ment inflicted on Bolingbroke is scarcely material now. He well deserved a bill of "Pains and Penalties;" and whether he was or was not visited with the very penalty that was most suitable, does not matter much.

On Bolingbroke's arrival in France, he looked about him for awhile. He was at once solicited by the emissaries of the Pretender, but he deliberated for some time, and it would have been wiser for him to have deliberated longer. He well knew that though there was much latent Jacobite sentiment in England, there was no good material for a Jacobite rebellion. Many squires and rectors and peasants would have been glad to see the legitimate king restored; but their zeal was not very active; it belonged to the region of traditional sentiment and vague prejudice rather than to that of practical and vigorous life. The House of Hanover had the force of government and the sense of the country in its favour. It was in possession, and Bolingbroke was aware that the Jacobites, without trusted leaders, without organisation or arms, could not expel it from possession. He knew all this well, but his passions were too strong for his judgment; from excitability, restlessness, and rage, he joined the Pretender. He must be busy, and hoped, or half-hoped to be revenged on his enemies.

He could not, however, long agree with his new associates. The descent from actual office to imaginary office was too sudden; to many men it was pleasing to be secretary of state to a mock king, but it was very painful to one who had just been secretary to a real queen. His contempt, too, for the Irish associates of the Pretender was unbounded. He saw that they were hotheaded and ignorant men,-who knew nothing of the country which they hoped to rule,-whom that country would not endure for a day. He knew that the Roman Catholics in England were a small and unpopular body, and their aid more dangerous than their enmity. The genuine Jacobites distrusted him also. He said that they were untrustworthy because they were fools, and they said that he was untrustworthy because he was a traitor. This could not last; after a brief interval, he left the Pretender and his court: they began to slander him, and he began to speak much evil of them.

With his secession from the Jacobites Bolingbroke's active career ends. He was afterwards only an aspirant for a career. He was, after several years, permitted to return to England, and to enjoy his estate though he was an attainted traitor; but the attainder was not reversed, and while it was in force he could not take his seat in the House of Lords, or hold any office whatever. He wrote much against Walpole, but he did not turn out Walpole. On one occasion he was much mortified because Pul

teney and the practical opponents of Walpole said that the support of his name rather weakened than strengthened them. He gave in a long memorial of suggestions to George I.; but the King said they were "bagatelles." He then fancied that he should become minister because of the support of Lady Suffolk, George II.'s mistress; but Lady Suffolk had no influence, and Queen Caroline, who had predominant influence, supported Walpole. He then hoped to be minister under the Prince of Wales, George II.'s son, and wrote a treatise on a "Patriot King" for that prince's use. But George II. outlived his son; and he was saved the mortification of seeing how little that small prince would have carried out his great ideas. Though he survived Queen Anne more than thirty years, he never after her death attained in England to a day's power. Three years of eager unwise power, and thirty-five of sickly longing and impotent regret,-such, or something like it, will ever be in this cold modern world the fate of an Alcibiades.

ART. VII.-ROBA DI ROMA.

Roba di Roma. By W. W. Story. London: Chapman and Hall. IT was Chateaubriand, we think, who called Rome the second country of all the world. The phrase was one of that happy class which tell a whole story in half a dozen words; and the secret charm of Rome can hardly be expressed better than by saying, that no stranger has ever lived there without feeling a sense of home. In the first place, it is, so at least it has always seemed to us, a city without a people. We are not speaking of the vast extent of the ancient walls, which might embrace a population numbered by millions, not by thousands, but of the sort of moral separation between the city and its populace. The modern Romans have the air of being as much strangers amidst those mighty ruins as we are ourselves. The Capitol, the Colosseum, and the Forum, are as much our property as they are theirs. The story of old Rome, the legends of consuls and emperors, the doings of the world's conquerors, are better known to us than they are to them. The glories of mediæval Rome, St. Peter's, and the Lateran, and Santa Maria Maggiore, they are the property of the Catholic world, of the "orbis terrarum," not of the Romans themselves. Even we, who belong to another faith, seem to have an unacknowledged share in that grand inheritance. As to modern Rome, the Pincio and the Borghese Gardens are open to us as readily as to the native, and know the harsh tones of our guttural languages better

than the soft sweet accents of the Italian tongues. The pale listless Roman nobles glide about quietly in their carriages, like shadows which shun the light; the shopkeepers and mezzo ceto" are there to minister to our comforts; and the common people form the picturesque background of the scenes that we love to gaze upon. So in Rome we foreigners, especially we of the Anglo-Saxon race, are the real masters. We attend the ceremonies, we visit the antiquities, we keep alive the Carnival, we patronise the arts, we scour the Campagna, we supply bread to the "populus Romanus ;" and so every thing is arranged for our especial delectation. In any other foreign capital, an Englishman can hardly help having the sentiment that, however superior he may be to the natives in every mental and physical quality, still he does not belong to the ruling race, he is not of the upper ten thousand, to whom every thing is made to yield. But in Rome this feeling vanishes. The "forestiere Inglese" is a greater personage than the cardinal in his purple stockings, or the Principe in his palace. This state of things is not unpleasant. Occasionally some of our countrymen may manifest their satisfaction at it by vulgar pretension; but, as a rule, we take this acknowledgment of our superiority quietly and unconsciously.

Each nation, and each individual of a nation, feels the charm of this position more or less according to circumstances. But in our own experience, we should say that Americans possibly feel it most of all. They are more at home in Rome, we fancy, than in any part of the Continent. Here, in the presence of bygone antiquity, other European nations are no more venerable by age than their own. The old Romans knew of no difference between one race of barbarians and another; and men of Northern blood are all alike barbarians at Rome. There, the American, in as far as the natives recognise him as a distinct entity, is only an Englishman who dislikes other Englishmen, and spends his money somewhat more freely than the run of his compatriots. Like us, he is an honoured guest, and avails himself calmly of the advantages of the situation. Moreover, paradoxical as it may perhaps seem, the American appreciates the antiquity of Rome even more than we do ourselves. Coming as he does from a land where there is nothing older than himself, and where even the primeval forest is a poetic fiction, not an actual reality, he feels the full charm of seeing old things about him to an extent we cannot realise. Few persons, we should think, could have wandered much about Rome alone without having at times a doubt pass across their minds as to the truth of our received faith of progress. What can we do that has not been done here before? We may go on

building up our Tower of Babel, and then, when we have raised it to its height, to the grandeur of that Roman structure among whose ruins we walk, the edifice will crumble down, and another generation will begin again that Sisyphean labour, taking no warning by our example. Why, so the thought runs, should not we be wise in time? Let the world move on as best it may, we will fold our arms, and study nature which makes no progress, and beauty which never changes, and the past which lies beyond reform. Under the influence of thoughts like these, Englishmen and Americans by the score come to the Eternal City; and, weary of life's struggle in the West, loiter their years away there uselessly if not hurtfully.

To this class we are glad to say that the author of the Roba di Roma does not belong. To the English public he is best known as a sculptor of high fame and higher promise. The Cleopatra in her wicked beauty, and the Libyan Sibyl in her sullen grandeur, will be long remembered by every visitor at the International Exhibition. It was not so much, we think, to their innate beauty that these statues owed their success. Their popularity was rather due to the fact, that amidst a crowd of inane prettinesses and soulless graces, they bore an unwonted stamp of mind and thought. The mark of the creative power rested on them, and the public recognised it at once, as it never fails to recognise genius. To English residents at Rome, Mr. Story's name is familiar as that of the pleasantest of hosts, and the brightest of talkers. To those whose acquaintance with him is more intimate, it will be no news to say, that the sculptor is also a keen politician and ardent patriot. Even the most enthusiastic of Southern sympathisers will not respect or like Mr. Story the less for the knowledge that his long absence from home has not blunted his affection for the land of his birth, and that he is as uncompromising an advocate of the union as if he had never left his native state of Massachusetts.

We have made these remarks to show our readers that they need not fear to find the Roba di Roma the dilettante work of an Italianised American who has become so enamoured of the past as to have grown careless of the present. It is the work of a thoughtful observer who has lived long in Rome, and who, while he has learnt, as he could not fail, to love it dearly, has not grown blind to its faults and errors. Turning over the pleasant pages, we seem again to be within the walls of that wondrous city, to see again the dome of St. Peter's rising above the sea of brown tiled roofs, to watch the shadows of the clouds rolling over that vast Campagna desert, to stroll through those narrow empty streets, to drive through the oak-groves of the Borghese gardens, and to wander up and down amidst the tombs upon

the Appian Way. And the charm of the Roba di Roma is, that it throws so many new illustrations on the scenes we recollect so well. It tells us so much about people we know something of, and whose faces Anglo-Romans must remember so vividly in this dull colourless English life of ours. Who, for instance, does not know Beppo? At the time when these lines are written, or when they are read, supposing that event to take place from sunrise to sunset, he is at his place on the summit of the Piazza di Spagna, wriggling about the pavement on his legless stumps, and asking for alms with his commanding air. He is not a pleasant old man to our minds; and when we felt nervous, we had always an impression that his real legs were doubled under him, and that if we gave him nothing, he would spring up and garotte us. Moreover, we had a painful consciousness that he looked upon us as parvenus, who gave him charity only to be able to say, that we too were Romans, and knew the lions of the place. Finally, he had an unamiable way of consigning our souls to very uncomfortable localities if we did not happen to accede to his demands. Still, we look back kindly now on the memory of that graceless old reprobate, and are right glad to hear what Mr. Story has to tell us of him. We have seen him often riding into business on his jackass, which, by the way, he belabours cruelly when he is out of humour; but we did not know that he is a sort of Roman Gobseck, or Gigonnet, and unites the office of money-lender and banker to that of beggar. He has been known to lend some sixty scudi at a moment's notice; he pays rent to the Government for the platform on which he crouches and carries on his trade; he has got a wife and children; is a gentleman in his own paese in the contorni of Rome; and generally is a respectable and well-to-do citizen of the Papal city. It is some comfort to us when we reflect on all the pauls and baiocchi of ours which have gone into those capacious pockets, to learn that Beppo is not devoid of genial feelings, and that Mr. Story saw him once in his glory at a beggars' supper, where he discharged the duties of host and entertainer with due dignity and liberality.

But Beppo is only the first of the Roman beggars of whom our author has so much to tell us. The loss of a limb, an eye, or a sense, is a godsend to the povero stroppiato. A deformity is a stock in trade. Of all the manifold wretchedness in the eternal city, we doubt if that of the professed beggar is the greatest. He has nothing to do, he has few wants, and he can reckon confidently on receiving his small pittance. It is a mistake to suppose that the tradesmen of Rome live upon the strangers exclusively. No doubt the aristocracy of the class

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