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All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir,
and maccaroni-eating at Sunset, and flower-selling all day
long, and begging and stealing everywhere and at all hours,
you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the
Bay sparkle merrily. But, lovers and hunters of the pic-
turesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view, the
miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with
which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It
is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and the Porta
Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged
red scarf, do not make all the difference between what is
interesting and what is coarse and odious? Painting and
poetising for ever, if you will, the beauties of this most
beautiful and lovely spot of earth, let us, as our duty, try
to associate a new picturesque with some faint recognition
of man's destiny and capabilities; more hopeful, I believe,
among the ice and snow of the North Pole, than in the sun
and bloom of Naples.

Capri - once made odious by the deified beast Ti-
berius - Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant beau-
ties of the Bay, lie in the blue sea yonder, changing in
the mist and sunshine twenty times a day: now close at
hand, now far off, now unseen. The fairest country in
the world, is spread about us. Whether we turn towards
the Miseno shore of the splendid watery amphiteatre,
and go by the Grotto of Posillipo to the Grotto del Cane
and away to Baiae: or take the other way, towards Ve-
suvius and Sorrento, it is one succession of delights. In
the last-named direction, where, over doors and archways,

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