And at night the swart mechanic comes to drown his cark and care, Quaffing ale from pewter tankards, in the master's antique chair.

Vanish'd is the ancient splendour, and before my dreamy eye
Wave these mingling shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry.

Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard; But thy painter, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs, thy cobbler-bard.

Thus, O Nuremberg, a wanderer from a region far away,

As he paced thy streets and courtyards, sang in thought his careless lay:

Gathering from the pavement's crevice, as a floweret of the soil,

The nobility of labour,-the long pedigree of toil.

HE first look of Rome shakes one's preconceived notions. With an imagination inflamed by historical and poetic recollections, we have not fully realised the fact, that the Rome of the present day bears no resemblance whatever to the Rome of the Cæsars-that it can hardly be said to stand on the same spot of ground-that it is a comparatively modern city, built very much in the style of the older part of Paris, consisting, for the most part, of narrow and not over-clean thoroughfares, lined with tall but substantial edifices of a dull, yellowish-coloured stone. Except it be this stone-the inexhaustible. travertine of the neighbourhood-also a few relics of antiquity-there is positively nothing shared in common between old and new Rome. Yet, with so little to satisfy cherished fancies on the subject, and so much to give pain as regards the social aspects of the place, there is

I

that about Rome which still makes it a wonder of the world, and must ever draw a crowd of pilgrims from the uttermost ends of the earth. There are two things alone, one ancient and one modern— the ruins of the Colosseum and St Peter's-a sight of either of which is worth all the trouble and cost of a journey of thousands of miles. Like the Pyramids, they are unmatched-each the grandest thing of the kind ever raised by the hand of man-the Colosseum overwhelming us with its vastness and historical associations; St Peter's, the marvel of architectural genius, the glory of Michael Angelo.

EHOLD St Paul at Athens! think of the matchless splendour which blazed upon his view as he rolled his eye round the enchanting panorama that encircled the hill of Mars. On the one hand, as he stood upon the summit of the rock, beneath the canopy of heaven, was spread a glorious prospect of mountains, islands, seas, and skies; on the other, quite within his view, was the plain of Marathon, where the wrecks of former generations and the tombs of departed heroes mingled together in silent desolation. Behind him towered the lofty Acropolis, crowned with the pride of Grecian architecture. There, in the zenith of their splendour and the perfection of their beauty, stood those peerless temples, the very fragments of which are viewed by modern travellers with an idolatry almost equal to that which reared them. Stretched along the plain below him, and reclining her head on the slope of the neighbouring hills, was Athens, mother of the arts and sciences, with her noble offspring sporting by her side. The Porch, the Lyceum, and the Grove, with the stations of departed sages and the forms of

their living disciples, were all presented to the apostle's eye. What mind, possessing the slightest pretension to classic taste, can think of his situation, and such sublime and captivating scenery, without a momentary rapture? Yet there, even there, did this accomplished scholar stand as insensible to all this grandeur, as if nothing was before him but the treeless, turfless desert. Absorbed in the holy abstractions of his own mind, he saw no charms, felt no fascination, but on the contrary was pierced with the most poignant distress; and what was the cause? "He saw the city wholly given to idolatry." To him it presented nothing but a magnificent mausoleum, decorated, it is true, with the richest productions of the sculptor and the architect, but still, where the souls of men lay dead in trespasses and sins; while the dim light of philosophy, that still glimmered in the schools, appeared but as the lamp of the sepulchre, shedding its pale and sickly ray around these gorgeous chambers of death.