hours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious and enviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wanted none. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to live in Rome without thinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems very familiar, but strangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense before of confusing vastness. Sancta simplicitas! All my old friends however stand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them their old pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormous amount of padding - the number of third-rate, fourth-rate things that weary the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty and thirty best. In spite of the padding there are dozens of treasures that one passes regretfully; but the impression of the whole place is the great thing - the feeling that through these solemn vistas flows the source of an incalculable part of our present conception of Beauty.

April 10th. - Last night, in the rain, to the Teatro Valle

to see a comedy of Goldoni in Venetian dialect - "I Quattro Rustighi." I could but half follow it; enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity of irony, it wasn't so good as Molière. The acting was capital - broad, free and natural; the play of talk easier even than life itself; but, like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in finesse, that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows art. I contrasted the affair with the evening in December last that I walked over (also in the rain) to the Odeon and saw the "Plaideurs" and the "Malade lmaginaire." There, too, was hardly more than a handful of spectators; but what rich, ripe, fully representational and above all intellectual comedy, and what polished, educated playing! These Venetians in particular, however, have a marvellous entrain of their own; they seem even less than the French to recite. In some of the women - ugly, with red hands and shabby dresses - an extraordinary gift of natural utterance, of seeming to invent joyously as they go.

Later. - Last evening in H.'s box at the Apollo to hear