We reached Rome on a lovely evening, my sister, Anna Maria, and McGeachy meeting us a little outside and lodging me in thier house in Via Felice, Monte Mario, Acland joining his father, who had come by yacht, St. Kilda, and taken the Villa Aldobrandini. Three months in Rome, with the Vatican, Sixtine Chapel, Forum, the Offices of Christina, Carnival, Campagna rides, Laurentine Wood and Ostia, opened the mind to new sensations, thoughts, tastes, and ideas.
This summer passed in an excursion with Lord Clements round Sicily — full, to my mind, of Virgil, and realising my little store of classical recollections. We went on to Malta, living there a week with the 60th Rifles, and, coming back to Naples, found a vendetta prepared which might have anticipated my friend’s murder.
I stayed a little at Rome, en retour, as the guest of Thorwaldsen, whose bas-reliefs now adorn the hall at Hams.
I posted alone through the South of France and, by Paris, back to England about September 1836, after an absence of over nine months.
[Nedenstående er en note i bogen, der refererer til omtalen af reliefferne på Hams Hall omtalt ovenfor]
The following is a list of Thorwaldsen’s works at Hams — the two first were gifts from the sculptor, the rest were done to order :
(1) Singing Genii ; (2) Playing Genii ; (3) Cupid awaking the fainted Psyche ; (4) Bacchus giving Cupid his first cup ; (5) Cupid’s reception by Anacreon, wounded by dart of poetry in gratitude. These are all in marble. The terra-cotta frieze (6), round the cornice of the hall, represents the Triumphal Procession of Alexander the Great into Babylon — the same as in marble at the Villa Sommariva Como and the Quirinal, Rome. After seeing the latter, Mendelssohn, in his ” Letters from Italy and Switzerland, ” wrote (March 1831) : ” Never did any piece of sculpture make such an impression on me. I go there every week and stand gazing on that alone, and enter Babylon along with the Conqueror.”
