A Roman Holiday

ROME, February, 1873.

IT is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment ; but the right moment hardly seems to me to be the ten days of the Roman Carnival. It was a rather cynical suspicion of mine perhaps, that they would not keep to my imagination the brilliant promise of tradition ; but I have been justified by the event, and have been decidedly less conscious of the festal influences of the season than of the inalienable gravity of the place. There was a time when the Carnival was a serious matter, that is, a heartily joyous one ; but in the striding march of progress which Italy has recently witnessed, the fashion of public revelry has fallen wofully out of step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival was kept in generous good faith, I doubt if an American can very exactly conceive : he can only say to himself that, for a month in the year, it must have been sweet to forget! But now that Italy is made, the Carnival is unmade ; and we are not especially tempted to envy the attitude of a population who have lost their relish for play, and not yet acquired, to any striking extent, an enthusiasm for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on the whole, a sort of measure of that great breach with the past of which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in September, 1870. A traveller who had seen old Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have immediately perceived that something momentous had happened, — something hostile to picturesqueness. My first warning was that, ten minutes after my arrival, I found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The impossibility in the other days of having anything in the journalistic line but the Osservatore Romano and the Voce della Verità used to seem to me to have much to do with the extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to which Rome admitted you. But now the slender piping of the Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide venders of the Capitate, the Liberià, and the Fanfulla; and Rome reading unsifted news is another Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the Libertà, I incline to think there is an antique masker and reveller the less. As striking a sign of the new régime seemed to me the extraordinary increase of population. The Corso was always a well-filled street: now it’s a perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen who stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those camere mobiliate of which I have had glimpses. This, however, is their own question ; bravely they resolve it. They seemed to proclaim, as I say, that, by force of numbers, Rome had been secularized. An Italian dandy is a very fine fellow; but I confess these goodly throngs of them are to my sense an insufficient compensation for the absent monsignori, treading the streets in their purple stockings, and followed by their solemn servants, returning on their behalf the bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning-gear ot the Cardinals’ coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet, and swung with the weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that you’ll not, by the best of traveller’s luck, meet the Pope sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted fingers, like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet the king, indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some idols, though not as inaccessible. The other day, as I was passing the Quirinal, he drove up in a low carriage, with a single attendant; and a group of men and women, who had been waiting near the gate, rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage slackened pace, and he pocketed their offerings with a business-like air, — that of a good-natured man accepting hand-bills at a street-corner. Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving petitions from his subjects,— being adjured to right their wrongs. The scene ought to have been picturesque, but, somehow, it had no more color than a woodcut in an illustrated newspaper. Comfortable I should call it at most; admirably so, certainly, for there were until lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their people enjoyed these filial hand-tohand relations. The king, this year, however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope, and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by JAMES R. OSGOOD & Co., in the Office of tha Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

It was advertised to begin at half past two o’clock of a certain Saturday ; and punctually, at the stroke of the hour, from my room across a wide court I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds and confusion of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend for whom I cared more than for a Roman holiday ; but as the minutes elapsed and the hubbub deepened, curiosity got the better of affection, and I remembered that I was really within eye-shot of a spectacle whose reputation had ministered to the day-dreams of my infancy. I used to have a scrapbook with a colored print of the starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library rich in keepsakes and annuals whose frontispiece was commonly a masked lady in a balcony, — the heroine of a delightful tale farther on. Agitated by these tender memories, I descended into the street; but I confess that I looked in vain for a masked lady who might serve as a frontispiece, or any object whatever that might adorn a tale. Masked and muffled ladies there were in abundance ; but their masks were of ugly wire and perfectly resembled the little covers placed upon strong cheese in German hotels, and their drapery was a shabby water-proof, with the hoods pulled over their chignons. They were armed with great tin scoops or funnels, with which they were solemnly shovelling lime and flour out of bushel baskets down upon the heads of the people in the street. They were packed into balconies all the way down the long vista of the Corso, in which their calcareous shower maintained a dense, a gritty, unpalatable fog. The crowd was compact in the street, and the Americans in it were tossing back confetti out of great satchels hung round their necks. It was quite the “you 're another ” sort of repartee, and less flavored than I had hoped with the airy mockery which tradition associates with this festival. The scene was striking, certainly ; but, somehow, not as I had dreamed of its being. I stood contemplating it, I suppose, with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head. Decidedly it was an ignoble form of humor. I shook my ears like an emergent diver, and had a sudden vision of how still and sunny and solemn, how peculiarly and undisturbedly themselves, how secure from any intrusion less sympathetic than one’s own, certain outlying parts of Rome must just now be. The Carnival had received its death-blow, in my imagination; and it has been ever since but a thin and dusky ghost of pleasure that has flitted at intervals in and out of my consciousness. I turned my back on the Corso and wandered away, and found the grass-grown quarters delightfully free even from the possibility of a fellow-countryman ! And so having set myself an example, I have been keeping Carnival by strolling perversely along the silent circumference of Rome. I have no doubt I have lost a great deal. The Princess Margaret has occupied a balcony opposite the open space which leads into the Via Condotti, and, I believe, like the discreet princess that she is, has dealt in no missiles but bonbons, bouquets, and white doves. I would have waited half an hour any day to see the Princess Margaret holding a dove on her forefinger; but I never chanced to notice any preparations for this delightful spectacle. And, yet do what you will, you cannot really elude the Carnival. As the days elapse, it filters down, as it were, into the manners of the common people ; and before the week is over, the very beggars at the churchdoors seem to have gone to the expense of a domino. This masquerading of paupers, or of all but paupers, is the only feature of the affair especially suggestive of the old pleasure-taking passion. When you meet these specimens of dingy drollery capering about in dusky back streets at all hours of the day and night, and flitting out of black doorways between those greasy groups which cluster about Roman thresholds, you feel that once upon a time the seeds of merriment must have been implanted in the Roman temperament with a vigorous hand. An unsophisticated American cannot but be struck with the immense number of persons, of every age and various conditions, to whom it costs nothing in the nature of an ingenuous blush to walk up and down the streets in the costume of a theatrical supernumerary. Fathers of families do it at the head of an admiring progeniture; aunts and uncles and grandmothers do it; all the family does it, with varying splendor, but the same good conscience. “ A pack of babies ! ” the philosophic American pronounces it for its pains, and tries to imagine himself strutting along Broadway in a battered tin helmet and a pair of yellow tights. Our vices are certainly different ; it takes those of the innocent sort to be ridiculous ! Roman childishness seems to me so intimately connected with Roman amenity, urbanity, and general gracefulness, that, for myself, I should be sorry to lay a tax on it, lest these other commodities should also cease to come to market. The Carnival is a bore, as much as you please ; but it has this great merit, that its very existence means good-nature; means no rowdies, nor loafers, nor drunkards, nor pickpockets, nor fisticuffs. It may be childish, but in the nursery shoulderhitting is undeveloped.

I was rewarded, when I had turned away with my ears full of flour, by a glimpse of an intenser sort of life than the dingy foolery of the Corso. I walked down by the back streets to the steps which ascend to the Capitol,— that long inclined plane, rather, broken at every two paces, which is the unfailing disappointment, I believe, of tourists primed for retrospective raptures. Certainly, the Capitol, seen from this side, is not commanding. The hill is so low, the ascent so narrow, Michael Angelo’s architecture in the quadrangle at the top so meagre, the whole place, somehow, so much more of a mole-hill than a mountain, that for the first ten minutes of your standing there Roman history seems suddenly to have sunk through a trap-door. It emerges, however, on the other side, in the Forum ; and here, meanwhile, if you get no sense of the sublime, you get gradually a delightful sense of the picturesque. Nowhere in Rome is there more color, more charm, more sport for the eye. The gentle slope, during the winter months, is always covered with lounging sun-seekers, and especially with those more constantly obvious members of the Roman population,— beggars, soldiers, monks, and tourists. The beggars and peasants lie kicking their heels along that grandest of loafing-places, the great steps of the Ara Cœli. The dwarfish look of the Capitol is greatly increased, I think, by the neighborhood of this huge blank staircase, mouldering away in disuse, with the weeds in its crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes massing its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to have an even more than Roman desolation, and confusedly suggests Spain and Africa,— lands with nothing but a past. The legendary wolf of Rome has lately been accommodated with a little artificial grotto, among the cacti and the palms, in the fantastic triangular garden squeezed between the steps of the church and the ascent to the Capitol, where she holds a perpetual levee, and “ draws,” apparently, as powerfully as the Pope himself. Above, in the little piazza before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are more loungers and knitters in the sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with “ a command which is in itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the popular heart. Irrecoverable simplicity has no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce ; but contrasted with this mild old monarch, their prancing horses seem like a company of ridingmasters, taking out a young ladies’ boarding-school. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rugged, rusty bronze and the archaic singularity of the design ; and one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian will is that of a pagan emperor.

You recover in some degree your stifled hopes of sublimity as you pass beyond the palace, and take your choice of two curving slopes, to descend into the Forum. Then you see that the little stuccoed edifice is but a modern excrescence upon the mighty cliff of a primitive construction whose great squares of porous tufa, as they descend, seem to resolve themselves back into the colossal cohesion of unhewn rock. There is a prodigious picturesqueness in the union of this airy, fresh-faced superstructure and these deep-plunging, hoary foundations ; and few things in Rome are more entertaining to the eye than to measure the long plumb-line which drops from the inhabited windows of the palace, with their little overpeeping balconies, their muslin curtains and their bird-cages, down to the rugged handiwork of the republic. In the Forum proper the sublime is eclipsed again, though the late extension of the excavations gives a chance for it. As yet, nothing has been laid bare save an immense stretch of pavement, studded with the broken pedestals of vanished columns,— the ancient floor, I believe, of the Basilica Julia. The narrow, rough-flagged Via Sacra passes directly beside it, and the edge of the building seems to have pressed close upon the curbstone. These great masses of pavement are rather a naked spectacle ; but to the lingering eye they acquire a strangely solemn charm, — so worn and fretted with human use they are, with history literally trodden into them, — and still so capable of bearing the weight of the present and connecting it with the past. The floor of the temple, in smooth fair slabs of pale blue and gray, has an extraordinary freshness and tenderness of color. Burial has made it young again, and it seems good for another thousand years. Nothing you can do in Rome helps your fancy to a more vigorous backward flight than to lounge on a sunny day over the railing which guards this vast excavation. It gives one the oddest feeling to see the past, the ancient world, as one stands there, bodily turned up with the spade, and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces. The pleasure is the same — in kind — as what you get at Pompeii, and the pain the same. It was not here, however, that I found my reward for turning my back on the Corso, but in a little church at the end of the narrow byway which diverges up the Palatine from just beside the Arch of Titus. This by-way leads you between high walls, then takes a bend and introduces you to a long row of rusty, dusty little pictures of the stations of the cross. Beyond these stands a small church with a facade so modest that you hardly recognize it until you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without lifting it ; it is sure to cover a picture of some sort, — good, bad, or indifferent. The picture this time was poor, — whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal features. I should not have remained if I had not been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper, — a young priest kneeling

before one of the side-altars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a sidelong look, — so charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately became an object of interest; he was visiting each of the altars in turn, and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the church, and, indeed, in the whole neighborhood. There were no beggars, even, at the door ; they were plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In the whole deserted place he alone knelt there for religion, and, as I sat respectfully by, it seemed to me that I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face, — his pious fatigue, his droning prayer, and his isolation, — which gave me just then and there a supreme vision of the religious passion, — its privations and resignations and exhaustions, and its terribly small share of amusement. He was young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival ; but planted there with his face pale with fasting and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down and confirm his choice. But, I confess, though I was not enamored of the Carnival myself, that his seemed a grim preference, and this forswearing of the world a terrible game ; a gaining one only if your zeal never falters ; a hard fight when it does ! In such an hour, to a stout young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem horribly stale, and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks a very meagre piece of splendor. And it would n’t have helped him much to think that not so very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for the million, for nothing. I doubt whether my young priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very substance of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper. And so, as I say, I found a solider fact of human nature than the love of coriandoli !

One never passes the Coliseum, of course, without paying it one’s respects, — without going in under one of the hundred portals and crossing the long oval and sitting down awhile, generally at the foot of the cross in the centre. I always feel, as I do so, as if I were sitting in the depths of some Alpine valley. The upper portions of the side toward the Esquiline seem as remote and lonely as an Alpine ridge, and you look up at their rugged sky-line, drinking in the sun and silvered by the blue air, with much the same feeling with which you would look at a gray cliff on which an eagle might lodge. This roughly mountainous quality of the great ruin is its chief interest; beauty of detail has pretty well vanished, especially since the high-growing wild flowers have been plucked away by the new government, whose functionaries, surely, at certain points of their task, must have felt as if they shared the dreadful trade of those who gather samphire. Even if you are on your way to the Lateran, you will not grudge the twenty minutes it will take you, on leaving the Coliseum, to turn away under the Arch of Constantine, whose noble battered bas - reliefs, with the chain of tragic statues, fettered, drooping barbarians, round its summit, I assume you to have profoundly admired, to the little piazza before the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the slope of the Cælian, There is no more charmingly picturesque spot in Rome. The ancient brick apse of the church peeps down into the trees of the little wooded walk before the neighboring church of San Gregorio, intensely venerable beneath its excessive modernization ; and a series of heavy brick buttresses, flying across to an opposite wall, overarches the short, steep, paved passage which leads you into the piazza. This is bordered on one side by the long mediæval portico of the church of the two saints, sustained by eight timeblackened columns of granite and marble ; on another by the great scantily windowed walls of a Passionist convent; on a third by the gate of a charming villa, whose tall porter, with his cockade and silver - topped staff, standing sublime behind his grating, seems a kind of mundane St. Peter, I suppose, to the beggars who sit at the church-door or lie in the sun along the farther slope which leads to the gate of the convent. The place always seems to me the perfection of an out-of-the-way corner, — a place you would think twice before telling people about, lest you should find them there the next time you were to go. It is such a group of objects, singly and in their happy combination, as one must come to Rome to find at one’s villa door ; but what makes it peculiarly a picture is the beautiful dark red campanile of the church, standing embedded in the mass of the convent, It begins, as so many things in Rome begin, with a stout foundation of antique travertine, and rises high, in delicately quaint mediæval brick-work, — little stories and apertures, sustained on miniature columns and adorned with little cracked slabs of green and yellow marble, inserted almost at random. When there are three or four brownbreasted contadini sleeping in the sun before the convent doors, and a departing monk leading his shadow down over them, I think you will not find anything in Rome more sketchable.

If yon stop, however, to observe everything worthy of your water-colors, you will never reach the Lateran. My business was much less with the interior of St. John Lateran, which I have never found peculiarly interesting, than with certain charming features of its surrounding precinct,— the crooked old court beside it, which admits you to the Baptistery and to a delightful rear-view of the queer architectural odds and ends which in Rome may compose a florid ecclesiastical facade. There are more of these, a stranger jumble of chance detail, of lurking recesses and wanton projections and inexplicable windows, than I have memory or phrases for ; but the gem of the collection is the oddly perched peaked turret, with its yellow travertine welded upon the rusty brick-work, which was not meant to be suspected, and the brick-work retreating beneath and leaving it in the odd position of a tower under which you may see the sky. As to the great front of the church overlooking the Porta San Giovanni, you are not admitted behind the scenes ; the phrase is quite in keeping, for the architecture has a vastly theatrical air. It is extremely imposing, — that of St. Peter’s alone is more so ; and when from far off on the Campagna you see the colossal images of the mitred saints along the top standing distinct against the sky, you forget their coarse construction and their breezy draperies. The view from the great space which stretches from the church-steps to the city wall is the very prince of views. Just beside you, beyond the great portico of mosaics, is the Scala Santa, the marble staircase on which (says the legend) Christ descended under the weight of Pilate’s judgment, and which all Christians must forever ascend on their knees ; before you is the city gate which opens upon the Via Appia Nuova, the long gaunt file of arches of the Claudian aqueduct, their jagged ridge stretching away like the vertebral column of some monstrous, mouldering skeleton, and upon the blooming brown and purple flats and dells of the Campagna and the glaring blue of the Alban Mountains, spotted with their while, high - nestling towns, all beautifully named, — Grotta Ferrata, Rocca di Papa, Castel Gandolfo, Albano, Palestrina ; and to your left is the great grassy space lined with dwarfish mulberry-trees, which stretches across to the damp little sister-basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. During a former visit to Rome I lost my heart to this idle tract, and wasted much time in sitting on the steps of the church and watching certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great many of the king’s recruits who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa Croce, and are led forward to practise their goose-step on the sunny turf. Here, too, the poor old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio, descend from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable knees. These members alone still testify to the traditional splendor of the princes of the Church ; for as they advance, the lifted black petticoat reveals a flash of scarlet stockings, and makes you groan at the victory of civilization over color.

If St. John Lateran disappoints you internally, you have an easy compensation in traversing the long lane which connects it with Santa Maria Maggiore and entering the singularly perfect nave of that most delightful of churches. The first day of my stay in Rome, under the old dispensation, I spent in wandering at random through the city, with accident for my valet de place. It served me to perfection and introduced me to the best things, among others to Santa Maria Maggiore. First impressions, memorable impressions, are generally irrecoverable; they often leave one the wiser, but they rarely return in the same form. I remember of my coming uninformed and unprepared into Santa Maria Maggiore, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect feast of fancy. The place seemed to me so endlessly suggestive that perception became a sort of throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have sat down more than once at the base of the same column again ; but you live your life but once, the parts as well as the whole. Ihe obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave, — its perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary splendor of effect, which I recommend you to visit of a fine afternoon. At such a time, the glowing western, light, entering the high windows of the tribune, kindles the scattered masses of color into sombre brightness, scintillates on the great solemn mosaic of the vault, touches the porphyry columns of the superb baldachino with ruby lights, and buries its glaring shafts in the deep-toned shadows which cluster over frescos and sculptures and mouldings. The deeper charm to me, however, is the social atmosphere of the church, as I must call it for want of a better term,—the sense it gives you, in common with most of the Roman churches and more than any of them, of having been prayed in for several centuries by a singularly complicated and picturesque society. It takes no great shrewdness to perceive that the social râle of the Church in Italy is terribly shrunken nowadays ; but also as little, perhaps, to feel that, as they stand, these deserted temples were produced by a society leavened through and through by ecclesiastical manners, and that they formed for ages the constant background of the human drama. They are, as one may say, the churchiest churches in Europe,— the fullest of gathered detail and clustering association. There is not a figure that I have read of in history, fiction, or poetry pertaining to Italy,— and dreamed of in consequence,— that I cannot imagine in its proper place kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable realities, very much what one’s capricious intellect projects there ; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one’s constant excursions into churches are not the least interesting episodes of one’s walks in Rome.

I had meant to give a simple specimen of these daily strolls ; but I have given it at such a length that I have scanty space left to touch upon the innumerable topics which occur to the pen that begins to scribble about Rome. It is by the aimless flânerie, which leaves you free to follow capriciously every hint of entertainment, that you get to know Rome. The greater part of Roman life goes on in the streets, and to a traveller fresh from a country in which town scenery is rather wanting in variety, it is full of picturesque and curious incident. If at times you find it rather unsavory, you may turn aside into the company of shining statues, ranged in long vistas, into the duskily splendid galleries of the Doria and Colonna Palaces, into the sun-checkered boscages of antique villas, or into ever-empty churches, thankful even for a tourist’s tribute of interest. The squalor of Rome is certainly a stubborn fact, and there is no denying that it is a dirty place. “ Don’t talk to me of liking Rome,” an old sojourner lately said to me ; “ you don’t really like it till you like the dirt.” This statement was a shock to my nascent passion ; but— I blush to write it — I am growing to think there is something in it. The nameless uncleanness with which all Roman things are Oversmeared seems to one at first a damning token of moral vileness. It fills you with more even of contempt than pity for Roman poverty, and you look with inexpressible irritation at the grovelling creatures who complacently vegetate in the midst of it. Soon after his arrival here, an intimate friend of mine had an illness which depressed his spirits and made him unable to see the universal “joke” of things. I found him one evening in his arm-chair, gazing grimly at his half-packed trunk. On my asking him what he intended: “ This horrible

place,” he cried, “ is an insufferable weight on my soul, and it seems to me monstrous to come here and feast on human misery. You ’re very happy to be able to take things easily ; you’ve either much more philosophy than I, or much less. The squalor, the shabbiness,the provincialism, the barbarism, of Rome are too much for me. I must go somewhere and drink deep of modern civilization. This morning, as I came up the Scalinata, I felt as if I could strangle every one of those filthy models that loaf there in their shameless degradation and sit staring at you with all the ignorance, and none of the innocence, of childhood. Is n't it an abomination that our enjoyment here directly implies their wretchedness ; their knowing neither how to read nor to write, their draping themselves in mouldy rags, their doing never a stroke of honest work, their wearing those mummy-swathings round their legs from one year’s end to another ? So they’re kept, that Rome may be picturesque, and the forestieri abound, and a lot of profligate artists may paint wretchedly poor pictures of them. What should I stay for ? I know the Vatican by heart ; and, except St. Peter’s and the Pantheon, there’s not a fine building in Rome. I’m sick of the Italian face,—of black eyes and blue chins and lying vowel sounds. I want to see people who look as if they knew how to read and write, and care for something else than flocking to the Pincio to suck the knobs on their canes and stare at fine ladies they ’ll never by any hazard speak to. The Duke of Sermoneta has just been elected to — something or other — by a proper majority. But what do you think of their mustering but a hundred voters ? I like the picturesque, but I like the march of mind as well, and I long to see a newspaper a little bigger than a play-bill. I shall leave by the first train in the morning, and if you value your immortal soul you will come with me ! ”

My friend’s accent was moving, and for some moments I was inclined to follow his example ; but deep in my heart I felt the stir of certain gathered pledges of future enjoyment, and after a rapid struggle I bade him a respectful farewell. He travelled due north, and has been having a delightful winter at Munich, where the march of mind advances to the accompaniment of Wagner’s music. Since his departure, to prove to him that I have rather more than less philosophy, I have written to him that the love of Rome is, in its last analysis, simply that perfectly honorable and legitimate instinct, the love of the status qno, — the preference of contemplative and slow-moving minds for the visible, palpable, measurable present, — touched here and there with the warm lights and shadows of the past. “ What you call dirt,” an excellent authority has written, “ I call color” : and it is certain that, if cleanliness is next to godliness, it is a very distant neighbor to chiaroscuro. That I have come to relish dirt as dirt, I hesitate yet awhile to affirm ; but I admit that, as I walk about the streets and glance under black archways into dim old courts and up mouldering palace facades at the colored rags that flap over the twisted balustrades of balconies, I find I very much enjoy their “ tone ” ; and I remain vaguely conscious that it would require a strong stomach to resolve this tone into its component elements. I don’t know that my immortal soul permanently suffers ; it simply retires for a moment to give place to that of a hankering water-color sketcher. As for the models on the Spanish Steps, I have lately been going somewhat to the studios, and the sight of the copies has filled me with compassionate tenderness for the originals. I regard them as an abused and persecuted race, and I freely forgive them their mouldy leggings and their dusky intellects.

I owe the reader amends for writing either of Roman churches or of Roman walks, without an allusion to St. Peter’s. I go there often on rainy days, with prosaic intentions of “exercise,” and carry them out, body and mind. As a mere promenade, St. Peter’s is unequalled. It is better than the Boulevards, than Piccadilly or Broadway, and if it were not the most beautiful place in the world, it would be the most entertaining. Few great works of art last longer to one’s curiosity. You think you have taken its measure; but it expands again, and leaves your vision shrunken. I never let the ponderous leather curtain bang down behind me, without feeling as if all former visits were but a vague prevision, and this the first crossing of the threshold. Tourists will never cease to be asked, I suppose, if they have not been disappointed in the size of St. Peter’s ; but a few modest spirits, here and there, I hope, will never cease to say No. It seemed to me from the first the hugest thing conceivable,—a real exaltation of one’s idea of space ; so that one’s entrance, even from the great empty square, glaring beneath the deep blue sky, or cool in the farcast shadow of the immense facade, seems not so much a going in somewhere as a going out. I should confidently recommend a first glimpse of the interior to a man of pleasure in quest of new sensations, as one of the strongest the world affords. There are days when the vast nave looks vaster than at others, and the gorgeous baldachino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading tesselated plain of the pavement, when the light has a quality which lets things look their largest, and the scattered figures mark happily the scale of certain details. Then you have only to stroll and stroll, and gaze and gaze, and watch the baldachino lift its bronze architecture, like a temple within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot. Much of the beauty of St. Peter’s resides, I think, in the fact that it is all general beauty, that you are appealed to by no specific details, that the details indeed, when you observe them, are often poor and sometimes ridiculous. The sculptures, with the sole exception of Michael Angelo’s admirable Pietà, which lurks obscurely in a dusky chapel, are either bad or indifferent ; and the universal incrustation of marble, though sumptuous enough, has a less brilliant effect than much later work of the same sort, — that, for instance, of St. Paul’s without the Walls. The supreme beauty of the church is its magnificently sustained simplicity. It seems — as it is —a realization of the happiest mood of

a colossal imagination. The happiest mood, I say, because this is the only one of Michael Angelo’s works in the presence of which you venture to be cheerful. You may smile in St. Peter’s without a sense of sacrilege, which you can hardly do, if you have a tender conscience, in Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame. The abundance of enclosed light has much to do with your smile. There are no shadows, to speak of, no marked effects of shade ; but effects of light innumerable, — points at which the light seems to mass itself in airy density, and scatter itself in enchanting gradations and cadences. It performs the office of shadow in Gothic churches; hangs like a rolling mist along the gilded vault of the nave, melts into bright interfusion the mosaic scintillations of the dome, clings and clusters and lingers and vivifies the whole vast atmosphere. A good Catholic, I suppose, is a Catholic anywhere, in the grandest as well as in the humblest churches ; but to a traveller not especially pledged to be devout, St. Peter’s speaks more of contentment than of aspiration. The mind seems to expand there immensely, but on its own level, as we may sny. It marvels at the reach of the human imagination and the vastness of our earthly means. This is heaven enough, we say : what it lacks in beauty it makes up in certainty. And yet if one’s half-hours at St. Peter’s are not actually spent on one’s knees, the mind reverts to its tremendous presence with an ardor deeply akin to a passionate effusion of faith. When you are weary of the swarming democracy of your fellow-tourists, of the unremunerative aspects of human nature on the Corso and Pincio, of the oppressively frequent combination of coronets on carriage panels and stupid faces in carriages, of addled brains and lacquered boots, of ruin and dirt and decay, of priests and beggars and the myriad tokens of a halting civilization, the image of the great temple depresses the balance of your doubts and seems to refute the invasive vulgarity of things, and assure you that nothing great is impossible. It is a comfort, in other words, to feel that there is nothing but a cab-fare between your discontent and one of the greatest of human achievements.

This might serve as a Lenten peroration to these remarks of mine which have strayed so wofully from their jovial text, but that I ought fairly to confess that my last impression of the Carnival was altogether Caruivalesque. The merry-making on Shrove Tuesday had an air of native vigor, and the dead letter of tradition seemed at moments to be informed with a living spirit. I pocketed my scepticism and spent a long afternoon on the Corso. Almost every one was a masker, but I had no need to conform ; the pelting rain of confetti effectually disguised me. I can’t say I found it all very exhilarating ; but here and there I noticed a brighter episode,—a capering clown inflamed with contagious jollity, some finer humorist, forming a circle every thirty yards to crow at his indefatigable sallies. One clever performer especially pleased me, and I should have been glad to catch a glimpse of the natural man. I had a fancy that he was taking a prodigious intellectual holiday, and that his gayety was in inverse ratio to his daily mood. He was dressed like a needy scholar, in an ancient evening-coat, with a rusty black hat and gloves fantastically patched, and he carried a little volume carefully under his arm. His humors were in excellent taste, his whole manner the perfection of genteel comedy. The crowd seemed to relish him vastly, and he immediately commanded a gleefully attentive audience. Many of his sallies I lost; those I caught were excellent. His trick was often to begin by taking some one urbanely and caressingly by the chin and complimenting him on the intelligenza della sua fisionomia. I kept near him as long as I could ; for he seemed to me an artist, cherishing a disinterested passion for the grotesque. But I should have liked to see him the next morning, or when he unmasked that night, over his hard-earned supper, in a smoky trattoria! As the evening went on, the crowd thickened and became a motley press of shouting, pushing, scrambling — everything but squabbling— revellers. The rain of missiles ceased at dusk ; but the universal deposit of chalk and flour was trampled into a cloud, made lurid by the flaring pyramids of gas-lamps, replacing for the occasion the stingy Roman luminaries. Early in the evening came off the classic exhibition of the moccoletti, which I but half saw, like a languid reporter resigned beforehand to be cashiered for want of enterprise. From the mouth of a side-street, over a thousand heads, I beheld a huge, slowmoving illuminated car, from which blue-lights and rockets and Roman candles were being discharged,and meeting in a dim fuliginous glare far above the house-tops. It was like a glimpse of some public orgy in ancient Babylon. In the small hours of the morning, walking homeward from a private entertainment, I found Ash-Wednesday still kept at bay. The Corso was flaring with light, and smelt like a circus. Every one was taking friendly liberties with every one else, and using up the dregs of his festive energy in convulsive hootings and gymnastics. Here and there certain indefatigable spirits, clad all in red, as devils, were leaping furiously about with torches and being supposed to startle you. But they shared the universal geniality and bequeathed me no midnight fears as a pretext for keeping Lent, — the carnovale dei Preti, as I read in that profanely radical sheet, the Libertà. Of this, too, I have been having glimpses. Going lately into Santa Francesca Romana, the picturesque church near the Temple of Peace, I found a feast for the eyes, — a dim, crimson-toned light through curtained windows, a great festoon of tapers round the altar, a bulging girdle of lamps before the sunken shrine beneath, and a dozen white-robed Dominicans scattered in the happiest “composition” on the pavement. It was better than the moccoletti.

H. James Jr.