A few days after, I happened to go into their church, and found it thronged, while a preacher, panting, sweating, leaning half out of the pulpit, was exhorting his hearers to “imitate Christ.”  With unspeakable disgust I gazed on this false shepherd of those who had just so failed in their duty to a poor stray lamb, Their church is so rich in ornaments, the seven baiocchi were hardly needed to burnish it.  Their altar-piece is a very imposing composition, by an artist of Rome, still in the prime of his powers.  Capalti.  It represents the Circumcision, with the cross and six waiting angels in the background; Joseph, who holds the child, the priest, and all the figures in the foreground, seem intent upon the barbarous rite, except Mary the mother; her mind seems to rush forward into the future, and understand the destiny of her child; she sees the cross,—­she sees the angels, too.

Now I have mentioned a picture, let me say a word or two about Art and artists, by way of parenthesis in this letter so much occupied, with political affairs.  We laugh a little here at some words that come from your city on the subject of Art.

We hear that the landscapes painted here show a want of familiarity with Nature; artists need to return to America and see her again.  But, friends, Nature wears a different face in Italy from what she does in America.  Do you not want to see her Italian face? it is very glorious!  We thought it was the aim of Art to reproduce all forms of Nature, and that you would not be sorry to have transcripts of what you have not always round you.  American Art is not necessarily a reproduction of American Nature.

Hicks has made a charming picture of familiar life, which those who cannot believe in Italian daylight would not tolerate.  I am not sure that all eyes are made in the same manner, for I have known those who declare they see nothing remarkable in these skies, these hues; and always complain when they are reproduced in picture.  I have yet seen no picture by Cropsey on an Italian subject, but his sketches from Scotch scenes are most poetical and just presentations of those lakes, those mountains, with their mourning veils.  He is an artist of great promise.  Cranch has made a picture for Mr. Ogden Haggerty of a fine mountain-hold of old Colonna story.  I wish he would write a ballad about it too; there is plenty of material.

But to return to the Jesuits.  One swallow does not make a summer, nor am I—­who have seen so much hard-heartedness and barbarous greed of gain in all classes of men—­so foolish as to attach undue importance to the demand, by those who have dared to appropriate peculiarly to themselves the sacred name of Jesus, from a poor orphan, and for the soul of one of their own order, of “seven baiocchi more.”  But I have always been satisfied, from the very nature of their institutions, that the current prejudice against them must be correct.  These institutions are calculated to harden the heart,