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[82] man, very kind in his manner, and with more the air of a scholar in his looks, conversation, and the arrangement of his rooms, than any Italian I have seen in Rome.

I talked with him, of course, about his famous discoveries, especially of the ‘Republic of Cicero,’ and of his other publications; but this was chiefly when I saw him before. To-day I took Mr. Gannett, and we gave our time chiefly to examining the famous Vatican manuscript of the Greek Bible, counted to be of the fourth century, and the oldest of all the manuscripts of the Scriptures. It is uncommonly well preserved, except that the beginning is wanting, and the Apocalypse, which Mai himself admits may never have been there; but these deficiencies have been supplied by a manuscript of, apparently, the tenth century. He has it now in his possession, by permission of the Pope, to publish, and he showed me the other day some of the sheets. The work is far advanced, and will be out, he thinks, in the course of a year, preserving even the minutest defects and errors of the original.1 We spent the afternoon among the frescos and oil-paintings of the Vatican, where—especially in the Stanze of the Disputa and of Constantine—we seemed every moment, in the multitude of subsidiary figures and ornaments, to find something new, graceful, and beautiful. These rooms are, indeed, better worth studying than anything, to the same amount, which the art of painting has produced, and it is melancholy to see how they are going to decay.

April 9.—We dined at the Prince Gabrielli's, and had much such a dinner as we had there before . . . . . The Princess showed us her private chapel, in which mass is said every morning as an indulgence to her rank. It is in modest and excellent taste. A door opens from one side of it into a sort of balcony or tribune in a church adjacent; a luxury in religion which the higher Romans much affect. She is deeply and sincerely religious, and could not help, to-day at table, telling me, as she has often told me before, how much she is anxious that I should become a Catholic, and that she prays for it constantly.

April 16.—. . . . The evening we passed at Lady Westmoreland's, where Mr.Hare and Mrs. Hare, the Abbe Stuart, and two or three other people were invited to meet us, and where, until half past 11 o'clock, we had an excellent dish of genuinely English talk, no small luxury at Rome; for, in their respective and very different ways, the Countess, Mr. Hare, and the Abbe Stuart are three of the best talkers I know of.

April 19. . . . . We went to the Vatican Library . . . . As a


1 Note by Mr. Ticknor: ‘It was not published, I think, till 1850.’

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