ABSTRACT
A factitious taste for the arts in Rome became the deadliest foe to the preservation of their monuments; and they who pelted their enemies with the statues of Adrian’s mole in one age, were succeeded in another by men perhaps less fierce, but, with respect to the arts, scarcely less barbarous. The palaces of Rome belong to its Church history. They are not the results of mercantile wealth or feudal enterprise! they are monuments of the prodigality of the Popes to their illegitimate children, or of the indulgence of that fatal nepotism, which originated a class of tyrants in Rome, unknown in the rest of Italy. The artificial overstocking of the market by the academies now opened in Rome by the Austrian, French, and Russian governments, is but one among many proofs of their total ignorance of human nature, and of legislative philosophy.
