Wonderful, However, As This Act Of Improvising May Appear, It Is Not Perhaps So Much So As The Mathematical Faculty

Of a youth of eight years of age, Yorkshireman by birth, who has lately exhibited his talent for arithmetical calculation

Improvised in England and who in a few seconds, from mental calculation, could give the cube root of a number containing fifteen or sixteen figures.

Is not all this a confirmation of Doctor Gall's theory on craniology? viz., that our faculties depend on the organisation of the scull. I think I have seen this frequently exemplified at Eton. I have known a boy who could not compose a verse, make a considerable figure in arithmetic and geometry; and another, who could write Latin verse with almost Ovidian elegance, and yet could not work the simplest question in vulgar fractions. Indeed, I think there seems little doubt that we are born with dispositions and propensities, which may be developed and encouraged, or damped and checked altogether by education.

I have become acquainted with several families at Rome, so that I am at no loss where to spend my evenings. Music is the never failing resource for those with whom the spirit of conversation fails. The society at Rome is perfectly free from etiquette or gene. When once presented to a family you may enter their house every evening without invitation, make your bow to the master and mistress of the house, enter into conversation or not as you please. You may absent yourself for weeks together from these conversazioni, and nobody will on your re-appearance enquire where you have been or what you have been doing. In short, in the intercourse with Roman society, you meet with great affability, sometimes a little ennui, but no commerage. The avvocati may be said to form almost exclusively the middling class in Rome, and they educate their families very respectably. This class was much caressed by the French Government during the time that Rome was annexed to the French Empire, and most of the employes of the Government at that time were taken from this class. I have met with several sensible well-informed people, who have been accurate observers of the times, and had derived profit in point of instruction from the scenes they had witnessed.

The Papal Government began, as most of the restored governments did, by displacing many of these gentlemen, for no other fault than because they had served under the Ex-government, and replaced them by ecclesiastics, as in the olden time. But the Papal Government very soon discovered that the whole political machine would be very soon at a stand, by such an epuration; and the most of them have been since reinstated. Consalvi, the Secretary of State, is a very sensible man; he has hard battles to fight with the Ultras of Rome in order to maintain in force the useful regulations introduced by the French Government, particularly the organisation of a vigilant police, and the putting a stop to the murders and robberies, which used formerly to be committed with impunity.

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