude, and desolation. ROME IN MIDSUMMER. She who tamed the world seemed to tame herself at last, and falling under her own weight grew to be a prey to Time, who with his iron teeth consumes all bodies at last, making all things both animate and inanimate, which have their being under that changeling the Moon, to be subject unto corruption and desolation. HOWELL'S Signorie of Venice. THE masks and mummeries of Carnival are over; the imposing ceremonies of Holy Week have become a tale of the times of old; the illumination of St. Peter's and the Girandola are no longer the theme of gentle and simple; and finally, the barbarians of the North have retreated from the gates of Rome, and left the Eternal City silent and deserted. The cicerone stands at the corner of the street with his hands in his pockets,-the artist has shut himself up in his studio to muse upon antiquity,--and the idle facchino lounges in the market-place and plays at morra by the foun tain. Midsummer has come; and you may now hire a palace for what, a few weeks ago, would hardly have paid 'your night's lodging in its garret. I am still lingering in Rome--a student, not an artist—and have taken lodgings in the Piazza Navona, the very heart of the city, and one of the largest and most magnificent squares of modern Rome. It occupies the site of the ancient amphitheatre of Alexander Severus; and the churches, palaces, and shops that now surround it, are built upon the old foundations of the amphitheatre. At each extremity of the square stands a fountain; the one with a simple jet of crystal water, the other with a triton holding a dolphin by the tail. In the centre rises a nobler work of art; a fountain with a marble basin more than two hundred feet in circumference. From the midst uprises a huge rock, pierced with four grottoes, wherein sit a rampant sea-horse and a lion couchant. On the sides of the rock are four colossal statues, representing the four principal rivers of the world; and from its summit, forty feet from the basin below, shoots up an obelisk of red granite, covered with hieroglyphics, and fifty feet in height,—a relic of the amphitheatre of Caracalla. In this quarter of the city I have domiciliated |