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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens,
+Illustrated by Marcus Stone
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Pictures from Italy
+
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2013  [eBook #650]
+[This file was first posted on September 17, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES FROM ITALY***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman & Hall, Ltd. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                              AMERICAN NOTES
+                                   FOR
+                         GENERAL CIRCULATION {1}
+                                   AND
+                           PICTURES FROM ITALY
+
+
+                                    BY
+                             CHARLES DICKENS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                         WITH 8 ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+                            MARCUS STONE, R.A.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                           CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
+                                   1913
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Reader’s Passport                                              215
+Going through France                                               218
+Lyons, the Rhone, and the Goblin of Avignon                        225
+Avignon to Genoa                                                   233
+Genoa and its Neighbourhood                                        238
+To Parma, Modena, and Bologna                                      264
+Through Bologna and Ferrara                                        272
+An Italian Dream                                                   277
+By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the Simplon       284
+into Switzerland
+To Rome by Pisa and Siena                                          297
+Rome                                                               308
+A Rapid Diorama                                                    345
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+CIVIL AND MILITARY       _Marcus Stone_, _R.A._      218
+ITALIAN PEASANTS                ,, ,, ,,             250
+THE CHIFFONIER                  ,, ,, ,,             294
+IN THE CATACOMBS                ,, ,, ,,             326
+
+
+
+
+THE READER’S PASSPORT
+
+
+IF the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their
+credentials for the different places which are the subject of its
+author’s reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit
+them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of
+what they are to expect.
+
+Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of studying
+the history of that interesting country, and the innumerable associations
+entwined about it.  I make but little reference to that stock of
+information; not at all regarding it as a necessary consequence of my
+having had recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should
+reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers.
+
+Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave examination into
+the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country.  No
+visitor of that beautiful land can fail to have a strong conviction on
+the subject; but as I chose when residing there, a Foreigner, to abstain
+from the discussion of any such questions with any order of Italians, so
+I would rather not enter on the inquiry now.  During my twelve months’
+occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found that authorities
+constitutionally jealous were distrustful of me; and I should be sorry to
+give them occasion to regret their free courtesy, either to myself or any
+of my countrymen.
+
+There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but
+could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to
+dissertations on it.  I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer of
+Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures and
+Statues.
+
+This Book is a series of faint reflections—mere shadows in the water—of
+places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in a
+greater or less degree, on which mine had dwelt for years, and which have
+some interest for all.  The greater part of the descriptions were written
+on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters.  I do
+not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any defects they may
+present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to the Reader that they
+were at least penned in the fulness of the subject, and with the
+liveliest impressions of novelty and freshness.
+
+If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader will
+suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the midst of the
+objects of which they treat, and will like them none the worse for having
+such influences of the country upon them.
+
+I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of the Roman
+Catholic faith, on account of anything contained in these pages.  I have
+done my best, in one of my former productions, to do justice to them; and
+I trust, in this, they will do justice to me.  When I mention any
+exhibition that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not seek to
+connect it, or recognise it as necessarily connected with, any essentials
+of their creed.  When I treat of the ceremonies of the Holy Week, I
+merely treat of their effect, and do not challenge the good and learned
+Dr. Wiseman’s interpretation of their meaning.  When I hint a dislike of
+nunneries for young girls who abjure the world before they have ever
+proved or known it; or doubt the _ex officio_ sanctity of all Priests and
+Friars; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics both abroad and at
+home.
+
+I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and would fain
+hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to mar the
+shadows.  I could never desire to be on better terms with all my friends
+than now, when distant mountains rise, once more, in my path.  For I need
+not hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake I made,
+not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between myself and my
+readers, and departing for a moment from my old pursuits, I am about to
+resume them, joyfully, in Switzerland; where during another year of
+absence, I can at once work out the themes I have now in my mind, without
+interruption: and while I keep my English audience within speaking
+distance, extend my knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly
+attractive to me. {216}
+
+This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would be a great
+pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to compare impressions
+with some among the multitudes who will hereafter visit the scenes
+described with interest and delight.
+
+And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my reader’s portrait,
+which I hope may be thus supposititiously traced for either sex:
+
+Complexion               Fair.
+Eyes                     Very cheerful.
+Nose                     Not supercilious.
+Mouth                    Smiling.
+Visage                   Beaming.
+General Expression       Extremely agreeable.
+
+GOING THROUGH FRANCE
+
+
+ON a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of eighteen
+hundred and forty-four, it was, my good friend, when—don’t be alarmed;
+not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way
+over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter of a
+Middle Aged novel is usually attained—but when an English
+travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady
+halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square, London, was observed (by
+a very small French soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the
+gate of the Hôtel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.
+
+I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this
+carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday
+morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for
+all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men
+postilions; which is the invariable rule.  But, they had some sort of
+reason for what they did, I have no doubt; and their reason for being
+there at all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair
+Genoa for a year; and that the head of the family purposed, in that space
+of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him.
+
+And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the
+population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and not
+the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat beside me in the person of
+a French Courier—best of servants and most beaming of men!  Truth to say,
+he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his
+portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all.
+
+                      [Picture: Civil and military]
+
+There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris—as we rattled
+near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf—to reproach us for our
+Sunday travelling.  The wine-shops (every second house) were driving a
+roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging,
+outside the cafés, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking of
+cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-blacks were busy on the bridges;
+shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro; the narrow,
+up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River, were so many dense
+perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured nightcaps,
+tobacco-pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at
+that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and
+there, of a family pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering
+cab; or of some contemplative holiday-maker in the freest and easiest
+dishabille, leaning out of a low garret window, watching the drying of
+his newly polished shoes on the little parapet outside (if a gentleman),
+or the airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady), with calm
+anticipation.
+
+Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which
+surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles
+are quiet and monotonous enough.  To Sens.  To Avallon.  To Chalons.  A
+sketch of one day’s proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is.
+
+We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very long whip, and
+drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint Petersburgh in the
+circle at Astley’s or Franconi’s: only he sits his own horse instead of
+standing on him.  The immense jack-boots worn by these postilions, are
+sometimes a century or two old; and are so ludicrously disproportionate
+to the wearer’s foot, that the spur, which is put where his own heel
+comes, is generally halfway up the leg of the boots.  The man often comes
+out of the stable-yard, with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and
+brings out, in both hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the
+ground by the side of his horse, with great gravity, until everything is
+ready.  When it is—and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it!—he gets
+into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a couple of
+friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the labours of innumerable
+pigeons in the stables; makes all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his
+whip like a madman; shouts ‘En route—Hi!’ and away we go.  He is sure to
+have a contest with his horse before we have gone very far; and then he
+calls him a Thief, and a Brigand, and a Pig, and what not; and beats him
+about the head as if he were made of wood.
+
+There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the country,
+for the first two days.  From a dreary plain, to an interminable avenue,
+and from an interminable avenue to a dreary plain again.  Plenty of vines
+there are in the open fields, but of a short low kind, and not trained in
+festoons, but about straight sticks.  Beggars innumerable there are,
+everywhere; but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children
+than I ever encountered.  I don’t believe we saw a hundred children
+between Paris and Chalons.  Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled:
+with odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the
+wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other
+strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and in
+farm-yards: all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof, and never
+used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all sorts; sometimes an
+hôtel de ville, sometimes a guard-house, sometimes a dwelling-house,
+sometimes a château with a rank garden, prolific in dandelion, and
+watched over by extinguisher-topped turrets, and blink-eyed little
+casements; are the standard objects, repeated over and over again.
+Sometimes we pass a village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging to it,
+and a perfect town of out-houses; and painted over the gateway, ‘Stabling
+for Sixty Horses;’ as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score,
+were there any horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or
+anything stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the
+wine inside: which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with
+everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though always
+so old as to be dropping to pieces.  And all day long, strange little
+narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from
+Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line, of one man, or
+even boy—and he very often asleep in the foremost cart—come jingling
+past: the horses drowsily ringing the bells upon their harness, and
+looking as if they thought (no doubt they do) their great blue woolly
+furniture, of immense weight and thickness, with a pair of grotesque
+horns growing out of the collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer
+weather.
+
+Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty
+outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white
+nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking, like
+an idiot’s head; and its Young-France passengers staring out of window,
+with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading
+their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp.
+Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at
+a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time.  Steady old
+Curés come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty,
+clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women
+dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed,
+or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or
+representing real shepherdesses with their flocks—to obtain an adequate
+idea of which pursuit and its followers, in any country, it is only
+necessary to take any pastoral poem, or picture, and imagine to yourself
+whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike the descriptions therein
+contained.
+
+You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do in
+the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the
+horses—twenty-four apiece—have been ringing sleepily in your ears for
+half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous,
+tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the
+dinner you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long
+avenue of trees through which you are travelling, the first indication of
+a town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the
+carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement.  As
+if the equipage were a great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking
+cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and
+splutter, as if the very devil were in it.  Crack, crack, crack, crack.
+Crack-crack-crack.  Crick-crack.  Crick-crack.  Helo!  Hola!  Vite!
+Voleur!  Brigand!  Hi hi hi!  En r-r-r-r-r-route!  Whip, wheels, driver,
+stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charité pour
+l’amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump,
+jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street,
+down the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump; jolt,
+jog, crick, crick, crick; crack, crack, crack; into the shop-windows on
+the left-hand side of the street, preliminary to a sweeping turn into the
+wooden archway on the right; rumble, rumble, rumble; clatter, clatter,
+clatter; crick, crick, crick; and here we are in the yard of the Hôtel de
+l’Ecu d’Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted; but sometimes
+making a false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming of it—like a
+firework to the last!
+
+The landlady of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the landlord of the
+Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the Hôtel de
+l’Ecu d’Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with a red beard
+like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, is here;
+and Monsieur le Curé is walking up and down in a corner of the yard by
+himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black gown on his back,
+and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other; and everybody,
+except Monsieur le Curé, is open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening
+of the carriage-door.  The landlord of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, dotes to
+that extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his coming down
+from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends.
+‘My Courier!  My brave Courier!  My friend!  My brother!’  The landlady
+loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the garçon worships him.
+The Courier asks if his letter has been received?  It has, it has.  Are
+the rooms prepared?  They are, they are.  The best rooms for my noble
+Courier.  The rooms of state for my gallant Courier; the whole house is
+at the service of my best of friends!  He keeps his hand upon the
+carriage-door, and asks some other question to enhance the expectation.
+He carries a green leathern purse outside his coat, suspended by a belt.
+The idlers look at it; one touches it.  It is full of five-franc pieces.
+Murmurs of admiration are heard among the boys.  The landlord falls upon
+the Courier’s neck, and folds him to his breast.  He is so much fatter
+than he was, he says!  He looks so rosy and so well!
+
+The door is opened.  Breathless expectation.  The lady of the family gets
+out.  Ah sweet lady!  Beautiful lady!  The sister of the lady of the
+family gets out.  Great Heaven, Ma’amselle is charming!  First little boy
+gets out.  Ah, what a beautiful little boy!  First little girl gets out.
+Oh, but this is an enchanting child!  Second little girl gets out.  The
+landlady, yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches
+her up in her arms!  Second little boy gets out.  Oh, the sweet boy!  Oh,
+the tender little family!  The baby is handed out.  Angelic baby!  The
+baby has topped everything.  All the rapture is expended on the baby!
+Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into madness,
+the whole family are swept up-stairs as on a cloud; while the idlers
+press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk round it, and touch
+it.  For it is something to touch a carriage that has held so many
+people.  It is a legacy to leave one’s children.
+
+The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the night, which
+is a great rambling chamber, with four or five beds in it: through a dark
+passage, up two steps, down four, past a pump, across a balcony, and next
+door to the stable.  The other sleeping apartments are large and lofty;
+each with two small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like the windows, with
+red and white drapery.  The sitting-room is famous.  Dinner is already
+laid in it for three; and the napkins are folded in cocked-hat fashion.
+The floors are of red tile.  There are no carpets, and not much furniture
+to speak of; but there is abundance of looking-glass, and there are large
+vases under glass shades, filled with artificial flowers; and there are
+plenty of clocks.  The whole party are in motion.  The brave Courier, in
+particular, is everywhere: looking after the beds, having wine poured
+down his throat by his dear brother the landlord, and picking up green
+cucumbers—always cucumbers; Heaven knows where he gets them—with which he
+walks about, one in each hand, like truncheons.
+
+Dinner is announced.  There is very thin soup; there are very large
+loaves—one apiece; a fish; four dishes afterwards; some poultry
+afterwards; a dessert afterwards; and no lack of wine.  There is not much
+in the dishes; but they are very good, and always ready instantly.  When
+it is nearly dark, the brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers,
+sliced up in the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another
+of vinegar, emerges from his retreat below, and proposes a visit to the
+Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon the court-yard of the
+inn.  Off we go; and very solemn and grand it is, in the dim light: so
+dim at last, that the polite, old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble
+little bit of candle in his hand, to grope among the tombs with—and looks
+among the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is searching for his
+own.
+
+Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants of the inn
+are supping in the open air, at a great table; the dish, a stew of meat
+and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in the iron cauldron it was
+boiled in.  They have a pitcher of thin wine, and are very merry; merrier
+than the gentleman with the red beard, who is playing billiards in the
+light room on the left of the yard, where shadows, with cues in their
+hands, and cigars in their mouths, cross and recross the window,
+constantly.  Still the thin Curé walks up and down alone, with his book
+and umbrella.  And there he walks, and there the billiard-balls rattle,
+long after we are fast asleep.
+
+We are astir at six next morning.  It is a delightful day, shaming
+yesterday’s mud upon the carriage, if anything could shame a carriage, in
+a land where carriages are never cleaned.  Everybody is brisk; and as we
+finish breakfast, the horses come jingling into the yard from the
+Post-house.  Everything taken out of the carriage is put back again.  The
+brave Courier announces that all is ready, after walking into every room,
+and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing is left behind.
+Everybody gets in.  Everybody connected with the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is
+again enchanted.  The brave Courier runs into the house for a parcel
+containing cold fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands
+it into the coach; and runs back again.
+
+What has he got in his hand now?  More cucumbers?  No.  A long strip of
+paper.  It’s the bill.
+
+The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning: one supporting the
+purse: another, a mighty good sort of leathern bottle, filled to the
+throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in the house.  He never pays the
+bill till this bottle is full.  Then he disputes it.
+
+He disputes it now, violently.  He is still the landlord’s brother, but
+by another father or mother.  He is not so nearly related to him as he
+was last night.  The landlord scratches his head.  The brave Courier
+points to certain figures in the bill, and intimates that if they remain
+there, the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or is thenceforth and for ever an hôtel de
+l’Ecu de cuivre.  The landlord goes into a little counting-house.  The
+brave Courier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand, and talks
+more rapidly than ever.  The landlord takes the pen.  The Courier smiles.
+The landlord makes an alteration.  The Courier cuts a joke.  The landlord
+is affectionate, but not weakly so.  He bears it like a man.  He shakes
+hands with his brave brother, but he don’t hug him.  Still, he loves his
+brother; for he knows that he will be returning that way, one of these
+fine days, with another family, and he foresees that his heart will yearn
+towards him again.  The brave Courier traverses all round the carriage
+once, looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps up, gives the word,
+and away we go!
+
+It is market morning.  The market is held in the little square outside in
+front of the cathedral.  It is crowded with men and women, in blue, in
+red, in green, in white; with canvassed stalls; and fluttering
+merchandise.  The country people are grouped about, with their clean
+baskets before them.  Here, the lace-sellers; there, the butter and
+egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there, the shoe-makers.  The whole
+place looks as if it were the stage of some great theatre, and the
+curtain had just run up, for a picturesque ballet.  And there is the
+cathedral to boot: scene-like: all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and
+cold: just splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops,
+as the morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side,
+struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western.
+
+In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
+kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and are
+again upon the road.
+
+
+
+
+LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
+
+
+CHALONS is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the bank of
+the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and red paint, that
+come and go upon it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene, after
+the dusty roads.  But, unless you would like to dwell on an enormous
+plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that look in the
+distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and unless you would like
+to pass your life without the possibility of going up-hill, or going up
+anything but stairs: you would hardly approve of Chalons as a place of
+residence.
+
+You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which you may
+reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats, in eight
+hours.
+
+What a city Lyons is!  Talk about people feeling, at certain unlucky
+times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds!  Here is a whole town that
+is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught up, like
+other stones that tumble down from that region, out of fens and barren
+places, dismal to behold!  The two great streets through which the two
+great rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name is Legion, were
+scorching, blistering, and sweltering.  The houses, high and vast, dirty
+to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled.  All up the
+hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were
+lolling out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and
+crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp upon
+the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and bales of
+fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not dying till their
+time should come, in an exhausted receiver.  Every manufacturing town,
+melted into one, would hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it
+presented itself to me: for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities of
+a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a
+manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would go some miles out
+of my way to avoid encountering again.
+
+In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of the day: we
+went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a few dogs, were
+engaged in contemplation.  There was no difference, in point of
+cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the streets; and
+there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth aboard ship, with a
+glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to say to, on
+any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed of.  If you
+would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its
+dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr.
+Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him,
+as I did!
+
+For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock in
+Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in connection
+with that piece of mechanism.  The keeper of the church was very anxious
+it should be shown; partly for the honour of the establishment and the
+town; and partly, perhaps, because of his deriving a percentage from the
+additional consideration.  However that may be, it was set in motion, and
+thereupon a host of little doors flew open, and innumerable little
+figures staggered out of them, and jerked themselves back again, with
+that special unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in the gait, which
+usually attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work.  Meanwhile, the
+Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and pointing them out,
+severally, with a wand.  There was a centre puppet of the Virgin Mary;
+and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which another and a very
+ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw
+accomplished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and banging
+his little door violently after him.  Taking this to be emblematic of the
+victory over Sin and Death, and not at all unwilling to show that I
+perfectly understood the subject, in anticipation of the showman, I
+rashly said, ‘Aha!  The Evil Spirit.  To be sure.  He is very soon
+disposed of.’  ‘Pardon, Monsieur,’ said the Sacristan, with a polite
+motion of his hand towards the little door, as if introducing
+somebody—‘The Angel Gabriel!’
+
+Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down the Arrowy Rhone,
+at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel full of
+merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers for our
+companions: among whom, the most remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced,
+garlic-eating, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red
+ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there to remind
+himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in his
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the first
+indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance.  Now, we were rushing
+on beside them: sometimes close beside them: sometimes with an
+intervening slope, covered with vineyards.  Villages and small towns
+hanging in mid-air, with great woods of olives seen through the light
+open towers of their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the
+steep acclivity behind them; ruined castles perched on every eminence;
+and scattered houses in the clefts and gullies of the hills; made it very
+beautiful.  The great height of these, too, making the buildings look so
+tiny, that they had all the charm of elegant models; their excessive
+whiteness, as contrasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull,
+heavy green of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of
+the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture.
+There were ferries out of number, too; bridges; the famous Pont d’Esprit,
+with I don’t know how many arches; towns where memorable wines are made;
+Vallence, where Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing at every
+winding turn, new beauties into view.
+
+There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of Avignon,
+and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an under-done-pie-crust,
+battlemented wall, that never will be brown, though it bake for
+centuries.
+
+The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the brilliant
+Oleander was in full bloom everywhere.  The streets are old and very
+narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from house
+to house.  Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames
+of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and
+staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was very
+quaint and lively.  All this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one
+caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet sleepy court-yards,
+having stately old houses within, as silent as tombs.  It was all very
+like one of the descriptions in the Arabian Nights.  The three one-eyed
+Calenders might have knocked at any one of those doors till the street
+rang again, and the porter who persisted in asking questions—the man who
+had the delicious purchases put into his basket in the morning—might have
+opened it quite naturally.
+
+After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the lions.  Such a
+delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north, as made the walk
+delightful: though the pavement-stones, and stones of the walls and
+houses, were far too hot to have a hand laid on them comfortably.
+
+We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral: where Mass
+was performing to an auditory very like that of Lyons, namely, several
+old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog, who had marked out for
+himself a little course or platform for exercise, beginning at the
+altar-rails and ending at the door, up and down which constitutional walk
+he trotted, during the service, as methodically and calmly, as any old
+gentleman out of doors.
+
+It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are sadly defaced
+by time and damp weather; but the sun was shining in, splendidly, through
+the red curtains of the windows, and glittering on the altar furniture;
+and it looked as bright and cheerful as need be.
+
+Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was being
+executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to observe
+more closely than I might otherwise have done, a great number of votive
+offerings with which the walls of the different chapels were profusely
+hung.  I will not say decorated, for they were very roughly and comically
+got up; most likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in
+that way.  They were all little pictures: each representing some sickness
+or calamity from which the person placing it there, had escaped, through
+the interposition of his or her patron saint, or of the Madonna; and I
+may refer to them as good specimens of the class generally.  They are
+abundant in Italy.
+
+In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective,
+they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but they were
+oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the Primrose family,
+had not been sparing of his colours.  In one, a lady was having a toe
+amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the
+room, upon a couch, to superintend.  In another, a lady was lying in bed,
+tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a
+tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the
+only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber.  One would
+never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the
+inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not
+hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in one corner,
+with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like boot-trees.
+Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan, promised to restore the
+patient.  In another case, a lady was in the very act of being run over,
+immediately outside the city walls, by a sort of piano-forte van.  But
+the Madonna was there again.  Whether the supernatural appearance had
+startled the horse (a bay griffin), or whether it was invisible to him, I
+don’t know; but he was galloping away, ding dong, without the smallest
+reverence or compunction.  On every picture ‘Ex voto’ was painted in
+yellow capitals in the sky.
+
+Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are
+evidently among the many compromises made between the false religion and
+the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could wish that all the
+other compromises were as harmless.  Gratitude and Devotion are Christian
+qualities; and a grateful, humble, Christian spirit may dictate the
+observance.
+
+Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which
+one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while
+gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own
+old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings.  But we neither
+went there, to see state rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common
+jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst
+the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and
+watched us eagerly.  We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in
+which the Inquisition used to sit.
+
+A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes,—proof
+that the world hadn’t conjured down the devil within her, though it had
+had between sixty and seventy years to do it in,—came out of the Barrack
+Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands,
+and marshalled us the way that we should go.  How she told us, on the
+way, that she was a Government Officer (_concierge du palais a
+apostolique_), and had been, for I don’t know how many years; and how she
+had shown these dungeons to princes; and how she was the best of dungeon
+demonstrators; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant,—had
+been born there, if I recollect right,—I needn’t relate.  But such a
+fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld.
+She was alight and flaming, all the time.  Her action was violent in the
+extreme.  She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose.
+She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into
+attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now
+whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she
+were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her
+forefinger, when approaching the remains of some new horror—looking back
+and walking stealthily, and making horrible grimaces—that might alone
+have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man’s counterpane, to the
+exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.
+
+Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle soldiers, we turned
+off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our admission, and
+locked again behind us: and entered a narrow court, rendered narrower by
+fallen stones and heaps of rubbish; part of it choking up the mouth of a
+ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is said to have
+done so) with another castle on the opposite bank of the river.  Close to
+this court-yard is a dungeon—we stood within it, in another minute—in the
+dismal tower _des oubliettes_, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by
+an iron chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out from
+the sky which now looks down into it.  A few steps brought us to the
+Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined for
+forty-eight hours after their capture, without food or drink, that their
+constancy might be shaken, even before they were confronted with their
+gloomy judges.  The day has not got in there yet.  They are still small
+cells, shut in by four unyielding, close, hard walls; still profoundly
+dark; still massively doored and fastened, as of old.
+
+Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a vaulted
+chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of the Holy Office.
+The place where the tribunal sat, was plain.  The platform might have
+been removed but yesterday.  Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan
+having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers!
+But it was, and may be traced there yet.
+
+High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering replies of
+the accused were heard and noted down.  Many of them had been brought out
+of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully; along the same
+stone passage.  We had trodden in their very footsteps.
+
+I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when
+Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the
+handle of a key, upon her lip.  She invites me, with a jerk, to follow
+her.  I do so.  She leads me out into a room adjoining—a rugged room,
+with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright
+day.  I ask her what it is.  She folds her arms, leers hideously, and
+stares.  I ask again.  She glances round, to see that all the little
+company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms,
+and yells out, like a fiend, ‘La Salle de la Question!’
+
+The Chamber of Torture!  And the roof was made of that shape to stifle
+the victim’s cries!  Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in
+silence.  Peace, Goblin!  Sit with your short arms crossed on your short
+legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out
+again.
+
+Minutes!  Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock, when, with her
+eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber,
+describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows.  Thus it ran
+round! cries Goblin.  Mash, mash, mash!  An endless routine of heavy
+hammers.  Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs.  See the stone
+trough! says Goblin.  For the water torture!  Gurgle, swill, bloat,
+burst, for the Redeemer’s honour!  Suck the bloody rag, deep down into
+your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you draw!  And when the
+executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God’s
+own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon
+on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal:
+who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness,
+madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed
+hand out, but to give relief and ease!
+
+See! cries Goblin.  There the furnace was.  There they made the irons
+red-hot.  Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the tortured
+persons hung poised: dangling with their whole weight from the roof.
+‘But;’ and Goblin whispers this; ‘Monsieur has heard of this tower?  Yes?
+Let Monsieur look down, then!’
+
+A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur;
+for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall.  Monsieur
+looks in.  Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark,
+lofty tower: very dismal, very dark, very cold.  The Executioner of the
+Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung
+those who were past all further torturing, down here.  ‘But look! does
+Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?’  A glance, over his shoulder,
+at Goblin’s keen eye, shows Monsieur—and would without the aid of the
+directing key—where they are.  ‘What are they?’  ‘Blood!’
+
+In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty
+persons: men and women (‘and priests,’ says Goblin, ‘priests’): were
+murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit,
+where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon their bodies.  Those
+ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one stone of
+the strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon another,
+there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see as the
+splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.
+
+Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel deed
+should be committed in this place!  That a part of the atrocities and
+monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores of years, at work, to
+change men’s nature, should in its last service, tempt them with the
+ready means of gratifying their furious and beastly rage!  Should enable
+them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a
+great, solemn, legal establishment, in the height of its power!  No
+worse!  Much better.  They used the Tower of the Forgotten, in the name
+of Liberty—their liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud
+of the Bastile moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many
+evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up—but the Inquisition used it in
+the name of Heaven.
+
+Goblin’s finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the Chapel of
+the Holy Office.  She stops at a certain part of the flooring.  Her great
+effect is at hand.  She waits for the rest.  She darts at the brave
+Courier, who is explaining something; hits him a sounding rap on the hat
+with the largest key; and bids him be silent.  She assembles us all,
+round a little trap-door in the floor, as round a grave.
+
+‘Voilà!’ she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with a
+crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light weight.  ‘Voilà les
+oubliettes!  Voilà les oubliettes!  Subterranean! Frightful!  Black!
+Terrible!  Deadly!  Les oubliettes de l’Inquisition!’
+
+My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where
+these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside: of
+wives, friends, children, brothers: starved to death, and made the stones
+ring with their unavailing groans.  But, the thrill I felt on seeing the
+accursed wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in
+through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory and triumph.  I
+felt exalted with the proud delight of living in these degenerate times,
+to see it.  As if I were the hero of some high achievement!  The light in
+the doleful vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in, on all
+persecution in God’s name, but which is not yet at its noon!  It cannot
+look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a
+traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down the
+darkness of that Infernal Well.
+
+
+
+
+AVIGNON TO GENOA
+
+
+GOBLIN, having shown _les oubliettes_, felt that her great _coup_ was
+struck.  She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her
+arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.
+
+When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the outer
+gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building.  Her
+cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the thick
+wall—in the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little
+counter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household
+implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a sober-looking
+woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with Goblin,) knitting at
+the door—looked exactly like a picture by OSTADE.
+
+I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet
+with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light,
+down in the vaults, had given me the assurance.  The immense thickness
+and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive
+towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions,
+frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder.  The
+recollection of its opposite old uses: an impregnable fortress, a
+luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the
+Inquisition: at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting,
+religion, and blood: gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful
+interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities.  I could think of
+little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the dungeons.
+The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and
+being forced to echo their rough talk, and common oaths, and to have
+their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of
+its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the
+sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty—that was its desolation and
+defeat!  If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have
+felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns,
+could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its
+prisons.
+
+Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the little
+history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite appropriate to
+itself, connected with its adventures.
+
+‘An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de Lude,
+the Pope’s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished ladies of
+Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man, and horribly
+mutilated him.  For several years the legate kept _his_ revenge within
+his own breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification
+at last.  He even made, in the fulness of time, advances towards a
+complete reconciliation; and when their apparent sincerity had prevailed,
+he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace, certain families, whole
+families, whom he sought to exterminate.  The utmost gaiety animated the
+repast; but the measures of the legate were well taken.  When the dessert
+was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the announcement that a
+strange ambassador solicited an extraordinary audience.  The legate,
+excusing himself, for the moment, to his guests, retired, followed by his
+officers.  Within a few minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were
+reduced to ashes: the whole of that wing of the building having been
+blown into the air with a terrible explosion!’
+
+After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just
+now), we left Avignon that afternoon.  The heat being very great, the
+roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every
+little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake,
+who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their
+playing bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road.  The
+harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were treading
+out the corn in the fields.  We came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly
+country, once famous for brigands; and travelled slowly up a steep
+ascent.  So we went on, until eleven at night, when we halted at the town
+of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.
+
+The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the light and
+heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and the town was very
+clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when I walked out at noon
+it was like coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp blue fire.
+The air was so very clear, that distant hills and rocky points appeared
+within an hour’s walk; while the town immediately at hand—with a kind of
+blue wind between me and it—seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing
+off a fiery air from the surface.
+
+We left this town towards evening, and took the road to Marseilles.  A
+dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines powdered
+white.  At nearly all the cottage doors, women were peeling and slicing
+onions into earthen bowls for supper.  So they had been doing last night
+all the way from Avignon.  We passed one or two shady dark châteaux,
+surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool basins of water: which
+were the more refreshing to behold, from the great scarcity of such
+residences on the road we had travelled.  As we approached Marseilles,
+the road began to be covered with holiday people.  Outside the
+public-houses were parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards,
+and (once) dancing.  But dust, dust, dust, everywhere.  We went on,
+through a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people; having on
+our left a dreary slope of land, on which the country-houses of the
+Marseilles merchants, always staring white, are jumbled and heaped
+without the slightest order: backs, fronts, sides, and gables towards all
+points of the compass; until, at last, we entered the town.
+
+I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and foul; and I
+am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and disagreeable place.
+But the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful
+Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful.
+These heights are a desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons—as an
+escape from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great
+harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable
+ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot weather, is dreadful in
+the last degree.
+
+There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with red
+shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange
+colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no
+beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan
+head-dresses.  There were the townspeople sitting in clusters on the
+pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up
+and down the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds
+of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way,
+constantly.  In the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the
+common madhouse; a low, contracted, miserable building, looking straight
+upon the street, without the smallest screen or court-yard; where
+chattering mad-men and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at
+the staring faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into
+their little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if
+they were baited by a pack of dogs.
+
+We were pretty well accommodated at the Hôtel du Paradis, situated in a
+narrow street of very high houses, with a hairdresser’s shop opposite,
+exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen ladies, twirling
+round and round: which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and
+his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement
+outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity.
+The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the
+hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there,
+with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn’t bear to
+have the shutters put up.
+
+Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all nations
+were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines, oils,
+silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise.  Taking one of a
+great number of lively little boats with gay-striped awnings, we rowed
+away, under the sterns of great ships, under tow-ropes and cables,
+against and among other boats, and very much too near the sides of
+vessels that were faint with oranges, to the _Marie Antoinette_, a
+handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbour.
+By-and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy ‘trifle from the Pantechnicon,’ on
+a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a
+prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside; and
+by five o’clock we were steaming out in the open sea.  The vessel was
+beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning on deck; the
+night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and sky
+unspeakable.
+
+We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along, within a few
+miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its place) nearly all day.
+We could see Genoa before three; and watching it as it gradually
+developed its splendid amphitheatre, terrace rising above terrace, garden
+above garden, palace above palace, height upon height, was ample
+occupation for us, till we ran into the stately harbour.  Having been
+duly astonished, here, by the sight of a few Cappucini monks, who were
+watching the fair-weighing of some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to
+Albaro, two miles distant, where we had engaged a house.
+
+The way lay through the main streets, but not through the Strada Nuova,
+or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets of palaces.  I never in
+my life was so dismayed!  The wonderful novelty of everything, the
+unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the
+cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one
+upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than
+any in St. Giles’s or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but
+well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and
+repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or
+shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before;
+and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly confounded
+me.  I fell into a dismal reverie.  I am conscious of a feverish and
+bewildered vision of saints and virgins’ shrines at the street corners—of
+great numbers of friars, monks, and soldiers—of vast red curtains, waving
+in the doorways of the churches—of always going up hill, and yet seeing
+every other street and passage going higher up—of fruit-stalls, with
+fresh lemons and oranges hanging in garlands made of vine-leaves—of a
+guard-house, and a drawbridge—and some gateways—and vendors of iced
+water, sitting with little trays upon the margin of the kennel—and this
+is all the consciousness I had, until I was set down in a rank, dull,
+weedy court-yard, attached to a kind of pink jail; and was told I lived
+there.
+
+I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an attachment
+for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the
+city with affection as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet!
+But these are my first impressions honestly set down; and how they
+changed, I will set down too.  At present, let us breathe after this
+long-winded journey.
+
+
+
+
+GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
+
+
+THE first impressions of such a place as ALBARO, the suburb of Genoa,
+where I am now, as my American friends would say, ‘located,’ can hardly
+fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and disappointing.  It requires a
+little time and use to overcome the feeling of depression consequent, at
+first, on so much ruin and neglect.  Novelty, pleasant to most people, is
+particularly delightful, I think, to me.  I am not easily dispirited when
+I have the means of pursuing my own fancies and occupations; and I
+believe I have some natural aptitude for accommodating myself to
+circumstances.  But, as yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes and
+corners of the neighbourhood, in a perpetual state of forlorn surprise;
+and returning to my villa: the Villa Bagnerello (it sounds romantic, but
+Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by): have sufficient occupation in
+pondering over my new experiences, and comparing them, very much to my
+own amusement, with my expectations, until I wander out again.
+
+The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name for
+the mansion: is in one of the most splendid situations imaginable.  The
+noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched out
+near at hand; monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted all
+about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with
+strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the
+left; and in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a
+ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks on the
+sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in
+partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on a rough
+trellis-work across the narrow paths.
+
+This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow, that when we
+arrived at the Custom-house, we found the people here had _taken the
+measure_ of the narrowest among them, and were waiting to apply it to the
+carriage; which ceremony was gravely performed in the street, while we
+all stood by in breathless suspense.  It was found to be a very tight
+fit, but just a possibility, and no more—as I am reminded every day, by
+the sight of various large holes which it punched in the walls on either
+side as it came along.  We are more fortunate, I am told, than an old
+lady, who took a house in these parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in
+_her_ carriage in a lane; and as it was impossible to open one of the
+doors, she was obliged to submit to the indignity of being hauled through
+one of the little front windows, like a harlequin.
+
+When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come to an archway,
+imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate—my gate.  The rusty old gate
+has a bell to correspond, which you ring as long as you like, and which
+nobody answers, as it has no connection whatever with the house.  But
+there is a rusty old knocker, too—very loose, so that it slides round
+when you touch it—and if you learn the trick of it, and knock long
+enough, somebody comes.  The brave Courier comes, and gives you
+admittance.  You walk into a seedy little garden, all wild and weedy,
+from which the vineyard opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a
+cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous
+room with a vaulted roof and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great
+Methodist chapel.  This is the _sala_.  It has five windows and five
+doors, and is decorated with pictures which would gladden the heart of
+one of those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as a sign, a picture
+divided, like death and the lady, at the top of the old ballad: which
+always leaves you in a state of uncertainty whether the ingenious
+professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied the other.  The furniture of
+this _sala_ is a sort of red brocade.  All the chairs are immovable, and
+the sofa weighs several tons.
+
+On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are dining-room,
+drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a multiplicity of doors and
+windows.  Up-stairs are divers other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and
+down-stairs is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange
+contrivances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical laboratory.
+There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms, where the servants in
+this hot July, may escape from the heat of the fire, and where the brave
+Courier plays all sorts of musical instruments of his own manufacture,
+all the evening long.  A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim,
+bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of.
+
+There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the drawing-room;
+and under this terrace, and forming one side of the little garden, is
+what used to be the stable.  It is now a cow-house, and has three cows in
+it, so that we get new milk by the bucketful.  There is no pasturage
+near, and they never go out, but are constantly lying down, and
+surfeiting themselves with vine-leaves—perfect Italian cows enjoying the
+_dolce far’ niente_ all day long.  They are presided over, and slept
+with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son; two burnt-sienna natives
+with naked legs and feet, who wear, each, a shirt, a pair of trousers,
+and a red sash, with a relic, or some sacred charm like the bonbon off a
+twelfth-cake, hanging round the neck.  The old man is very anxious to
+convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently.  We sit upon
+a stone by the door, sometimes in the evening, like Robinson Crusoe and
+Friday reversed; and he generally relates, towards my conversion, an
+abridgment of the History of Saint Peter—chiefly, I believe, from the
+unspeakable delight he has in his imitation of the cock.
+
+The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you must keep the
+lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when the
+sun goes down you must shut up all the windows, or the mosquitoes would
+tempt you to commit suicide.  So at this time of the year, you don’t see
+much of the prospect within doors.  As for the flies, you don’t mind
+them.  Nor the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose name is Legion,
+and who populate the coach-house to that extent that I daily expect to
+see the carriage going off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas
+in harness.  The rats are kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean
+cats, who roam about the garden for that purpose.  The lizards, of
+course, nobody cares for; they play in the sun, and don’t bite.  The
+little scorpions are merely curious.  The beetles are rather late, and
+have not appeared yet.  The frogs are company.  There is a preserve of
+them in the grounds of the next villa; and after nightfall, one would
+think that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going up and down
+a wet stone pavement without a moment’s cessation.  That is exactly the
+noise they make.
+
+The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was
+dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist.  I believe there
+is a legend that Saint John’s bones were received there, with various
+solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses
+them to this day.  When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are
+brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to
+calm.  In consequence of this connection of Saint John with the city,
+great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni Baptista,
+which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese patois ‘Batcheetcha,’ like
+a sneeze.  To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a
+Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a
+little singular and amusing to a stranger.
+
+The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose walls
+(outside walls, I mean) are profusely painted with all sorts of subjects,
+grim and holy.  But time and the sea-air have nearly obliterated them;
+and they look like the entrance to Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day.  The
+court-yards of these houses are overgrown with grass and weeds; all sorts
+of hideous patches cover the bases of the statues, as if they were
+afflicted with a cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty; and the
+iron bars outside the lower windows are all tumbling down.  Firewood is
+kept in halls where costly treasures might be heaped up, mountains high;
+waterfalls are dry and choked; fountains, too dull to play, and too lazy
+to work, have just enough recollection of their identity, in their sleep,
+to make the neighbourhood damp; and the sirocco wind is often blowing
+over all these things for days together, like a gigantic oven out for a
+holiday.
+
+Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the _Virgin’s mother_,
+when the young men of the neighbourhood, having worn green wreaths of the
+vine in some procession or other, bathed in them, by scores.  It looked
+very odd and pretty.  Though I am bound to confess (not knowing of the
+festa at that time), that I thought, and was quite satisfied, they wore
+them as horses do—to keep the flies off.
+
+Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St. Nazaro.
+One of the Albaro young men brought two large bouquets soon after
+breakfast, and coming up-stairs into the great _sala_, presented them
+himself.  This was a polite way of begging for a contribution towards the
+expenses of some music in the Saint’s honour, so we gave him whatever it
+may have been, and his messenger departed: well satisfied.  At six
+o’clock in the evening we went to the church—close at hand—a very gaudy
+place, hung all over with festoons and bright draperies, and filled, from
+the altar to the main door, with women, all seated.  They wear no bonnets
+here, simply a long white veil—the ‘mezzero;’ and it was the most gauzy,
+ethereal-looking audience I ever saw.  The young women are not generally
+pretty, but they walk remarkably well, and in their personal carriage and
+the management of their veils, display much innate grace and elegance.
+There were some men present: not very many: and a few of these were
+kneeling about the aisles, while everybody else tumbled over them.
+Innumerable tapers were burning in the church; the bits of silver and tin
+about the saints (especially in the Virgin’s necklace) sparkled
+brilliantly; the priests were seated about the chief altar; the organ
+played away, lustily, and a full band did the like; while a conductor, in
+a little gallery opposite to the band, hammered away on the desk before
+him, with a scroll; and a tenor, without any voice, sang.  The band
+played one way, the organ played another, the singer went a third, and
+the unfortunate conductor banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on
+some principle of his own: apparently well satisfied with the whole
+performance.  I never did hear such a discordant din.  The heat was
+intense all the time.
+
+The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their shoulders
+(they never put them on), were playing bowls, and buying sweetmeats,
+immediately outside the church.  When half-a-dozen of them finished a
+game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water,
+knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked off again to play another
+game at bowls.  They are remarkably expert at this diversion, and will
+play in the stony lanes and streets, and on the most uneven and
+disastrous ground for such a purpose, with as much nicety as on a
+billiard-table.  But the most favourite game is the national one of Mora,
+which they pursue with surprising ardour, and at which they will stake
+everything they possess.  It is a destructive kind of gambling, requiring
+no accessories but the ten fingers, which are always—I intend no pun—at
+hand.  Two men play together.  One calls a number—say the extreme one,
+ten.  He marks what portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or
+four, or five fingers; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at
+hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many fingers, as
+will make the exact balance.  Their eyes and hands become so used to
+this, and act with such astonishing rapidity, that an uninitiated
+bystander would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the
+progress of the game.  The initiated, however, of whom there is always an
+eager group looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity; and as
+they are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of a
+dispute, and are frequently divided in their partisanship, it is often a
+very noisy proceeding.  It is never the quietest game in the world; for
+the numbers are always called in a loud sharp voice, and follow as close
+upon each other as they can be counted.  On a holiday evening, standing
+at a window, or walking in a garden, or passing through the streets, or
+sauntering in any quiet place about the town, you will hear this game in
+progress in a score of wine-shops at once; and looking over any vineyard
+walk, or turning almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in
+full cry.  It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out
+some particular number oftener than another; and the vigilance with which
+two sharp-eyed players will mutually endeavour to detect this weakness,
+and adapt their game to it, is very curious and entertaining.  The effect
+is greatly heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of
+gesture; two men playing for half a farthing with an intensity as
+all-absorbing as if the stake were life.
+
+Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member of the
+Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits for their
+summer quarters.  I walked into its dismantled precincts the other
+evening about sunset, and couldn’t help pacing up and down for a little
+time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place: which is repeated
+hereabouts in all directions.
+
+I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a weedy,
+grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third side, and a low
+terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the neighbouring hills, the
+fourth.  I don’t believe there was an uncracked stone in the whole
+pavement.  In the centre was a melancholy statue, so piebald in its
+decay, that it looked exactly as if it had been covered with
+sticking-plaster, and afterwards powdered.  The stables, coach-houses,
+offices, were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted.
+
+Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
+windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about
+in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-buildings,
+that I couldn’t help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with
+suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again.
+One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye (a
+poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came prowling round
+and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the
+hero come to marry the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his
+mistake, he suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a
+tremendous tail, that he couldn’t get into the little hole where he
+lived, but was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his
+tail had gone down together.
+
+In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this colonnade, some
+Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut; but the Jesuits had
+given them notice to go, and they had gone, and _that_ was shut up too.
+The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering barrack of a place, with the
+lower windows barred up, as usual, was wide open at the door: and I have
+no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody
+a bit the wiser.  Only one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted;
+and from one of these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising
+bravura lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
+
+I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
+avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in stone
+basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling, under grown
+or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy,
+creeping, and uncomfortable life.  There was nothing bright in the whole
+scene but a firefly—one solitary firefly—showing against the dark bushes
+like the last little speck of the departed Glory of the house; and even
+it went flitting up and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a
+jerk, and describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
+with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking for the rest of
+the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had become of it.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my dismal
+entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar forms and
+substances; and I already began to think that when the time should come,
+a year hence, for closing the long holiday and turning back to England, I
+might part from Genoa with anything but a glad heart.
+
+It is a place that ‘grows upon you’ every day.  There seems to be always
+something to find out in it.  There are the most extraordinary alleys and
+by-ways to walk about in.  You can lose your way (what a comfort that is,
+when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again,
+under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties.  It abounds in the
+strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean,
+magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every
+turn.
+
+They who would know how beautiful the country immediately surrounding
+Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of Monte Faccio, or,
+at least, ride round the city walls: a feat more easily performed.  No
+prospect can be more diversified and lovely than the changing views of
+the harbour, and the valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and the
+Bizagno, from the heights along which the strongly fortified walls are
+carried, like the great wall of China in little.  In not the least
+picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen of a real Genoese
+tavern, where the visitor may derive good entertainment from real Genoese
+dishes, such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German sausages, strong of garlic,
+sliced and eaten with fresh green figs; cocks’ combs and sheep-kidneys,
+chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces of some unknown part
+of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and served up in a great
+dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of that kind.  They often get
+wine at these suburban Trattorie, from France and Spain and Portugal,
+which is brought over by small captains in little trading-vessels.  They
+buy it at so much a bottle, without asking what it is, or caring to
+remember if anybody tells them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of
+which they label one Champagne, and the other Madeira.  The various
+opposite flavours, qualities, countries, ages, and vintages that are
+comprised under these two general heads is quite extraordinary.  The most
+limited range is probably from cool Gruel up to old Marsala, and down
+again to apple Tea.
+
+The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare can
+well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live and walk
+about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind of well, or
+breathing-place.  The houses are immensely high, painted in all sorts of
+colours, and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of
+repair.  They are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses
+in the old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris.  There are few
+street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part, looked upon as
+public property; and any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a
+fine fortune by now and then clearing them out.  As it is impossible for
+coaches to penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded
+and otherwise, for hire in divers places.  A great many private chairs
+are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
+trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great
+lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame.  The sedans and
+lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of patient
+and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells through these
+confined streets all day long.  They follow them, as regularly as the
+stars the sun.
+
+When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and the
+Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day, when I first saw
+it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of summer skies:
+which its narrow perspective of immense mansions, reduced to a tapering
+and most precious strip of brightness, looking down upon the heavy shade
+below!  A brightness not too common, even in July and August, to be well
+esteemed: for, if the Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in
+as many midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when,
+looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of deep
+and brilliant blue.  At other times, there were clouds and haze enough to
+make an Englishman grumble in his own climate.
+
+The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some of them,
+within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke!  The great, heavy, stone
+balconies, one above another, and tier over tier: with here and there,
+one larger than the rest, towering high up—a huge marble platform; the
+doorless vestibules, massively barred lower windows, immense public
+staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary,
+dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers: among which the eye wanders again,
+and again, and again, as every palace is succeeded by another—the terrace
+gardens between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and
+groves of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
+thirty, forty feet above the street—the painted halls, mouldering, and
+blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in
+beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry—the
+faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns,
+and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and here and
+there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast with
+some fresh little Cupids, who on a more recently decorated portion of the
+front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance of a blanket,
+but is, indeed, a sun-dial—the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small
+palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces
+looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and innumerable Churches;
+and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of
+the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with
+half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether,
+such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so
+quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet
+so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk
+on, and on, and on, and look about him.  A bewildering phantasmagoria,
+with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the
+pleasure of an extravagant reality!
+
+The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all at
+once, is characteristic.  For instance, the English Banker (my excellent
+and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized Palazzo in the
+Strada Nuova.  In the hall (every inch of which is elaborately painted,
+but which is as dirty as a police-station in London), a hook-nosed
+Saracen’s Head with an immense quantity of black hair (there is a man
+attached to it) sells walking-sticks.  On the other side of the doorway,
+a lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress (wife to the Saracen’s
+Head, I believe) sells articles of her own knitting; and sometimes
+flowers.  A little further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg.
+Sometimes, they are visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart,
+but who has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
+well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the ground up
+to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of cellar-steps to
+speak to somebody.  A little further in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep
+in the middle of the day; or they may be chairmen waiting for their
+absent freight.  If so, they have brought their chairs in with them, and
+there _they_ stand also.  On the left of the hall is a little room: a
+hatter’s shop.  On the first floor, is the English bank.  On the first
+floor also, is a whole house, and a good large residence too.  Heaven
+knows what there may be above that; but when you are there, you have only
+just begun to go up-stairs.  And yet, coming down-stairs again, thinking
+of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the hall,
+instead of turning the other way, to get into the street again; it bangs
+behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome echoes, and you stand
+in a yard (the yard of the same house) which seems to have been unvisited
+by human foot, for a hundred years.  Not a sound disturbs its repose.
+Not a head, thrust out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows, within
+sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement faint of heart, by
+suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub them up.
+Opposite to you, is a giant figure carved in stone, reclining, with an
+urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn,
+dangles the fag end of a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a
+small torrent down the rocks.  But the eye-sockets of the giant are not
+drier than this channel is now.  He seems to have given his urn, which is
+nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a sepulchral
+child, ‘All gone!’ to have lapsed into a stony silence.
+
+In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size
+notwithstanding, and extremely high.  They are very dirty: quite
+undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and emit a peculiar fragrance,
+like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets.
+Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been a
+lack of room in the City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere.
+Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack
+or corner, in it has gone.  If there be a nook or angle in the wall of a
+church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are
+sure to find some kind of habitation: looking as if it had grown there,
+like a fungus.  Against the Government House, against the old Senate
+House, round about any large building, little shops stick so close, like
+parasite vermin to the great carcase.  And for all this, look where you
+may: up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere: there are irregular
+houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning against their
+neighbours, crippling themselves or their friends by some means or other,
+until one, more irregular than the rest, chokes up the way, and you can’t
+see any further.
+
+One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by the
+landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated with a great
+deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped it deeper
+in my mind.  Here, again, the houses are very high, and are of an
+infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of the houses
+have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and wafting its
+frowsy fragrance on the breeze.  Sometimes, it is a curtain; sometimes,
+it is a carpet; sometimes, it is a bed; sometimes, a whole line-full of
+clothes; but there is almost always something.  Before the basement of
+these houses, is an arcade over the pavement: very massive, dark, and
+low, like an old crypt.  The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has
+turned quite black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts
+of filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously.  Beneath some of
+the arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta establish their stalls,
+which are by no means inviting.  The offal of a fish-market, near at
+hand—that is to say, of a back lane, where people sit upon the ground and
+on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to
+dispose of—and of a vegetable market, constructed on the same
+principle—are contributed to the decoration of this quarter; and as all
+the mercantile business is transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it
+has a very decided flavour about it.  The Porto Franco, or Free Port
+(where goods brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are
+sold and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
+also; and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to
+search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and Ladies.  For,
+Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of
+smuggling, and in the same way: that is to say, by concealing the
+smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its dress.  So Sanctity and
+Beauty may, by no means, enter.
+
+The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of a few
+Priests of prepossessing appearance.  Every fourth or fifth man in the
+streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure to be at least
+one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney carriage on
+the neighbouring roads.  I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more
+repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry.  If
+Nature’s handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of sloth,
+deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed among any class
+of men in the world.
+
+MR. PEPYS once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in illustration of
+his respect for the Priestly office, that if he could meet a Priest and
+angel together, he would salute the Priest first.  I am rather of the
+opinion of PETRARCH, who, when his pupil BOCCACCIO wrote to him in great
+tribulation, that he had been visited and admonished for his writings by
+a Carthusian Friar who claimed to be a messenger immediately commissioned
+by Heaven for that purpose, replied, that for his own part, he would take
+the liberty of testing the reality of the commission by personal
+observation of the Messenger’s face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and
+discourse.  I cannot but believe myself, from similar observation, that
+many unaccredited celestial messengers may be seen skulking through the
+streets of Genoa, or droning away their lives in other Italian towns.
+
+Perhaps the Cappuccíni, though not a learned body, are, as an order, the
+best friends of the people.  They seem to mingle with them more
+immediately, as their counsellors and comforters; and to go among them
+more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some other orders, into
+the secrets of families, for the purpose of establishing a baleful
+ascendency over their weaker members; and to be influenced by a less
+fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to let them go to ruin,
+soul and body.  They may be seen, in their coarse dress, in all parts of
+the town at all times, and begging in the markets early in the morning.
+The Jesuits too, muster strong in the streets, and go slinking
+noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats.
+
+In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades congregate.  There is a
+street of jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers; but even down in
+places where nobody ever can, or ever could, penetrate in a carriage,
+there are mighty old palaces shut in among the gloomiest and closest
+walls, and almost shut out from the sun.  Very few of the tradesmen have
+any idea of setting forth their goods, or disposing them for show.  If
+you, a stranger, want to buy anything, you usually look round the shop
+till you see it; then clutch it, if it be within reach, and inquire how
+much.  Everything is sold at the most unlikely place.  If you want
+coffee, you go to a sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will
+probably find it behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps,
+in some sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison,
+and Genoa’s law were death to any that uttered it.
+
+Most of the apothecaries’ shops are great lounging-places.  Here, grave
+men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together, passing a
+meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking, drowsily and
+sparingly, about the News.  Two or three of these are poor physicians,
+ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and tear off with any
+messenger who may arrive.  You may know them by the way in which they
+stretch their necks to listen, when you enter; and by the sigh with which
+they fall back again into their dull corners, on finding that you only
+want medicine.  Few people lounge in the barbers’ shops; though they are
+very numerous, as hardly any man shaves himself.  But the apothecary’s
+has its group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their
+hands folded over the tops of their sticks.  So still and quiet, that
+either you don’t see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them—as I did
+one ghostly man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a stopper—for
+Horse Medicine.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves, as
+their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch of space
+in and about the town.  In all the lanes and alleys, and up every little
+ascent, and on every dwarf wall, and on every flight of steps, they
+cluster like bees.  Meanwhile (and especially on festa-days) the bells of
+the churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known form of sound,
+but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle: with a
+sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening.  This
+performance is usually achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes
+hold of the clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle
+louder than every other boy similarly employed.  The noise is supposed to
+be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but looking up into the
+steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus engaged,
+one might very naturally mistake them for the Enemy.
+
+Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous.  All the shops were
+shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays; and one night, all the
+houses in the neighbourhood of a particular church were illuminated,
+while the church itself was lighted, outside, with torches; and a grove
+of blazing links was erected, in an open space outside one of the city
+gates.  This part of the ceremony is prettier and more singular a little
+way in the country, where you can trace the illuminated cottages all the
+way up a steep hill-side; and where you pass festoons of tapers, wasting
+away in the starlight night, before some lonely little house upon the
+road.
+
+On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in whose honour
+the festa is holden, very gaily.  Gold-embroidered festoons of different
+colours, hang from the arches; the altar furniture is set forth; and
+sometimes, even the lofty pillars are swathed from top to bottom in
+tight-fitting draperies.  The cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo.  On
+St. Lorenzo’s day, we went into it, just as the sun was setting.
+Although these decorations are usually in very indifferent taste, the
+effect, just then, was very superb indeed.  For the whole building was
+dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red
+curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own.  When
+the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a
+few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small dangling
+silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective.  But, sitting in any
+of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of opium.
+
+                        [Picture: Italian Romance]
+
+With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the dressing of
+the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the tapers.  If there
+be any left (which seldom happens, I believe), the souls in Purgatory get
+the benefit of it.  They are also supposed to have the benefit of the
+exertions of certain small boys, who shake money-boxes before some
+mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up
+close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some
+flowers inside.
+
+Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small house, with an
+altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for the benefit of the
+souls in Purgatory.  Still further to stimulate the charitable, there is
+a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the grated door,
+representing a select party of souls, frying.  One of them has a grey
+moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken
+out of a hairdresser’s window and cast into the furnace.  There he is: a
+most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the
+real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and
+improvement (and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.
+
+They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their
+holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the women, being the
+churches and the public walks.  They are very good-tempered, obliging,
+and industrious.  Industry has not made them clean, for their habitations
+are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday
+morning, is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other’s heads.  But
+their dwellings are so close and confined that if those parts of the city
+had been beaten down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it
+would have at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.
+
+The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing
+clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and ditch, that one
+cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them when
+they are clean.  The custom is to lay the wet linen which is being
+operated upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat
+wooden mallet.  This they do, as furiously as if they were revenging
+themselves on dress in general for being connected with the Fall of
+Mankind.
+
+It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these times,
+or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly swathed up, arms
+and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of wrapper, so that it is
+unable to move a toe or finger.  This custom (which we often see
+represented in old pictures) is universal among the common people.  A
+child is left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is
+accidentally knocked off a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to
+a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at an English
+rag-shop, without the least inconvenience to anybody.
+
+I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little country
+church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city, while a baptism
+took place.  I saw the priest, and an attendant with a large taper, and a
+man, and a woman, and some others; but I had no more idea, until the
+ceremony was all over, that it was a baptism, or that the curious little
+stiff instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the course of
+the ceremony, by the handle—like a short poker—was a child, than I had
+that it was my own christening.  I borrowed the child afterwards, for a
+minute or two (it was lying across the font then), and found it very red
+in the face but perfectly quiet, and not to be bent on any terms.  The
+number of cripples in the streets, soon ceased to surprise me.
+
+There are plenty of Saints’ and Virgin’s Shrines, of course; generally at
+the corners of streets.  The favourite memento to the Faithful, about
+Genoa, is a painting, representing a peasant on his knees, with a spade
+and some other agricultural implements beside him; and the Madonna, with
+the Infant Saviour in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud.  This is the
+legend of the Madonna della Guardia: a chapel on a mountain within a few
+miles, which is in high repute.  It seems that this peasant lived all
+alone by himself, tilling some land atop of the mountain, where, being a
+devout man, he daily said his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for
+his hut was a very poor one.  Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to
+him, as in the picture, and said, ‘Why do you pray in the open air, and
+without a priest?’  The peasant explained because there was neither
+priest nor church at hand—a very uncommon complaint indeed in Italy.  ‘I
+should wish, then,’ said the Celestial Visitor, ‘to have a chapel built
+here, in which the prayers of the Faithful may be offered up.’  ‘But,
+Santissima Madonna,’ said the peasant, ‘I am a poor man; and chapels
+cannot be built without money.  They must be supported, too, Santissima;
+for to have a chapel and not support it liberally, is a wickedness—a
+deadly sin.’  This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visitor.
+‘Go!’ said she.  ‘There is such a village in the valley on the left, and
+such another village in the valley on the right, and such another village
+elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to the building of a chapel.  Go
+to them!  Relate what you have seen; and do not doubt that sufficient
+money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel, or that it will,
+afterwards, be handsomely maintained.’  All of which (miraculously)
+turned out to be quite true.  And in proof of this prediction and
+revelation, there is the chapel of the Madonna della Guardia, rich and
+flourishing at this day.
+
+The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be
+exaggerated.  The church of the Annunciata especially: built, like many
+of the others, at the cost of one noble family, and now in slow progress
+of repair: from the outer door to the utmost height of the high cupola,
+is so elaborately painted and set in gold, that it looks (as SIMOND
+describes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great enamelled
+snuff-box.  Most of the richer churches contain some beautiful pictures,
+or other embellishments of great price, almost universally set, side by
+side, with sprawling effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and
+tinsel ever seen.
+
+It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular mind,
+and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but there is very little
+tenderness for the _bodies_ of the dead here.  For the very poor, there
+are, immediately outside one angle of the walls, and behind a jutting
+point of the fortification, near the sea, certain common pits—one for
+every day in the year—which all remain closed up, until the turn of each
+comes for its daily reception of dead bodies.  Among the troops in the
+town, there are usually some Swiss: more or less.  When any of these die,
+they are buried out of a fund maintained by such of their countrymen as
+are resident in Genoa.  Their providing coffins for these men is matter
+of great astonishment to the authorities.
+
+Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent splashing down of
+dead people in so many wells, is bad.  It surrounds Death with revolting
+associations, that insensibly become connected with those whom Death is
+approaching.  Indifference and avoidance are the natural result; and all
+the softening influences of the great sorrow are harshly disturbed.
+
+There is a ceremony when an old Cavaliére or the like, expires, of
+erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to represent his bier;
+covering them over with a pall of black velvet; putting his hat and sword
+on the top; making a little square of seats about the whole; and sending
+out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintances to come and sit
+there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal Altar,
+decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose.
+
+When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of death, their
+nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into the country for a
+little change, and leaving the body to be disposed of, without any
+superintendence from them.  The procession is usually formed, and the
+coffin borne, and the funeral conducted, by a body of persons called a
+Confratérnita, who, as a kind of voluntary penance, undertake to perform
+these offices, in regular rotation, for the dead; but who, mingling
+something of pride with their humility, are dressed in a loose garment
+covering their whole person, and wear a hood concealing the face; with
+breathing-holes and apertures for the eyes.  The effect of this costume
+is very ghastly: especially in the case of a certain Blue Confratérnita
+belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of them, are very ugly
+customers, and who look—suddenly encountered in their pious ministration
+in the streets—as if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing off the body
+for themselves.
+
+Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on many
+Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of establishing a current
+account with Heaven, on which to draw, too easily, for future bad
+actions, or as an expiation for past misdeeds, it must be admitted to be
+a good one, and a practical one, and one involving unquestionably good
+works.  A voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed
+penance (not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks to such
+and such a stone in the pavement of the cathedral; or than a vow to the
+Madonna to wear nothing but blue for a year or two.  This is supposed to
+give great delight above; blue being (as is well known) the Madonna’s
+favourite colour.  Women who have devoted themselves to this act of
+Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.
+
+There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now rarely
+opened.  The most important—the Carlo Felice: the opera-house of Genoa—is
+a very splendid, commodious, and beautiful theatre.  A company of
+comedians were acting there, when we arrived: and soon after their
+departure, a second-rate opera company came.  The great season is not
+until the carnival time—in the spring.  Nothing impressed me, so much, in
+my visits here (which were pretty numerous) as the uncommonly hard and
+cruel character of the audience, who resent the slightest defect, take
+nothing good-humouredly, seem to be always lying in wait for an
+opportunity to hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the actors.
+
+But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they are
+allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are resolved to
+make the most of this opportunity.
+
+There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are allowed the
+privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next to nothing:
+gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen being insisted on,
+by the Governor, in all public or semi-public entertainments.  They are
+lofty critics in consequence, and infinitely more exacting than if they
+made the unhappy manager’s fortune.
+
+The TEATRO DIURNO, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open air,
+where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of the
+afternoon; commencing at four or five o’clock, and lasting, some three
+hours.  It is curious, sitting among the audience, to have a fine view of
+the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see the neighbours at their
+windows looking on, and to hear the bells of the churches and convents
+ringing at most complete cross-purposes with the scene.  Beyond this, and
+the novelty of seeing a play in the fresh pleasant air, with the
+darkening evening closing in, there is nothing very exciting or
+characteristic in the performances.  The actors are indifferent; and
+though they sometimes represent one of Goldoni’s comedies, the staple of
+the Drama is French.  Anything like nationality is dangerous to despotic
+governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
+
+The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti—a famous company from Milan—is,
+without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld in my life.
+I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous.  They _look_ between four
+and five feet high, but are really much smaller; for when a musician in
+the orchestra happens to put his hat on the stage, it becomes alarmingly
+gigantic, and almost blots out an actor.  They usually play a comedy, and
+a ballet.  The comic man in the comedy I saw one summer night, is a
+waiter in an hotel.  There never was such a locomotive actor, since the
+world began.  Great pains are taken with him.  He has extra joints in his
+legs: and a practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner
+that is absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
+audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
+everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a man.
+His spirits are prodigious.  He continually shakes his legs, and winks
+his eye.  And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who sits down on
+the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter in the
+regular conventional way, who is tremendous.  No one would suppose it
+possible that anything short of a real man could be so tedious.  It is
+the triumph of art.
+
+In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very hour of
+her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to soothe her.  They
+sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the regular place, O. P. Second
+Entrance!) and a procession of musicians enters; one creature playing a
+drum, and knocking himself off his legs at every blow.  These failing to
+delight her, dancers appear.  Four first; then two; _the_ two; the
+flesh-coloured two.  The way in which they dance; the height to which
+they spring; the impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette;
+the revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a pause,
+on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it; the
+gentleman’s retiring up, when it is the lady’s turn; and the lady’s
+retiring up, when it is the gentleman’s turn; the final passion of a
+pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!—I shall never see a real
+ballet, with a composed countenance again.
+
+I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called ‘St.
+Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.’  It began by the disclosure of
+Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at St.
+Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure announcement:
+
+‘Sir Yew ud se on Low?’ (the _ow_, as in cow).
+
+Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a perfect
+mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a monstrously
+disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-jaw, to express
+his tyrannical and obdurate nature.  He began his system of persecution,
+by calling his prisoner ‘General Buonaparte;’ to which the latter
+replied, with the deepest tragedy, ‘Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not
+thus.  Repeat that phrase and leave me!  I am Napoleon, Emperor of
+France!’  Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him
+with an ordinance of the British Government, regulating the state he
+should preserve, and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his
+attendants to four or five persons.  ‘Four or five for _me_!’ said
+Napoleon.  ‘Me!  One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command;
+and this English officer talks of four or five for _me_!’  Throughout the
+piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was, for
+ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on ‘these
+English officers,’ and ‘these English soldiers;’ to the great
+satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to have Low
+bullied; and who, whenever Low said ‘General Buonaparte’ (which he always
+did: always receiving the same correction), quite execrated him.  It
+would be hard to say why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise
+with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
+
+There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised as an
+Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being discovered, but
+not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to steal his freedom, was
+immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged.  In two very long speeches,
+which Low made memorable, by winding up with ‘Yas!’—to show that he was
+English—which brought down thunders of applause.  Napoleon was so
+affected by this catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was
+carried out by two other puppets.  Judging from what followed, it would
+appear that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
+a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a lady,
+prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children, who kneeled
+down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the last word on his
+lips being ‘Vatterlo.’
+
+It was unspeakably ludicrous.  Buonaparte’s boots were so wonderfully
+beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their own accord:
+doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and dangling in the
+air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of all human knowledge,
+when he was in full speech—mischances which were not rendered the less
+absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted in his face.  To put an end to
+one conference with Low, he had to go to a table, and read a book: when
+it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see his body bending over
+the volume, like a boot-jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring
+obstinately into the pit.  He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an
+immense collar to his shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet.
+So was Dr. Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
+Mawworm’s, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires, hovered
+about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions in the air.  He
+was almost as good as Low, though the latter was great at all times—a
+decided brute and villain, beyond all possibility of mistake.  Low was
+especially fine at the last, when, hearing the doctor and the valet say,
+‘The Emperor is dead!’ he pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece
+(not the watch) by exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, ‘Ha! ha!
+Eleven minutes to six!  The General dead! and the spy hanged!’  This
+brought the curtain down, triumphantly.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
+residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither
+we removed as soon as our three months’ tenancy of the Pink Jail at
+Albaro had ceased and determined.
+
+It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the town:
+surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with statues, vases,
+fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of orange-trees and
+lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias.  All its apartments are
+beautiful in their proportions and decorations; but the great hall, some
+fifty feet in height, with three large windows at the end, overlooking
+the whole town of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords
+one of the most fascinating and delightful prospects in the world.  Any
+house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it
+would be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than
+the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.  It is
+more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave and sober
+lodging.
+
+How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the wild
+fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh colouring as
+if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor, or even the great
+hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade; or how
+there are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use and rarely
+visit, and scarcely know the way through; or how there is a view of a
+perfectly different character on each of the four sides of the building;
+matters little.  But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me.
+I go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred times
+a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents from the
+garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of happiness.
+
+There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many churches,
+monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny sky; and down below
+me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary convent parapet, fashioned
+like a gallery, with an iron across at the end, where sometimes early in
+the morning, I have seen a little group of dark-veiled nuns gliding
+sorrowfully to and fro, and stopping now and then to peep down upon the
+waking world in which they have no part.  Old Monte Faccio, brightest of
+hills in good weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here,
+upon the left.  The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to
+command the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about their ears, in
+case they should be discontented) commands that height upon the right.
+The broad sea lies beyond, in front there; and that line of coast,
+beginning by the light-house, and tapering away, a mere speck in the rosy
+distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads to Nice.  The garden
+near at hand, among the roofs and houses: all red with roses and fresh
+with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola—a public promenade, where the
+military band plays gaily, and the white veils cluster thick, and the
+Genoese nobility ride round, and round, and round, in state-clothes and
+coaches at least, if not in absolute wisdom.  Within a stone’s-throw, as
+it seems, the audience of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned this
+way.  But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of
+the cause, to see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to
+laughter; and odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of applause,
+rattling in the evening air, to which the curtain falls.  But, being
+Sunday night, they act their best and most attractive play.  And now, the
+sun is going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green, and
+golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and to the ringing
+of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at once, without a twilight.  Then,
+lights begin to shine in Genoa, and on the country road; and the
+revolving lanthorn out at sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this
+palace front and portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon
+bursting from behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity.  And
+this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after
+dark, and think it haunted.
+
+My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing worse,
+I will engage.  The same Ghost will occasionally sail away, as I did one
+pleasant autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and sniff the morning
+air at Marseilles.
+
+The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside his
+shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with the natural
+inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were languishing,
+stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to blind corners of the
+establishment, where it was impossible for admirers to penetrate.
+
+The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen hours, and
+we were going to run back again by the Cornice road from Nice: not being
+satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the beautiful towns that rise
+in picturesque white clusters from among the olive woods, and rocks, and
+hills, upon the margin of the Sea.
+
+The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o’clock, was very
+small, and so crowded with goods that there was scarcely room to move;
+neither was there anything to cat on board, except bread; nor to drink,
+except coffee.  But being due at Nice at about eight or so in the
+morning, this was of no consequence; so when we began to wink at the
+bright stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their winking at us, we
+turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little cabin, and slept
+soundly till morning.
+
+The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built, it
+was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice Harbour, where we
+very little expected anything but breakfast.  But we were laden with
+wool.  Wool must not remain in the Custom-house at Marseilles more than
+twelve months at a stretch, without paying duty.  It is the custom to
+make fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this law; to take it
+somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out; bring it straight back
+again; and warehouse it, as a new cargo, for nearly twelve months longer.
+This wool of ours, had come originally from some place in the East.  It
+was recognised as Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour.
+Accordingly, the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which
+had come off to greet us, were warned away by the authorities; we were
+declared in quarantine; and a great flag was solemnly run up to the
+mast-head on the wharf, to make it known to all the town.
+
+It was a very hot day indeed.  We were unshaved, unwashed, undressed,
+unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying blistering in a lazy
+harbour, with the town looking on from a respectful distance, all manner
+of whiskered men in cocked hats discussing our fate at a remote
+guard-house, with gestures (we looked very hard at them through
+telescopes) expressive of a week’s detention at least: and nothing
+whatever the matter all the time.  But even in this crisis the brave
+Courier achieved a triumph.  He telegraphed somebody (_I_ saw nobody)
+either naturally connected with the hotel, or put _en rapport_ with the
+establishment for that occasion only.  The telegraph was answered, and in
+half an hour or less, there came a loud shout from the guard-house.  The
+captain was wanted.  Everybody helped the captain into his boat.
+Everybody got his luggage, and said we were going.  The captain rowed
+away, and disappeared behind a little jutting corner of the
+Galley-slaves’ Prison: and presently came back with something, very
+sulkily.  The brave Courier met him at the side, and received the
+something as its rightful owner.  It was a wicker basket, folded in a
+linen cloth; and in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some
+salt fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so of
+peaches, and a few other trifles.  When we had selected our own
+breakfast, the brave Courier invited a chosen party to partake of these
+refreshments, and assured them that they need not be deterred by motives
+of delicacy, as he would order a second basket to be furnished at their
+expense.  Which he did—no one knew how—and by-and-by, the captain being
+again summoned, again sulkily returned with another something; over which
+my popular attendant presided as before: carving with a clasp-knife, his
+own personal property, something smaller than a Roman sword.
+
+The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected supplies;
+but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman, who got drunk in
+five minutes, and a sturdy Cappuccíno Friar, who had taken everybody’s
+fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily
+believe.
+
+He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing beard; and was
+a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty.  He had come up to us, early
+in the morning, and inquired whether we were sure to be at Nice by
+eleven; saying that he particularly wanted to know, because if we reached
+it by that time he would have to perform Mass, and must deal with the
+consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas, if there were no chance of his being
+in time, he would immediately breakfast.  He made this communication,
+under the idea that the brave Courier was the captain; and indeed he
+looked much more like it than anybody else on board.  Being assured that
+we should arrive in good time, he fasted, and talked, fasting, to
+everybody, with the most charming good humour; answering jokes at the
+expense of friars, with other jokes at the expense of laymen, and saying
+that, friar as he was, he would engage to take up the two strongest men
+on board, one after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the
+deck.  Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could have done
+it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in the Cappuccíno
+dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that can well be.
+
+All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who
+gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate him
+as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an
+unfortunate destiny.  Although his patronage was such as a mouse might
+bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension; and in
+the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe, to slap the
+Friar on the back.
+
+When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass: the Friar went
+to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold meat and bread, drinking
+deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars, taking snuff, sustaining an
+uninterrupted conversation with all hands, and occasionally running to
+the boat’s side and hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence that
+we _must_ be got out of this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to
+take part in a great religious procession in the afternoon.  After this,
+he would come back, laughing lustily from pure good humour: while the
+Frenchman wrinkled his small face into ten thousand creases, and said how
+droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar!  At length the heat of
+the sun without, and the wine within, made the Frenchman sleepy.  So, in
+the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic protégé, he lay down among
+the wool, and began to snore.
+
+It was four o’clock before we were released; and the Frenchman, dirty and
+woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar went ashore.  As
+soon as we were free, we all hurried away, to wash and dress, that we
+might make a decent appearance at the procession; and I saw no more of
+the Frenchman until we took up our station in the main street to see it
+pass, when he squeezed himself into a front place, elaborately renovated;
+threw back his little coat, to show a broad-barred velvet waistcoat,
+sprinkled all over with stars; then adjusted himself and his cane so as
+utterly to bewilder and transfix the Friar, when he should appear.
+
+The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number of
+people divided into small parties; each party chanting nasally, on its
+own account, without reference to any other, and producing a most dismal
+result.  There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on flat boards
+surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals, infantry, tapers, monks,
+nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in green hats, walking under
+crimson parasols: and, here and there, a species of sacred street-lamp
+hoisted on a pole.  We looked out anxiously for the Cappuccíni, and
+presently their brown robes and corded girdles were seen coming on, in a
+body.
+
+I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the Friar
+saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would mentally exclaim, ‘Is
+that my Patron!  _That_ distinguished man!’ and would be covered with
+confusion.  Ah! never was the Frenchman so deceived.  As our friend the
+Cappuccíno advanced, with folded arms, he looked straight into the visage
+of the little Frenchman, with a bland, serene, composed abstraction, not
+to be described.  There was not the faintest trace of recognition or
+amusement on his features; not the smallest consciousness of bread and
+meat, wine, snuff, or cigars.  ‘C’est lui-même,’ I heard the little
+Frenchman say, in some doubt.  Oh yes, it was himself.  It was not his
+brother or his nephew, very like him.  It was he.  He walked in great
+state: being one of the Superiors of the Order: and looked his part to
+admiration.  There never was anything so perfect of its kind as the
+contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on us, his
+late companions, as if he had never seen us in his life and didn’t see us
+then.  The Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat at last, but the
+Friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity; and the
+broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd, was seen no more.
+
+The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that shook all the
+windows in the town.  Next afternoon we started for Genoa, by the famed
+Cornice road.
+
+The half-French, half-Italian Vetturíno, who undertook, with his little
+rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three days, was a
+careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness and singing
+propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on smoothly.  So long, he
+had a word and a smile, and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant
+girls, and odds and ends of the Sonnambula for all the echoes.  So long,
+he went jingling through every little village, with bells on his horses
+and rings in his ears: a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness.  But,
+it was highly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse of
+circumstances, when, in one part of the journey, we came to a narrow
+place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the road.  His hands
+were twined in his hair immediately, as if a combination of all the
+direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen on his devoted head.  He
+swore in French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down, beating his
+feet on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair.  There were various
+carters and mule-drivers assembled round the broken waggon, and at last
+some man of an original turn of mind, proposed that a general and joint
+effort should be made to get things to-rights again, and clear the way—an
+idea which I verily believe would never have presented itself to our
+friend, though we had remained there until now.  It was done at no great
+cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were wound in
+his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten his misery.
+The moment he was on his box once more, and clattering briskly down hill,
+he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant girls, as if it were not in
+the power of misfortune to depress him.
+
+Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful
+road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very
+miserable.  The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean
+and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair
+twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads
+on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too,
+that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or
+crooning together in by-corners, they are like a population of
+Witches—except that they certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or
+any other instrument of cleanliness.  Neither are the pig-skins, in
+common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by
+any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated
+pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their
+own tails.
+
+These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however: nestling, with
+their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill-sides, or
+built upon the brink of noble bays: are charming.  The vegetation is,
+everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel
+feature in the novel scenery.  In one town, San Remo—a most extraordinary
+place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble underneath
+the whole town—there are pretty terrace gardens; in other towns, there is
+the clang of shipwrights’ hammers, and the building of small vessels on
+the beach.  In some of the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at
+anchor.  In every case, each little group of houses presents, in the
+distance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanciful shapes.
+
+The road itself—now high above the glittering sea, which breaks against
+the foot of the precipice: now turning inland to sweep the shore of a
+bay: now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream: now low down on the
+beach: now winding among riven rocks of many forms and colours: now
+chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built, in
+old time, to protect the coast from the invasions of the Barbary
+Corsairs—presents new beauties every moment.  When its own striking
+scenery is passed, and it trails on through a long line of suburb, lying
+on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that
+noble city and its harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened by
+every huge, unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts: and
+coming to its climax when the city gate is reached, and all Genoa with
+its beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the
+view.
+
+
+
+
+TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA
+
+
+I STROLLED away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good many
+places (England among them), but first for Piacenza; for which town I
+started in the _coupé_ of a machine something like a travelling caravan,
+in company with the brave Courier, and a lady with a large dog, who
+howled dolefully, at intervals, all night.  It was very wet, and very
+cold; very dark, and very dismal; we travelled at the rate of barely four
+miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment.  At ten o’clock next
+morning, we changed coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in
+another coach (the body whereof would have been small for a fly), in
+company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his companion—who carried
+their breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting
+into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black stocking
+and his black knee-shorts, that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia’s
+closet, only it was visible on both legs—a provincial Avvocáto; and a
+gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular sheen upon
+it, which I never observed in the human subject before.  In this way we
+travelled on, until four o’clock in the afternoon; the roads being still
+very heavy, and the coach very slow.  To mend the matter, the old priest
+was troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible
+yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts of
+the company; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity.  This
+disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of conversation.
+Finding, in the afternoon, that the _coupé_ had discharged two people,
+and had only one passenger inside—a monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great
+purple moustache, of which no man could see the ends when he had his hat
+on—I took advantage of its better accommodation, and in company with this
+gentleman (who was very conversational and good-humoured) travelled on,
+until nearly eleven o’clock at night, when the driver reported that he
+couldn’t think of going any farther, and we accordingly made a halt at a
+place called Stradella.
+
+The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard where our
+coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and firewood, were all
+heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that you didn’t know, and
+couldn’t have taken your oath, which was a fowl and which was a cart.  We
+followed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into a great, cold room,
+where there were two immensely broad beds, on what looked like two
+immensely broad deal dining-tables; another deal table of similar
+dimensions in the middle of the bare floor; four windows; and two chairs.
+Somebody said it was my room; and I walked up and down it, for half an
+hour or so, staring at the Tuscan, the old priest, the young priest, and
+the Avvocáto (Red-Nose lived in the town, and had gone home), who sat
+upon their beds, and stared at me in return.
+
+The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the proceedings, is
+interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he had been cooking) that
+supper is ready; and to the priest’s chamber (the next room and the
+counterpart of mine) we all adjourn.  The first dish is a cabbage, boiled
+with a great quantity of rice in a tureen full of water, and flavoured
+with cheese.  It is so hot, and we are so cold, that it appears almost
+jolly.  The second dish is some little bits of pork, fried with pigs’
+kidneys.  The third, two red fowls.  The fourth, two little red turkeys.
+The fifth, a huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I don’t know what
+else; and this concludes the entertainment.
+
+Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the dampest, the
+door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the middle of such a
+quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood taking a winter walk.  He
+kindles this heap in a twinkling, and produces a jorum of hot brandy and
+water; for that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and now
+holds nothing but the purest _eau de vie_.  When he has accomplished this
+feat, he retires for the night; and I hear him, for an hour afterwards,
+and indeed until I fall asleep, making jokes in some outhouse (apparently
+under the pillow), where he is smoking cigars with a party of
+confidential friends.  He never was in the house in his life before; but
+he knows everybody everywhere, before he has been anywhere five minutes;
+and is certain to have attracted to himself, in the meantime, the
+enthusiastic devotion of the whole establishment.
+
+This is at twelve o’clock at night.  At four o’clock next morning, he is
+up again, fresher than a full-blown rose; making blazing fires without
+the least authority from the landlord; producing mugs of scalding coffee
+when nobody else can get anything but cold water; and going out into the
+dark streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on the chance of somebody with
+a cow getting up to supply it.  While the horses are ‘coming,’ I stumble
+out into the town too.  It seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold
+damp wind blowing in and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of
+pattern.  But it is profoundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn’t
+know it to-morrow, if I were taken there to try.  Which Heaven forbid.
+
+The horses arrive in about an hour.  In the interval, the driver swears;
+sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan oaths.  Sometimes, when it is
+a long, compound oath, he begins with Christianity and merges into
+Paganism.  Various messengers are despatched; not so much after the
+horses, as after each other; for the first messenger never comes back,
+and all the rest imitate him.  At length the horses appear, surrounded by
+all the messengers; some kicking them, and some dragging them, and all
+shouting abuse to them.  Then, the old priest, the young priest, the
+Avvocáto, the Tuscan, and all of us, take our places; and sleepy voices
+proceeding from the doors of extraordinary hutches in divers parts of the
+yard, cry out ‘Addio corrière mio!  Buon’ viággio, corrière!’
+Salutations which the courier, with his face one monstrous grin, returns
+in like manner as we go jolting and wallowing away, through the mud.
+
+At Piacenza, which was four or five hours’ journey from the inn at
+Stradella, we broke up our little company before the hotel door, with
+divers manifestations of friendly feeling on all sides.  The old priest
+was taken with the cramp again, before he had got half-way down the
+street; and the young priest laid the bundle of books on a door-step,
+while he dutifully rubbed the old gentleman’s legs.  The client of the
+Avvocáto was waiting for him at the yard-gate, and kissed him on each
+cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am afraid he had either a
+very bad case, or a scantily-furnished purse.  The Tuscan, with a cigar
+in his mouth, went loitering off, carrying his hat in his hand that he
+might the better trail up the ends of his dishevelled moustache.  And the
+brave Courier, as he and I strolled away to look about us, began
+immediately to entertain me with the private histories and family affairs
+of the whole party.
+
+A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is.  A deserted, solitary,
+grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches, which
+afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that wander about them; and
+streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other houses over the
+way.  The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go wandering about, with
+the double curse of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their
+misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of children play with their
+impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters; and the
+gauntest of dogs trot in and out of the dullest of archways, in perpetual
+search of something to eat, which they never seem to find.  A mysterious
+and solemn Palace, guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the
+place, stands gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king with
+the marble legs, who flourished in the time of the thousand and one
+Nights, might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy,
+in his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out.
+
+What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to ramble
+through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun!  Each, in its
+turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreary, God-forgotten towns in
+the wide world, the chief.  Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used
+to be, and where a noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman
+station here, I became aware that I have never known till now, what it is
+to be lazy.  A dormouse must surely be in very much the same condition
+before he retires under the wool in his cage; or a tortoise before he
+buries himself.
+
+I feel that I am getting rusty.  That any attempt to think, would be
+accompanied with a creaking noise.  That there is nothing, anywhere, to
+be done, or needing to be done.  That there is no more human progress,
+motion, effort, or advancement, of any kind beyond this.  That the whole
+scheme stopped here centuries ago, and laid down to rest until the Day of
+Judgment.
+
+Never while the brave Courier lives!  Behold him jingling out of
+Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise ever
+seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were peeping over
+a garden wall; while the postilion, concentrated essence of all the
+shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to
+touch his hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than
+himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch’s show outside the town.
+
+In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trellis-work,
+supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in themselves, are anything
+but picturesque.  But, here, they twine them around trees, and let them
+trail among the hedges; and the vineyards are full of trees, regularly
+planted for this purpose, each with its own vine twining and clustering
+about it.  Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest red;
+and never was anything so enchantingly graceful and full of beauty.
+Through miles of these delightful forms and colours, the road winds its
+way.  The wild festoons, the elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of
+all shapes; the fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them
+prisoners in sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon
+the ground; how rich and beautiful they are!  And every now and then, a
+long, long line of trees, will be all bound and garlanded together: as if
+they had taken hold of one another, and were coming dancing down the
+field!
+
+Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
+consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note.
+Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral, Baptistery, and
+Campanile—ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with
+innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in
+marble and red stone—are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose.
+Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw them, by the
+twittering of the many birds that were flying in and out of the crevices
+in the stones and little nooks in the architecture, where they had made
+their nests.  They were busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made
+with hands, into the sunny air of Heaven.  Not so the worshippers within,
+who were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
+kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed down,
+in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa and everywhere
+else.
+
+The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is covered,
+have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing influence.  It
+is miserable to see great works of art—something of the Souls of
+Painters—perishing and fading away, like human forms.  This cathedral is
+odorous with the rotting of Correggio’s frescoes in the Cupola.  Heaven
+knows how beautiful they may have been at one time.  Connoisseurs fall
+into raptures with them now; but such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such
+heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled
+together: no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest
+delirium.
+
+There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the roof supported
+by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to be at least one
+beggar in ambush: to say nothing of the tombs and secluded altars.  From
+every one of these lurking-places, such crowds of phantom-looking men and
+women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs, or chattering
+jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad
+infirmity, came hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the
+cathedral above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this
+lower church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or
+exhibited a more confounding display of arms and legs.
+
+There is Petrarch’s Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery, with its
+beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery containing some
+very remarkable pictures, whereof a few were being copied by hairy-faced
+artists, with little velvet caps more off their heads than on.  There is
+the Farnese Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of
+decay that ever was seen—a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away.
+
+It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower seats
+arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy chambers;
+rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their proud state.
+Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre, enhanced in the
+spectator’s fancy by its gay intention and design, none but worms can be
+familiar with.  A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was
+acted here.  The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof; the boxes
+are dropping down, wasting away, and only tenanted by rats; damp and
+mildew smear the faded colours, and make spectral maps upon the panels;
+lean rags are dangling down where there were gay festoons on the
+Proscenium; the stage has rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery is
+thrown across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the
+visitor in the gloomy depth beneath.  The desolation and decay impress
+themselves on all the senses.  The air has a mouldering smell, and an
+earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost
+sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot
+have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will seam
+and roughen a smooth hand.  If ever Ghosts act plays, they act them on
+this ghostly stage.
+
+It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the
+darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting the main
+street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by the bright
+sky, so wonderfully blue.  I passed from all the glory of the day, into a
+dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing, feeble tapers were
+burning, people were kneeling in all directions before all manner of
+shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the usual chant, in the
+usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone.
+
+Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this same
+Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same
+torpid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly
+scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was
+blown.  Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian company
+from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls of the church, and
+flouting, with their horses’ heels, the griffins, lions, tigers, and
+other monsters in stone and marble, decorating its exterior.  First,
+there came a stately nobleman with a great deal of hair, and no hat,
+bearing an enormous banner, on which was inscribed, MAZEPPA! TO-NIGHT!
+Then, a Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder,
+like Hercules.  Then, six or eight Roman chariots: each with a beautiful
+lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally pink tights, erect
+within: shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in which there was a
+latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for which I couldn’t
+account, until, as the open back of each chariot presented itself, I saw
+the immense difficulty with which the pink legs maintained their
+perpendicular, over the uneven pavement of the town: which gave me quite
+a new idea of the ancient Romans and Britons.  The procession was brought
+to a close, by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations,
+riding two and two, and haughtily surveying the tame population of
+Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally condescended to scatter
+largesse in the form of a few handbills.  After caracolling among the
+lions and tigers, and proclaiming that evening’s entertainments with
+blast of trumpet, it then filed off, by the other end of the square, and
+left a new and greatly increased dulness behind.
+
+When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the shrill trumpet
+was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse was hopelessly
+round the corner, the people who had come out of the church to stare at
+it, went back again.  But one old lady, kneeling on the pavement within,
+near the door, had seen it all, and had been immensely interested,
+without getting up; and this old lady’s eye, at that juncture, I happened
+to catch: to our mutual confusion.  She cut our embarrassment very short,
+however, by crossing herself devoutly, and going down, at full length, on
+her face, before a figure in a fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which
+was so like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps at this hour she
+may think the whole appearance a celestial vision.  Anyhow, I must
+certainly have forgiven her her interest in the Circus, though I had been
+her Father Confessor.
+
+There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, in the
+cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no effort to see the bucket
+(kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena took away from the
+people of Bologna in the fourteenth century, and about which there was
+war made and a mock-heroic poem by TASSONE, too.  Being quite content,
+however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast, in imagination,
+on the bucket within; and preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall
+Campanile, and about the cathedral; I have no personal knowledge of this
+bucket, even at the present time.
+
+Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the Guide-Book)
+would have considered that we had half done justice to the wonders of
+Modena.  But it is such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind, and
+still go on, encountering newer scenes—and, moreover, I have such a
+perverse disposition in respect of sights that are cut, and dried, and
+dictated—that I fear I sin against similar authorities in every place I
+visit.
+
+Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I found myself
+walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs and
+colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted by a little
+Cicerone of that town, who was excessively anxious for the honour of the
+place, and most solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments:
+whereas he was never tired of extolling the good ones.  Seeing this
+little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have nothing
+in his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking wistfully at a certain
+plot of grass, I asked him who was buried there.  ‘The poor people,
+Signore,’ he said, with a shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at
+me—for he always went on a little before, and took off his hat to
+introduce every new monument.  ‘Only the poor, Signore!  It’s very
+cheerful.  It’s very lively.  How green it is, how cool!  It’s like a
+meadow!  There are five,’—holding up all the fingers of his right hand to
+express the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it be
+within the compass of his ten fingers,—‘there are five of my little
+children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the right.  Well!
+Thanks to God!  It’s very cheerful.  How green it is, how cool it is!
+It’s quite a meadow!’
+
+He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him, took
+a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made a little bow;
+partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a subject, and partly
+in memory of the children and of his favourite saint.  It was as
+unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow, as ever man made.
+Immediately afterwards, he took his hat off altogether, and begged to
+introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his teeth shone
+brighter than before.
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
+
+
+THERE was such a very smart official in attendance at the Cemetery where
+the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when the little
+Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in
+presenting this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a
+couple of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked incredulously
+at his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling
+buttons, and rebuked the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head.
+For, in splendour of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy
+Usher of the Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler
+would say, ‘such a thing as tenpence’ away with him, seemed monstrous.
+He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it him,
+and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would have been a
+bargain at double the money.
+
+It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the people—at all
+events he was doing so; and when I compared him, like Gulliver in
+Brobdingnag, ‘with the Institutions of my own beloved country, I could
+not refrain from tears of pride and exultation.’  He had no pace at all;
+no more than a tortoise.  He loitered as the people loitered, that they
+might gratify their curiosity; and positively allowed them, now and then,
+to read the inscriptions on the tombs.  He was neither shabby, nor
+insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant.  He spoke his own language with
+perfect propriety, and seemed to consider himself, in his way, a kind of
+teacher of the people, and to entertain a just respect both for himself
+and them.  They would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster
+Abbey, than they would let the people in (as they do at Bologna) to see
+the monuments for nothing. {272}
+
+Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky; with heavy
+arcades over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and more
+cheerful archways in the newer portions of the town.  Again, brown piles
+of sacred buildings, with more birds flying in and out of chinks in the
+stones; and more snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars.  Again,
+rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells, priests in
+bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses, images,
+and artificial flowers.
+
+There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom
+upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and separate impression in the
+mind, among a crowd of cities, though it were not still further marked in
+the traveller’s remembrance by the two brick leaning towers (sufficiently
+unsightly in themselves, it must be acknowledged), inclining cross-wise
+as if they were bowing stiffly to each other—a most extraordinary
+termination to the perspective of some of the narrow streets.  The
+colleges, and churches too, and palaces: and above all the academy of
+Fine Arts, where there are a host of interesting pictures, especially by
+GUIDO, DOMENICHINO, and LUDOVICO CARACCI: give it a place of its own in
+the memory.  Even though these were not, and there were nothing else to
+remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement of the church of San
+Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time among the kneeling people,
+would give it a fanciful and pleasant interest.
+
+Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an inundation
+which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was quartered up at the
+top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room which I never could find:
+containing a bed, big enough for a boarding-school, which I couldn’t fall
+asleep in.  The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely retreat,
+where there was no other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over
+the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the English; and the
+subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron.  I made the discovery
+by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the matting with
+which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at that season, when he
+immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been much attached to that kind
+of matting.  Observing, at the same moment, that I took no milk, he
+exclaimed with enthusiasm, that Milor Beeron had never touched it.  At
+first, I took it for granted, in my innocence, that he had been one of
+the Beeron servants; but no, he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking
+about my Lord, to English gentlemen; that was all.  He knew all about
+him, he said.  In proof of it, he connected him with every possible
+topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was grown on an
+estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was the very model of
+his.  When I left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard, a
+parting assurance that the road by which I was going, had been Milor
+Beeron’s favourite ride; and before the horse’s feet had well begun to
+clatter on the pavement, he ran briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to
+tell some other Englishman in some other solitary room that the guest who
+had just departed was Lord Beeron’s living image.
+
+I had entered Bologna by night—almost midnight—and all along the road
+thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory: which is not, in
+any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter’s keys being rather rusty
+now; the driver had so worried about the danger of robbers in travelling
+after dark, and had so infected the brave Courier, and the two had been
+so constantly stopping and getting up and down to look after a
+portmanteau which was tied on behind, that I should have felt almost
+obliged to any one who would have had the goodness to take it away.
+Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left Bologna, we should start
+so as not to arrive at Ferrara later than eight at night; and a
+delightful afternoon and evening journey it was, albeit through a flat
+district which gradually became more marshy from the overflow of brooks
+and rivers in the recent heavy rains.
+
+At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I
+arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental
+operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to
+me, and which I see distinctly now.  There was not much in it.  In the
+blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the
+evening wind; upon its margin a few trees.  In the foreground was a group
+of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, and
+looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance, a
+deep bell; the shade of approaching night on everything.  If I had been
+murdered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember
+the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood;
+and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so
+strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could
+forget it.
+
+More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any
+city of the solemn brotherhood!  The grass so grows up in the silent
+streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while the sun
+shines.  But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara;
+and the people are so few who pass and re-pass through the places, that
+the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the
+squares.
+
+I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next
+door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor feel as if the beating
+hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy!  I wonder
+why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with
+unnecessary doors that can’t be shut, and will not open, and abut on
+pitchy darkness!  I wonder why it is not enough that these distrustful
+genii stand agape at one’s dreams all night, but there must also be round
+open portholes, high in the wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is
+heard behind the wainscot, of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes,
+in his endeavours to reach one of these portholes and look in!  I wonder
+why the faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony
+of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of cold and
+suffocation at all other times!  I wonder, above all, why it is the great
+feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all the fire goes
+up the chimney, except the smoke!
+
+The answer matters little.  Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke, and
+faggots, are welcome to me.  Give me the smiling face of the attendant,
+man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to please and to
+be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air—so many jewels set in
+dirt—and I am theirs again to-morrow!
+
+ARIOSTO’S house, TASSO’S prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral, and more
+churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara.  But the long silent
+streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners,
+and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long-untrodden stairs,
+are the best sights of all.
+
+The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise one fine
+morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it seemed unreal and
+spectral.  It was no matter that the people were not yet out of bed; for
+if they had all been up and busy, they would have made but little
+difference in that desert of a place.  It was best to see it, without a
+single figure in the picture; a city of the dead, without one solitary
+survivor.  Pestilence might have ravaged streets, squares, and
+market-places; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses, battered
+down their doors and windows, and made breaches in their roofs.  In one
+part, a great tower rose into the air; the only landmark in the
+melancholy view.  In another, a prodigious castle, with a moat about it,
+stood aloof: a sullen city in itself.  In the black dungeons of this
+castle, Parisina and her lover were beheaded in the dead of night.  The
+red light, beginning to shine when I looked back upon it, stained its
+walls without, as they have, many a time, been stained within, in old
+days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and the city might
+have been avoided by all human creatures, from the moment when the axe
+went down upon the last of the two lovers: and might have never vibrated
+to another sound
+
+    Beyond the blow that to the block
+    Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.
+
+Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running fiercely, we
+crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so came into the Austrian
+territory, and resumed our journey: through a country of which, for some
+miles, a great part was under water.  The brave Courier and the soldiery
+had first quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our eternal
+passport.  But this was a daily relaxation with the Brave, who was always
+stricken deaf when shabby functionaries in uniform came, as they
+constantly did come, plunging out of wooden boxes to look at it—or in
+other words to beg—and who, stone deaf to my entreaties that the man
+might have a trifle given him, and we resume our journey in peace, was
+wont to sit reviling the functionary in broken English: while the
+unfortunate man’s face was a portrait of mental agony framed in the coach
+window, from his perfect ignorance of what was being said to his
+disparagement.
+
+There was a postilion, in the course of this day’s journey, as wild and
+savagely good-looking a vagabond as you would desire to see.  He was a
+tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned fellow, with a profusion of shaggy
+black hair hanging all over his face, and great black whiskers stretching
+down his throat.  His dress was a torn suit of rifle green, garnished
+here and there with red; a steeple-crowned hat, innocent of nap, with a
+broken and bedraggled feather stuck in the band; and a flaming red
+neckerchief hanging on his shoulders.  He was not in the saddle, but
+reposed, quite at his ease, on a sort of low foot-board in front of the
+postchaise, down amongst the horses’ tails—convenient for having his
+brains kicked out, at any moment.  To this Brigand, the brave Courier,
+when we were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest the practicability
+of going faster.  He received the proposal with a perfect yell of
+derision; brandished his whip about his head (such a whip! it was more
+like a home-made bow); flung up his heels, much higher than the horses;
+and disappeared, in a paroxysm, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the
+axle-tree.  I fully expected to see him lying in the road, a hundred
+yards behind, but up came the steeple-crowned hat again, next minute, and
+he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining himself with the idea,
+and crying, ‘Ha, ha! what next!  Oh the devil!  Faster too!
+Shoo—hoo—o—o!’  (This last ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.)
+Being anxious to reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured,
+by-and-by, to repeat the experiment on my own account.  It produced
+exactly the same effect.  Round flew the whip with the same scornful
+flourish, up came the heels, down went the steeple-crowned hat, and
+presently he reappeared, reposing as before and saying to himself, ‘Ha
+ha! what next!  Faster too!  Oh the devil!  Shoo—hoo—o—o!’
+
+
+
+
+AN ITALIAN DREAM
+
+
+I HAD been travelling, for some days; resting very little in the night,
+and never in the day.  The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties
+that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a crowd
+of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I
+travelled on, by a solitary road.  At intervals, some one among them
+would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and enable
+me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness.
+After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern;
+and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some
+not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen,
+lingering behind it, and coming through it.  This was no sooner visible
+than, in its turn, it melted into something else.
+
+At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged churches
+of Modena.  As I recognised the curious pillars with grim monsters for
+their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by themselves in the quiet
+square at Padua, where there were the staid old University, and the
+figures, demurely gowned, grouped here and there in the open space about
+it.  Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city,
+admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and
+orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before.  In their stead arose,
+immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all
+these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous
+moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance,
+came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the solitary,
+grass-grown, withered town.  In short, I had that incoherent but
+delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have, and are
+indolently willing to encourage.  Every shake of the coach in which I
+sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection out
+of its place, and to jerk some other new recollection into it; and in
+this state I fell asleep.
+
+I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of the
+coach.  It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside.  There lay
+here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of the same
+mournful colour.  When I had taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled,
+by two men, towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea.
+
+Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind.  It ruffled the water,
+and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before the stars.  I
+could not but think how strange it was, to be floating away at that hour:
+leaving the land behind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea.
+It soon began to burn brighter; and from being one light became a cluster
+of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the water, as the boat approached
+towards them by a dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts
+and piles.
+
+We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I heard it
+rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at hand.  Looking out
+attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a something black and massive—like
+a shore, but lying close and flat upon the water, like a raft—which we
+were gliding past.  The chief of the two rowers said it was a
+burial-place.
+
+Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there, in the
+lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should recede in our
+path, when it was quickly shut out from my view.  Before I knew by what,
+or how, I found that we were gliding up a street—a phantom street; the
+houses rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding
+on beneath their windows.  Lights were shining from some of these
+casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream with their reflected
+rays, but all was profoundly silent.
+
+So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our course
+through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water.
+Some of the corners where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow,
+that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them; but the
+rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on without
+a pause.  Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like our own,
+echoed the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours)
+would come flitting past us like a dark shadow.  Other boats, of the same
+sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to
+dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water.  Some of these
+were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I saw some
+figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace: gaily
+dressed, and attended by torch-bearers.  It was but a glimpse I had of
+them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready
+to fall down and crush us: one of the many bridges that perplexed the
+Dream: blotted them out, instantly.  On we went, floating towards the
+heart of this strange place—with water all about us where never water was
+elsewhere—clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings
+growing out of it—and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.
+Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I
+thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which
+it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous
+construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of
+hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people
+walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large
+mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries
+innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up
+and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
+
+The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its freshness,
+motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its clear blue sky
+and rustling air; no waking words can tell.  But, from my window, I
+looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on
+groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on wide
+quays, strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on great
+ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on islands, crowned with
+gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the
+light, atop of wondrous churches, springing from the sea!  Going down
+upon the margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling
+all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and such
+grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison with its
+absorbing loveliness.
+
+It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest, in the
+deep ocean.  On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic and
+magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the earth, in the
+high prime and fulness of their youth.  Cloisters and galleries: so
+light, they might have been the work of fairy hands: so strong that
+centuries had battered them in vain: wound round and round this palace,
+and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies
+of the East.  At no great distance from its porch, a lofty tower,
+standing by itself, and rearing its proud head, alone, into the sky,
+looked out upon the Adriatic Sea.  Near to the margin of the stream, were
+two ill-omened pillars of red granite; one having on its top, a figure
+with a sword and shield; the other, a winged lion.  Not far from these
+again, a second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even
+here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming with
+gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a mimic sun
+revolving in its course around them: while above, two bronze giants
+hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell.  An oblong square of lofty
+houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a light and beautiful arcade,
+formed part of this enchanted scene; and, here and there, gay masts for
+flags rose, tapering, from the pavement of the unsubstantial ground.
+
+I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many
+arches: traversing its whole extent.  A grand and dreamy structure, of
+immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim
+with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and
+metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
+saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
+woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened
+distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal,
+fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout.  I thought I entered the old
+palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old
+rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures,
+from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on
+canvas, fought and conquered as of old.  I thought I wandered through its
+halls of state and triumph—bare and empty now!—and musing on its pride
+and might, extinct: for that was past; all past: heard a voice say, ‘Some
+tokens of its ancient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall,
+may be traced here, yet!’
+
+I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms, communicating
+with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a lofty bridge
+crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs.
+
+But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions’
+mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I
+thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been
+dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark.  So, when I saw
+the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, and
+the door by which they passed out, when they were condemned—a door that
+never closed upon a man with life and hope before him—my heart appeared
+to die within me.
+
+It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from the
+cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful,
+horrible stone cells.  They were quite dark.  Each had a loop-hole in its
+massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was placed—I
+dreamed—to light the prisoner within, for half an hour.  The captives, by
+the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in
+the blackened vaults.  I saw them.  For their labour with a rusty nail’s
+point, had outlived their agony and them, through many generations.
+
+One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty
+hours; being marked for dead before he entered it.  Hard by, another, and
+a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came—a monk
+brown-robed, and hooded—ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but in
+the midnight of that murky prison, Hope’s extinguisher, and Murder’s
+herald.  I had my foot upon the spot, where, at the same dread hour, the
+shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty
+door—low-browed and stealthy—through which the lumpish sack was carried
+out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a
+net.
+
+Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking the
+rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime within:
+stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as if the very
+stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a smooth road for the
+removal of the bodies of the secret victims of the State—a road so ready
+that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel
+officer—flowed the same water that filled this Dream of mine, and made it
+seem one, even at the time.
+
+Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
+Giant’s—I had some imaginary recollection of an old man abdicating,
+coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he heard the bell,
+proclaiming his successor—I glided off, in one of the dark boats, until
+we came to an old arsenal guarded by four marble lions.  To make my Dream
+more monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon
+its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown
+language; so that their purport was a mystery to all men.
+
+There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships, and
+little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no more, as I
+have said.  Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found drifting on the sea; a
+strange flag hoisted in its honourable stations, and strangers standing
+at its helm.  A splendid barge in which its ancient chief had gone forth,
+pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no
+more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection
+like the city’s greatness; and it told of what had been (so are the
+strong and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the
+massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships that
+had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth.
+
+An armoury was there yet.  Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury.  With
+a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull air of its
+cage.  Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were hoarded there;
+crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears; swords, daggers,
+maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes.  Plates of wrought steel and iron,
+to make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales; and one
+spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to do its
+office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned darts.
+
+One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly
+contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men’s bones, and tear
+and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths.  Before it, were
+two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth
+upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small
+knob or anvil, where the directing devil could repose his elbow at his
+ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and
+confessions of the wretch within.  There was that grim resemblance in
+them to the human shape—they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained
+and cramped—that it was difficult to think them empty; and terrible
+distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me, when, taking to
+my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or public walk in the sea,
+where there were grass and trees.  But I forgot them when I stood upon
+its farthest brink—I stood there, in my dream—and looked, along the
+ripple, to the setting sun; before me, in the sky and on the deep, a
+crimson flush; and behind me the whole city resolving into streaks of red
+and purple, on the water.
+
+In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of
+time, and had but little understanding of its flight.  But there were
+days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of
+lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought:
+plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as
+my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.
+
+Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I
+wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through labyrinths
+of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments where the
+furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering away.  Pictures
+were there, replete with such enduring beauty and expression: with such
+passion, truth and power: that they seemed so many young and fresh
+realities among a host of spectres.  I thought these, often intermingled
+with the old days of the city: with its beauties, tyrants, captains,
+patriots, merchants, counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and
+bricks, and public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the
+walls.  Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped
+and oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and went
+on in my dream.
+
+Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane and
+chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon the water,
+where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap.  Past
+open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through
+which some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual
+shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves.  Past quays and
+terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and repassing, and
+where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on
+flights of steps.  Past bridges, where there were idlers too; loitering
+and looking over.  Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height,
+before the loftiest windows of the loftiest houses.  Past plots of
+garden, theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of
+architecture—Gothic—Saracenic—fanciful with all the fancies of all times
+and countries.  Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and
+white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.
+Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last
+into a Grand Canal!  There, in the errant fancy of my dream, I saw old
+Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with shops and
+humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for Desdemona’s,
+leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower.  And, in the
+dream, I thought that Shakespeare’s spirit was abroad upon the water
+somewhere: stealing through the city.
+
+At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin, in a
+gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that the
+great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light, and that
+its whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting
+themselves in splendid coffee-houses opening from it—which were never
+shut, I thought, but open all night long.  When the bronze giants struck
+the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation of the
+city were all centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent
+quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen
+wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.
+
+But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking at
+their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town: crept the
+water always.  Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and round it, in its
+many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when
+people should look down into its depths for any stone of the old city
+that had claimed to be its mistress.
+
+Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona.
+I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this strange Dream upon
+the water: half-wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be VENICE.
+
+
+
+
+BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO
+SWITZERLAND
+
+
+I HAD been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out
+of conceit with Romeo and Juliet.  But, I was no sooner come into the old
+market-place, than the misgiving vanished.  It is so fanciful, quaint,
+and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety
+of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core of
+even this romantic town: scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful
+of stories.
+
+It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House
+of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little inn.  Noisy
+vetturíni and muddy market-carts were disputing possession of the yard,
+which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered
+geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a doorway,
+who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over
+the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times.  The
+orchard fell into other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but
+there used to be one attached to the house—or at all events there may
+have, been,—and the hat (Cappêllo) the ancient cognizance of the family,
+may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard.  The
+geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the
+way of the story, it must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter
+to have found the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the
+disused rooms.  But the hat was unspeakably comfortable; and the place
+where the garden used to be, hardly less so.  Besides, the house is a
+distrustful, jealous-looking house as one would desire to see, though of
+a very moderate size.  So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable
+mansion of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my
+acknowledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the
+Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at the
+geese; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one particular of
+being very great indeed in the ‘Family’ way.
+
+From Juliet’s home, to Juliet’s tomb, is a transition as natural to the
+visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet that ever
+has taught the torches to burn bright in any time.  So, I went off, with
+a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging to an old, old convent, I
+suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman
+who was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh plants and
+young flowers were prettily growing among fragments of old wall, and
+ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown a little tank, or water-trough, which
+the bright-eyed woman—drying her arms upon her ‘kerchief, called ‘La
+tomba di Giulietta la sfortunáta.’  With the best disposition in the
+world to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright-eyed
+woman believed; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary fee in
+ready money.  It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that
+Juliet’s resting-place was forgotten.  However consolatory it may have
+been to Yorick’s Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and,
+twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet
+to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as
+come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.
+
+Pleasant Verona!  With its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in
+the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded
+galleries.  With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and
+casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred years
+ago.  With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture,
+and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and
+Capulets once resounded,
+
+    And made Verona’s ancient citizens
+    Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,
+    To wield old partizans.
+
+With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving
+cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful!  Pleasant Verona!
+
+In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Brá—a spirit of old time among the
+familiar realities of the passing hour—is the great Roman Amphitheatre.
+So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is
+there, unbroken.  Over certain of the arches, the old Roman numerals may
+yet be seen; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subterranean
+passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground and below, as when
+the fierce thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of
+the arena.  Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the
+walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one
+kind or other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the
+parapet.  But little else is greatly changed.
+
+When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone up
+to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama
+closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed
+to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw,
+with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being
+represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats.  The comparison is a
+homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was
+irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless.
+
+An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before—the same troop, I
+dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at Modena—and had
+scooped out a little ring at one end of the area; where their
+performances had taken place, and where the marks of their horses’ feet
+were still fresh.  I could not but picture to myself, a handful of
+spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone seats, and a
+spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with the grim
+walls looking on.  Above all, I thought how strangely those Roman mutes
+would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling English,
+where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach: dressed
+in a blue-tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a
+white hat: comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an
+English lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red
+spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up
+parasol.
+
+I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and could
+have walked there until now, I think.  In one place, there was a very
+pretty modern theatre, where they had just performed the opera (always
+popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet.  In another there was a
+collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains,
+presided over by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic
+himself; for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he had
+unlocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he described
+the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them: he was so very old.  In
+another place, there was a gallery of pictures: so abominably bad, that
+it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away.  But anywhere: in
+the churches, among the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down
+beside the river: it was always pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance
+always will be.
+
+I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night—of course,
+no Englishman had ever read it there, before—and set out for Mantua next
+day at sunrise, repeating to myself (in the _coupé_ of an omnibus, and
+next to the conductor, who was reading the Mysteries of Paris),
+
+    There is no world without Verona’s walls
+    But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
+    Hence-banished is banished from the world,
+    And world’s exile is death—
+
+which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty miles
+after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy and boldness.
+
+Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I wonder!  Did it wind
+through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and
+dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees!  Those purple mountains lay
+on the horizon, then, for certain; and the dresses of these peasant
+girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English
+‘life-preserver’ through their hair behind, can hardly be much changed.
+The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning, and so exquisite a sunrise,
+can have been no stranger, even to an exiled lover’s breast; and Mantua
+itself must have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and
+walls, and water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial
+omnibus.  He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two
+rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long, covered, wooden
+bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of
+stagnant Mantua.
+
+If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place of
+residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a
+perfect fitness of things.  It may have been more stirring then, perhaps.
+If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his time, and knew what
+Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-four.  He fasted much, and
+that assisted him in his foreknowledge.
+
+I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room
+arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest little
+tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery surrounding a
+court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man looked in, to inquire if
+the gentleman would have a Cicerone to show the town.  His face was so
+very wistful and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there was so
+much poverty expressed in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in
+the thread-bare worsted glove with which he held it—not expressed the
+less, because these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped
+on—that I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him.  I engaged
+him on the instant, and he stepped in directly.
+
+While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood, beaming
+by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing my hat with his arm.
+If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was francs, there could not
+have shot over the twilight of his shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as
+lighted up the whole man, now that he was hired.
+
+‘Well!’ said I, when I was ready, ‘shall we go out now?’
+
+‘If the gentleman pleases.  It is a beautiful day.  A little fresh, but
+charming; altogether charming.  The gentleman will allow me to open the
+door.  This is the Inn Yard.  The court-yard of the Golden Lion!  The
+gentleman will please to mind his footing on the stairs.’
+
+We were now in the street.
+
+‘This is the street of the Golden Lion.  This, the outside of the Golden
+Lion.  The interesting window up there, on the first Piano, where the
+pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman’s chamber!’
+
+Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there were much
+to see in Mantua.
+
+‘Well!  Truly, no.  Not much!  So, so,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders
+apologetically.
+
+‘Many churches?’
+
+‘No.  Nearly all suppressed by the French.’
+
+‘Monasteries or convents?’
+
+‘No.  The French again!  Nearly all suppressed by Napoleon.’
+
+‘Much business?’
+
+‘Very little business.’
+
+‘Many strangers?’
+
+‘Ah Heaven!’
+
+I thought he would have fainted.
+
+‘Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder, what shall we do
+next?’ said I.
+
+He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his chin
+timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a light had broken on
+his mind, yet with a humble appeal to my forbearance that was perfectly
+irresistible:
+
+‘We can take a little turn about the town, Signore!’  (Si può far ’un
+píccolo gíro della citta).
+
+It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the proposal, so we
+set off together in great good-humour.  In the relief of his mind, he
+opened his heart, and gave up as much of Mantua as a Cicerone could.
+
+‘One must eat,’ he said; ‘but, bah! it was a dull place, without doubt!’
+
+He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa Andrea—a noble
+church—and of an inclosed portion of the pavement, about which tapers
+were burning, and a few people kneeling, and under which is said to be
+preserved the Sangreal of the old Romances.  This church disposed of, and
+another after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the Museum,
+which was shut up.  ‘It was all the same,’ he said.  ‘Bah!  There was not
+much inside!’  Then, we went to see the Piazza del Diavolo, built by the
+Devil (for no particular purpose) in a single night; then, the Piazza
+Virgiliana; then, the statue of Virgil—_our_ Poet, my little friend said,
+plucking up a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on one
+side.  Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which a
+picture-gallery was approached.  The moment the gate of this retreat was
+opened, some five hundred geese came waddling round us, stretching out
+their necks, and clamouring in the most hideous manner, as if they were
+ejaculating, ‘Oh! here’s somebody come to see the Pictures!  Don’t go up!
+Don’t go up!’  While we went up, they waited very quietly about the door
+in a crowd, cackling to one another occasionally, in a subdued tone; but
+the instant we appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and
+setting up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, ‘What, you would
+go, would you!  What do you think of it!  How do you like it!’ they
+attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively, into
+Mantua.
+
+The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to these, Pork to the
+learned Pig.  What a gallery it was!  I would take their opinion on a
+question of art, in preference to the discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus ignominiouly
+escorted thither, my little friend was plainly reduced to the ‘píccolo
+gíro,’ or little circuit of the town, he had formerly proposed.  But my
+suggestion that we should visit the Palazzo Tè (of which I had heard a
+great deal, as a strange wild place) imparted new life to him, and away
+we went.
+
+The secret of the length of Midas’s ears, would have been more
+extensively known, if that servant of his, who whispered it to the reeds,
+had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and rushes enough to have
+published it to all the world.  The Palazzo Tè stands in a swamp, among
+this sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular a place as I ever
+saw.
+
+Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary.  Not for its dampness,
+though it is very damp.  Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as
+desolate and neglected as house can be.  But chiefly for the
+unaccountable nightmares with which its interior has been decorated
+(among other subjects of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano.
+There is a leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are
+dozens of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another room,
+so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man
+can have imagined such creatures.  In the chamber in which they abound,
+these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of
+distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight
+of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving
+masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to
+sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their heads;
+and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad and demoniacal
+destruction.  The figures are immensely large, and exaggerated to the
+utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and
+the whole effect more like (I should imagine) a violent rush of blood to
+the head of the spectator, than any real picture set before him by the
+hand of an artist.  This apoplectic performance was shown by a
+sickly-looking woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the
+bad air of the marshes; but it was difficult to help feeling as if she
+were too much haunted by the Giants, and they were frightening her to
+death, all alone in that exhausted cistern of a Palace, among the reeds
+and rushes, with the mists hovering about outside, and stalking round and
+round it continually.
+
+Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some
+suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all: all
+as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of tumbling down bodily.
+The marshy town was so intensely dull and flat, that the dirt upon it
+seemed not to have come there in the ordinary course, but to have settled
+and mantled on its surface as on standing water.  And yet there were some
+business-dealings going on, and some profits realising; for there were
+arcades full of Jews, where those extraordinary people were sitting
+outside their shops, contemplating their stores of stuffs, and woollens,
+and bright handkerchiefs, and trinkets: and looking, in all respects, as
+wary and business-like, as their brethren in Houndsditch, London.
+
+Having selected a Vetturíno from among the neighbouring Christians, who
+agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and a half, and to start, next
+morning, as soon as the gates were opened, I returned to the Golden Lion,
+and dined luxuriously in my own room, in a narrow passage between two
+bedsteads: confronted by a smoky fire, and backed up by a chest of
+drawers.  At six o’clock next morning, we were jingling in the dark
+through the wet cold mist that enshrouded the town; and, before noon, the
+driver (a native of Mantua, and sixty years of age or thereabouts) began
+_to ask the way_ to Milan.
+
+It lay through Bozzolo; formerly a little republic, and now one of the
+most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns: where the landlord of the
+miserable inn (God bless him! it was his weekly custom) was distributing
+infinitesimal coins among a clamorous herd of women and children, whose
+rags were fluttering in the wind and rain outside his door, where they
+were gathered to receive his charity.  It lay through mist, and mud, and
+rain, and vines trained low upon the ground, all that day and the next;
+the first sleeping-place being Cremona, memorable for its dark brick
+churches, and immensely high tower, the Torrazzo—to say nothing of its
+violins, of which it certainly produces none in these degenerate days;
+and the second, Lodi.  Then we went on, through more mud, mist, and rain,
+and marshy ground: and through such a fog, as Englishmen, strong in the
+faith of their own grievances, are apt to believe is nowhere to be found
+but in their own country, until we entered the paved streets of Milan.
+
+The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far-famed Cathedral
+might as well have been at Bombay, for anything that could be seen of it
+at that time.  But as we halted to refresh, for a few days then, and
+returned to Milan again next summer, I had ample opportunities of seeing
+the glorious structure in all its majesty and beauty.
+
+All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it!  There are many
+good and true saints in the calendar, but San Carlo Borromeo has—if I may
+quote Mrs. Primrose on such a subject—‘my warm heart.’  A charitable
+doctor to the sick, a munificent friend to the poor, and this, not in any
+spirit of blind bigotry, but as the bold opponent of enormous abuses in
+the Romish church, I honour his memory.  I honour it none the less,
+because he was nearly slain by a priest, suborned, by priests, to murder
+him at the altar: in acknowledgment of his endeavours to reform a false
+and hypocritical brotherhood of monks.  Heaven shield all imitators of
+San Carlo Borromeo as it shielded him!  A reforming Pope would need a
+little shielding, even now.
+
+The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo Borromeo is
+preserved, presents as striking and as ghastly a contrast, perhaps, as
+any place can show.  The tapers which are lighted down there, flash and
+gleam on alti-rilievi in gold and silver, delicately wrought by skilful
+hands, and representing the principal events in the life of the saint.
+Jewels, and precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side.  A windlass
+slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it, in a gorgeous
+shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster, the shrivelled
+mummy of a man: the pontifical robes with which it is adorned, radiant
+with diamonds, emeralds, rubies: every costly and magnificent gem.  The
+shrunken heap of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more
+pitiful than if it lay upon a dung-hill.  There is not a ray of
+imprisoned light in all the flash and fire of jewels, but seems to mock
+the dusty holes where eyes were, once.  Every thread of silk in the rich
+vestments seems only a provision from the worms that spin, for the behoof
+of worms that propagate in sepulchres.
+
+In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of Santa Maria delle
+Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps, better known than any other in the
+world: the Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci—with a door cut through it
+by the intelligent Dominican friars, to facilitate their operations at
+dinner-time.
+
+I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of painting, and have no
+other means of judging of a picture than as I see it resembling and
+refining upon nature, and presenting graceful combinations of forms and
+colours.  I am, therefore, no authority whatever, in reference to the
+‘touch’ of this or that master; though I know very well (as anybody may,
+who chooses to think about the matter) that few very great masters can
+possibly have painted, in the compass of their lives, one-half of the
+pictures that bear their names, and that are recognised by many aspirants
+to a reputation for taste, as undoubted originals.  But this, by the way.
+Of the Last Supper, I would simply observe, that in its beautiful
+composition and arrangement, there it is, at Milan, a wonderful picture;
+and that, in its original colouring, or in its original expression of any
+single face or feature, there it is not.  Apart from the damage it has
+sustained from damp, decay, or neglect, it has been (as Barry shows) so
+retouched upon, and repainted, and that so clumsily, that many of the
+heads are, now, positive deformities, with patches of paint and plaster
+sticking upon them like wens, and utterly distorting the expression.
+Where the original artist set that impress of his genius on a face,
+which, almost in a line or touch, separated him from meaner painters and
+made him what he was, succeeding bunglers, filling up, or painting across
+seams and cracks, have been quite unable to imitate his hand; and putting
+in some scowls, or frowns, or wrinkles, of their own, have blotched and
+spoiled the work.  This is so well established as an historical fact,
+that I should not repeat it, at the risk of being tedious, but for having
+observed an English gentleman before the picture, who was at great pains
+to fall into what I may describe as mild convulsions, at certain minute
+details of expression which are not left in it.  Whereas, it would be
+comfortable and rational for travellers and critics to arrive at a
+general understanding that it cannot fail to have been a work of
+extraordinary merit, once: when, with so few of its original beauties
+remaining, the grandeur of the general design is yet sufficient to
+sustain it, as a piece replete with interest and dignity.
+
+We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due course, and a fine city it
+is, though not so unmistakably Italian as to possess the characteristic
+qualities of many towns far less important in themselves.  The Corso,
+where the Milanese gentry ride up and down in carriages, and rather than
+not do which, they would half starve themselves at home, is a most noble
+public promenade, shaded by long avenues of trees.  In the splendid
+theatre of La Scala, there was a ballet of action performed after the
+opera, under the title of Prometheus: in the beginning of which, some
+hundred or two of men and women represented our mortal race before the
+refinements of the arts and sciences, and loves and graces, came on earth
+to soften them.  I never saw anything more effective.  Generally
+speaking, the pantomimic action of the Italians is more remarkable for
+its sudden and impetuous character than for its delicate expression, but,
+in this case, the drooping monotony: the weary, miserable, listless,
+moping life: the sordid passions and desires of human creatures,
+destitute of those elevating influences to which we owe so much, and to
+whose promoters we render so little: were expressed in a manner really
+powerful and affecting.  I should have thought it almost impossible to
+present such an idea so strongly on the stage, without the aid of speech.
+
+Milan soon lay behind us, at five o’clock in the morning; and before the
+golden statue on the summit of the cathedral spire was lost in the blue
+sky, the Alps, stupendously confused in lofty peaks and ridges, clouds
+and snow, were towering in our path.
+
+Still, we continued to advance toward them until nightfall; and, all day
+long, the mountain tops presented strangely shifting shapes, as the road
+displayed them in different points of view.  The beautiful day was just
+declining, when we came upon the Lago Maggiore, with its lovely islands.
+For however fanciful and fantastic the Isola Bella may be, and is, it
+still is beautiful.  Anything springing out of that blue water, with that
+scenery around it, must be.
+
+It was ten o’clock at night when we got to Domo d’Ossola, at the foot of
+the Pass of the Simplon.  But as the moon was shining brightly, and there
+was not a cloud in the starlit sky, it was no time for going to bed, or
+going anywhere but on.  So, we got a little carriage, after some delay,
+and began the ascent.
+
+It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five feet thick in
+the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new drift was already
+deep), the air was piercing cold.  But, the serenity of the night, and
+the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms,
+and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon and its incessant roar
+of falling water, rendered the journey more and more sublime at every
+step.
+
+Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleeping in the
+moonlight, the road began to wind among dark trees, and after a time
+emerged upon a barer region, very steep and toilsome, where the moon
+shone bright and high.  By degrees, the roar of water grew louder; and
+the stupendous track, after crossing the torrent by a bridge, struck in
+between two massive perpendicular walls of rock that quite shut out the
+moonlight, and only left a few stars shining in the narrow strip of sky
+above.  Then, even this was lost, in the thick darkness of a cavern in
+the rock, through which the way was pierced; the terrible cataract
+thundering and roaring close below it, and its foam and spray hanging, in
+a mist, about the entrance.  Emerging from this cave, and coming again
+into the moonlight, and across a dizzy bridge, it crept and twisted
+upward, through the Gorge of Gondo, savage and grand beyond description,
+with smooth-fronted precipices, rising up on either hand, and almost
+meeting overhead.  Thus we went, climbing on our rugged way, higher and
+higher all night, without a moment’s weariness: lost in the contemplation
+of the black rocks, the tremendous heights and depths, the fields of
+smooth snow lying, in the clefts and hollows, and the fierce torrents
+thundering headlong down the deep abyss.
+
+Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen wind was blowing
+fiercely.  Having, with some trouble, awakened the inmates of a wooden
+house in this solitude: round which the wind was howling dismally,
+catching up the snow in wreaths and hurling it away: we got some
+breakfast in a room built of rough timbers, but well warmed by a stove,
+and well contrived (as it had need to be) for keeping out the bitter
+storms.  A sledge being then made ready, and four horses harnessed to it,
+we went, ploughing, through the snow.  Still upward, but now in the cold
+light of morning, and with the great white desert on which we travelled,
+plain and clear.
+
+We were well upon the summit of the mountain: and had before us the rude
+cross of wood, denoting its greatest altitude above the sea: when the
+light of the rising sun, struck, all at once, upon the waste of snow, and
+turned it a deep red.  The lonely grandeur of the scene was then at its
+height.
+
+                        [Picture: The Chiffonier]
+
+As we went sledging on, there came out of the Hospice founded by
+Napoleon, a group of Peasant travellers, with staves and knapsacks, who
+had rested there last night: attended by a Monk or two, their hospitable
+entertainers, trudging slowly forward with them, for company’s sake.  It
+was pleasant to give them good morning, and pretty, looking back a long
+way after them, to see them looking back at us, and hesitating presently,
+when one of our horses stumbled and fell, whether or no they should
+return and help us.  But he was soon up again, with the assistance of a
+rough waggoner whose team had stuck fast there too; and when we had
+helped him out of his difficulty, in return, we left him slowly ploughing
+towards them, and went slowly and swiftly forward, on the brink of a
+steep precipice, among the mountain pines.
+
+Taking to our wheels again, soon afterwards, we began rapidly to descend;
+passing under everlasting glaciers, by means of arched galleries, hung
+with clusters of dripping icicles; under and over foaming waterfalls;
+near places of refuge, and galleries of shelter against sudden danger;
+through caverns over whose arched roofs the avalanches slide, in spring,
+and bury themselves in the unknown gulf beneath.  Down, over lofty
+bridges, and through horrible ravines: a little shifting speck in the
+vast desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite rocks; down
+through the deep Gorge of the Saltine, and deafened by the torrent
+plunging madly down, among the riven blocks of rock, into the level
+country, far below.  Gradually down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an
+upward and a downward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and
+softer scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver
+in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow, domes
+and church-spires of a Swiss town.
+
+The business of these recollections being with Italy, and my business,
+consequently, being to scamper back thither as fast as possible, I will
+not recall (though I am sorely tempted) how the Swiss villages, clustered
+at the feet of Giant mountains, looked like playthings; or how confusedly
+the houses were heaped and piled together; or how there were very narrow
+streets to shut the howling winds out in the winter-time; and broken
+bridges, which the impetuous torrents, suddenly released in spring, had
+swept away.  Or how there were peasant women here, with great round fur
+caps: looking, when they peeped out of casements and only their heads
+were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to the Lord Mayor of
+London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the smooth lake of Geneva, was
+beautiful to see; or how the statue of Saint Peter in the street at
+Fribourg, grasps the largest key that ever was beheld; or how Fribourg is
+illustrious for its two suspension bridges, and its grand cathedral
+organ.
+
+Or how, between that town and Bâle, the road meandered among thriving
+villages of wooden cottages, with overhanging thatched roofs, and low
+protruding windows, glazed with small round panes of glass like
+crown-pieces; or how, in every little Swiss homestead, with its cart or
+waggon carefully stowed away beside the house, its little garden, stock
+of poultry, and groups of red-cheeked children, there was an air of
+comfort, very new and very pleasant after Italy; or how the dresses of
+the women changed again, and there were no more sword-bearers to be seen;
+and fair white stomachers, and great black, fan-shaped, gauzy-looking
+caps, prevailed instead.
+
+Or how the country by the Jura mountains, sprinkled with snow, and
+lighted by the moon, and musical with falling water, was delightful; or
+how, below the windows of the great hotel of the Three Kings at Bâle, the
+swollen Rhine ran fast and green; or how, at Strasbourg, it was quite as
+fast but not as green: and was said to be foggy lower down: and, at that
+late time of the year, was a far less certain means of progress, than the
+highway road to Paris.
+
+Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic Cathedral, and
+its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and gables, made a little
+gallery of quaint and interesting views; or how a crowd was gathered
+inside the cathedral at noon, to see the famous mechanical clock in
+motion, striking twelve.  How, when it struck twelve, a whole army of
+puppets went through many ingenious evolutions; and, among them, a huge
+puppet-cock, perched on the top, crowed twelve times, loud and clear.  Or
+how it was wonderful to see this cock at great pains to clap its wings,
+and strain its throat; but obviously having no connection whatever with
+its own voice; which was deep within the clock, a long way down.
+
+Or how the road to Paris, was one sea of mud, and thence to the coast, a
+little better for a hard frost.  Or how the cliffs of Dover were a
+pleasant sight, and England was so wonderfully neat—though dark, and
+lacking colour on a winter’s day, it must be conceded.
+
+Or how, a few days afterwards, it was cool, re-crossing the channel, with
+ice upon the decks, and snow lying pretty deep in France.  Or how the
+Malle Poste scrambled through the snow, headlong, drawn in the hilly
+parts by any number of stout horses at a canter; or how there were,
+outside the Post-office Yard in Paris, before daybreak, extraordinary
+adventurers in heaps of rags, groping in the snowy streets with little
+rakes, in search of odds and ends.
+
+Or how, between Paris and Marseilles, the snow being then exceeding deep,
+a thaw came on, and the mail waded rather than rolled for the next three
+hundred miles or so; breaking springs on Sunday nights, and putting out
+its two passengers to warm and refresh themselves pending the repairs, in
+miserable billiard-rooms, where hairy company, collected about stoves,
+were playing cards; the cards being very like themselves—extremely limp
+and dirty.
+
+Or how there was detention at Marseilles from stress of weather; and
+steamers were advertised to go, which did not go; or how the good
+Steam-packet Charlemagne at length put out, and met such weather that now
+she threatened to run into Toulon, and now into Nice, but, the wind
+moderating, did neither, but ran on into Genoa harbour instead, where the
+familiar Bells rang sweetly in my ear.  Or how there was a travelling
+party on board, of whom one member was very ill in the cabin next to
+mine, and being ill was cross, and therefore declined to give up the
+Dictionary, which he kept under his pillow; thereby obliging his
+companions to come down to him, constantly, to ask what was the Italian
+for a lump of sugar—a glass of brandy and water—what’s o’clock? and so
+forth: which he always insisted on looking out, with his own sea-sick
+eyes, declining to entrust the book to any man alive.
+
+Like GRUMIO, I might have told you, in detail, all this and something
+more—but to as little purpose—were I not deterred by the remembrance that
+my business is with Italy.  Therefore, like GRUMIO’S story, ‘it shall die
+in oblivion.’
+
+
+
+
+TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA
+
+
+THERE is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-road
+between Genoa and Spezzia.  On one side: sometimes far below, sometimes
+nearly on a level with the road, and often skirted by broken rocks of
+many shapes: there is the free blue sea, with here and there a
+picturesque felucca gliding slowly on; on the other side are lofty hills,
+ravines besprinkled with white cottages, patches of dark olive woods,
+country churches with their light open towers, and country houses gaily
+painted.  On every bank and knoll by the wayside, the wild cactus and
+aloe flourish in exuberant profusion; and the gardens of the bright
+villages along the road, are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with
+clusters of the Belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter
+with golden oranges and lemons.
+
+Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by fishermen; and
+it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled up on the beach, making
+little patches of shade, where they lie asleep, or where the women and
+children sit romping and looking out to sea, while they mend their nets
+upon the shore.  There is one town, Camoglia, with its little harbour on
+the sea, hundreds of feet below the road; where families of mariners
+live, who, time out of mind, have owned coasting-vessels in that place,
+and have traded to Spain and elsewhere.  Seen from the road above, it is
+like a tiny model on the margin of the dimpled water, shining in the sun.
+Descended into, by the winding mule-tracks, it is a perfect miniature of
+a primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest, most piratical little
+place that ever was seen.  Great rusty iron rings and mooring-chains,
+capstans, and fragments of old masts and spars, choke up the way; hardy
+rough-weather boats, and seamen’s clothing, flutter in the little harbour
+or are drawn out on the sunny stones to dry; on the parapet of the rude
+pier, a few amphibious-looking fellows lie asleep, with their legs
+dangling over the wall, as though earth or water were all one to them,
+and if they slipped in, they would float away, dozing comfortably among
+the fishes; the church is bright with trophies of the sea, and votive
+offerings, in commemoration of escape from storm and shipwreck.  The
+dwellings not immediately abutting on the harbour are approached by blind
+low archways, and by crooked steps, as if in darkness and in difficulty
+of access they should be like holds of ships, or inconvenient cabins
+under water; and everywhere, there is a smell of fish, and sea-weed, and
+old rope.
+
+The coast-road whence Camoglia is descried so far below, is famous, in
+the warm season, especially in some parts near Genoa, for fire-flies.
+Walking there on a dark night, I have seen it made one sparkling
+firmament by these beautiful insects: so that the distant stars were pale
+against the flash and glitter that spangled every olive wood and
+hill-side, and pervaded the whole air.
+
+It was not in such a season, however, that we traversed this road on our
+way to Rome.  The middle of January was only just past, and it was very
+gloomy and dark weather; very wet besides.  In crossing the fine pass of
+Bracco, we encountered such a storm of mist and rain, that we travelled
+in a cloud the whole way.  There might have been no Mediterranean in the
+world, for anything that we saw of it there, except when a sudden gust of
+wind, clearing the mist before it, for a moment, showed the agitated sea
+at a great depth below, lashing the distant rocks, and spouting up its
+foam furiously.  The rain was incessant; every brook and torrent was
+greatly swollen; and such a deafening leaping, and roaring, and
+thundering of water, I never heard the like of in my life.
+
+Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra, an unbridged
+river on the high-road to Pisa, was too high to be safely crossed in the
+Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait until the afternoon of next day, when
+it had, in some degree, subsided.  Spezzia, however, is a good place to
+tarry at; by reason, firstly, of its beautiful bay; secondly, of its
+ghostly Inn; thirdly, of the head-dress of the women, who wear, on one
+side of their head, a small doll’s straw hat, stuck on to the hair; which
+is certainly the oddest and most roguish head-gear that ever was
+invented.
+
+The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat—the passage is not by any
+means agreeable, when the current is swollen and strong—we arrived at
+Carrara, within a few hours.  In good time next morning, we got some
+ponies, and went out to see the marble quarries.
+
+They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of lofty
+hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by being abruptly
+strangled by Nature.  The quarries, ‘or caves,’ as they call them there,
+are so many openings, high up in the hills, on either side of these
+passes, where they blast and excavate for marble: which may turn out good
+or bad: may make a man’s fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great
+expense of working what is worth nothing.  Some of these caves were
+opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour.
+Many others are being worked at this moment; others are to be begun
+to-morrow, next week, next month; others are unbought, unthought of; and
+marble enough for more ages than have passed since the place was resorted
+to, lies hidden everywhere: patiently awaiting its time of discovery.
+
+As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having left your
+pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down) you hear,
+every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a low tone, more silent
+than the previous silence, a melancholy warning bugle,—a signal to the
+miners to withdraw.  Then, there is a thundering, and echoing from hill
+to hill, and perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of rock into the
+air; and on you toil again until some other bugle sounds, in a new
+direction, and you stop directly, lest you should come within the range
+of the new explosion.
+
+There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills—on the
+sides—clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone and
+earth, to make way for the blocks of marble that had been discovered.  As
+these came rolling down from unseen hands into the narrow valley, I could
+not help thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen) where the
+Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where the merchants from the heights
+above, flung down great pieces of meat for the diamonds to stick to.
+There were no eagles here, to darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce
+upon them; but it was as wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds.
+
+But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense the
+blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its institutions,
+pave that road: repair it, watch it, keep it going!  Conceive a channel
+of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all
+shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley; and _that_
+being the road—because it was the road five hundred years ago!  Imagine
+the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and
+drawn, as they used to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose
+ancestors were worn to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy
+descendants are now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this
+cruel work!  Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block,
+according to its size; down it must come, this way.  In their struggling
+from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die
+frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for their passionate
+drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed to death
+beneath the wheels.  But it was good five hundred years ago, and it must
+be good now: and a railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing
+in the world) would be flat blasphemy.
+
+When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair of
+oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming down, I
+hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke, to keep it on
+the neck of the poor beasts—and who faced backwards: not before him—as
+the very Devil of true despotism.  He had a great rod in his hand, with
+an iron point; and when they could plough and force their way through the
+loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into
+their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it round and round in their
+nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain;
+repeated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when
+they stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to an
+abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and smarting, and
+the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the precipice in a cloud
+of scattered water, whirled his rod above his head, and gave a great
+whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved something, and had no idea that
+they might shake him off, and blindly mash his brains upon the road, in
+the noontide of his triumph.
+
+Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that afternoon—for it is a
+great workshop, full of beautifully-finished copies in marble, of almost
+every figure, group, and bust, we know—it seemed, at first, so strange to
+me that those exquisite shapes, replete with grace, and thought, and
+delicate repose, should grow out of all this toil, and sweat, and
+torture!  But I soon found a parallel to it, and an explanation of it, in
+every virtue that springs up in miserable ground, and every good thing
+that has its birth in sorrow and distress.  And, looking out of the
+sculptor’s great window, upon the marble mountains, all red and glowing
+in the decline of day, but stern and solemn to the last, I thought, my
+God! how many quarries of human hearts and souls, capable of far more
+beautiful results, are left shut up and mouldering away: while
+pleasure-travellers through life, avert their faces, as they pass, and
+shudder at the gloom and ruggedness that conceal them!
+
+The then reigning Duke of Modena, to whom this territory in part
+belonged, claimed the proud distinction of being the only sovereign in
+Europe who had not recognised Louis-Philippe as King of the French!  He
+was not a wag, but quite in earnest.  He was also much opposed to
+railroads; and if certain lines in contemplation by other potentates, on
+either side of him, had been executed, would have probably enjoyed the
+satisfaction of having an omnibus plying to and fro across his not very
+vast dominions, to forward travellers from one terminus to another.
+
+Carrara, shut in by great hills, is very picturesque and bold.  Few
+tourists stay there; and the people are nearly all connected, in one way
+or other, with the working of marble.  There are also villages among the
+caves, where the workmen live.  It contains a beautiful little Theatre,
+newly built; and it is an interesting custom there, to form the chorus of
+labourers in the marble quarries, who are self-taught and sing by ear.  I
+heard them in a comic opera, and in an act of ‘Norma;’ and they acquitted
+themselves very well; unlike the common people of Italy generally, who
+(with some exceptions among the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of tune, and
+have very disagreeable singing voices.
+
+From the summit of a lofty hill beyond Carrara, the first view of the
+fertile plain in which the town of Pisa lies—with Leghorn, a purple spot
+in the flat distance—is enchanting.  Nor is it only distance that lends
+enchantment to the view; for the fruitful country, and rich woods of
+olive-trees through which the road subsequently passes, render it
+delightful.
+
+The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for a long time we
+could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower, all awry in the uncertain
+light; the shadowy original of the old pictures in school-books, setting
+forth ‘The Wonders of the World.’  Like most things connected in their
+first associations with school-books and school-times, it was too small.
+I felt it keenly.  It was nothing like so high above the wall as I had
+hoped.  It was another of the many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris,
+Bookseller, at the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard, London.  _His_ Tower
+was a fiction, but this was a reality—and, by comparison, a short
+reality.  Still, it looked very well, and very strange, and was quite as
+much out of the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be.  The
+quiet air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the gate, with only two
+little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of people in
+them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the centre of the town; were
+excellent.  So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr. Harris
+(remembering his good intentions), but forgave him before dinner, and
+went out, full of confidence, to see the Tower next morning.
+
+I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected to see it,
+casting its long shadow on a public street where people came and went all
+day.  It was a surprise to me to find it in a grave retired place, apart
+from the general resort, and carpeted with smooth green turf.  But, the
+group of buildings, clustered on and about this verdant carpet:
+comprising the Tower, the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Church of
+the Campo Santo: is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful in the
+whole world; and from being clustered there, together, away from the
+ordinary transactions and details of the town, they have a singularly
+venerable and impressive character.  It is the architectural essence of a
+rich old city, with all its common life and common habitations pressed
+out, and filtered away.
+
+SIMOND compares the Tower to the usual pictorial representations in
+children’s books of the Tower of Babel.  It is a happy simile, and
+conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured
+description.  Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the
+structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance.
+In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase),
+the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes so,
+and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over,
+through the action of an ebb-tide.  The effect _upon the low side_, so to
+speak—looking over from the gallery, and seeing the shaft recede to its
+base—is very startling; and I saw a nervous traveller hold on to the
+Tower involuntarily, after glancing down, as if he had some idea of
+propping it up.  The view within, from the ground—looking up, as through
+a slanted tube—is also very curious.  It certainly inclines as much as
+the most sanguine tourist could desire.  The natural impulse of
+ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were about to recline upon the
+grass below it, to rest, and contemplate the adjacent buildings, would
+probably be, not to take up their position under the leaning side; it is
+so very much aslant.
+
+The manifold beauties of the Cathedral and Baptistery need no
+recapitulation from me; though in this case, as in a hundred others, I
+find it difficult to separate my own delight in recalling them, from your
+weariness in having them recalled.  There is a picture of St. Agnes, by
+Andrea del Sarto, in the former, and there are a variety of rich columns
+in the latter, that tempt me strongly.
+
+It is, I hope, no breach of my resolution not to be tempted into
+elaborate descriptions, to remember the Campo Santo; where grass-grown
+graves are dug in earth brought more than six hundred years ago, from the
+Holy Land; and where there are, surrounding them, such cloisters, with
+such playing lights and shadows falling through their delicate tracery on
+the stone pavement, as surely the dullest memory could never forget.  On
+the walls of this solemn and lovely place, are ancient frescoes, very
+much obliterated and decayed, but very curious.  As usually happens in
+almost any collection of paintings, of any sort, in Italy, where there
+are many heads, there is, in one of them, a striking accidental likeness
+of Napoleon.  At one time, I used to please my fancy with the speculation
+whether these old painters, at their work, had a foreboding knowledge of
+the man who would one day arise to wreak such destruction upon art: whose
+soldiers would make targets of great pictures, and stable their horses
+among triumphs of architecture.  But the same Corsican face is so
+plentiful in some parts of Italy at this day, that a more commonplace
+solution of the coincidence is unavoidable.
+
+If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its Tower, it may
+claim to be, at least, the second or third in right of its beggars.  They
+waylay the unhappy visitor at every turn, escort him to every door he
+enters at, and lie in wait for him, with strong reinforcements, at every
+door by which they know he must come out.  The grating of the portal on
+its hinges is the signal for a general shout, and the moment he appears,
+he is hemmed in, and fallen on, by heaps of rags and personal
+distortions.  The beggars seem to embody all the trade and enterprise of
+Pisa.  Nothing else is stirring, but warm air.  Going through the
+streets, the fronts of the sleepy houses look like backs.  They are all
+so still and quiet, and unlike houses with people in them, that the
+greater part of the city has the appearance of a city at daybreak, or
+during a general siesta of the population.  Or it is yet more like those
+backgrounds of houses in common prints, or old engravings, where windows
+and doors are squarely indicated, and one figure (a beggar of course) is
+seen walking off by itself into illimitable perspective.
+
+Not so Leghorn (made illustrious by SMOLLETT’S grave), which is a
+thriving, business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idleness is
+shouldered out of the way by commerce.  The regulations observed there,
+in reference to trade and merchants, are very liberal and free; and the
+town, of course, benefits by them.  Leghorn had a bad name in connection
+with stabbers, and with some justice it must be allowed; for, not many
+years ago, there was an assassination club there, the members of which
+bore no ill-will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people (quite
+strangers to them) in the streets at night, for the pleasure and
+excitement of the recreation.  I think the president of this amiable
+society was a shoemaker.  He was taken, however, and the club was broken
+up.  It would, probably, have disappeared in the natural course of
+events, before the railroad between Leghorn and Pisa, which is a good
+one, and has already begun to astonish Italy with a precedent of
+punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improvement—the most dangerous and
+heretical astonisher of all.  There must have been a slight sensation, as
+of earthquake, surely, in the Vatican, when the first Italian railroad
+was thrown open.
+
+Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered Vetturíno, and his four
+horses, to take us on to Rome, we travelled through pleasant Tuscan
+villages and cheerful scenery all day.  The roadside crosses in this part
+of Italy are numerous and curious.  There is seldom a figure on the
+cross, though there is sometimes a face, but they are remarkable for
+being garnished with little models in wood, of every possible object that
+can be connected with the Saviour’s death.  The cock that crowed when
+Peter had denied his Master thrice, is usually perched on the tip-top;
+and an ornithological phenomenon he generally is.  Under him, is the
+inscription.  Then, hung on to the cross-beam, are the spear, the reed
+with the sponge of vinegar and water at the end, the coat without seam
+for which the soldiers cast lots, the dice-box with which they threw for
+it, the hammer that drove in the nails, the pincers that pulled them out,
+the ladder which was set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the
+instrument of flagellation, the lanthorn with which Mary went to the tomb
+(I suppose), and the sword with which Peter smote the servant of the high
+priest,—a perfect toy-shop of little objects, repeated at every four or
+five miles, all along the highway.
+
+On the evening of the second day from Pisa, we reached the beautiful old
+city of Siena.  There was what they called a Carnival, in progress; but,
+as its secret lay in a score or two of melancholy people walking up and
+down the principal street in common toy-shop masks, and being more
+melancholy, if possible, than the same sort of people in England, I say
+no more of it.  We went off, betimes next morning, to see the Cathedral,
+which is wonderfully picturesque inside and out, especially the
+latter—also the market-place, or great Piazza, which is a large square,
+with a great broken-nosed fountain in it: some quaint Gothic houses: and
+a high square brick tower; _outside_ the top of which—a curious feature
+in such views in Italy—hangs an enormous bell.  It is like a bit of
+Venice, without the water.  There are some curious old Palazzi in the
+town, which is very ancient; and without having (for me) the interest of
+Verona, or Genoa, it is very dreamy and fantastic, and most interesting.
+
+We went on again, as soon as we had seen these things, and going over a
+rather bleak country (there had been nothing but vines until now: mere
+walking-sticks at that season of the year), stopped, as usual, between
+one and two hours in the middle of the day, to rest the horses; that
+being a part of every Vetturíno contract.  We then went on again, through
+a region gradually becoming bleaker and wilder, until it became as bare
+and desolate as any Scottish moors.  Soon after dark, we halted for the
+night, at the osteria of La Scala: a perfectly lone house, where the
+family were sitting round a great fire in the kitchen, raised on a stone
+platform three or four feet high, and big enough for the roasting of an
+ox.  On the upper, and only other floor of this hotel, there was a great,
+wild, rambling sála, with one very little window in a by-corner, and four
+black doors opening into four black bedrooms in various directions.  To
+say nothing of another large black door, opening into another large black
+sála, with the staircase coming abruptly through a kind of trap-door in
+the floor, and the rafters of the roof looming above: a suspicious little
+press skulking in one obscure corner: and all the knives in the house
+lying about in various directions.  The fireplace was of the purest
+Italian architecture, so that it was perfectly impossible to see it for
+the smoke.  The waitress was like a dramatic brigand’s wife, and wore the
+same style of dress upon her head.  The dogs barked like mad; the echoes
+returned the compliments bestowed upon them; there was not another house
+within twelve miles; and things had a dreary, and rather a cut-throat,
+appearance.
+
+They were not improved by rumours of robbers having come out, strong and
+boldly, within a few nights; and of their having stopped the mail very
+near that place.  They were known to have waylaid some travellers not
+long before, on Mount Vesuvius itself, and were the talk at all the
+roadside inns.  As they were no business of ours, however (for we had
+very little with us to lose), we made ourselves merry on the subject, and
+were very soon as comfortable as need be.  We had the usual dinner in
+this solitary house; and a very good dinner it is, when you are used to
+it.  There is something with a vegetable or some rice in it which is a
+sort of shorthand or arbitrary character for soup, and which tastes very
+well, when you have flavoured it with plenty of grated cheese, lots of
+salt, and abundance of pepper.  There is the half fowl of which this soup
+has been made.  There is a stewed pigeon, with the gizzards and livers of
+himself and other birds stuck all round him.  There is a bit of roast
+beef, the size of a small French roll.  There are a scrap of Parmesan
+cheese, and five little withered apples, all huddled together on a small
+plate, and crowding one upon the other, as if each were trying to save
+itself from the chance of being eaten.  Then there is coffee; and then
+there is bed.  You don’t mind brick floors; you don’t mind yawning doors,
+nor banging windows; you don’t mind your own horses being stabled under
+the bed: and so close, that every time a horse coughs or sneezes, he
+wakes you.  If you are good-humoured to the people about you, and speak
+pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word for it you may be well
+entertained in the very worst Italian Inn, and always in the most
+obliging manner, and may go from one end of the country to the other
+(despite all stories to the contrary) without any great trial of your
+patience anywhere.  Especially, when you get such wine in flasks, as the
+Orvieto, and the Monte Pulciano.
+
+It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we went, for twelve
+miles, over a country as barren, as stony, and as wild, as Cornwall in
+England, until we came to Radicofani, where there is a ghostly, goblin
+inn: once a hunting-seat, belonging to the Dukes of Tuscany.  It is full
+of such rambling corridors, and gaunt rooms, that all the murdering and
+phantom tales that ever were written might have originated in that one
+house.  There are some horrible old Palazzi in Genoa: one in particular,
+not unlike it, outside: but there is a winding, creaking, wormy,
+rustling, door-opening, foot-on-staircase-falling character about this
+Radicofani Hotel, such as I never saw, anywhere else.  The town, such as
+it is, hangs on a hill-side above the house, and in front of it.  The
+inhabitants are all beggars; and as soon as they see a carriage coming,
+they swoop down upon it, like so many birds of prey.
+
+When we got on the mountain pass, which lies beyond this place, the wind
+(as they had forewarned us at the inn) was so terrific, that we were
+obliged to take my other half out of the carriage, lest she should be
+blown over, carriage and all, and to hang to it, on the windy side (as
+well as we could for laughing), to prevent its going, Heaven knows where.
+For mere force of wind, this land-storm might have competed with an
+Atlantic gale, and had a reasonable chance of coming off victorious.  The
+blast came sweeping down great gullies in a range of mountains on the
+right: so that we looked with positive awe at a great morass on the left,
+and saw that there was not a bush or twig to hold by.  It seemed as if,
+once blown from our feet, we must be swept out to sea, or away into
+space.  There was snow, and hail, and rain, and lightning, and thunder;
+and there were rolling mists, travelling with incredible velocity.  It
+was dark, awful, and solitary to the last degree; there were mountains
+above mountains, veiled in angry clouds; and there was such a wrathful,
+rapid, violent, tumultuous hurry, everywhere, as rendered the scene
+unspeakably exciting and grand.
+
+It was a relief to get out of it, notwithstanding; and to cross even the
+dismal, dirty Papal Frontier.  After passing through two little towns; in
+one of which, Acquapendente, there was also a ‘Carnival’ in progress:
+consisting of one man dressed and masked as a woman, and one woman
+dressed and masked as a man, walking ankle-deep, through the muddy
+streets, in a very melancholy manner: we came, at dusk, within sight of
+the Lake of Bolsena, on whose bank there is a little town of the same
+name, much celebrated for malaria.  With the exception of this poor
+place, there is not a cottage on the banks of the lake, or near it (for
+nobody dare sleep there); not a boat upon its waters; not a stick or
+stake to break the dismal monotony of seven-and-twenty watery miles.  We
+were late in getting in, the roads being very bad from heavy rains; and,
+after dark, the dulness of the scene was quite intolerable.
+
+We entered on a very different, and a finer scene of desolation, next
+night, at sunset.  We had passed through Montefiaschone (famous for its
+wine) and Viterbo (for its fountains): and after climbing up a long hill
+of eight or ten miles’ extent, came suddenly upon the margin of a
+solitary lake: in one part very beautiful, with a luxuriant wood; in
+another, very barren, and shut in by bleak volcanic hills.  Where this
+lake flows, there stood, of old, a city.  It was swallowed up one day;
+and in its stead, this water rose.  There are ancient traditions (common
+to many parts of the world) of the ruined city having been seen below,
+when the water was clear; but however that may be, from this spot of
+earth it vanished.  The ground came bubbling up above it; and the water
+too; and here they stand, like ghosts on whom the other world closed
+suddenly, and who have no means of getting back again.  They seem to be
+waiting the course of ages, for the next earthquake in that place; when
+they will plunge below the ground, at its first yawning, and be seen no
+more.  The unhappy city below, is not more lost and dreary, than these
+fire-charred hills and the stagnant water, above.  The red sun looked
+strangely on them, as with the knowledge that they were made for caverns
+and darkness; and the melancholy water oozed and sucked the mud, and
+crept quietly among the marshy grass and reeds, as if the overthrow of
+all the ancient towers and housetops, and the death of all the ancient
+people born and bred there, were yet heavy on its conscience.
+
+A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a little town
+like a large pig-sty, where we passed the night.  Next morning at seven
+o’clock, we started for Rome.
+
+As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the Campagna Romana;
+an undulating flat (as you know), where few people can live; and where,
+for miles and miles, there is nothing to relieve the terrible monotony
+and gloom.  Of all kinds of country that could, by possibility, lie
+outside the gates of Rome, this is the aptest and fittest burial-ground
+for the Dead City.  So sad, so quiet, so sullen; so secret in its
+covering up of great masses of ruin, and hiding them; so like the waste
+places into which the men possessed with devils used to go and howl, and
+rend themselves, in the old days of Jerusalem.  We had to traverse thirty
+miles of this Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing
+nothing but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking
+shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped to the
+chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep.  At the end of that
+distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch, in a
+common malaria-shaken, despondent little public-house, whose every inch
+of wall and beam, inside, was (according to custom) painted and decorated
+in a way so miserable that every room looked like the wrong side of
+another room, and, with its wretched imitation of drapery, and lop-sided
+little daubs of lyres, seemed to have been plundered from behind the
+scenes of some travelling circus.
+
+When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfect fever, to
+strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after another mile or two, the
+Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like—I am
+half afraid to write the word—like LONDON!!!  There it lay, under a thick
+cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising
+up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome.  I swear, that keenly
+as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it was so like London,
+at that distance, that if you could have shown it me, in a glass, I
+should have taken it for nothing else.
+
+
+
+
+ROME
+
+
+WE entered the Eternal City, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, on
+the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo, and came
+immediately—it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain—on
+the skirts of the Carnival.  We did not, then, know that we were only
+looking at the fag end of the masks, who were driving slowly round and
+round the Piazza until they could find a promising opportunity for
+falling into the stream of carriages, and getting, in good time, into the
+thick of the festivity; and coming among them so abruptly, all
+travel-stained and weary, was not coming very well prepared to enjoy the
+scene.
+
+We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles before.
+It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and hurrying on between its
+worn-away and miry banks, had a promising aspect of desolation and ruin.
+The masquerade dresses on the fringe of the Carnival, did great violence
+to this promise.  There were no great ruins, no solemn tokens of
+antiquity, to be seen;—they all lie on the other side of the city.  There
+seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops and houses, such as are to
+be found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages,
+ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude of chattering strangers.  It was
+no more _my_ Rome: the Rome of anybody’s fancy, man or boy; degraded and
+fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than the Place
+de la Concorde in Paris is.  A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain, and muddy
+streets, I was prepared for, but not for this: and I confess to having
+gone to bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour, and with a very
+considerably quenched enthusiasm.
+
+Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St. Peter’s.  It
+looked immense in the distance, but distinctly and decidedly small, by
+comparison, on a near approach.  The beauty of the Piazza, on which it
+stands, with its clusters of exquisite columns, and its gushing
+fountains—so fresh, so broad, and free, and beautiful—nothing can
+exaggerate.  The first burst of the interior, in all its expansive
+majesty and glory: and, most of all, the looking up into the Dome: is a
+sensation never to be forgotten.  But, there were preparations for a
+Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent
+frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the subterranean
+chapel: which is before it: in the centre of the church: were like a
+goldsmith’s shop, or one of the opening scenes in a very lavish
+pantomime.  And though I had as high a sense of the beauty of the
+building (I hope) as it is possible to entertain, I felt no very strong
+emotion.  I have been infinitely more affected in many English cathedrals
+when the organ has been playing, and in many English country churches
+when the congregation have been singing.  I had a much greater sense of
+mystery and wonder, in the Cathedral of San Mark at Venice.
+
+When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour staring up
+into the dome: and would not have ‘gone over’ the Cathedral then, for any
+money), we said to the coachman, ‘Go to the Coliseum.’  In a quarter of
+an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.
+
+It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive
+and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment—actually in passing
+in—they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used
+to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and
+such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there, as no
+language can describe.  Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter
+desolation, strike upon the stranger the next moment, like a softened
+sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome
+by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and
+afflictions.
+
+To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown
+with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its
+porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets,
+and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds
+who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of
+Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in the centre;
+to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all
+about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and
+Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Cæsars; the temples of the old
+religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked,
+wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.
+It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand,
+majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.  Never, in its bloodiest prime,
+can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the
+lustiest life, have moved one’s heart, as it must move all who look upon
+it now, a ruin.  GOD be thanked: a ruin!
+
+As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among graves: so
+do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old mythology
+and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman
+people.  The Italian face changes as the visitor approaches the city; its
+beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one countenance in a
+hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not be at
+home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow.
+
+Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine in
+its full and awful grandeur!  We wandered out upon the Appian Way, and
+then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken walls, with here
+and there a desolate and uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus,
+where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges,
+competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old
+time: past the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclosure, hedge, or
+stake, wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where on that side of
+Rome, nothing is to be beheld but Ruin.  Except where the distant
+Apennines bound the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one
+field of ruin.  Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and
+beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs.  A desert of
+decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in
+every stone that strews the ground.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+On Sunday, the Pope assisted in the performance of High Mass at St.
+Peter’s.  The effect of the Cathedral on my mind, on that second visit,
+was exactly what it was at first, and what it remains after many visits.
+It is not religiously impressive or affecting.  It is an immense edifice,
+with no one point for the mind to rest upon; and it tires itself with
+wandering round and round.  The very purpose of the place, is not
+expressed in anything you see there, unless you examine its details—and
+all examination of details is incompatible with the place itself.  It
+might be a Pantheon, or a Senate House, or a great architectural trophy,
+having no other object than an architectural triumph.  There is a black
+statue of St. Peter, to be sure, under a red canopy; which is larger than
+life and which is constantly having its great toe kissed by good
+Catholics.  You cannot help seeing that: it is so very prominent and
+popular.  But it does not heighten the effect of the temple, as a work of
+art; and it is not expressive—to me at least—of its high purpose.
+
+A large space behind the altar, was fitted up with boxes, shaped like
+those at the Italian Opera in England, but in their decoration much more
+gaudy.  In the centre of the kind of theatre thus railed off, was a
+canopied dais with the Pope’s chair upon it.  The pavement was covered
+with a carpet of the brightest green; and what with this green, and the
+intolerable reds and crimsons, and gold borders of the hangings, the
+whole concern looked like a stupendous Bonbon.  On either side of the
+altar, was a large box for lady strangers.  These were filled with ladies
+in black dresses and black veils.  The gentlemen of the Pope’s guard, in
+red coats, leather breeches, and jack-boots, guarded all this reserved
+space, with drawn swords that were very flashy in every sense; and from
+the altar all down the nave, a broad lane was kept clear by the Pope’s
+Swiss guard, who wear a quaint striped surcoat, and striped tight legs,
+and carry halberds like those which are usually shouldered by those
+theatrical supernumeraries, who never _can_ get off the stage fast
+enough, and who may be generally observed to linger in the enemy’s camp
+after the open country, held by the opposite forces, has been split up
+the middle by a convulsion of Nature.
+
+I got upon the border of the green carpet, in company with a great many
+other gentlemen, attired in black (no other passport is necessary), and
+stood there at my ease, during the performance of Mass.  The singers were
+in a crib of wirework (like a large meat-safe or bird-cage) in one
+corner; and sang most atrociously.  All about the green carpet, there was
+a slowly moving crowd of people: talking to each other: staring at the
+Pope through eye-glasses; defrauding one another, in moments of partial
+curiosity, out of precarious seats on the bases of pillars: and grinning
+hideously at the ladies.  Dotted here and there, were little knots of
+friars (Frances-cáni, or Cappuccíni, in their coarse brown dresses and
+peaked hoods) making a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics of
+higher degree, and having their humility gratified to the utmost, by
+being shouldered about, and elbowed right and left, on all sides.  Some
+of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas, and stained garments: having
+trudged in from the country.  The faces of the greater part were as
+coarse and heavy as their dress; their dogged, stupid, monotonous stare
+at all the glory and splendour, having something in it, half miserable,
+and half ridiculous.
+
+Upon the green carpet itself, and gathered round the altar, was a perfect
+army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold, purple, violet, white, and
+fine linen.  Stragglers from these, went to and fro among the crowd,
+conversing two and two, or giving and receiving introductions, and
+exchanging salutations; other functionaries in black gowns, and other
+functionaries in court-dresses, were similarly engaged.  In the midst of
+all these, and stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out, and the extreme
+restlessness of the Youth of England, who were perpetually wandering
+about, some few steady persons in black cassocks, who had knelt down with
+their faces to the wall, and were poring over their missals, became,
+unintentionally, a sort of humane man-traps, and with their own devout
+legs, tripped up other people’s by the dozen.
+
+There was a great pile of candles lying down on the floor near me, which
+a very old man in a rusty black gown with an open-work tippet, like a
+summer ornament for a fireplace in tissue-paper, made himself very busy
+in dispensing to all the ecclesiastics: one a-piece.  They loitered about
+with these for some time, under their arms like walking-sticks, or in
+their hands like truncheons.  At a certain period of the ceremony,
+however, each carried his candle up to the Pope, laid it across his two
+knees to be blessed, took it back again, and filed off.  This was done in
+a very attenuated procession, as you may suppose, and occupied a long
+time.  Not because it takes long to bless a candle through and through,
+but because there were so many candles to be blessed.  At last they were
+all blessed: and then they were all lighted; and then the Pope was taken
+up, chair and all, and carried round the church.
+
+I must say, that I never saw anything, out of November, so like the
+popular English commemoration of the fifth of that month.  A bundle of
+matches and a lantern, would have made it perfect.  Nor did the Pope,
+himself, at all mar the resemblance, though he has a pleasant and
+venerable face; for, as this part of the ceremony makes him giddy and
+sick, he shuts his eyes when it is performed: and having his eyes shut
+and a great mitre on his head, and his head itself wagging to and fro as
+they shook him in carrying, he looked as if his mask were going to tumble
+off.  The two immense fans which are always borne, one on either side of
+him, accompanied him, of course, on this occasion.  As they carried him
+along, he blessed the people with the mystic sign; and as he passed them,
+they kneeled down.  When he had made the round of the church, he was
+brought back again, and if I am not mistaken, this performance was
+repeated, in the whole, three times.  There was, certainly nothing solemn
+or effective in it; and certainly very much that was droll and tawdry.
+But this remark applies to the whole ceremony, except the raising of the
+Host, when every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and
+dashed his naked sword on the ground; which had a fine effect.
+
+The next time I saw the cathedral, was some two or three weeks
+afterwards, when I climbed up into the ball; and then, the hangings being
+taken down, and the carpet taken up, but all the framework left, the
+remnants of these decorations looked like an exploded cracker.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+The Friday and Saturday having been solemn Festa days, and Sunday being
+always a _dies non_ in carnival proceedings, we had looked forward, with
+some impatience and curiosity, to the beginning of the new week: Monday
+and Tuesday being the two last and best days of the Carnival.
+
+On the Monday afternoon at one or two o’clock, there began to be a great
+rattling of carriages into the court-yard of the hotel; a hurrying to and
+fro of all the servants in it; and, now and then, a swift shooting across
+some doorway or balcony, of a straggling stranger in a fancy dress: not
+yet sufficiently well used to the same, to wear it with confidence, and
+defy public opinion.  All the carriages were open, and had the linings
+carefully covered with white cotton or calico, to prevent their proper
+decorations from being spoiled by the incessant pelting of sugar-plums;
+and people were packing and cramming into every vehicle as it waited for
+its occupants, enormous sacks and baskets full of these confétti,
+together with such heaps of flowers, tied up in little nosegays, that
+some carriages were not only brimful of flowers, but literally running
+over: scattering, at every shake and jerk of the springs, some of their
+abundance on the ground.  Not to be behindhand in these essential
+particulars, we caused two very respectable sacks of sugar-plums (each
+about three feet high) and a large clothes-basket full of flowers to be
+conveyed into our hired barouche, with all speed.  And from our place of
+observation, in one of the upper balconies of the hotel, we contemplated
+these arrangements with the liveliest satisfaction.  The carriages now
+beginning to take up their company, and move away, we got into ours, and
+drove off too, armed with little wire masks for our faces; the
+sugar-plums, like Falstaff’s adulterated sack, having lime in their
+composition.
+
+The Corso is a street a mile long; a street of shops, and palaces, and
+private houses, sometimes opening into a broad piazza.  There are
+verandahs and balconies, of all shapes and sizes, to almost every
+house—not on one story alone, but often to one room or another on every
+story—put there in general with so little order or regularity, that if,
+year after year, and season after season, it had rained balconies, hailed
+balconies, snowed balconies, blown balconies, they could scarcely have
+come into existence in a more disorderly manner.
+
+This is the great fountain-head and focus of the Carnival.  But all the
+streets in which the Carnival is held, being vigilantly kept by dragoons,
+it is necessary for carriages, in the first instance, to pass, in line,
+down another thoroughfare, and so come into the Corso at the end remote
+from the Piázza del Popolo; which is one of its terminations.
+Accordingly, we fell into the string of coaches, and, for some time,
+jogged on quietly enough; now crawling on at a very slow walk; now
+trotting half-a-dozen yards; now backing fifty; and now stopping
+altogether: as the pressure in front obliged us.  If any impetuous
+carriage dashed out of the rank and clattered forward, with the wild idea
+of getting on faster, it was suddenly met, or overtaken, by a trooper on
+horseback, who, deaf as his own drawn sword to all remonstrances,
+immediately escorted it back to the very end of the row, and made it a
+dim speck in the remotest perspective.  Occasionally, we interchanged a
+volley of confétti with the carriage next in front, or the carriage next
+behind; but as yet, this capturing of stray and errant coaches by the
+military, was the chief amusement.
+
+Presently, we came into a narrow street, where, besides one line of
+carriages going, there was another line of carriages returning.  Here the
+sugar-plums and the nosegays began to fly about, pretty smartly; and I
+was fortunate enough to observe one gentleman attired as a Greek warrior,
+catch a light-whiskered brigand on the nose (he was in the very act of
+tossing up a bouquet to a young lady in a first-floor window) with a
+precision that was much applauded by the bystanders.  As this victorious
+Greek was exchanging a facetious remark with a stout gentleman in a
+doorway—one-half black and one-half white, as if he had been peeled up
+the middle—who had offered him his congratulations on this achievement,
+he received an orange from a housetop, full on his left ear, and was much
+surprised, not to say discomfited.  Especially, as he was standing up at
+the time; and in consequence of the carriage moving on suddenly, at the
+same moment, staggered ignominiously, and buried himself among his
+flowers.
+
+Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress, brought us to the
+Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as the whole scene
+there, it would be difficult to imagine.  From all the innumerable
+balconies: from the remotest and highest, no less than from the lowest
+and nearest: hangings of bright red, bright green, bright blue, white and
+gold, were fluttering in the brilliant sunlight.  From windows, and from
+parapets, and tops of houses, streamers of the richest colours, and
+draperies of the gaudiest and most sparkling hues, were floating out upon
+the street.  The buildings seemed to have been literally turned inside
+out, and to have all their gaiety towards the highway.  Shop-fronts were
+taken down, and the windows filled with company, like boxes at a shining
+theatre; doors were carried off their hinges, and long tapestried groves,
+hung with garlands of flowers and evergreens, displayed within; builders’
+scaffoldings were gorgeous temples, radiant in silver, gold, and crimson;
+and in every nook and corner, from the pavement to the chimney-tops,
+where women’s eyes could glisten, there they danced, and laughed, and
+sparkled, like the light in water.  Every sort of bewitching madness of
+dress was there.  Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old
+stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses,
+strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and
+clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold,
+shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every
+fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as
+if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe
+into Rome, upon their sturdy arches, that morning.
+
+The carriages were now three abreast; in broader places four; often
+stationary for a long time together, always one close mass of variegated
+brightness; showing, the whole street-full, through the storm of flowers,
+like flowers of a larger growth themselves.  In some, the horses were
+richly caparisoned in magnificent trappings; in others they were decked
+from head to tail, with flowing ribbons.  Some were driven by coachmen
+with enormous double faces: one face leering at the horses: the other
+cocking its extraordinary eyes into the carriage: and both rattling
+again, under the hail of sugar-plums.  Other drivers were attired as
+women, wearing long ringlets and no bonnets, and looking more ridiculous
+in any real difficulty with the horses (of which, in such a concourse,
+there were a great many) than tongue can tell, or pen describe.  Instead
+of sitting _in_ the carriages, upon the seats, the handsome Roman women,
+to see and to be seen the better, sit in the heads of the barouches, at
+this time of general licence, with their feet upon the cushions—and oh,
+the flowing skirts and dainty waists, the blessed shapes and laughing
+faces, the free, good-humoured, gallant figures that they make! There
+were great vans, too, full of handsome girls—thirty, or more together,
+perhaps—and the broadsides that were poured into, and poured out of,
+these fairy fire-shops, splashed the air with flowers and bon-bons for
+ten minutes at a time.  Carriages, delayed long in one place, would begin
+a deliberate engagement with other carriages, or with people at the lower
+windows; and the spectators at some upper balcony or window, joining in
+the fray, and attacking both parties, would empty down great bags of
+confétti, that descended like a cloud, and in an instant made them white
+as millers.  Still, carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours
+on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.  Men and boys clinging to
+the wheels of coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their
+wake, and diving in among the horses’ feet to pick up scattered flowers
+to sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic
+exaggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through enormous
+eye-glasses, and always transported with an ecstasy of love, on the
+discovery of any particularly old lady at a window; long strings of
+Policinelli, laying about them with blown bladders at the ends of sticks;
+a waggon-full of madmen, screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full
+of grave mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a
+party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of
+sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals with pigs’
+faces, and lions’ tails, carried under their arms, or worn gracefully
+over their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours
+on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.  Not many actual characters
+sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering the number dressed, but
+the main pleasure of the scene consisting in its perfect good temper; in
+its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety; and in its entire
+abandonment to the mad humour of the time—an abandonment so perfect, so
+contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to
+his middle in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them
+all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o’clock, when he is
+suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the whole
+business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound, and seeing the
+dragoons begin to clear the street.
+
+How it ever _is_ cleared for the race that takes place at five, or how
+the horses ever go through the race, without going over the people, is
+more than I can say.  But the carriages get out into the by-streets, or
+up into the Piázza del Popolo, and some people sit in temporary galleries
+in the latter place, and tens of thousands line the Corso on both sides,
+when the horses are brought out into the Piázza—to the foot of that same
+column which, for centuries, looked down upon the games and chariot-races
+in the Circus Maximus.
+
+At a given signal they are started off.  Down the live lane, the whole
+length of the Corso, they fly like the wind: riderless, as all the world
+knows: with shining ornaments upon their backs, and twisted in their
+plaited manes: and with heavy little balls stuck full of spikes, dangling
+at their sides, to goad them on.  The jingling of these trappings, and
+the rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the dash and fury of
+their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very cannon that are
+fired—these noises are nothing to the roaring of the multitude: their
+shouts: the clapping of their hands.  But it is soon over—almost
+instantaneously.  More cannon shake the town.  The horses have plunged
+into the carpets put across the street to stop them; the goal is reached;
+the prizes are won (they are given, in part, by the poor Jews, as a
+compromise for not running foot-races themselves); and there is an end to
+that day’s sport.
+
+But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last day but
+one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height of glittering
+colour, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that the bare recollection
+of it makes me giddy at this moment.  The same diversions, greatly
+heightened and intensified in the ardour with which they are pursued, go
+on until the same hour.  The race is repeated; the cannon are fired; the
+shouting and clapping of hands are renewed; the cannon are fired again;
+the race is over; and the prizes are won.  But the carriages: ankle-deep
+with sugar-plums within, and so be-flowered and dusty without, as to be
+hardly recognisable for the same vehicles that they were, three hours
+ago: instead of scampering off in all directions, throng into the Corso,
+where they are soon wedged together in a scarcely moving mass.  For the
+diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the Carnival, is now
+at hand; and sellers of little tapers like what are called Christmas
+candles in England, are shouting lustily on every side, ‘Moccoli,
+Moccoli!  Ecco Moccoli!’—a new item in the tumult; quite abolishing that
+other item of ‘Ecco Fióri!  Ecco Fior-r-r!’ which has been making itself
+audible over all the rest, at intervals, the whole day through.
+
+As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one dull, heavy,
+uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights begin flashing, here and
+there: in the windows, on the housetops, in the balconies, in the
+carriages, in the hands of the foot-passengers: little by little:
+gradually, gradually: more and more: until the whole long street is one
+great glare and blaze of fire.  Then, everybody present has but one
+engrossing object; that is, to extinguish other people’s candles, and to
+keep his own alight; and everybody: man, woman, or child, gentleman or
+lady, prince or peasant, native or foreigner: yells and screams, and
+roars incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued, ‘Senza Moccolo, Senza
+Moccolo!’  (Without a light!  Without a light!) until nothing is heard
+but a gigantic chorus of those two words, mingled with peals of laughter.
+
+The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordinary that can be
+imagined.  Carriages coming slowly by, with everybody standing on the
+seats or on the box, holding up their lights at arms’ length, for greater
+safety; some in paper shades; some with a bunch of undefended little
+tapers, kindled altogether; some with blazing torches; some with feeble
+little candles; men on foot, creeping along, among the wheels, watching
+their opportunity, to make a spring at some particular light, and dash it
+out; other people climbing up into carriages, to get hold of them by main
+force; others, chasing some unlucky wanderer, round and round his own
+coach, to blow out the light he has begged or stolen somewhere, before he
+can ascend to his own company, and enable them to light their
+extinguished tapers; others, with their hats off, at a carriage-door,
+humbly beseeching some kind-hearted lady to oblige them with a light for
+a cigar, and when she is in the fulness of doubt whether to comply or no,
+blowing out the candle she is guarding so tenderly with her little hand;
+other people at the windows, fishing for candles with lines and hooks, or
+letting down long willow-wands with handkerchiefs at the end, and
+flapping them out, dexterously, when the bearer is at the height of his
+triumph, others, biding their time in corners, with immense extinguishers
+like halberds, and suddenly coming down upon glorious torches; others,
+gathered round one coach, and sticking to it; others, raining oranges and
+nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or regularly storming a pyramid
+of men, holding up one man among them, who carries one feeble little wick
+above his head, with which he defies them all!  Senza Moccolo!  Senza
+Moccolo!  Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, pointing in derision
+at extinguished lights, and clapping their hands, as they pass on,
+crying, ‘Senza Moccolo!  Senza Moccolo!’; low balconies full of lovely
+faces and gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some
+repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over,
+some shrinking back—delicate arms and bosoms—graceful figures—glowing
+lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza
+Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!—when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest
+ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and
+the Carnival is over in an instant—put out like a taper, with a breath!
+
+There was a masquerade at the theatre at night, as dull and senseless as
+a London one, and only remarkable for the summary way in which the house
+was cleared at eleven o’clock: which was done by a line of soldiers
+forming along the wall, at the back of the stage, and sweeping the whole
+company out before them, like a broad broom.  The game of the Moccoletti
+(the word, in the singular, Moccoletto, is the diminutive of Moccolo, and
+means a little lamp or candlesnuff) is supposed by some to be a ceremony
+of burlesque mourning for the death of the Carnival: candles being
+indispensable to Catholic grief.  But whether it be so, or be a remnant
+of the ancient Saturnalia, or an incorporation of both, or have its
+origin in anything else, I shall always remember it, and the frolic, as a
+brilliant and most captivating sight: no less remarkable for the unbroken
+good-humour of all concerned, down to the very lowest (and among those
+who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than
+for its innocent vivacity.  For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport
+so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any
+taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly
+be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of
+general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of
+with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a whole year.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Availing ourselves of a part of the quiet interval between the
+termination of the Carnival and the beginning of the Holy Week: when
+everybody had run away from the one, and few people had yet begun to run
+back again for the other: we went conscientiously to work, to see Rome.
+And, by dint of going out early every morning, and coming back late every
+evening, and labouring hard all day, I believe we made acquaintance with
+every post and pillar in the city, and the country round; and, in
+particular, explored so many churches, that I abandoned that part of the
+enterprise at last, before it was half finished, lest I should never, of
+my own accord, go to church again, as long as I lived.  But, I managed,
+almost every day, at one time or other, to get back to the Coliseum, and
+out upon the open Campagna, beyond the Tomb of Cecilia Metella.
+
+We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company of English
+Tourists, with whom I had an ardent, but ungratified longing, to
+establish a speaking acquaintance.  They were one Mr. Davis, and a small
+circle of friends.  It was impossible not to know Mrs. Davis’s name, from
+her being always in great request among her party, and her party being
+everywhere.  During the Holy Week, they were in every part of every scene
+of every ceremony.  For a fortnight or three weeks before it, they were
+in every tomb, and every church, and every ruin, and every Picture
+Gallery; and I hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment.
+Deep underground, high up in St. Peter’s, out on the Campagna, and
+stifling in the Jews’ quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the same.  I
+don’t think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything; and she
+had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket, and was trying to
+find it, with all her might and main, among an immense quantity of
+English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon the sea-shore, at the
+bottom of it.  There was a professional Cicerone always attached to the
+party (which had been brought over from London, fifteen or twenty strong,
+by contract), and if he so much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably
+cut him short by saying, ‘There, God bless the man, don’t worrit me!  I
+don’t understand a word you say, and shouldn’t if you was to talk till
+you was black in the face!’  Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured
+great-coat on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and had a
+slow curiosity constantly devouring him, which prompted him to do
+extraordinary things, such as taking the covers off urns in tombs, and
+looking in at the ashes as if they were pickles—and tracing out
+inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and saying, with intense
+thoughtfulness, ‘Here’s a B you see, and there’s a R, and this is the way
+we goes on in; is it!’  His antiquarian habits occasioned his being
+frequently in the rear of the rest; and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis,
+and the party in general, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be
+lost.  This caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and
+at the most improper seasons.  And when he came, slowly emerging out of
+some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful Ghoule, saying ‘Here I am!’ Mrs.
+Davis invariably replied, ‘You’ll be buried alive in a foreign country,
+Davis, and it’s no use trying to prevent you!’
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been brought from
+London in about nine or ten days.  Eighteen hundred years ago, the Roman
+legions under Claudius, protested against being led into Mr. and Mrs.
+Davis’s country, urging that it lay beyond the limits of the world.
+
+Among what may be called the Cubs or minor Lions of Rome, there was one
+that amused me mightily.  It is always to be found there; and its den is
+on the great flight of steps that lead from the Piazza di Spágna, to the
+church of Trínita del Monte.  In plainer words, these steps are the great
+place of resort for the artists’ ‘Models,’ and there they are constantly
+waiting to be hired.  The first time I went up there, I could not
+conceive why the faces seemed familiar to me; why they appeared to have
+beset me, for years, in every possible variety of action and costume; and
+how it came to pass that they started up before me, in Rome, in the broad
+day, like so many saddled and bridled nightmares.  I soon found that we
+had made acquaintance, and improved it, for several years, on the walls
+of various Exhibition Galleries.  There is one old gentleman, with long
+white hair and an immense beard, who, to my knowledge, has gone half
+through the catalogue of the Royal Academy.  This is the venerable, or
+patriarchal model.  He carries a long staff; and every knot and twist in
+that staff I have seen, faithfully delineated, innumerable times.  There
+is another man in a blue cloak, who always pretends to be asleep in the
+sun (when there is any), and who, I need not say, is always very wide
+awake, and very attentive to the disposition of his legs.  This is the
+_dolce far’ niente_ model.  There is another man in a brown cloak, who
+leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and looks out
+of the corners of his eyes: which are just visible beneath his broad
+slouched hat.  This is the assassin model.  There is another man, who
+constantly looks over his own shoulder, and is always going away, but
+never does.  This is the haughty, or scornful model.  As to Domestic
+Happiness, and Holy Families, they should come very cheap, for there are
+lumps of them, all up the steps; and the cream of the thing is, that they
+are all the falsest vagabonds in the world, especially made up for the
+purpose, and having no counterparts in Rome or any other part of the
+habitable globe.
+
+My recent mention of the Carnival, reminds me of its being said to be a
+mock mourning (in the ceremony with which it closes), for the gaieties
+and merry-makings before Lent; and this again reminds me of the real
+funerals and mourning processions of Rome, which, like those in most
+other parts of Italy, are rendered chiefly remarkable to a Foreigner, by
+the indifference with which the mere clay is universally regarded, after
+life has left it.  And this is not from the survivors having had time to
+dissociate the memory of the dead from their well-remembered appearance
+and form on earth; for the interment follows too speedily after death,
+for that: almost always taking place within four-and-twenty hours, and,
+sometimes, within twelve.
+
+At Rome, there is the same arrangement of Pits in a great, bleak, open,
+dreary space, that I have already described as existing in Genoa.  When I
+visited it, at noonday, I saw a solitary coffin of plain deal: uncovered
+by any shroud or pall, and so slightly made, that the hoof of any
+wandering mule would have crushed it in: carelessly tumbled down, all on
+one side, on the door of one of the pits—and there left, by itself, in
+the wind and sunshine.  ‘How does it come to be left here?’ I asked the
+man who showed me the place.  ‘It was brought here half an hour ago,
+Signore,’ he said.  I remembered to have met the procession, on its
+return: straggling away at a good round pace.  ‘When will it be put in
+the pit?’ I asked him.  ‘When the cart comes, and it is opened to-night,’
+he said.  ‘How much does it cost to be brought here in this way, instead
+of coming in the cart?’ I asked him.  ‘Ten scudi,’ he said (about two
+pounds, two-and-sixpence, English).  ‘The other bodies, for whom nothing
+is paid, are taken to the church of the Santa Maria della Consolázione,’
+he continued, ‘and brought here altogether, in the cart at night.’  I
+stood, a moment, looking at the coffin, which had two initial letters
+scrawled upon the top; and turned away, with an expression in my face, I
+suppose, of not much liking its exposure in that manner: for he said,
+shrugging his shoulders with great vivacity, and giving a pleasant smile,
+‘But he’s dead, Signore, he’s dead.  Why not?’
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Among the innumerable churches, there is one I must select for separate
+mention.  It is the church of the Ara Coeli, supposed to be built on the
+site of the old Temple of Jupiter Feretrius; and approached, on one side,
+by a long steep flight of steps, which seem incomplete without some group
+of bearded soothsayers on the top.  It is remarkable for the possession
+of a miraculous Bambíno, or wooden doll, representing the Infant Saviour;
+and I first saw this miraculous Bambíno, in legal phrase, in manner
+following, that is to say:
+
+We had strolled into the church one afternoon, and were looking down its
+long vista of gloomy pillars (for all these ancient churches built upon
+the ruins of old temples, are dark and sad), when the Brave came running
+in, with a grin upon his face that stretched it from ear to ear, and
+implored us to follow him, without a moment’s delay, as they were going
+to show the Bambíno to a select party.  We accordingly hurried off to a
+sort of chapel, or sacristy, hard by the chief altar, but not in the
+church itself, where the select party, consisting of two or three
+Catholic gentlemen and ladies (not Italians), were already assembled: and
+where one hollow-cheeked young monk was lighting up divers candles, while
+another was putting on some clerical robes over his coarse brown habit.
+The candles were on a kind of altar, and above it were two delectable
+figures, such as you would see at any English fair, representing the Holy
+Virgin, and Saint Joseph, as I suppose, bending in devotion over a wooden
+box, or coffer; which was shut.
+
+The hollow-cheeked monk, number One, having finished lighting the
+candles, went down on his knees, in a corner, before this set-piece; and
+the monk number Two, having put on a pair of highly ornamented and
+gold-bespattered gloves, lifted down the coffer, with great reverence,
+and set it on the altar.  Then, with many genuflexions, and muttering
+certain prayers, he opened it, and let down the front, and took off
+sundry coverings of satin and lace from the inside.  The ladies had been
+on their knees from the commencement; and the gentlemen now dropped down
+devoutly, as he exposed to view a little wooden doll, in face very like
+General Tom Thumb, the American Dwarf: gorgeously dressed in satin and
+gold lace, and actually blazing with rich jewels.  There was scarcely a
+spot upon its little breast, or neck, or stomach, but was sparkling with
+the costly offerings of the Faithful.  Presently, he lifted it out of the
+box, and carrying it round among the kneelers, set its face against the
+forehead of every one, and tendered its clumsy foot to them to kiss—a
+ceremony which they all performed down to a dirty little ragamuffin of a
+boy who had walked in from the street.  When this was done, he laid it in
+the box again: and the company, rising, drew near, and commended the
+jewels in whispers.  In good time, he replaced the coverings, shut up the
+box, put it back in its place, locked up the whole concern (Holy Family
+and all) behind a pair of folding-doors; took off his priestly vestments;
+and received the customary ‘small charge,’ while his companion, by means
+of an extinguisher fastened to the end of a long stick, put out the
+lights, one after another.  The candles being all extinguished, and the
+money all collected, they retired, and so did the spectators.
+
+I met this same Bambíno, in the street a short time afterwards, going, in
+great state, to the house of some sick person.  It is taken to all parts
+of Rome for this purpose, constantly; but, I understand that it is not
+always as successful as could be wished; for, making its appearance at
+the bedside of weak and nervous people in extremity, accompanied by a
+numerous escort, it not unfrequently frightens them to death.  It is most
+popular in cases of child-birth, where it has done such wonders, that if
+a lady be longer than usual in getting through her difficulties, a
+messenger is despatched, with all speed, to solicit the immediate
+attendance of the Bambíno.  It is a very valuable property, and much
+confided in—especially by the religious body to whom it belongs.
+
+I am happy to know that it is not considered immaculate, by some who are
+good Catholics, and who are behind the scenes, from what was told me by
+the near relation of a Priest, himself a Catholic, and a gentleman of
+learning and intelligence.  This Priest made my informant promise that he
+would, on no account, allow the Bambíno to be borne into the bedroom of a
+sick lady, in whom they were both interested.  ‘For,’ said he, ‘if they
+(the monks) trouble her with it, and intrude themselves into her room, it
+will certainly kill her.’  My informant accordingly looked out of the
+window when it came; and, with many thanks, declined to open the door.
+He endeavoured, in another case of which he had no other knowledge than
+such as he gained as a passer-by at the moment, to prevent its being
+carried into a small unwholesome chamber, where a poor girl was dying.
+But, he strove against it unsuccessfully, and she expired while the crowd
+were pressing round her bed.
+
+Among the people who drop into St. Peter’s at their leisure, to kneel on
+the pavement, and say a quiet prayer, there are certain schools and
+seminaries, priestly and otherwise, that come in, twenty or thirty
+strong.  These boys always kneel down in single file, one behind the
+other, with a tall grim master in a black gown, bringing up the rear:
+like a pack of cards arranged to be tumbled down at a touch, with a
+disproportionately large Knave of clubs at the end.  When they have had a
+minute or so at the chief altar, they scramble up, and filing off to the
+chapel of the Madonna, or the sacrament, flop down again in the same
+order; so that if anybody did stumble against the master, a general and
+sudden overthrow of the whole line must inevitably ensue.
+
+The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible.  The same
+monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going on; the same dark
+building, darker from the brightness of the street without; the same
+lamps dimly burning; the selfsame people kneeling here and there; turned
+towards you, from one altar or other, the same priest’s back, with the
+same large cross embroidered on it; however different in size, in shape,
+in wealth, in architecture, this church is from that, it is the same
+thing still.  There are the same dirty beggars stopping in their muttered
+prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity at
+the doors; the same blind men, rattling little pots like kitchen
+pepper-castors: their depositories for alms; the same preposterous crowns
+of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins in
+crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a head-dress
+bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent miles of landscape;
+the same favourite shrine or figure, smothered with little silver hearts
+and crosses, and the like: the staple trade and show of all the
+jewellers; the same odd mixture of respect and indecorum, faith and
+phlegm: kneeling on the stones, and spitting on them, loudly; getting up
+from prayers to beg a little, or to pursue some other worldly matter: and
+then kneeling down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the
+point where it was interrupted.  In one church, a kneeling lady got up
+from her prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card, as a teacher of
+Music; and in another, a sedate gentleman with a very thick
+walking-staff, arose from his devotions to belabour his dog, who was
+growling at another dog: and whose yelps and howls resounded through the
+church, as his master quietly relapsed into his former train of
+meditation—keeping his eye upon the dog, at the same time, nevertheless.
+
+Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contributions of the
+Faithful, in some form or other.  Sometimes, it is a money-box, set up
+between the worshipper, and the wooden life-size figure of the Redeemer;
+sometimes, it is a little chest for the maintenance of the Virgin;
+sometimes, an appeal on behalf of a popular Bambíno; sometimes, a bag at
+the end of a long stick, thrust among the people here and there, and
+vigilantly jingled by an active Sacristan; but there it always is, and,
+very often, in many shapes in the same church, and doing pretty well in
+all.  Nor, is it wanting in the open air—the streets and roads—for, often
+as you are walking along, thinking about anything rather than a tin
+canister, that object pounces out upon you from a little house by the
+wayside; and on its top is painted, ‘For the Souls in Purgatory;’ an
+appeal which the bearer repeats a great many times, as he rattles it
+before you, much as Punch rattles the cracked bell which his sanguine
+disposition makes an organ of.
+
+And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar sanctity, bear the
+inscription, ‘Every Mass performed at this altar frees a soul from
+Purgatory.’  I have never been able to find out the charge for one of
+these services, but they should needs be expensive.  There are several
+Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of which, confers indulgences for
+varying terms.  That in the centre of the Coliseum, is worth a hundred
+days; and people may be seen kissing it from morning to night.  It is
+curious that some of these crosses seem to acquire an arbitrary
+popularity: this very one among them.  In another part of the Coliseum
+there is a cross upon a marble slab, with the inscription, ‘Who kisses
+this cross shall be entitled to Two hundred and forty days’ indulgence.’
+But I saw no one person kiss it, though, day after day, I sat in the
+arena, and saw scores upon scores of peasants pass it, on their way to
+kiss the other.
+
+To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches, would be
+the wildest occupation in the world.  But St. Stefano Rotondo, a damp,
+mildewed vault of an old church in the outskirts of Rome, will always
+struggle uppermost in my mind, by reason of the hideous paintings with
+which its walls are covered.  These represent the martyrdoms of saints
+and early Christians; and such a panorama of horror and butchery no man
+could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for
+supper.  Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed,
+eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by
+horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn
+with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their
+jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the
+stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest
+subjects.  So insisted on, and laboured at, besides, that every sufferer
+gives you the same occasion for wonder as poor old Duncan awoke, in Lady
+Macbeth, when she marvelled at his having so much blood in him.
+
+There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what is said to
+have been—and very possibly may have been—the dungeon of St. Peter.  This
+chamber is now fitted up as an oratory, dedicated to that saint; and it
+lives, as a distinct and separate place, in my recollection, too.  It is
+very small and low-roofed; and the dread and gloom of the ponderous,
+obdurate old prison are on it, as if they had come up in a dark mist
+through the floor.  Hanging on the walls, among the clustered votive
+offerings, are objects, at once strangely in keeping, and strangely at
+variance, with the place—rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers
+instruments of violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use, and
+hung up to propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon them would
+drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry with.  It is all
+so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the dungeons below are so
+black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked; that this little dark spot
+becomes a dream within a dream: and in the vision of great churches which
+come rolling past me like a sea, it is a small wave by itself, that melts
+into no other wave, and does not flow on with the rest.
+
+It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are entered
+from some Roman churches, and undermine the city.  Many churches have
+crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which, in the ancient
+time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples, and what not: but I do
+not speak of them.  Beneath the church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo,
+there are the jaws of a terrific range of caverns, hewn out of the rock,
+and said to have another outlet underneath the Coliseum—tremendous
+darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth and unexplorable,
+where the dull torches, flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long
+ranges of distant vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in
+a city of the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls,
+drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and there,
+and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the sun.  Some accounts make
+these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the amphitheatre; some
+the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some, both.  But the legend most
+appalling to the fancy is, that in the upper range (for there are two
+stories of these caves) the Early Christians destined to be eaten at the
+Coliseum Shows, heard the wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down
+below; until, upon the night and solitude of their captivity, there burst
+the sudden noon and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and
+of these, their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
+
+Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of San
+Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs of
+Rome—quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places of the
+Christians.  These ghastly passages have been explored for twenty miles;
+and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.
+
+A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only guide,
+down into this profound and dreadful place.  The narrow ways and openings
+hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon blotted
+out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we had come:
+and I could not help thinking ‘Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of
+madness, he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a
+fit, what would become of us!’  On we wandered, among martyrs’ graves:
+passing great subterranean vaulted roads, diverging in all directions,
+and choked up with heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not
+take refuge there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that
+which lives between it and the sun.  Graves, graves, graves; Graves of
+men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
+persecutors, ‘We are Christians!  We are Christians!’ that they might be
+murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly
+cut into their stone boundaries, and little niches, made to hold a vessel
+of the martyrs’ blood; Graves of some who lived down here, for years
+together, ministering to the rest, and preaching truth, and hope, and
+comfort, from the rude altars, that bear witness to their fortitude at
+this hour; more roomy graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds,
+being surprised, were hemmed in and walled up: buried before Death, and
+killed by slow starvation.
+
+‘The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid
+churches,’ said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped to rest
+in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding us on every
+side.  ‘They are here!  Among the Martyrs’ Graves!’  He was a gentle,
+earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I thought how Christian
+men have dealt with one another; how, perverting our most merciful
+religion, they have hunted down and tortured, burnt and beheaded,
+strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed each other; I pictured to myself an
+agony surpassing any that this Dust had suffered with the breath of life
+yet lingering in it, and how these great and constant hearts would have
+been shaken—how they would have quailed and drooped—if a foreknowledge of
+the deeds that professing Christians would commit in the Great Name for
+which they died, could have rent them with its own unutterable anguish,
+on the cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful fire.
+
+                       [Picture: In the Catacombs]
+
+Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain
+apart, and keep their separate identity.  I have a fainter recollection,
+sometimes of the relics; of the fragments of the pillar of the Temple
+that was rent in twain; of the portion of the table that was spread for
+the Last Supper; of the well at which the woman of Samaria gave water to
+Our Saviour; of two columns from the house of Pontius Pilate; of the
+stone to which the Sacred hands were bound, when the scourging was
+performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it,
+marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on
+some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an
+instant, as they flit before me.  The rest is a vast wilderness of
+consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with
+another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the
+ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of
+Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and
+ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and
+sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ: of Madonne, with their
+breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern
+fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy
+satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their withered crust of
+skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets of crushed flowers;
+sometimes of people gathered round the pulpit, and a monk within it
+stretching out the crucifix, and preaching fiercely: the sun just
+streaming down through some high window on the sail-cloth stretched above
+him and across the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost
+among the echoes of the roof.  Then my tired memory comes out upon a
+flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the
+light; and strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and
+hovels, of an old Italian street.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was beheaded here.
+Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a Bavarian countess, travelling
+as a pilgrim to Rome—alone and on foot, of course—and performing, it is
+said, that act of piety for the fourth time.  He saw her change a piece
+of gold at Viterbo, where he lived; followed her; bore her company on her
+journey for some forty miles or more, on the treacherous pretext of
+protecting her; attacked her, in the fulfilment of his unrelenting
+purpose, on the Campagna, within a very short distance of Rome, near to
+what is called (but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat
+her to death with her own pilgrim’s staff.  He was newly married, and
+gave some of her apparel to his wife: saying that he had bought it at a
+fair.  She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess passing through
+their town, recognised some trifle as having belonged to her.  Her
+husband then told her what he had done.  She, in confession, told a
+priest; and the man was taken, within four days after the commission of
+the murder.
+
+There are no fixed times for the administration of justice, or its
+execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had been in prison ever
+since.  On the Friday, as he was dining with the other prisoners, they
+came and told him he was to be beheaded next morning, and took him away.
+It is very unusual to execute in Lent; but his crime being a very bad
+one, it was deemed advisable to make an example of him at that time, when
+great numbers of pilgrims were coming towards Rome, from all parts, for
+the Holy Week.  I heard of this on the Friday evening, and saw the bills
+up at the churches, calling on the people to pray for the criminal’s
+soul.  So, I determined to go, and see him executed.
+
+The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o’clock, Roman time:
+or a quarter before nine in the forenoon.  I had two friends with me; and
+as we did not know but that the crowd might be very great, we were on the
+spot by half-past seven.  The place of execution was near the church of
+San Giovanni decolláto (a doubtful compliment to Saint John the Baptist)
+in one of the impassable back streets without any footway, of which a
+great part of Rome is composed—a street of rotten houses, which do not
+seem to belong to anybody, and do not seem to have ever been inhabited,
+and certainly were never built on any plan, or for any particular
+purpose, and have no window-sashes, and are a little like deserted
+breweries, and might be warehouses but for having nothing in them.
+Opposite to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was built.  An
+untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking thing of course: some seven
+feet high, perhaps: with a tall, gallows-shaped frame rising above it, in
+which was the knife, charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all ready to
+descend, and glittering brightly in the morning sun, whenever it looked
+out, now and then, from behind a cloud.
+
+There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at a
+considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope’s
+dragoons.  Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms, standing
+at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were walking up and
+down in twos and threes, chatting together, and smoking cigars.
+
+At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would be a
+dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of vegetable refuse,
+but for such things being thrown anywhere and everywhere in Rome, and
+favouring no particular sort of locality.  We got into a kind of
+wash-house, belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and standing
+there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled against the wall,
+looked, through a large grated window, at the scaffold, and straight down
+the street beyond it until, in consequence of its turning off abruptly to
+the left, our perspective was brought to a sudden termination, and had a
+corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.
+
+Nine o’clock struck, and ten o’clock struck, and nothing happened.  All
+the bells of all the churches rang as usual.  A little parliament of dogs
+assembled in the open space, and chased each other, in and out among the
+soldiers.  Fierce-looking Romans of the lowest class, in blue cloaks,
+russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked, came and went, and talked together.
+Women and children fluttered, on the skirts of the scanty crowd.  One
+large muddy spot was left quite bare, like a bald place on a man’s head.
+A cigar-merchant, with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one hand, went
+up and down, crying his wares.  A pastry-merchant divided his attention
+between the scaffold and his customers.  Boys tried to climb up walls,
+and tumbled down again.  Priests and monks elbowed a passage for
+themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of the
+knife: then went away.  Artists, in inconceivable hats of the
+middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed
+picturesque scowls about them from their stations in the throng.  One
+gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I presume) went up and down in a
+pair of Hessian-boots, with a red beard hanging down on his breast, and
+his long and bright red hair, plaited into two tails, one on either side
+of his head, which fell over his shoulders in front of him, very nearly
+to his waist, and were carefully entwined and braided!
+
+Eleven o’clock struck and still nothing happened.  A rumour got about,
+among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess; in which case, the
+priests would keep him until the Ave Maria (sunset); for it is their
+merciful custom never finally to turn the crucifix away from a man at
+that pass, as one refusing to be shriven, and consequently a sinner
+abandoned of the Saviour, until then.  People began to drop off.  The
+officers shrugged their shoulders and looked doubtful.  The dragoons, who
+came riding up below our window, every now and then, to order an unlucky
+hackney-coach or cart away, as soon as it had comfortably established
+itself, and was covered with exulting people (but never before), became
+imperious, and quick-tempered.  The bald place hadn’t a straggling hair
+upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning the perspective, took a
+world of snuff.
+
+Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets.  ‘Attention!’ was among the
+foot-soldiers instantly.  They were marched up to the scaffold and formed
+round it.  The dragoons galloped to their nearer stations too.  The
+guillotine became the centre of a wood of bristling bayonets and shining
+sabres.  The people closed round nearer, on the flank of the soldiery.  A
+long straggling stream of men and boys, who had accompanied the
+procession from the prison, came pouring into the open space.  The bald
+spot was scarcely distinguishable from the rest.  The cigar and
+pastry-merchants resigned all thoughts of business, for the moment, and
+abandoning themselves wholly to pleasure, got good situations in the
+crowd.  The perspective ended, now, in a troop of dragoons.  And the
+corpulent officer, sword in hand, looked hard at a church close to him,
+which he could see, but we, the crowd, could not.
+
+After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the scaffold
+from this church; and above their heads, coming on slowly and gloomily,
+the effigy of Christ upon the cross, canopied with black.  This was
+carried round the foot of the scaffold, to the front, and turned towards
+the criminal, that he might see it to the last.  It was hardly in its
+place, when he appeared on the platform, bare-footed; his hands bound;
+and with the collar and neck of his shirt cut away, almost to the
+shoulder.  A young man—six-and-twenty—vigorously made, and well-shaped.
+Face pale; small dark moustache; and dark brown hair.
+
+He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife
+brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had
+occasioned the delay.
+
+He immediately kneeled down, below the knife.  His neck fitting into a
+hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another
+plank above; exactly like the pillory.  Immediately below him was a
+leathern bag.  And into it his head rolled instantly.
+
+The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the
+scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife
+had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
+
+When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set
+upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and white, for the long
+street to stare at, and the flies to settle on.  The eyes were turned
+upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to
+the crucifix.  Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant.
+It was dull, cold, livid, wax.  The body also.
+
+There was a great deal of blood.  When we left the window, and went close
+up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were
+throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a
+shell, picked his way as through mire.  A strange appearance was the
+apparent annihilation of the neck.  The head was taken off so close, that
+it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or
+shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left
+above the shoulder.
+
+Nobody cared, or was at all affected.  There was no manifestation of
+disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow.  My empty pockets were
+tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the scaffold, as the
+corpse was being put into its coffin.  It was an ugly, filthy, careless,
+sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the momentary
+interest, to the one wretched actor.  Yes!  Such a sight has one meaning
+and one warning.  Let me not forget it.  The speculators in the lottery,
+station themselves at favourable points for counting the gouts of blood
+that spirt out, here or there; and buy that number.  It is pretty sure to
+have a run upon it.
+
+The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the scaffold
+taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed.  The executioner: an
+outlaw _ex officio_ (what a satire on the Punishment!) who dare not, for
+his life, cross the Bridge of St. Angelo but to do his work: retreated to
+his lair, and the show was over.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the Vatican, of
+course, with its treasures of art, its enormous galleries, and
+staircases, and suites upon suites of immense chambers, ranks highest and
+stands foremost.  Many most noble statues, and wonderful pictures, are
+there; nor is it heresy to say that there is a considerable amount of
+rubbish there, too.  When any old piece of sculpture dug out of the
+ground, finds a place in a gallery because it is old, and without any
+reference to its intrinsic merits: and finds admirers by the hundred,
+because it is there, and for no other reason on earth: there will be no
+lack of objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one who
+employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of Cant for
+less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste for the mere
+trouble of putting them on.
+
+I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural
+perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-door, in Italy or
+elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I were travelling in the East.
+I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of face, natural to
+certain passions, and as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a
+lion, or the flight of an eagle.  I cannot dismiss from my certain
+knowledge, such commonplace facts as the ordinary proportion of men’s
+arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that do
+violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter where they may
+be, I cannot honestly admire them, and think it best to say so; in spite
+of high critical advice that we should sometimes feign an admiration,
+though we have it not.
+
+Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young Waterman
+representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and Perkins’s Drayman depicted as
+an Evangelist, I see nothing to commend or admire in the performance,
+however great its reputed Painter.  Neither am I partial to libellous
+Angels, who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of
+sprawling monks apparently in liquor.  Nor to those Monsieur Tonsons of
+galleries, Saint Francis and Saint Sebastian; both of whom I submit
+should have very uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify
+their compound multiplication by Italian Painters.
+
+It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined raptures in
+which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the true appreciation of
+the really great and transcendent works.  I cannot imagine, for example,
+how the resolute champion of undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing
+beauty of Titian’s great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin at
+Venice; or how the man who is truly affected by the sublimity of that
+exquisite production, or who is truly sensible of the beauty of
+Tintoretto’s great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same
+place, can discern in Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment, in the Sistine
+chapel, any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the
+stupendous subject.  He who will contemplate Raphael’s masterpiece, the
+Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that same
+Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael, representing (in
+incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of a great fire by Leo the
+Fourth—and who will say that he admires them both, as works of
+extraordinary genius—must, as I think, be wanting in his powers of
+perception in one of the two instances, and, probably, in the high and
+lofty one.
+
+It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether,
+sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and whether it
+is quite well or agreeable that we should know beforehand, where this
+figure will be turning round, and where that figure will be lying down,
+and where there will be drapery in folds, and so forth.  When I observe
+heads inferior to the subject, in pictures of merit, in Italian
+galleries, I do not attach that reproach to the Painter, for I have a
+suspicion that these great men, who were, of necessity, very much in the
+hands of monks and priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too
+often.  I frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below
+the story and the painter: and I invariably observe that those heads are
+of the Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the Convent
+inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that, in such cases,
+the lameness was not with the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance
+of certain of his employers, who would be apostles—on canvas, at all
+events.
+
+The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova’s statues; the wonderful gravity
+and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both in the Capitol
+and the Vatican; and the strength and fire of many others; are, in their
+different ways, beyond all reach of words.  They are especially
+impressive and delightful, after the works of Bernini and his disciples,
+in which the churches of Rome, from St. Peter’s downward, abound; and
+which are, I verily believe, the most detestable class of productions in
+the wide world.  I would infinitely rather (as mere works of art) look
+upon the three deities of the Past, the Present, and the Future, in the
+Chinese Collection, than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose
+every fold of drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein, or
+artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is like a nest of
+lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other extravagance to shame.
+Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there can be no place in the world,
+where such intolerable abortions, begotten of the sculptor’s chisel, are
+to be found in such profusion, as in Rome.
+
+There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican; and
+the ceilings of the rooms in which they are arranged, are painted to
+represent a starlight sky in the Desert.  It may seem an odd idea, but it
+is very effective.  The grim, half-human monsters from the temples, look
+more grim and monstrous underneath the deep dark blue; it sheds a strange
+uncertain gloomy air on everything—a mystery adapted to the objects; and
+you leave them, as you find them, shrouded in a solemn night.
+
+In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advantage.  There
+are seldom so many in one place that the attention need become
+distracted, or the eye confused.  You see them very leisurely; and are
+rarely interrupted by a crowd of people.  There are portraits
+innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke; heads by Guido, and
+Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects by Correggio, and Murillo,
+and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and Spagnoletto—many of which it would be
+difficult, indeed, to praise too highly, or to praise enough; such is
+their tenderness and grace; their noble elevation, purity, and beauty.
+
+The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a picture
+almost impossible to be forgotten.  Through the transcendent sweetness
+and beauty of the face, there is a something shining out, that haunts me.
+I see it now, as I see this paper, or my pen.  The head is loosely draped
+in white; the light hair falling down below the linen folds.  She has
+turned suddenly towards you; and there is an expression in the
+eyes—although they are very tender and gentle—as if the wildness of a
+momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome,
+that instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,
+and a desolate earthly helplessness remained.  Some stories say that
+Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other stories,
+that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on her way to the
+scaffold.  I am willing to believe that, as you see her on his canvas, so
+she turned towards him, in the crowd, from the first sight of the axe,
+and stamped upon his mind a look which he has stamped on mine as though I
+had stood beside him in the concourse.  The guilty palace of the Cenci:
+blighting a whole quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by
+grains: had that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its
+black, blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and
+growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries.  The History is
+written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl’s face, by Nature’s
+own hand.  And oh! how in that one touch she puts to flight (instead of
+making kin) the puny world that claim to be related to her, in right of
+poor conventional forgeries!
+
+I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at whose
+base Cæsar fell.  A stern, tremendous figure!  I imagined one of greater
+finish: of the last refinement: full of delicate touches: losing its
+distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose blood was ebbing before it,
+and settling into some such rigid majesty as this, as Death came creeping
+over the upturned face.
+
+The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would be
+full of interest were it only for the changing views they afford, of the
+wild Campagna.  But, every inch of ground, in every direction, is rich in
+associations, and in natural beauties.  There is Albano, with its lovely
+lake and wooded shore, and with its wine, that certainly has not improved
+since the days of Horace, and in these times hardly justifies his
+panegyric.  There is squalid Tivoli, with the river Anio, diverted from
+its course, and plunging down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of
+it.  With its picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag;
+its minor waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good
+cavern yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots
+on, low down under beetling rocks.  There, too, is the Villa d’Este,
+deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and cypress trees,
+where it seems to lie in state.  Then, there is Frascati, and, on the
+steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where Cicero lived, and wrote, and
+adorned his favourite house (some fragments of it may yet be seen there),
+and where Cato was born.  We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a grey, dull
+day, when a shrill March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones
+of the old city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and
+dead as the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
+
+One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen miles
+distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the ancient Appian
+way, long since ruined and overgrown.  We started at half-past seven in
+the morning, and within an hour or so were out upon the open Campagna.
+For twelve miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of
+mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.  Tombs and temples, overthrown and
+prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks
+of granite and marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin
+enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us.  Sometimes,
+loose walls, built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across
+our path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
+obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves, rolling
+from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance; but it was
+always ruin.  Now, we tracked a piece of the old road, above the ground;
+now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave;
+but all the way was ruin.  In the distance, ruined aqueducts went
+stalking on their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind
+that swept towards us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up,
+spontaneously, on miles of ruin.  The unseen larks above us, who alone
+disturbed the awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce
+herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from
+their sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin.  The aspect of the desolate
+Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an
+American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have
+never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have left their
+footprints in the earth from which they have vanished; where the
+resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their Dead; and the broken
+hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust!  Returning, by the road,
+at sunset! and looking, from the distance, on the course we had taken in
+the morning, I almost feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that
+hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that
+night, upon a ruined world.
+
+To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
+fitting close to such a day.  The narrow streets, devoid of footways, and
+choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dunghill-rubbish, contrast
+so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth, and darkness,
+with the broad square before some haughty church: in the centre of which,
+a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the
+Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an
+ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supports a Christian
+saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter.
+Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from the spoliation of the
+Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like mountains: while here and there,
+are broken arches and rent walls, through which it gushes freely, as the
+life comes pouring from a wound.  The little town of miserable houses,
+walled, and shut in by barred gates, is the quarter where the Jews are
+locked up nightly, when the clock strikes eight—a miserable place,
+densely populated, and reeking with bad odours, but where the people are
+industrious and money-getting.  In the day-time, as you make your way
+along the narrow streets, you see them all at work: upon the pavement,
+oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing old clothes, and
+driving bargains.
+
+Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the moon once
+more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and rolling
+over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear.  In the narrow little
+throat of street, beyond, a booth, dressed out with flaring lamps, and
+boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky Romans round its smoky coppers
+of hot broth, and cauliflower stew; its trays of fried fish, and its
+flasks of wine.  As you rattle round the sharply-twisting corner, a
+lumbering sound is heard.  The coachman stops abruptly, and uncovers, as
+a van comes slowly by, preceded by a man who bears a large cross; by a
+torch-bearer; and a priest: the latter chaunting as he goes.  It is the
+Dead Cart, with the bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the
+Sacred Field outside the walls, where they will be thrown into the pit
+that will be covered with a stone to-night, and sealed up for a year.
+
+But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns ancient
+temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums: it is strange to see,
+how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended into some
+modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose—a wall, a
+dwelling-place, a granary, a stable—some use for which it never was
+designed, and associated with which it cannot otherwise than lamely
+assort.  It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old
+mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance: have
+been incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how, in
+numberless respects, the false faith and the true are fused into a
+monstrous union.
+
+From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a squat and
+stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius) makes an opaque
+triangle in the moonlight.  But, to an English traveller, it serves to
+mark the grave of Shelley too, whose ashes lie beneath a little garden
+near it.  Nearer still, almost within its shadow, lie the bones of Keats,
+‘whose name is writ in water,’ that shines brightly in the landscape of a
+calm Italian night.
+
+The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attractions to all
+visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sunday, I would counsel
+those who go to Rome for its own interest, to avoid it at that time.  The
+ceremonies, in general, are of the most tedious and wearisome kind; the
+heat and crowd at every one of them, painfully oppressive; the noise,
+hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting.  We abandoned the pursuit of
+these shows, very early in the proceedings, and betook ourselves to the
+Ruins again.  But, we plunged into the crowd for a share of the best of
+the sights; and what we saw, I will describe to you.
+
+At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little, for by the
+time we reached it (though we were early) the besieging crowd had filled
+it to the door, and overflowed into the adjoining hall, where they were
+struggling, and squeezing, and mutually expostulating, and making great
+rushes every time a lady was brought out faint, as if at least fifty
+people could be accommodated in her vacant standing-room.  Hanging in the
+doorway of the chapel, was a heavy curtain, and this curtain, some twenty
+people nearest to it, in their anxiety to hear the chaunting of the
+Miserere, were continually plucking at, in opposition to each other, that
+it might not fall down and stifle the sound of the voices.  The
+consequence was, that it occasioned the most extraordinary confusion, and
+seemed to wind itself about the unwary, like a Serpent.  Now, a lady was
+wrapped up in it, and couldn’t be unwound.  Now, the voice of a stifling
+gentleman was heard inside it, beseeching to be let out.  Now, two
+muffled arms, no man could say of which sex, struggled in it as in a
+sack.  Now, it was carried by a rush, bodily overhead into the chapel,
+like an awning.  Now, it came out the other way, and blinded one of the
+Pope’s Swiss Guard, who had arrived, that moment, to set things to
+rights.
+
+Being seated at a little distance, among two or three of the Pope’s
+gentlemen, who were very weary and counting the minutes—as perhaps his
+Holiness was too—we had better opportunities of observing this eccentric
+entertainment, than of hearing the Miserere.  Sometimes, there was a
+swell of mournful voices that sounded very pathetic and sad, and died
+away, into a low strain again; but that was all we heard.
+
+At another time, there was the Exhibition of Relics in St. Peter’s, which
+took place at between six and seven o’clock in the evening, and was
+striking from the cathedral being dark and gloomy, and having a great
+many people in it.  The place into which the relics were brought, one by
+one, by a party of three priests, was a high balcony near the chief
+altar.  This was the only lighted part of the church.  There are always a
+hundred and twelve lamps burning near the altar, and there were two tall
+tapers, besides, near the black statue of St. Peter; but these were
+nothing in such an immense edifice.  The gloom, and the general upturning
+of faces to the balcony, and the prostration of true believers on the
+pavement, as shining objects, like pictures or looking-glasses, were
+brought out and shown, had something effective in it, despite the very
+preposterous manner in which they were held up for the general
+edification, and the great elevation at which they were displayed; which
+one would think rather calculated to diminish the comfort derivable from
+a full conviction of their being genuine.
+
+On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament from the
+Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina, another chapel in
+the Vatican;—a ceremony emblematical of the entombment of the Saviour
+before His Resurrection.  We waited in a great gallery with a great crowd
+of people (three-fourths of them English) for an hour or so, while they
+were chaunting the Miserere, in the Sistine chapel again.  Both chapels
+opened out of the gallery; and the general attention was concentrated on
+the occasional opening and shutting of the door of the one for which the
+Pope was ultimately bound.  None of these openings disclosed anything
+more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting a great quantity of
+candles; but at each and every opening, there was a terrific rush made at
+this ladder and this man, something like (I should think) a charge of the
+heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.  The man was never brought down,
+however, nor the ladder; for it performed the strangest antics in the
+world among the crowd—where it was carried by the man, when the candles
+were all lighted; and finally it was stuck up against the gallery wall,
+in a very disorderly manner, just before the opening of the other chapel,
+and the commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach of his
+Holiness.  At this crisis, the soldiers of the guard, who had been poking
+the crowd into all sorts of shapes, formed down the gallery: and the
+procession came up, between the two lines they made.
+
+There were a few choristers, and then a great many priests, walking two
+and two, and carrying—the good-looking priests at least—their lighted
+tapers, so as to throw the light with a good effect upon their faces: for
+the room was darkened.  Those who were not handsome, or who had not long
+beards, carried _their_ tapers anyhow, and abandoned themselves to
+spiritual contemplation.  Meanwhile, the chaunting was very monotonous
+and dreary.  The procession passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the
+drone of voices went on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself
+appeared, walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered
+Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making
+a brilliant show.  The soldiers of the guard knelt down as he passed; all
+the bystanders bowed; and so he passed on into the chapel: the white
+satin canopy being removed from over him at the door, and a white satin
+parasol hoisted over his poor old head, in place of it.  A few more
+couples brought up the rear, and passed into the chapel also.  Then, the
+chapel door was shut; and it was all over; and everybody hurried off
+headlong, as for life or death, to see something else, and say it wasn’t
+worth the trouble.
+
+I think the most popular and most crowded sight (excepting those of
+Easter Sunday and Monday, which are open to all classes of people) was
+the Pope washing the feet of Thirteen men, representing the twelve
+apostles, and Judas Iscariot.  The place in which this pious office is
+performed, is one of the chapels of St. Peter’s, which is gaily decorated
+for the occasion; the thirteen sitting, ‘all of a row,’ on a very high
+bench, and looking particularly uncomfortable, with the eyes of Heaven
+knows how many English, French, Americans, Swiss, Germans, Russians,
+Swedes, Norwegians, and other foreigners, nailed to their faces all the
+time.  They are robed in white; and on their heads they wear a stiff
+white cap, like a large English porter-pot, without a handle.  Each
+carries in his hand, a nosegay, of the size of a fine cauliflower; and
+two of them, on this occasion, wore spectacles; which, remembering the
+characters they sustained, I thought a droll appendage to the costume.
+There was a great eye to character.  St. John was represented by a
+good-looking young man.  St. Peter, by a grave-looking old gentleman,
+with a flowing brown beard; and Judas Iscariot by such an enormous
+hypocrite (I could not make out, though, whether the expression of his
+face was real or assumed) that if he had acted the part to the death and
+had gone away and hanged himself, he would have left nothing to be
+desired.
+
+As the two large boxes, appropriated to ladies at this sight, were full
+to the throat, and getting near was hopeless, we posted off, along with a
+great crowd, to be in time at the Table, where the Pope, in person, waits
+on these Thirteen; and after a prodigious struggle at the Vatican
+staircase, and several personal conflicts with the Swiss guard, the whole
+crowd swept into the room.  It was a long gallery hung with drapery of
+white and red, with another great box for ladies (who are obliged to
+dress in black at these ceremonies, and to wear black veils), a royal box
+for the King of Naples and his party; and the table itself, which, set
+out like a ball supper, and ornamented with golden figures of the real
+apostles, was arranged on an elevated platform on one side of the
+gallery.  The counterfeit apostles’ knives and forks were laid out on
+that side of the table which was nearest to the wall, so that they might
+be stared at again, without let or hindrance.
+
+The body of the room was full of male strangers; the crowd immense; the
+heat very great; and the pressure sometimes frightful.  It was at its
+height, when the stream came pouring in, from the feet-washing; and then
+there were such shrieks and outcries, that a party of Piedmontese
+dragoons went to the rescue of the Swiss guard, and helped them to calm
+the tumult.
+
+The ladies were particularly ferocious, in their struggles for places.
+One lady of my acquaintance was seized round the waist, in the ladies’
+box, by a strong matron, and hoisted out of her place; and there was
+another lady (in a back row in the same box) who improved her position by
+sticking a large pin into the ladies before her.
+
+The gentlemen about me were remarkably anxious to see what was on the
+table; and one Englishman seemed to have embarked the whole energy of his
+nature in the determination to discover whether there was any mustard.
+‘By Jupiter there’s vinegar!’ I heard him say to his friend, after he had
+stood on tiptoe an immense time, and had been crushed and beaten on all
+sides.  ‘And there’s oil!  I saw them distinctly, in cruets!  Can any
+gentleman, in front there, see mustard on the table?  Sir, will you
+oblige me!  _Do_ you see a Mustard-Pot?’
+
+The apostles and Judas appearing on the platform, after much expectation,
+were marshalled, in line, in front of the table, with Peter at the top;
+and a good long stare was taken at them by the company, while twelve of
+them took a long smell at their nosegays, and Judas—moving his lips very
+obtrusively—engaged in inward prayer.  Then, the Pope, clad in a scarlet
+robe, and wearing on his head a skull-cap of white satin, appeared in the
+midst of a crowd of Cardinals and other dignitaries, and took in his hand
+a little golden ewer, from which he poured a little water over one of
+Peter’s hands, while one attendant held a golden basin; a second, a fine
+cloth; a third, Peter’s nosegay, which was taken from him during the
+operation.  This his Holiness performed, with considerable expedition, on
+every man in the line (Judas, I observed, to be particularly overcome by
+his condescension); and then the whole Thirteen sat down to dinner.
+Grace said by the Pope.  Peter in the chair.
+
+There was white wine, and red wine: and the dinner looked very good.  The
+courses appeared in portions, one for each apostle: and these being
+presented to the Pope, by Cardinals upon their knees, were by him handed
+to the Thirteen.  The manner in which Judas grew more white-livered over
+his victuals, and languished, with his head on one side, as if he had no
+appetite, defies all description.  Peter was a good, sound, old man, and
+went in, as the saying is, ‘to win;’ eating everything that was given him
+(he got the best: being first in the row) and saying nothing to anybody.
+The dishes appeared to be chiefly composed of fish and vegetables.  The
+Pope helped the Thirteen to wine also; and, during the whole dinner,
+somebody read something aloud, out of a large book—the Bible, I
+presume—which nobody could hear, and to which nobody paid the least
+attention.  The Cardinals, and other attendants, smiled to each other,
+from time to time, as if the thing were a great farce; and if they
+thought so, there is little doubt they were perfectly right.  His
+Holiness did what he had to do, as a sensible man gets through a
+troublesome ceremony, and seemed very glad when it was all over.
+
+The Pilgrims’ Suppers: where lords and ladies waited on the Pilgrims, in
+token of humility, and dried their feet when they had been well washed by
+deputy: were very attractive.  But, of all the many spectacles of
+dangerous reliance on outward observances, in themselves mere empty
+forms, none struck me half so much as the Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase,
+which I saw several times, but to the greatest advantage, or
+disadvantage, on Good Friday.
+
+This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have
+belonged to Pontius Pilate’s house and to be the identical stair on which
+Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat.  Pilgrims ascend
+it, only on their knees.  It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel,
+reported to be full of relics; into which they peep through some iron
+bars, and then come down again, by one of two side staircases, which are
+not sacred, and may be walked on.
+
+On Good Friday, there were, on a moderate computation, a hundred people,
+slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees, at one time; while
+others, who were going up, or had come down—and a few who had done both,
+and were going up again for the second time—stood loitering in the porch
+below, where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-box, rattled a tin
+canister, with a slit in the top, incessantly, to remind them that he
+took the money.  The majority were country-people, male and female.
+There were four or five Jesuit priests, however, and some half-dozen
+well-dressed women.  A whole school of boys, twenty at least, were about
+half-way up—evidently enjoying it very much.  They were all wedged
+together, pretty closely; but the rest of the company gave the boys as
+wide a berth as possible, in consequence of their betraying some
+recklessness in the management of their boots.
+
+I never, in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so
+unpleasant, as this sight—ridiculous in the absurd incidents inseparable
+from it; and unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning degradation.
+There are two steps to begin with, and then a rather broad landing.  The
+more rigid climbers went along this landing on their knees, as well as up
+the stairs; and the figures they cut, in their shuffling progress over
+the level surface, no description can paint.  Then, to see them watch
+their opportunity from the porch, and cut in where there was a place next
+the wall!  And to see one man with an umbrella (brought on purpose, for
+it was a fine day) hoisting himself, unlawfully, from stair to stair!
+And to observe a demure lady of fifty-five or so, looking back, every now
+and then, to assure herself that her legs were properly disposed!
+
+There were such odd differences in the speed of different people, too.
+Some got on as if they were doing a match against time; others stopped to
+say a prayer on every step.  This man touched every stair with his
+forehead, and kissed it; that man scratched his head all the way.  The
+boys got on brilliantly, and were up and down again before the old lady
+had accomplished her half-dozen stairs.  But most of the penitents came
+down, very sprightly and fresh, as having done a real good substantial
+deed which it would take a good deal of sin to counterbalance; and the
+old gentleman in the watch-box was down upon them with his canister while
+they were in this humour, I promise you.
+
+As if such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll enough,
+there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a crucifix,
+resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety and unsteady, that
+whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure, with more than usual
+devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer, with more than common
+readiness (for it served in this respect as a second or supplementary
+canister), it gave a great leap and rattle, and nearly shook the
+attendant lamp out: horribly frightening the people further down, and
+throwing the guilty party into unspeakable embarrassment.
+
+On Easter Sunday, as well as on the preceding Thursday, the Pope bestows
+his benediction on the people, from the balcony in front of St. Peter’s.
+This Easter Sunday was a day so bright and blue: so cloudless, balmy,
+wonderfully bright: that all the previous bad weather vanished from the
+recollection in a moment.  I had seen the Thursday’s Benediction dropping
+damply on some hundreds of umbrellas, but there was not a sparkle then,
+in all the hundred fountains of Rome—such fountains as they are!—and on
+this Sunday morning they were running diamonds.  The miles of miserable
+streets through which we drove (compelled to a certain course by the
+Pope’s dragoons: the Roman police on such occasions) were so full of
+colour, that nothing in them was capable of wearing a faded aspect.  The
+common people came out in their gayest dresses; the richer people in
+their smartest vehicles; Cardinals rattled to the church of the Poor
+Fishermen in their state carriages; shabby magnificence flaunted its
+thread-bare liveries and tarnished cocked hats, in the sun; and every
+coach in Rome was put in requisition for the Great Piazza of St. Peter’s.
+
+One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at least!  Yet there was
+ample room.  How many carriages were there, I don’t know; yet there was
+room for them too, and to spare.  The great steps of the church were
+densely crowded.  There were many of the Contadini, from Albano (who
+delight in red), in that part of the square, and the mingling of bright
+colours in the crowd was beautiful.  Below the steps the troops were
+ranged.  In the magnificent proportions of the place they looked like a
+bed of flowers.  Sulky Romans, lively peasants from the neighbouring
+country, groups of pilgrims from distant parts of Italy, sight-seeing
+foreigners of all nations, made a murmur in the clear air, like so many
+insects; and high above them all, plashing and bubbling, and making
+rainbow colours in the light, the two delicious fountains welled and
+tumbled bountifully.
+
+A kind of bright carpet was hung over the front of the balcony; and the
+sides of the great window were bedecked with crimson drapery.  An awning
+was stretched, too, over the top, to screen the old man from the hot rays
+of the sun.  As noon approached, all eyes were turned up to this window.
+In due time, the chair was seen approaching to the front, with the
+gigantic fans of peacock’s feathers, close behind.  The doll within it
+(for the balcony is very high) then rose up, and stretched out its tiny
+arms, while all the male spectators in the square uncovered, and some,
+but not by any means the greater part, kneeled down.  The guns upon the
+ramparts of the Castle of St. Angelo proclaimed, next moment, that the
+benediction was given; drums beat; trumpets sounded; arms clashed; and
+the great mass below, suddenly breaking into smaller heaps, and
+scattering here and there in rills, was stirred like parti-coloured sand.
+
+What a bright noon it was, as we rode away!  The Tiber was no longer
+yellow, but blue.  There was a blush on the old bridges, that made them
+fresh and hale again.  The Pantheon, with its majestic front, all seamed
+and furrowed like an old face, had summer light upon its battered walls.
+Every squalid and desolate hut in the Eternal City (bear witness every
+grim old palace, to the filth and misery of the plebeian neighbour that
+elbows it, as certain as Time has laid its grip on its patrician head!)
+was fresh and new with some ray of the sun.  The very prison in the
+crowded street, a whirl of carriages and people, had some stray sense of
+the day, dropping through its chinks and crevices: and dismal prisoners
+who could not wind their faces round the barricading of the blocked-up
+windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to the rusty bars,
+turned _them_ towards the overflowing street: as if it were a cheerful
+fire, and could be shared in, that way.
+
+But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the full moon, what a
+sight it was to see the Great Square full once more, and the whole
+church, from the cross to the ground, lighted with innumerable lanterns,
+tracing out the architecture, and winking and shining all round the
+colonnade of the piazza!  And what a sense of exultation, joy, delight,
+it was, when the great bell struck half-past seven—on the instant—to
+behold one bright red mass of fire, soar gallantly from the top of the
+cupola to the extremest summit of the cross, and the moment it leaped
+into its place, become the signal of a bursting out of countless lights,
+as great, and red, and blazing as itself, from every part of the gigantic
+church; so that every cornice, capital, and smallest ornament of stone,
+expressed itself in fire: and the black, solid groundwork of the enormous
+dome seemed to grow transparent as an egg-shell!
+
+A train of gunpowder, an electric chain—nothing could be fired, more
+suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumination; and when we had got
+away, and gone upon a distant height, and looked towards it two hours
+afterwards, there it still stood, shining and glittering in the calm
+night like a jewel!  Not a line of its proportions wanting; not an angle
+blunted; not an atom of its radiance lost.
+
+The next night—Easter Monday—there was a great display of fireworks from
+the Castle of St. Angelo.  We hired a room in an opposite house, and made
+our way, to our places, in good time, through a dense mob of people
+choking up the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so
+loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it seemed
+ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below.  There are statues on this
+bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning
+tow were placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not
+less strangely on the stone counterfeits above them.
+
+The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
+twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant sheet
+of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour, size, and
+speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or
+scores, but hundreds at a time.  The concluding burst—the Girandola—was
+like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle, without
+smoke or dust.
+
+In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed; the moon
+was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the river; and
+half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle in their hands:
+moving here and there, in search of anything worth having, that might
+have been dropped in the press: had the whole scene to themselves.
+
+By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
+firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum.  I had seen it by
+moonlight before (I could never get through a day without going back to
+it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past all telling.  The
+ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal Arches of Old Emperors; those
+enormous masses of ruins which were once their palaces; the grass-grown
+mounds that mark the graves of ruined temples; the stones of the Via
+Sacra, smooth with the tread of feet in ancient Rome; even these were
+dimmed, in their transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody
+holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
+Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of weed,
+and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every gap and
+broken arch—the shadow of its awful self, immovable!
+
+As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our way to
+Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little wooden cross had
+been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim Countess was murdered.
+So, we piled some loose stones about it, as the beginning of a mound to
+her memory, and wondered if we should ever rest there again, and look
+back at Rome.
+
+
+
+
+A RAPID DIORAMA
+
+
+WE are bound for Naples!  And we cross the threshold of the Eternal City
+at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the two last
+objects that attract the notice of a departing visitor, and the two first
+objects that attract the notice of an arriving one, are a proud church
+and a decaying ruin—good emblems of Rome.
+
+Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright blue
+day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of ruin being
+plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through the arches of the broken
+aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining through them in the
+melancholy distance.  When we have traversed it, and look back from
+Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies below us like a stagnant lake,
+or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing round the walls of Rome, and
+separating it from all the world!  How often have the Legions, in
+triumphant march, gone glittering across that purple waste, so silent and
+unpeopled now!  How often has the train of captives looked, with sinking
+hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population pouring out, to
+hail the return of their conqueror!  What riot, sensuality and murder,
+have run mad in the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble!
+What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
+and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is now
+heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol unmolested in
+the sun!
+
+The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy peasant
+reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-skin, is ended
+now, and we go toiling up into a higher country where there are trees.
+The next day brings us on the Pontine Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome,
+and overgrown with brushwood, and swamped with water, but with a fine
+road made across them, shaded by a long, long avenue.  Here and there, we
+pass a solitary guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled
+up.  Some herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
+sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes rippling idly along
+it.  A horseman passes occasionally, carrying a long gun cross-wise on
+the saddle before him, and attended by fierce dogs; but there is nothing
+else astir save the wind and the shadows, until we come in sight of
+Terracina.
+
+How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn so
+famous in robber stories!  How picturesque the great crags and points of
+rock overhanging to-morrow’s narrow road, where galley-slaves are working
+in the quarries above, and the sentinels who guard them lounge on the
+sea-shore!  All night there is the murmur of the sea beneath the stars;
+and, in the morning, just at daybreak, the prospect suddenly becoming
+expanded, as if by a miracle, reveals—in the far distance, across the sea
+there!—Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius spouting fire!  Within a
+quarter of an hour, the whole is gone as if it were a vision in the
+clouds, and there is nothing but the sea and sky.
+
+The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours’ travelling; and the
+hungriest of soldiers and custom-house officers with difficulty appeased;
+we enter, by a gateless portal, into the first Neapolitan town—Fondi.
+Take note of Fondi, in the name of all that is wretched and beggarly.
+
+A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the centre of the
+miserable streets, fed by obscene rivulets that trickle from the abject
+houses.  There is not a door, a window, or a shutter; not a roof, a wall,
+a post, or a pillar, in all Fondi, but is decayed, and crazy, and rotting
+away.  The wretched history of the town, with all its sieges and pillages
+by Barbarossa and the rest, might have been acted last year.  How the
+gaunt dogs that sneak about the miserable streets, come to be alive, and
+undevoured by the people, is one of the enigmas of the world.
+
+A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are!  All beggars; but that’s
+nothing.  Look at them as they gather round.  Some, are too indolent to
+come down-stairs, or are too wisely mistrustful of the stairs, perhaps,
+to venture: so stretch out their lean hands from upper windows, and howl;
+others, come flocking about us, fighting and jostling one another, and
+demanding, incessantly, charity for the love of God, charity for the love
+of the Blessed Virgin, charity for the love of all the Saints.  A group
+of miserable children, almost naked, screaming forth the same petition,
+discover that they can see themselves reflected in the varnish of the
+carriage, and begin to dance and make grimaces, that they may have the
+pleasure of seeing their antics repeated in this mirror.  A crippled
+idiot, in the act of striking one of them who drowns his clamorous demand
+for charity, observes his angry counterpart in the panel, stops short,
+and thrusting out his tongue, begins to wag his head and chatter.  The
+shrill cry raised at this, awakens half-a-dozen wild creatures wrapped in
+frowsy brown cloaks, who are lying on the church-steps with pots and pans
+for sale.  These, scrambling up, approach, and beg defiantly.  ‘I am
+hungry.  Give me something.  Listen to me, Signor.  I am hungry!’  Then,
+a ghastly old woman, fearful of being too late, comes hobbling down the
+street, stretching out one hand, and scratching herself all the way with
+the other, and screaming, long before she can be heard, ‘Charity,
+charity!  I’ll go and pray for you directly, beautiful lady, if you’ll
+give me charity!’  Lastly, the members of a brotherhood for burying the
+dead: hideously masked, and attired in shabby black robes, white at the
+skirts, with the splashes of many muddy winters: escorted by a dirty
+priest, and a congenial cross-bearer: come hurrying past.  Surrounded by
+this motley concourse, we move out of Fondi: bad bright eyes glaring at
+us, out of the darkness of every crazy tenement, like glistening
+fragments of its filth and putrefaction.
+
+A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong eminence,
+traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old town of Itrí, like
+a device in pastry, built up, almost perpendicularly, on a hill, and
+approached by long steep flights of steps; beautiful Mola di Gaëta, whose
+wines, like those of Albano, have degenerated since the days of Horace,
+or his taste for wine was bad: which is not likely of one who enjoyed it
+so much, and extolled it so well; another night upon the road at St.
+Agatha; a rest next day at Capua, which is picturesque, but hardly so
+seductive to a traveller now, as the soldiers of Prætorian Rome were wont
+to find the ancient city of that name; a flat road among vines festooned
+and looped from tree to tree; and Mount Vesuvius close at hand at
+last!—its cone and summit whitened with snow; and its smoke hanging over
+it, in the heavy atmosphere of the day, like a dense cloud.  So we go,
+rattling down hill, into Naples.
+
+A funeral is coming up the street, towards us.  The body, on an open
+bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth of crimson
+and gold.  The mourners, in white gowns and masks.  If there be death
+abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples would seem to be out
+of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages.  Some of these, the common
+Vetturíno vehicles, are drawn by three horses abreast, decked with smart
+trappings and great abundance of brazen ornament, and always going very
+fast.  Not that their loads are light; for the smallest of them has at
+least six people inside, four in front, four or five more hanging on
+behind, and two or three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where
+they lie half-suffocated with mud and dust.  Exhibitors of Punch, buffo
+singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a row of
+cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and trumpets, painted
+cloths representing the wonders within, and admiring crowds assembled
+without, assist the whirl and bustle.  Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in
+doorways, archways, and kennels; the gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing
+up and down in carriages on the Chiaji, or walking in the Public Gardens;
+and quiet letter-writers, perched behind their little desks and inkstands
+under the Portico of the Great Theatre of San Carlo, in the public
+street, are waiting for clients.
+
+Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written to a friend.
+He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting under the corner arch, and
+makes his bargain.  He has obtained permission of the sentinel who guards
+him: who stands near, leaning against the wall and cracking nuts.  The
+galley-slave dictates in the ear of the letter-writer, what he desires to
+say; and as he can’t read writing, looks intently in his face, to read
+there whether he sets down faithfully what he is told.  After a time, the
+galley-slave becomes discursive—incoherent.  The secretary pauses and
+rubs his chin.  The galley-slave is voluble and energetic.  The
+secretary, at length, catches the idea, and with the air of a man who
+knows how to word it, sets it down; stopping, now and then, to glance
+back at his text admiringly.  The galley-slave is silent.  The soldier
+stoically cracks his nuts.  Is there anything more to say? inquires the
+letter-writer.  No more.  Then listen, friend of mine.  He reads it
+through.  The galley-slave is quite enchanted.  It is folded, and
+addressed, and given to him, and he pays the fee.  The secretary falls
+back indolently in his chair, and takes a book.  The galley-slave gathers
+up an empty sack.  The sentinel throws away a handful of nut-shells,
+shoulders his musket, and away they go together.
+
+Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right hands,
+when you look at them?  Everything is done in pantomime in Naples, and
+that is the conventional sign for hunger.  A man who is quarrelling with
+another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand on the back of his left,
+and shakes the two thumbs—expressive of a donkey’s ears—whereat his
+adversary is goaded to desperation.  Two people bargaining for fish, the
+buyer empties an imaginary waistcoat pocket when he is told the price,
+and walks away without a word: having thoroughly conveyed to the seller
+that he considers it too dear.  Two people in carriages, meeting, one
+touches his lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his
+right hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm.  The
+other nods briskly, and goes his way.  He has been invited to a friendly
+dinner at half-past five o’clock, and will certainly come.
+
+All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist, with
+the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative—the only negative
+beggars will ever understand.  But, in Naples, those five fingers are a
+copious language.
+
+All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
+macaroni-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 picturesque, 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 Tiberius—Ischia, Procida, and
+the thousand distant beauties 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 amphitheatre, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del
+Cane and away to Baiæ: or take the other way, towards Vesuvius and
+Sorrento, it is one succession of delights.  In the last-named direction,
+where, over doors and archways, there are countless little images of San
+Gennaro, with his Canute’s hand stretched out, to check the fury of the
+Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on the
+beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built upon the
+ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, within a
+hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries, and macaroni
+manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare, with its ruined castle, now inhabited by
+fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks.  Here, the railroad
+terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken succession of
+enchanting bays, and beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit
+of Saint Angelo, the highest neighbouring mountain, down to the water’s
+edge—among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons,
+orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills—and by the bases of
+snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-haired
+women at the doors—and pass delicious summer villas—to Sorrento, where
+the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him.
+Returning, we may climb the heights above Castel-a-Mare, and looking down
+among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun;
+and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great
+extent of prospect, down to dice.  The coming back to the city, by the
+beach again, at sunset: with the glowing sea on one side, and the
+darkening mountain, with its smoke and flame, upon the other: is a
+sublime conclusion to the glory of the day.
+
+That church by the Porta Capuana—near the old fisher-market in the
+dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello began—is
+memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest proclamations
+to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it
+be its waxen and bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or
+the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins
+there, like a battery of castanets.  The cathedral with the beautiful
+door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once
+ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
+Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver
+tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the great
+admiration of the people.  At the same moment, the stone (distant some
+miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red.  It is
+said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes, when
+these miracles occur.
+
+The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient
+catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to be
+buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal
+Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals.  Two of these old
+spectres totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns of
+death—as unconcerned as if they were immortal.  They were used as
+burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit
+full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great mortality
+occasioned by a plague.  In the rest there is nothing but dust.  They
+consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
+rock.  At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses
+of the daylight, shining down from above.  It looks as ghastly and as
+strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults: as if it,
+too, were dead and buried.
+
+The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city and
+Vesuvius.  The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five
+pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and are
+unclaimed by their friends.  The graceful new cemetery, at no great
+distance from it, though yet unfinished, has already many graves among
+its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades.  It might be reasonably
+objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and too
+fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount
+Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and
+saddens the scene.
+
+If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its dark
+smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and impressive is it,
+viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii!
+
+Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look up the
+silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and Isis, over the
+broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to the day, away to
+Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful distance; and lose all
+count of time, and heed of other things, in the strange and melancholy
+sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet
+picture in the sun.  Then, ramble on, and see, at every turn, the little
+familiar tokens of human habitation and every-day pursuits; the chafing
+of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of
+carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of
+drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphoræ in
+private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed
+to this hour—all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the
+place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury,
+had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of the sea.
+
+After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption,
+workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone, new ornaments for temples
+and other buildings that had suffered.  Here lies their work, outside the
+city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.
+
+In the cellar of Diomede’s house, where certain skeletons were found
+huddled together, close to the door, the impression of their bodies on
+the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped and fixed there,
+after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones.  So, in the theatre of
+Herculaneum, a comic mask, floating on the stream when it was hot and
+liquid, stamped its mimic features in it as it hardened into stone; and
+now, it turns upon the stranger the fantastic look it turned upon the
+audiences in that same theatre two thousand years ago.
+
+Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out of
+the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the temples of a
+religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many fresh
+traces of remote antiquity: as if the course of Time had been stopped
+after this desolation, and there had been no nights and days, months,
+years, and centuries, since: nothing is more impressive and terrible than
+the many evidences of the searching nature of the ashes, as bespeaking
+their irresistible power, and the impossibility of escaping them.  In the
+wine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen vessels: displacing
+the wine and choking them, to the brim, with dust.  In the tombs, they
+forced the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin
+even into them.  The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the skeletons,
+were stuffed with this terrible hail.  In Herculaneum, where the flood
+was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled in, like a sea.  Imagine
+a deluge of water turned to marble, at its height—and that is what is
+called ‘the lava’ here.
+
+Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we now
+stand, looking down, when they came on some of the stone benches of the
+theatre—those steps (for such they seem) at the bottom of the
+excavation—and found the buried city of Herculaneum.  Presently going
+down, with lighted torches, we are perplexed by great walls of monstrous
+thickness, rising up between the benches, shutting out the stage,
+obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd places, confusing the whole
+plan, and making it a disordered dream.  We cannot, at first, believe, or
+picture to ourselves, that THIS came rolling in, and drowned the city;
+and that all that is not here, has been cut away, by the axe, like solid
+stone.  But this perceived and understood, the horror and oppression of
+its presence are indescribable.
+
+Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of both
+cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh and
+plain, as if they had been executed yesterday.  Here are subjects of
+still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses, and the like;
+familiar classical stories, or mythological fables, always forcibly and
+plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling, sporting, working at
+trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading their productions to their
+friends; inscriptions chalked upon the walls; political squibs,
+advertisements, rough drawings by schoolboys; everything to people and
+restore the ancient cities, in the fancy of their wondering visitor.
+Furniture, too, you see, of every kind—lamps, tables, couches; vessels
+for eating, drinking, and cooking; workmen’s tools, surgical instruments,
+tickets for the theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of
+keys found clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards and
+warriors; little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic
+tones.
+
+The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the interest of
+Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination.  The looking, from
+either ruined city, into the neighbouring grounds overgrown with
+beautiful vines and luxuriant trees; and remembering that house upon
+house, temple on temple, building after building, and street after
+street, are still lying underneath the roots of all the quiet
+cultivation, waiting to be turned up to the light of day; is something so
+wonderful, so full of mystery, so captivating to the imagination, that
+one would think it would be paramount, and yield to nothing else.  To
+nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain is the genius of the scene.  From
+every indication of the ruin it has worked, we look, again, with an
+absorbing interest to where its smoke is rising up into the sky.  It is
+beyond us, as we thread the ruined streets: above us, as we stand upon
+the ruined walls, we follow it through every vista of broken columns, as
+we wander through the empty court-yards of the houses; and through the
+garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine.  Turning away to
+Pæstum yonder, to see the awful structures built, the least aged of them,
+hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and standing yet, erect in
+lonely majesty, upon the wild, malaria-blighted plain—we watch Vesuvius
+as it disappears from the prospect, and watch for it again, on our
+return, with the same thrill of interest: as the doom and destiny of all
+this beautiful country, biding its terrible time.
+
+It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when we return from
+Pæstum, but very cold in the shade: insomuch, that although we may lunch,
+pleasantly, at noon, in the open air, by the gate of Pompeii, the
+neighbouring rivulet supplies thick ice for our wine.  But, the sun is
+shining brightly; there is not a cloud or speck of vapour in the whole
+blue sky, looking down upon the bay of Naples; and the moon will be at
+the full to-night.  No matter that the snow and ice lie thick upon the
+summit of Vesuvius, or that we have been on foot all day at Pompeii, or
+that croakers maintain that strangers should not be on the mountain by
+night, in such an unusual season.  Let us take advantage of the fine
+weather; make the best of our way to Resina, the little village at the
+foot of the mountain; prepare ourselves, as well as we can, on so short a
+notice, at the guide’s house; ascend at once, and have sunset half-way
+up, moonlight at the top, and midnight to come down in!
+
+At four o’clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible uproar in the
+little stable-yard of Signior Salvatore, the recognised head-guide, with
+the gold band round his cap; and thirty under-guides who are all
+scuffling and screaming at once, are preparing half-a-dozen saddled
+ponies, three litters, and some stout staves, for the journey.  Every one
+of the thirty, quarrels with the other twenty-nine, and frightens the six
+ponies; and as much of the village as can possibly squeeze itself into
+the little stable-yard, participates in the tumult, and gets trodden on
+by the cattle.
+
+After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than would suffice for the
+storming of Naples, the procession starts.  The head-guide, who is
+liberally paid for all the attendants, rides a little in advance of the
+party; the other thirty guides proceed on foot.  Eight go forward with
+the litters that are to be used by-and-by; and the remaining
+two-and-twenty beg.
+
+We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights of stairs,
+for some time.  At length, we leave these, and the vineyards on either
+side of them, and emerge upon a bleak bare region where the lava lies
+confusedly, in enormous rusty masses; as if the earth had been ploughed
+up by burning thunderbolts.  And now, we halt to see the sun set.  The
+change that falls upon the dreary region, and on the whole mountain, as
+its red light fades, and the night comes on—and the unutterable solemnity
+and dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed it, can ever
+forget!
+
+It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the broken ground, we
+arrive at the foot of the cone: which is extremely steep, and seems to
+rise, almost perpendicularly, from the spot where we dismount.  The only
+light is reflected from the snow, deep, hard, and white, with which the
+cone is covered.  It is now intensely cold, and the air is piercing.  The
+thirty-one have brought no torches, knowing that the moon will rise
+before we reach the top.  Two of the litters are devoted to the two
+ladies; the third, to a rather heavy gentleman from Naples, whose
+hospitality and good-nature have attached him to the expedition, and
+determined him to assist in doing the honours of the mountain.  The
+rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by
+half-a-dozen.  We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the
+whole party begin to labour upward over the snow,—as if they were toiling
+to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake.
+
+We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks oddly about him
+when one of the company—not an Italian, though an habitué of the mountain
+for many years: whom we will call, for our present purpose, Mr. Pickle of
+Portici—suggests that, as it is freezing hard, and the usual footing of
+ashes is covered by the snow and ice, it will surely be difficult to
+descend.  But the sight of the litters above, tilting up and down, and
+jerking from this side to that, as the bearers continually slip and
+tumble, diverts our attention; more especially as the whole length of the
+rather heavy gentleman is, at that moment, presented to us alarmingly
+foreshortened, with his head downwards.
+
+The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flagging spirits of
+the bearers.  Stimulating each other with their usual watchword,
+‘Courage, friend!  It is to eat macaroni!’ they press on, gallantly, for
+the summit.
+
+From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of light, and
+pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while we have been
+ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the whole white
+mountain-side, and the broad sea down below, and tiny Naples in the
+distance, and every village in the country round.  The whole prospect is
+in this lovely state, when we come upon the platform on the
+mountain-top—the region of Fire—an exhausted crater formed of great
+masses of gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some tremendous
+waterfall, burnt up; from every chink and crevice of which, hot,
+sulphurous smoke is pouring out: while, from another conical-shaped hill,
+the present crater, rising abruptly from this platform at the end, great
+sheets of fire are streaming forth: reddening the night with flame,
+blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and
+cinders, that fly up into the air like feathers, and fall down like lead.
+What words can paint the gloom and grandeur of this scene!
+
+The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from the sulphur:
+the fear of falling down through the crevices in the yawning ground; the
+stopping, every now and then, for somebody who is missing in the dark
+(for the dense smoke now obscures the moon); the intolerable noise of the
+thirty; and the hoarse roaring of the mountain; make it a scene of such
+confusion, at the same time, that we reel again.  But, dragging the
+ladies through it, and across another exhausted crater to the foot of the
+present Volcano, we approach close to it on the windy side, and then sit
+down among the hot ashes at its foot, and look up in silence; faintly
+estimating the action that is going on within, from its being full a
+hundred feet higher, at this minute, than it was six weeks ago.
+
+There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an irresistible
+desire to get nearer to it.  We cannot rest long, without starting off,
+two of us, on our hands and knees, accompanied by the head-guide, to
+climb to the brim of the flaming crater, and try to look in.  Meanwhile,
+the thirty yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding,
+and call to us to come back; frightening the rest of the party out of
+their wits.
+
+What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin crust of
+ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us in the
+burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if there be any); and what
+with the flashing of the fire in our faces, and the shower of red-hot
+ashes that is raining down, and the choking smoke and sulphur; we may
+well feel giddy and irrational, like drunken men.  But, we contrive to
+climb up to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into the Hell of
+boiling fire below.  Then, we all three come rolling down; blackened, and
+singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy: and each with his dress alight
+in half-a-dozen places.
+
+You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of descending, is, by
+sliding down the ashes: which, forming a gradually-increasing ledge below
+the feet, prevent too rapid a descent.  But, when we have crossed the two
+exhausted craters on our way back and are come to this precipitous place,
+there is (as Mr. Pickle has foretold) no vestige of ashes to be seen; the
+whole being a smooth sheet of ice.
+
+In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously join hands, and
+make a chain of men; of whom the foremost beat, as well as they can, a
+rough track with their sticks, down which we prepare to follow.  The way
+being fearfully steep, and none of the party: even of the thirty: being
+able to keep their feet for six paces together, the ladies are taken out
+of their litters, and placed, each between two careful persons; while
+others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to prevent their falling
+forward—a necessary precaution, tending to the immediate and hopeless
+dilapidation of their apparel.  The rather heavy gentleman is abjured to
+leave his litter too, and be escorted in a similar manner; but he
+resolves to be brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that
+his fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and that he is
+safer so, than trusting to his own legs.
+
+In this order, we begin the descent: sometimes on foot, sometimes
+shuffling on the ice: always proceeding much more quietly and slowly,
+than on our upward way: and constantly alarmed by the falling among us of
+somebody from behind, who endangers the footing of the whole party, and
+clings pertinaciously to anybody’s ankles.  It is impossible for the
+litter to be in advance, too, as the track has to be made; and its
+appearance behind us, overhead—with some one or other of the bearers
+always down, and the rather heavy gentleman with his legs always in the
+air—is very threatening and frightful.  We have gone on thus, a very
+little way, painfully and anxiously, but quite merrily, and regarding it
+as a great success—and have all fallen several times, and have all been
+stopped, somehow or other, as we were sliding away—when Mr. Pickle of
+Portici, in the act of remarking on these uncommon circumstances as quite
+beyond his experience, stumbles, falls, disengages himself, with quick
+presence of mind, from those about him, plunges away head foremost, and
+rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the cone!
+
+Sickening as it is to look, and be so powerless to help him, I see him
+there, in the moonlight—I have had such a dream often—skimming over the
+white ice, like a cannon-ball.  Almost at the same moment, there is a cry
+from behind; and a man who has carried a light basket of spare cloaks on
+his head, comes rolling past, at the same frightful speed, closely
+followed by a boy.  At this climax of the chapter of accidents, the
+remaining eight-and-twenty vociferate to that degree, that a pack of
+wolves would be music to them!
+
+Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of Portici when
+we reach the place where we dismounted, and where the horses are waiting;
+but, thank God, sound in limb!  And never are we likely to be more glad
+to see a man alive and on his feet, than to see him now—making light of
+it too, though sorely bruised and in great pain.  The boy is brought into
+the Hermitage on the Mountain, while we are at supper, with his head tied
+up; and the man is heard of, some hours afterwards.  He too is bruised
+and stunned, but has broken no bones; the snow having, fortunately,
+covered all the larger blocks of rock and stone, and rendered them
+harmless.
+
+After a cheerful meal, and a good rest before a blazing fire, we again
+take horse, and continue our descent to Salvatore’s house—very slowly, by
+reason of our bruised friend being hardly able to keep the saddle, or
+endure the pain of motion.  Though it is so late at night, or early in
+the morning, all the people of the village are waiting about the little
+stable-yard when we arrive, and looking up the road by which we are
+expected.  Our appearance is hailed with a great clamour of tongues, and
+a general sensation for which in our modesty we are somewhat at a loss to
+account, until, turning into the yard, we find that one of a party of
+French gentlemen who were on the mountain at the same time is lying on
+some straw in the stable, with a broken limb: looking like Death, and
+suffering great torture; and that we were confidently supposed to have
+encountered some worse accident.
+
+So ‘well returned, and Heaven be praised!’ as the cheerful Vetturíno, who
+has borne us company all the way from Pisa, says, with all his heart!
+And away with his ready horses, into sleeping Naples!
+
+It wakes again to Policinelli and pickpockets, buffo singers and beggars,
+rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and universal degradation;
+airing its Harlequin suit in the sunshine, next day and every day;
+singing, starving, dancing, gaming, on the sea-shore; and leaving all
+labour to the burning mountain, which is ever at its work.
+
+Our English dilettanti would be very pathetic on the subject of the
+national taste, if they could hear an Italian opera half as badly sung in
+England as we may hear the Foscari performed, to-night, in the splendid
+theatre of San Carlo.  But, for astonishing truth and spirit in seizing
+and embodying the real life about it, the shabby little San Carlino
+Theatre—the rickety house one story high, with a staring picture outside:
+down among the drums and trumpets, and the tumblers, and the lady
+conjurer—is without a rival anywhere.
+
+There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples, at which
+we may take a glance before we go—the Lotteries.
+
+They prevail in most parts of Italy, but are particularly obvious, in
+their effects and influences, here.  They are drawn every Saturday.  They
+bring an immense revenue to the Government; and diffuse a taste for
+gambling among the poorest of the poor, which is very comfortable to the
+coffers of the State, and very ruinous to themselves.  The lowest stake
+is one grain; less than a farthing.  One hundred numbers—from one to a
+hundred, inclusive—are put into a box.  Five are drawn.  Those are the
+prizes.  I buy three numbers.  If one of them come up, I win a small
+prize.  If two, some hundreds of times my stake.  If three, three
+thousand five hundred times my stake.  I stake (or play as they call it)
+what I can upon my numbers, and buy what numbers I please.  The amount I
+play, I pay at the lottery office, where I purchase the ticket; and it is
+stated on the ticket itself.
+
+Every lottery office keeps a printed book, an Universal Lottery Diviner,
+where every possible accident and circumstance is provided for, and has a
+number against it.  For instance, let us take two carlini—about
+sevenpence.  On our way to the lottery office, we run against a black
+man.  When we get there, we say gravely, ‘The Diviner.’  It is handed
+over the counter, as a serious matter of business.  We look at black man.
+Such a number.  ‘Give us that.’  We look at running against a person in
+the street.  ‘Give us that.’  We look at the name of the street itself.
+‘Give us that.’  Now, we have our three numbers.
+
+If the roof of the theatre of San Carlo were to fall in, so many people
+would play upon the numbers attached to such an accident in the Diviner,
+that the Government would soon close those numbers, and decline to run
+the risk of losing any more upon them.  This often happens.  Not long
+ago, when there was a fire in the King’s Palace, there was such a
+desperate run on fire, and king, and palace, that further stakes on the
+numbers attached to those words in the Golden Book were forbidden.  Every
+accident or event, is supposed, by the ignorant populace, to be a
+revelation to the beholder, or party concerned, in connection with the
+lottery.  Certain people who have a talent for dreaming fortunately, are
+much sought after; and there are some priests who are constantly favoured
+with visions of the lucky numbers.
+
+I heard of a horse running away with a man, and dashing him down, dead,
+at the corner of a street.  Pursuing the horse with incredible speed, was
+another man, who ran so fast, that he came up, immediately after the
+accident.  He threw himself upon his knees beside the unfortunate rider,
+and clasped his hand with an expression of the wildest grief.  ‘If you
+have life,’ he said, ‘speak one word to me!  If you have one gasp of
+breath left, mention your age for Heaven’s sake, that I may play that
+number in the lottery.’
+
+It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and we may go to see our lottery
+drawn.  The ceremony takes place every Saturday, in the Tribunale, or
+Court of Justice—this singular, earthy-smelling room, or gallery, as
+mouldy as an old cellar, and as damp as a dungeon.  At the upper end is a
+platform, with a large horse-shoe table upon it; and a President and
+Council sitting round—all judges of the Law.  The man on the little stool
+behind the President, is the Capo Lazzarone, a kind of tribune of the
+people, appointed on their behalf to see that all is fairly conducted:
+attended by a few personal friends.  A ragged, swarthy fellow he is: with
+long matted hair hanging down all over his face: and covered, from head
+to foot, with most unquestionably genuine dirt.  All the body of the room
+is filled with the commonest of the Neapolitan people: and between them
+and the platform, guarding the steps leading to the latter, is a small
+body of soldiers.
+
+There is some delay in the arrival of the necessary number of judges;
+during which, the box, in which the numbers are being placed, is a source
+of the deepest interest.  When the box is full, the boy who is to draw
+the numbers out of it becomes the prominent feature of the proceedings.
+He is already dressed for his part, in a tight brown Holland coat, with
+only one (the left) sleeve to it, which leaves his right arm bared to the
+shoulder, ready for plunging down into the mysterious chest.
+
+During the hush and whisper that pervade the room, all eyes are turned on
+this young minister of fortune.  People begin to inquire his age, with a
+view to the next lottery; and the number of his brothers and sisters; and
+the age of his father and mother; and whether he has any moles or pimples
+upon him; and where, and how many; when the arrival of the last judge but
+one (a little old man, universally dreaded as possessing the Evil Eye)
+makes a slight diversion, and would occasion a greater one, but that he
+is immediately deposed, as a source of interest, by the officiating
+priest, who advances gravely to his place, followed by a very dirty
+little boy, carrying his sacred vestments, and a pot of Holy Water.
+
+Here is the last judge come at last, and now he takes his place at the
+horse-shoe table.
+
+There is a murmur of irrepressible agitation.  In the midst of it, the
+priest puts his head into the sacred vestments, and pulls the same over
+his shoulders.  Then he says a silent prayer; and dipping a brush into
+the pot of Holy Water, sprinkles it over the box—and over the boy, and
+gives them a double-barrelled blessing, which the box and the boy are
+both hoisted on the table to receive.  The boy remaining on the table,
+the box is now carried round the front of the platform, by an attendant,
+who holds it up and shakes it lustily all the time; seeming to say, like
+the conjurer, ‘There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen; keep your
+eyes upon me, if you please!’
+
+At last, the box is set before the boy; and the boy, first holding up his
+naked arm and open hand, dives down into the hole (it is made like a
+ballot-box) and pulls out a number, which is rolled up, round something
+hard, like a bonbon.  This he hands to the judge next him, who unrolls a
+little bit, and hands it to the President, next to whom he sits.  The
+President unrolls it, very slowly.  The Capo Lazzarone leans over his
+shoulder.  The President holds it up, unrolled, to the Capo Lazzarone.
+The Capo Lazzarone, looking at it eagerly, cries out, in a shrill, loud
+voice, ‘Sessantadue!’ (sixty-two), expressing the two upon his fingers,
+as he calls it out.  Alas! the Capo Lazzarone himself has not staked on
+sixty-two.  His face is very long, and his eyes roll wildly.
+
+As it happens to be a favourite number, however, it is pretty well
+received, which is not always the case.  They are all drawn with the same
+ceremony, omitting the blessing.  One blessing is enough for the whole
+multiplication-table.  The only new incident in the proceedings, is the
+gradually deepening intensity of the change in the Cape Lazzarone, who
+has, evidently, speculated to the very utmost extent of his means; and
+who, when he sees the last number, and finds that it is not one of his,
+clasps his hands, and raises his eyes to the ceiling before proclaiming
+it, as though remonstrating, in a secret agony, with his patron saint,
+for having committed so gross a breach of confidence.  I hope the Capo
+Lazzarone may not desert him for some other member of the Calendar, but
+he seems to threaten it.
+
+Where the winners may be, nobody knows.  They certainly are not present;
+the general disappointment filling one with pity for the poor people.
+They look: when we stand aside, observing them, in their passage through
+the court-yard down below: as miserable as the prisoners in the gaol (it
+forms a part of the building), who are peeping down upon them, from
+between their bars; or, as the fragments of human heads which are still
+dangling in chains outside, in memory of the good old times, when their
+owners were strung up there, for the popular edification.
+
+Away from Naples in a glorious sunrise, by the road to Capua, and then on
+a three days’ journey along by-roads, that we may see, on the way, the
+monastery of Monte Cassino, which is perched on the steep and lofty hill
+above the little town of San Germano, and is lost on a misty morning in
+the clouds.
+
+So much the better, for the deep sounding of its bell, which, as we go
+winding up, on mules, towards the convent, is heard mysteriously in the
+still air, while nothing is seen but the grey mist, moving solemnly and
+slowly, like a funeral procession.  Behold, at length the shadowy pile of
+building close before us: its grey walls and towers dimly seen, though so
+near and so vast: and the raw vapour rolling through its cloisters
+heavily.
+
+There are two black shadows walking to and fro in the quadrangle, near
+the statues of the Patron Saint and his sister; and hopping on behind
+them, in and out of the old arches, is a raven, croaking in answer to the
+bell, and uttering, at intervals, the purest Tuscan.  How like a Jesuit
+he looks!  There never was a sly and stealthy fellow so at home as is
+this raven, standing now at the refectory door, with his head on one
+side, and pretending to glance another way, while he is scrutinizing the
+visitors keenly, and listening with fixed attention.  What a dull-headed
+monk the porter becomes in comparison!
+
+‘He speaks like us!’ says the porter: ‘quite as plainly.’  Quite as
+plainly, Porter.  Nothing could be more expressive than his reception of
+the peasants who are entering the gate with baskets and burdens.  There
+is a roll in his eye, and a chuckle in his throat, which should qualify
+him to be chosen Superior of an Order of Ravens.  He knows all about it.
+‘It’s all right,’ he says.  ‘We know what we know.  Come along, good
+people.  Glad to see you!’  How was this extraordinary structure ever
+built in such a situation, where the labour of conveying the stone, and
+iron, and marble, so great a height, must have been prodigious?  ‘Caw!’
+says the raven, welcoming the peasants.  How, being despoiled by plunder,
+fire and earthquake, has it risen from its ruins, and been again made
+what we now see it, with its church so sumptuous and magnificent?  ‘Caw!’
+says the raven, welcoming the peasants.  These people have a miserable
+appearance, and (as usual) are densely ignorant, and all beg, while the
+monks are chaunting in the chapel.  ‘Caw!’ says the raven, ‘Cuckoo!’
+
+So we leave him, chuckling and rolling his eye at the convent gate, and
+wind slowly down again through the cloud.  At last emerging from it, we
+come in sight of the village far below, and the flat green country
+intersected by rivulets; which is pleasant and fresh to see after the
+obscurity and haze of the convent—no disrespect to the raven, or the holy
+friars.
+
+Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most shattered and
+tattered of villages, where there is not a whole window among all the
+houses, or a whole garment among all the peasants, or the least
+appearance of anything to eat, in any of the wretched hucksters’ shops.
+The women wear a bright red bodice laced before and behind, a white
+skirt, and the Neapolitan head-dress of square folds of linen,
+primitively meant to carry loads on.  The men and children wear anything
+they can get.  The soldiers are as dirty and rapacious as the dogs.  The
+inns are such hobgoblin places, that they are infinitely more attractive
+and amusing than the best hotels in Paris.  Here is one near Valmontone
+(that is Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which
+is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep.  There is a wild colonnade
+below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a great long
+kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form, where a party of
+travellers, with two priests among them, are crowding round the fire
+while their supper is cooking.  Above stairs, is a rough brick gallery to
+sit in, with very little windows with very small patches of knotty glass
+in them, and all the doors that open from it (a dozen or two) off their
+hinges, and a bare board on tressels for a table, at which thirty people
+might dine easily, and a fireplace large enough in itself for a
+breakfast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze and crackle, they
+illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn in charcoal on the
+whitewashed chimney-sides by previous travellers.  There is a flaring
+country lamp on the table; and, hovering about it, scratching her thick
+black hair continually, a yellow dwarf of a woman, who stands on tiptoe
+to arrange the hatchet knives, and takes a flying leap to look into the
+water-jug.  The beds in the adjoining rooms are of the liveliest kind.
+There is not a solitary scrap of looking-glass in the house, and the
+washing apparatus is identical with the cooking utensils.  But the yellow
+dwarf sets on the table a good flask of excellent wine, holding a quart
+at least; and produces, among half-a-dozen other dishes, two-thirds of a
+roasted kid, smoking hot.  She is as good-humoured, too, as dirty, which
+is saying a great deal.  So here’s long life to her, in the flask of
+wine, and prosperity to the establishment.
+
+Rome gained and left behind, and with it the Pilgrims who are now
+repairing to their own homes again—each with his scallop shell and staff,
+and soliciting alms for the love of God—we come, by a fair country, to
+the Falls of Terni, where the whole Velino river dashes, headlong, from a
+rocky height, amidst shining spray and rainbows.  Perugia, strongly
+fortified by art and nature, on a lofty eminence, rising abruptly from
+the plain where purple mountains mingle with the distant sky, is glowing,
+on its market-day, with radiant colours.  They set off its sombre but
+rich Gothic buildings admirably.  The pavement of its market-place is
+strewn with country goods.  All along the steep hill leading from the
+town, under the town wall, there is a noisy fair of calves, lambs, pigs,
+horses, mules, and oxen.  Fowls, geese, and turkeys, flutter vigorously
+among their very hoofs; and buyers, sellers, and spectators, clustering
+everywhere, block up the road as we come shouting down upon them.
+
+Suddenly, there is a ringing sound among our horses.  The driver stops
+them.  Sinking in his saddle, and casting up his eyes to Heaven, he
+delivers this apostrophe, ‘Oh Jove Omnipotent! here is a horse has lost
+his shoe!’
+
+Notwithstanding the tremendous nature of this accident, and the utterly
+forlorn look and gesture (impossible in any one but an Italian Vetturíno)
+with which it is announced, it is not long in being repaired by a mortal
+Farrier, by whose assistance we reach Castiglione the same night, and
+Arezzo next day.  Mass is, of course, performing in its fine cathedral,
+where the sun shines in among the clustered pillars, through rich
+stained-glass windows: half revealing, half concealing the kneeling
+figures on the pavement, and striking out paths of spotted light in the
+long aisles.
+
+But, how much beauty of another kind is here, when, on a fair clear
+morning, we look, from the summit of a hill, on Florence!  See where it
+lies before us in a sun-lighted valley, bright with the winding Arno, and
+shut in by swelling hills; its domes, and towers, and palaces, rising
+from the rich country in a glittering heap, and shining in the sun like
+gold!
+
+Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful Florence; and
+the strong old piles of building make such heaps of shadow, on the ground
+and in the river, that there is another and a different city of rich
+forms and fancies, always lying at our feet.  Prodigious palaces,
+constructed for defence, with small distrustful windows heavily barred,
+and walls of great thickness formed of huge masses of rough stone, frown,
+in their old sulky state, on every street.  In the midst of the city—in
+the Piazza of the Grand Duke, adorned with beautiful statues and the
+Fountain of Neptune—rises the Palazzo Vecchio, with its enormous
+overhanging battlements, and the Great Tower that watches over the whole
+town.  In its court-yard—worthy of the Castle of Otranto in its ponderous
+gloom—is a massive staircase that the heaviest waggon and the stoutest
+team of horses might be driven up.  Within it, is a Great Saloon, faded
+and tarnished in its stately decorations, and mouldering by grains, but
+recording yet, in pictures on its walls, the triumphs of the Medici and
+the wars of the old Florentine people.  The prison is hard by, in an
+adjacent court-yard of the building—a foul and dismal place, where some
+men are shut up close, in small cells like ovens; and where others look
+through bars and beg; where some are playing draughts, and some are
+talking to their friends, who smoke, the while, to purify the air; and
+some are buying wine and fruit of women-vendors; and all are squalid,
+dirty, and vile to look at.  ‘They are merry enough, Signore,’ says the
+jailer.  ‘They are all blood-stained here,’ he adds, indicating, with his
+hand, three-fourths of the whole building.  Before the hour is out, an
+old man, eighty years of age, quarrelling over a bargain with a young
+girl of seventeen, stabs her dead, in the market-place full of bright
+flowers; and is brought in prisoner, to swell the number.
+
+Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte Vecchio—that
+bridge which is covered with the shops of Jewellers and Goldsmiths—is a
+most enchanting feature in the scene.  The space of one house, in the
+centre, being left open, the view beyond is shown as in a frame; and that
+precious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings, shining so
+quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge, is exquisite.
+Above it, the Gallery of the Grand Duke crosses the river.  It was built
+to connect the two Great Palaces by a secret passage; and it takes its
+jealous course among the streets and houses, with true despotism: going
+where it lists, and spurning every obstacle away, before it.
+
+The Grand Duke has a worthier secret passage through the streets, in his
+black robe and hood, as a member of the Compagnia della Misericordia,
+which brotherhood includes all ranks of men.  If an accident take place,
+their office is, to raise the sufferer, and bear him tenderly to the
+Hospital.  If a fire break out, it is one of their functions to repair to
+the spot, and render their assistance and protection.  It is, also, among
+their commonest offices, to attend and console the sick; and they neither
+receive money, nor eat, nor drink, in any house they visit for this
+purpose.  Those who are on duty for the time, are all called together, on
+a moment’s notice, by the tolling of the great bell of the Tower; and it
+is said that the Grand Duke has been seen, at this sound, to rise from
+his seat at table, and quietly withdraw to attend the summons.
+
+In this other large Piazza, where an irregular kind of market is held,
+and stores of old iron and other small merchandise are set out on stalls,
+or scattered on the pavement, are grouped together, the Cathedral with
+its great Dome, the beautiful Italian Gothic Tower the Campanile, and the
+Baptistery with its wrought bronze doors.  And here, a small untrodden
+square in the pavement, is ‘the Stone of DANTE,’ where (so runs the
+story) he was used to bring his stool, and sit in contemplation.  I
+wonder was he ever, in his bitter exile, withheld from cursing the very
+stones in the streets of Florence the ungrateful, by any kind remembrance
+of this old musing-place, and its association with gentle thoughts of
+little Beatrice!
+
+The chapel of the Medici, the Good and Bad Angels, of Florence; the
+church of Santa Croce where Michael Angelo lies buried, and where every
+stone in the cloisters is eloquent on great men’s deaths; innumerable
+churches, often masses of unfinished heavy brickwork externally, but
+solemn and serene within; arrest our lingering steps, in strolling
+through the city.
+
+In keeping with the tombs among the cloisters, is the Museum of Natural
+History, famous through the world for its preparations in wax; beginning
+with models of leaves, seeds, plants, inferior animals; and gradually
+ascending, through separate organs of the human frame, up to the whole
+structure of that wonderful creation, exquisitely presented, as in recent
+death.  Few admonitions of our frail mortality can be more solemn and
+more sad, or strike so home upon the heart, as the counterfeits of Youth
+and Beauty that are lying there, upon their beds, in their last sleep.
+
+Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the convent at
+Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, BOCCACCIO’S house, old villas and
+retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glowing in a landscape of
+surpassing beauty steeped in the richest light; are spread before us.
+Returning from so much brightness, how solemn and how grand the streets
+again, with their great, dark, mournful palaces, and many legends: not of
+siege, and war, and might, and Iron Hand alone, but of the triumphant
+growth of peaceful Arts and Sciences.
+
+What light is shed upon the world, at this day, from amidst these rugged
+Palaces of Florence!  Here, open to all comers, in their beautiful and
+calm retreats, the ancient Sculptors are immortal, side by side with
+Michael Angelo, Canova, Titian, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poets, Historians,
+Philosophers—those illustrious men of history, beside whom its crowned
+heads and harnessed warriors show so poor and small, and are so soon
+forgotten.  Here, the imperishable part of noble minds survives, placid
+and equal, when strongholds of assault and defence are overthrown; when
+the tyranny of the many, or the few, or both, is but a tale; when Pride
+and Power are so much cloistered dust.  The fire within the stern
+streets, and among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled by rays from
+Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flickering of war is
+extinguished and the household fires of generations have decayed; as
+thousands upon thousands of faces, rigid with the strife and passion of
+the hour, have faded out of the old Squares and public haunts, while the
+nameless Florentine Lady, preserved from oblivion by a Painter’s hand,
+yet lives on, in enduring grace and youth.
+
+Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining Dome is
+seen no more, go travelling through cheerful Tuscany, with a bright
+remembrance of it; for Italy will be the fairer for the recollection.
+The summer-time being come: and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como
+lying far behind us: and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village, near the
+awful rocks and mountains, the everlasting snows and roaring cataracts,
+of the Great Saint Gothard: hearing the Italian tongue for the last time
+on this journey: let us part from Italy, with all its miseries and
+wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and
+artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness
+towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and
+sweet-tempered.  Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at
+work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit; miserable
+jealousies, fomented by petty Princes to whom union was destruction, and
+division strength, have been a canker at their root of nationality, and
+have barbarized their language; but the good that was in them ever, is in
+them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes.
+Let us entertain that hope!  And let us not remember Italy the less
+regardfully, because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every
+stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the
+lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the world
+is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and more
+hopeful, as it rolls!
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 THE END
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                PRINTED BY
+                    WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
+                           LONDON AND BECCLES.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  This Project Gutenberg eText contains just _Pictures from Italy_.
+_American Notes_ is also available from Project Gutenberg as a separate
+eText.—DP.
+
+{216}  This was written in 1846.
+
+{272}  A far more liberal and just recognition of the public has arisen
+in Westminster Abbey since this was written.
+
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens,
+Illustrated by Marcus Stone
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Pictures from Italy
+
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 17, 2013  [eBook #650]
+[This file was first posted on September 17, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES FROM ITALY***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman &amp; Hall, Ltd. edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<h1>AMERICAN NOTES<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">FOR</span><br />
+GENERAL CIRCULATION <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1"
+class="citation">[1]</a><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">AND</span><br />
+PICTURES FROM ITALY</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+CHARLES DICKENS</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WITH 8
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">MARCUS STONE, R.A.</span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">LONDON</span><br />
+CHAPMAN &amp; HALL, <span class="smcap">Ltd.</span><br />
+1913</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Reader&rsquo;s Passport</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page215">215</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Going through France</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lyons, the Rhone, and the Goblin of Avignon</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Avignon to Genoa</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page233">233</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Genoa and its Neighbourhood</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page238">238</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To Parma, Modena, and Bologna</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page264">264</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Through Bologna and Ferrara</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page272">272</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>An Italian Dream</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page277">277</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, across the Pass of the
+Simplon into Switzerland</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page284">284</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To Rome by Pisa and Siena</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page297">297</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Rome</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page308">308</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A Rapid Diorama</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page345">345</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Civil and Military</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p><i>Marcus Stone</i>, <i>R.A.</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Italian Peasants</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,, ,, ,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Chiffonier</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,, ,, ,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page294">294</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">In the Catacombs</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,, ,, ,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page326">326</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page215"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 215</span>THE
+READER&rsquo;S PASSPORT</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">If</span> the readers of this volume will
+be so kind as to take their credentials for the different places
+which are the subject of its author&rsquo;s reminiscences, from
+the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them, in fancy, the
+more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what they are
+to expect.</p>
+<p>Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means
+of studying the history of that interesting country, and the
+innumerable associations entwined about it.&nbsp; I make but
+little reference to that stock of information; not at all
+regarding it as a necessary consequence of my having had recourse
+to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should reproduce its
+easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers.</p>
+<p>Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave
+examination into the government or misgovernment of any portion
+of the country.&nbsp; No visitor of that beautiful land can fail
+to have a strong conviction on the subject; but as I chose when
+residing there, a Foreigner, to abstain from the discussion of
+any such questions with any order of Italians, so I would rather
+not enter on the inquiry now.&nbsp; During my twelve
+months&rsquo; occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found that
+authorities constitutionally jealous were distrustful of me; and
+I should be sorry to give them occasion to regret their free
+courtesy, either to myself or any of my countrymen.</p>
+<p>There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all
+Italy, but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed
+paper devoted to dissertations on it.&nbsp; I do not, therefore,
+though an earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at
+any length on famous Pictures and Statues.</p>
+<p>This Book is a series of faint reflections&mdash;mere shadows
+in the water&mdash;of places to which the imaginations of most
+people are attracted in a greater or less degree, on which mine
+had dwelt for years, and which have some interest for all.&nbsp;
+The greater part of the descriptions were written on the spot,
+and sent home, from time to time, in private letters.&nbsp; I do
+not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any defects they
+may present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to the
+Reader that they were at least penned in the fulness of the
+subject, and with the liveliest impressions of novelty and
+freshness.</p>
+<p>If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader
+will suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the
+midst of the objects of which they treat, and will like them none
+the worse for having such influences of the country upon
+them.</p>
+<p>I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of
+the Roman Catholic faith, on account of anything contained in
+these pages.&nbsp; I have done my best, in one of my former
+productions, to do justice to them; and I trust, in this, they
+will do justice to me.&nbsp; When I mention any exhibition that
+impressed me as absurd or disagreeable, I do not seek to connect
+it, or recognise it as necessarily connected with, any essentials
+of their creed.&nbsp; When I treat of the ceremonies of the Holy
+Week, I merely treat of their effect, and do not challenge the
+good and learned Dr. Wiseman&rsquo;s interpretation of their
+meaning.&nbsp; When I hint a dislike of nunneries for young girls
+who abjure the world before they have ever proved or known it; or
+doubt the <i>ex officio</i> sanctity of all Priests and Friars; I
+do no more than many conscientious Catholics both abroad and at
+home.</p>
+<p>I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and
+would fain hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so
+roughly, as to mar the shadows.&nbsp; I could never desire to be
+on better terms with all my friends than now, when distant
+mountains rise, once more, in my path.&nbsp; For I need not
+hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake I
+made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between
+myself and my readers, and departing for a moment from my old
+pursuits, I am about to resume them, joyfully, in Switzerland;
+where during another year of absence, I can at once work out the
+themes I have now in my mind, without interruption: and while I
+keep my English audience within speaking distance, extend my
+knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly attractive to me. <a
+name="citation216"></a><a href="#footnote216"
+class="citation">[216]</a></p>
+<p>This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would
+be a great pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to
+compare impressions with some among the multitudes who will
+hereafter visit the scenes described with interest and
+delight.</p>
+<p>And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my
+reader&rsquo;s portrait, which I hope may be thus
+supposititiously traced for either sex:</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Complexion</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Fair.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Eyes</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Very cheerful.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Nose</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Not supercilious.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Mouth</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Smiling.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Visage</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Beaming.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>General Expression</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Extremely agreeable.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page218"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+218</span>GOING THROUGH FRANCE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> a fine Sunday morning in the
+Midsummer time and weather of eighteen hundred and forty-four, it
+was, my good friend, when&mdash;don&rsquo;t be alarmed; not when
+two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way
+over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first
+chapter of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained&mdash;but when
+an English travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh
+from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square,
+London, was observed (by a very small French soldier; for I saw
+him look at it) to issue from the gate of the H&ocirc;tel Meurice
+in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.</p>
+<p>I am no more bound to explain why the English family
+travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting
+for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than
+I am to assign a reason for all the little men in France being
+soldiers, and all the big men postilions; which is the invariable
+rule.&nbsp; But, they had some sort of reason for what they did,
+I have no doubt; and their reason for being there at all, was, as
+you know, that they were going to live in fair Genoa for a year;
+and that the head of the family purposed, in that space of time,
+to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him.</p>
+<p>And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained
+to the population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and
+Chief; and not the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat
+beside me in the person of a French Courier&mdash;best of
+servants and most beaming of men!&nbsp; Truth to say, he looked a
+great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his
+portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p218b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Civil and military"
+title=
+"Civil and military"
+src="images/p218s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>There was, of course, very little in the aspect of
+Paris&mdash;as we rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the
+Pont Neuf&mdash;to reproach us for our Sunday travelling.&nbsp;
+The wine-shops (every second house) were driving a roaring trade;
+awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging, outside
+the caf&eacute;s, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking
+of cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-blacks were busy on the
+bridges; shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro;
+the narrow, up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River, were
+so many dense perspectives of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured
+nightcaps, tobacco-pipes, blouses, large boots, and shaggy heads
+of hair; nothing at that hour denoted a day of rest, unless it
+were the appearance, here and there, of a family pleasure-party,
+crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab; or of some contemplative
+holiday-maker in the freest and easiest dishabille, leaning out
+of a low garret window, watching the drying of his newly polished
+shoes on the little parapet outside (if a gentleman), or the
+airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady), with calm
+anticipation.</p>
+<p>Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement
+which surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards
+Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough.&nbsp; To Sens.&nbsp;
+To Avallon.&nbsp; To Chalons.&nbsp; A sketch of one day&rsquo;s
+proceedings is a sketch of all three; and here it is.</p>
+<p>We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very long
+whip, and drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint
+Petersburgh in the circle at Astley&rsquo;s or Franconi&rsquo;s:
+only he sits his own horse instead of standing on him.&nbsp; The
+immense jack-boots worn by these postilions, are sometimes a
+century or two old; and are so ludicrously disproportionate to
+the wearer&rsquo;s foot, that the spur, which is put where his
+own heel comes, is generally halfway up the leg of the
+boots.&nbsp; The man often comes out of the stable-yard, with his
+whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out, in both hands,
+one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by the side of
+his horse, with great gravity, until everything is ready.&nbsp;
+When it is&mdash;and oh Heaven! the noise they make about
+it!&mdash;he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted
+into them by a couple of friends; adjusts the rope harness,
+embossed by the labours of innumerable pigeons in the stables;
+makes all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his whip like a
+madman; shouts &lsquo;En route&mdash;Hi!&rsquo; and away we
+go.&nbsp; He is sure to have a contest with his horse before we
+have gone very far; and then he calls him a Thief, and a Brigand,
+and a Pig, and what not; and beats him about the head as if he
+were made of wood.</p>
+<p>There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the
+country, for the first two days.&nbsp; From a dreary plain, to an
+interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary
+plain again.&nbsp; Plenty of vines there are in the open fields,
+but of a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about
+straight sticks.&nbsp; Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere;
+but an extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than
+I ever encountered.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe we saw a hundred
+children between Paris and Chalons.&nbsp; Queer old towns,
+draw-bridged and walled: with odd little towers at the angles,
+like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask on, and were
+staring down into the moat; other strange little towers, in
+gardens and fields, and down lanes, and in farm-yards: all alone,
+and always round, with a peaked roof, and never used for any
+purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all sorts; sometimes an
+h&ocirc;tel de ville, sometimes a guard-house, sometimes a
+dwelling-house, sometimes a ch&acirc;teau with a rank garden,
+prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped
+turrets, and blink-eyed little casements; are the standard
+objects, repeated over and over again.&nbsp; Sometimes we pass a
+village inn, with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect
+town of out-houses; and painted over the gateway, &lsquo;Stabling
+for Sixty Horses;&rsquo; as indeed there might be stabling for
+sixty score, were there any horses to be stabled there, or
+anybody resting there, or anything stirring about the place but a
+dangling bush, indicative of the wine inside: which flutters idly
+in the wind, in lazy keeping with everything else, and certainly
+is never in a green old age, though always so old as to be
+dropping to pieces.&nbsp; And all day long, strange little narrow
+waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from
+Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line, of one
+man, or even boy&mdash;and he very often asleep in the foremost
+cart&mdash;come jingling past: the horses drowsily ringing the
+bells upon their harness, and looking as if they thought (no
+doubt they do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense
+weight and thickness, with a pair of grotesque horns growing out
+of the collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer weather.</p>
+<p>Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the
+dusty outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in
+white nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and
+shaking, like an idiot&rsquo;s head; and its Young-France
+passengers staring out of window, with beards down to their
+waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their warlike eyes,
+and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp.&nbsp; Also
+the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along
+at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no
+time.&nbsp; Steady old Cur&eacute;s come jolting past, now and
+then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no
+Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in
+solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or
+digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind,
+or representing real shepherdesses with their flocks&mdash;to
+obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and its followers, in
+any country, it is only necessary to take any pastoral poem, or
+picture, and imagine to yourself whatever is most exquisitely and
+widely unlike the descriptions therein contained.</p>
+<p>You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you
+generally do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six
+bells upon the horses&mdash;twenty-four apiece&mdash;have been
+ringing sleepily in your ears for half an hour or so; and it has
+become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome sort of business;
+and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner you will have
+at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long avenue of
+trees through which you are travelling, the first indication of a
+town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the
+carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven
+pavement.&nbsp; As if the equipage were a great firework, and the
+mere sight of a smoking cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly
+it begins to crack and splutter, as if the very devil were in
+it.&nbsp; Crack, crack, crack, crack.&nbsp;
+Crack-crack-crack.&nbsp; Crick-crack.&nbsp; Crick-crack.&nbsp;
+Helo!&nbsp; Hola!&nbsp; Vite!&nbsp; Voleur!&nbsp; Brigand!&nbsp;
+Hi hi hi!&nbsp; En r-r-r-r-r-route!&nbsp; Whip, wheels, driver,
+stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola!
+charit&eacute; pour l&rsquo;amour de Dieu!
+crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack,
+bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street, down
+the paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump;
+jolt, jog, crick, crick, crick; crack, crack, crack; into the
+shop-windows on the left-hand side of the street, preliminary to
+a sweeping turn into the wooden archway on the right; rumble,
+rumble, rumble; clatter, clatter, clatter; crick, crick, crick;
+and here we are in the yard of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu
+d&rsquo;Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted; but
+sometimes making a false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming
+of it&mdash;like a firework to the last!</p>
+<p>The landlady of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is
+here; and the landlord of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu
+d&rsquo;Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the H&ocirc;tel
+de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed
+cap, with a red beard like a bosom friend, who is staying at the
+H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or, is here; and Monsieur le
+Cur&eacute; is walking up and down in a corner of the yard by
+himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black gown on his
+back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other; and
+everybody, except Monsieur le Cur&eacute;, is open-mouthed and
+open-eyed, for the opening of the carriage-door.&nbsp; The
+landlord of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or, dotes to
+that extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his
+coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and
+boot-heels as he descends.&nbsp; &lsquo;My Courier!&nbsp; My
+brave Courier!&nbsp; My friend!&nbsp; My brother!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The landlady loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the
+gar&ccedil;on worships him.&nbsp; The Courier asks if his letter
+has been received?&nbsp; It has, it has.&nbsp; Are the rooms
+prepared?&nbsp; They are, they are.&nbsp; The best rooms for my
+noble Courier.&nbsp; The rooms of state for my gallant Courier;
+the whole house is at the service of my best of friends!&nbsp; He
+keeps his hand upon the carriage-door, and asks some other
+question to enhance the expectation.&nbsp; He carries a green
+leathern purse outside his coat, suspended by a belt.&nbsp; The
+idlers look at it; one touches it.&nbsp; It is full of five-franc
+pieces.&nbsp; Murmurs of admiration are heard among the
+boys.&nbsp; The landlord falls upon the Courier&rsquo;s neck, and
+folds him to his breast.&nbsp; He is so much fatter than he was,
+he says!&nbsp; He looks so rosy and so well!</p>
+<p>The door is opened.&nbsp; Breathless expectation.&nbsp; The
+lady of the family gets out.&nbsp; Ah sweet lady!&nbsp; Beautiful
+lady!&nbsp; The sister of the lady of the family gets out.&nbsp;
+Great Heaven, Ma&rsquo;amselle is charming!&nbsp; First little
+boy gets out.&nbsp; Ah, what a beautiful little boy!&nbsp; First
+little girl gets out.&nbsp; Oh, but this is an enchanting
+child!&nbsp; Second little girl gets out.&nbsp; The landlady,
+yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches her
+up in her arms!&nbsp; Second little boy gets out.&nbsp; Oh, the
+sweet boy!&nbsp; Oh, the tender little family!&nbsp; The baby is
+handed out.&nbsp; Angelic baby!&nbsp; The baby has topped
+everything.&nbsp; All the rapture is expended on the baby!&nbsp;
+Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into
+madness, the whole family are swept up-stairs as on a cloud;
+while the idlers press about the carriage, and look into it, and
+walk round it, and touch it.&nbsp; For it is something to touch a
+carriage that has held so many people.&nbsp; It is a legacy to
+leave one&rsquo;s children.</p>
+<p>The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the
+night, which is a great rambling chamber, with four or five beds
+in it: through a dark passage, up two steps, down four, past a
+pump, across a balcony, and next door to the stable.&nbsp; The
+other sleeping apartments are large and lofty; each with two
+small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like the windows, with red and
+white drapery.&nbsp; The sitting-room is famous.&nbsp; Dinner is
+already laid in it for three; and the napkins are folded in
+cocked-hat fashion.&nbsp; The floors are of red tile.&nbsp; There
+are no carpets, and not much furniture to speak of; but there is
+abundance of looking-glass, and there are large vases under glass
+shades, filled with artificial flowers; and there are plenty of
+clocks.&nbsp; The whole party are in motion.&nbsp; The brave
+Courier, in particular, is everywhere: looking after the beds,
+having wine poured down his throat by his dear brother the
+landlord, and picking up green cucumbers&mdash;always cucumbers;
+Heaven knows where he gets them&mdash;with which he walks about,
+one in each hand, like truncheons.</p>
+<p>Dinner is announced.&nbsp; There is very thin soup; there are
+very large loaves&mdash;one apiece; a fish; four dishes
+afterwards; some poultry afterwards; a dessert afterwards; and no
+lack of wine.&nbsp; There is not much in the dishes; but they are
+very good, and always ready instantly.&nbsp; When it is nearly
+dark, the brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers, sliced
+up in the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another
+of vinegar, emerges from his retreat below, and proposes a visit
+to the Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon the
+court-yard of the inn.&nbsp; Off we go; and very solemn and grand
+it is, in the dim light: so dim at last, that the polite, old,
+lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble little bit of candle in his
+hand, to grope among the tombs with&mdash;and looks among the
+grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is searching for his
+own.</p>
+<p>Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants
+of the inn are supping in the open air, at a great table; the
+dish, a stew of meat and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in
+the iron cauldron it was boiled in.&nbsp; They have a pitcher of
+thin wine, and are very merry; merrier than the gentleman with
+the red beard, who is playing billiards in the light room on the
+left of the yard, where shadows, with cues in their hands, and
+cigars in their mouths, cross and recross the window,
+constantly.&nbsp; Still the thin Cur&eacute; walks up and down
+alone, with his book and umbrella.&nbsp; And there he walks, and
+there the billiard-balls rattle, long after we are fast
+asleep.</p>
+<p>We are astir at six next morning.&nbsp; It is a delightful
+day, shaming yesterday&rsquo;s mud upon the carriage, if anything
+could shame a carriage, in a land where carriages are never
+cleaned.&nbsp; Everybody is brisk; and as we finish breakfast,
+the horses come jingling into the yard from the Post-house.&nbsp;
+Everything taken out of the carriage is put back again.&nbsp; The
+brave Courier announces that all is ready, after walking into
+every room, and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing
+is left behind.&nbsp; Everybody gets in.&nbsp; Everybody
+connected with the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is again
+enchanted.&nbsp; The brave Courier runs into the house for a
+parcel containing cold fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for
+lunch; hands it into the coach; and runs back again.</p>
+<p>What has he got in his hand now?&nbsp; More cucumbers?&nbsp;
+No.&nbsp; A long strip of paper.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the bill.</p>
+<p>The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning: one
+supporting the purse: another, a mighty good sort of leathern
+bottle, filled to the throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in
+the house.&nbsp; He never pays the bill till this bottle is
+full.&nbsp; Then he disputes it.</p>
+<p>He disputes it now, violently.&nbsp; He is still the
+landlord&rsquo;s brother, but by another father or mother.&nbsp;
+He is not so nearly related to him as he was last night.&nbsp;
+The landlord scratches his head.&nbsp; The brave Courier points
+to certain figures in the bill, and intimates that if they remain
+there, the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is thenceforth
+and for ever an h&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu de cuivre.&nbsp; The
+landlord goes into a little counting-house.&nbsp; The brave
+Courier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand, and
+talks more rapidly than ever.&nbsp; The landlord takes the
+pen.&nbsp; The Courier smiles.&nbsp; The landlord makes an
+alteration.&nbsp; The Courier cuts a joke.&nbsp; The landlord is
+affectionate, but not weakly so.&nbsp; He bears it like a
+man.&nbsp; He shakes hands with his brave brother, but he
+don&rsquo;t hug him.&nbsp; Still, he loves his brother; for he
+knows that he will be returning that way, one of these fine days,
+with another family, and he foresees that his heart will yearn
+towards him again.&nbsp; The brave Courier traverses all round
+the carriage once, looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps
+up, gives the word, and away we go!</p>
+<p>It is market morning.&nbsp; The market is held in the little
+square outside in front of the cathedral.&nbsp; It is crowded
+with men and women, in blue, in red, in green, in white; with
+canvassed stalls; and fluttering merchandise.&nbsp; The country
+people are grouped about, with their clean baskets before
+them.&nbsp; Here, the lace-sellers; there, the butter and
+egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there, the
+shoe-makers.&nbsp; The whole place looks as if it were the stage
+of some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a
+picturesque ballet.&nbsp; And there is the cathedral to boot:
+scene-like: all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold: just
+splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops, as
+the morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side,
+struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western.</p>
+<p>In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little
+ragged kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the
+town; and are again upon the road.</p>
+<h2><a name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+225</span>LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Chalons</span> is a fair resting-place, in
+right of its good inn on the bank of the river, and the little
+steamboats, gay with green and red paint, that come and go upon
+it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene, after the
+dusty roads.&nbsp; But, unless you would like to dwell on an
+enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that
+look in the distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and
+unless you would like to pass your life without the possibility
+of going up-hill, or going up anything but stairs: you would
+hardly approve of Chalons as a place of residence.</p>
+<p>You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which
+you may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned
+steamboats, in eight hours.</p>
+<p>What a city Lyons is!&nbsp; Talk about people feeling, at
+certain unlucky times, as if they had tumbled from the
+clouds!&nbsp; Here is a whole town that is tumbled, anyhow, out
+of the sky; having been first caught up, like other stones that
+tumble down from that region, out of fens and barren places,
+dismal to behold!&nbsp; The two great streets through which the
+two great rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name is
+Legion, were scorching, blistering, and sweltering.&nbsp; The
+houses, high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten as old cheeses,
+and as thickly peopled.&nbsp; All up the hills that hem the city
+in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were lolling out of
+the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and
+crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp
+upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and
+bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not
+dying till their time should come, in an exhausted
+receiver.&nbsp; Every manufacturing town, melted into one, would
+hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it presented itself to
+me: for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities of a foreign
+town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a
+manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would go some
+miles out of my way to avoid encountering again.</p>
+<p>In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of the
+day: we went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a
+few dogs, were engaged in contemplation.&nbsp; There was no
+difference, in point of cleanliness, between its stone pavement
+and that of the streets; and there was a wax saint, in a little
+box like a berth aboard ship, with a glass front to it, whom
+Madame Tussaud would have nothing to say to, on any terms, and
+which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed of.&nbsp; If you
+would know all about the architecture of this church, or any
+other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not
+written in Mr. Murray&rsquo;s Guide-Book, and may you not read it
+there, with thanks to him, as I did!</p>
+<p>For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious
+clock in Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I
+made, in connection with that piece of mechanism.&nbsp; The
+keeper of the church was very anxious it should be shown; partly
+for the honour of the establishment and the town; and partly,
+perhaps, because of his deriving a percentage from the additional
+consideration.&nbsp; However that may be, it was set in motion,
+and thereupon a host of little doors flew open, and innumerable
+little figures staggered out of them, and jerked themselves back
+again, with that special unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in
+the gait, which usually attaches to figures that are moved by
+clock-work.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the Sacristan stood explaining these
+wonders, and pointing them out, severally, with a wand.&nbsp;
+There was a centre puppet of the Virgin Mary; and close to her, a
+small pigeon-hole, out of which another and a very ill-looking
+puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw
+accomplished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and
+banging his little door violently after him.&nbsp; Taking this to
+be emblematic of the victory over Sin and Death, and not at all
+unwilling to show that I perfectly understood the subject, in
+anticipation of the showman, I rashly said, &lsquo;Aha!&nbsp; The
+Evil Spirit.&nbsp; To be sure.&nbsp; He is very soon disposed
+of.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Pardon, Monsieur,&rsquo; said the
+Sacristan, with a polite motion of his hand towards the little
+door, as if introducing somebody&mdash;&lsquo;The Angel
+Gabriel!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down the
+Arrowy Rhone, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very
+dirty vessel full of merchandise, and with only three or four
+other passengers for our companions: among whom, the most
+remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced, garlic-eating,
+immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red ribbon
+hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there to remind
+himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in
+his pocket-handkerchief.</p>
+<p>For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the
+first indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance.&nbsp;
+Now, we were rushing on beside them: sometimes close beside them:
+sometimes with an intervening slope, covered with
+vineyards.&nbsp; Villages and small towns hanging in mid-air,
+with great woods of olives seen through the light open towers of
+their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the steep
+acclivity behind them; ruined castles perched on every eminence;
+and scattered houses in the clefts and gullies of the hills; made
+it very beautiful.&nbsp; The great height of these, too, making
+the buildings look so tiny, that they had all the charm of
+elegant models; their excessive whiteness, as contrasted with the
+brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy green of the
+olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of the
+Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming
+picture.&nbsp; There were ferries out of number, too; bridges;
+the famous Pont d&rsquo;Esprit, with I don&rsquo;t know how many
+arches; towns where memorable wines are made; Vallence, where
+Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing at every winding
+turn, new beauties into view.</p>
+<p>There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of
+Avignon, and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an
+under-done-pie-crust, battlemented wall, that never will be
+brown, though it bake for centuries.</p>
+<p>The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the
+brilliant Oleander was in full bloom everywhere.&nbsp; The
+streets are old and very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded
+by awnings stretched from house to house.&nbsp; Bright stuffs and
+handkerchiefs, curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood, old
+chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring
+daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath, it was very
+quaint and lively.&nbsp; All this was much set off, too, by the
+glimpses one caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet
+sleepy court-yards, having stately old houses within, as silent
+as tombs.&nbsp; It was all very like one of the descriptions in
+the Arabian Nights.&nbsp; The three one-eyed Calenders might have
+knocked at any one of those doors till the street rang again, and
+the porter who persisted in asking questions&mdash;the man who
+had the delicious purchases put into his basket in the
+morning&mdash;might have opened it quite naturally.</p>
+<p>After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the
+lions.&nbsp; Such a delicious breeze was blowing in, from the
+north, as made the walk delightful: though the pavement-stones,
+and stones of the walls and houses, were far too hot to have a
+hand laid on them comfortably.</p>
+<p>We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral:
+where Mass was performing to an auditory very like that of Lyons,
+namely, several old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog,
+who had marked out for himself a little course or platform for
+exercise, beginning at the altar-rails and ending at the door, up
+and down which constitutional walk he trotted, during the
+service, as methodically and calmly, as any old gentleman out of
+doors.</p>
+<p>It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are
+sadly defaced by time and damp weather; but the sun was shining
+in, splendidly, through the red curtains of the windows, and
+glittering on the altar furniture; and it looked as bright and
+cheerful as need be.</p>
+<p>Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was
+being executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was
+led to observe more closely than I might otherwise have done, a
+great number of votive offerings with which the walls of the
+different chapels were profusely hung.&nbsp; I will not say
+decorated, for they were very roughly and comically got up; most
+likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in that
+way.&nbsp; They were all little pictures: each representing some
+sickness or calamity from which the person placing it there, had
+escaped, through the interposition of his or her patron saint, or
+of the Madonna; and I may refer to them as good specimens of the
+class generally.&nbsp; They are abundant in Italy.</p>
+<p>In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of
+perspective, they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but
+they were oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the
+Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours.&nbsp; In
+one, a lady was having a toe amputated&mdash;an operation which a
+saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to
+superintend.&nbsp; In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up
+very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod,
+with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the
+only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her
+chamber.&nbsp; One would never have supposed her to be labouring
+under any complaint, beyond the inconvenience of being
+miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not hit upon the idea
+of putting all her family on their knees in one corner, with
+their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like
+boot-trees.&nbsp; Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue
+divan, promised to restore the patient.&nbsp; In another case, a
+lady was in the very act of being run over, immediately outside
+the city walls, by a sort of piano-forte van.&nbsp; But the
+Madonna was there again.&nbsp; Whether the supernatural
+appearance had startled the horse (a bay griffin), or whether it
+was invisible to him, I don&rsquo;t know; but he was galloping
+away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or
+compunction.&nbsp; On every picture &lsquo;Ex voto&rsquo; was
+painted in yellow capitals in the sky.</p>
+<p>Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and
+are evidently among the many compromises made between the false
+religion and the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could
+wish that all the other compromises were as harmless.&nbsp;
+Gratitude and Devotion are Christian qualities; and a grateful,
+humble, Christian spirit may dictate the observance.</p>
+<p>Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes,
+of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy
+barrack: while gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and
+deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed
+bodies of kings.&nbsp; But we neither went there, to see state
+rooms, nor soldiers&rsquo; quarters, nor a common jail, though we
+dropped some money into a prisoners&rsquo; box outside, whilst
+the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up,
+and watched us eagerly.&nbsp; We went to see the ruins of the
+dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.</p>
+<p>A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black
+eyes,&mdash;proof that the world hadn&rsquo;t conjured down the
+devil within her, though it had had between sixty and seventy
+years to do it in,&mdash;came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of
+which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands, and
+marshalled us the way that we should go.&nbsp; How she told us,
+on the way, that she was a Government Officer (<i>concierge du
+palais a apostolique</i>), and had been, for I don&rsquo;t know
+how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to princes;
+and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how she
+had resided in the palace from an infant,&mdash;had been born
+there, if I recollect right,&mdash;I needn&rsquo;t relate.&nbsp;
+But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil
+I never beheld.&nbsp; She was alight and flaming, all the
+time.&nbsp; Her action was violent in the extreme.&nbsp; She
+never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose.&nbsp;
+She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into
+attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere
+emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still:
+now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a
+mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching
+the remains of some new horror&mdash;looking back and walking
+stealthily, and making horrible grimaces&mdash;that might alone
+have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man&rsquo;s
+counterpane, to the exclusion of all other figures, through a
+whole fever.</p>
+<p>Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle soldiers,
+we turned off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our
+admission, and locked again behind us: and entered a narrow
+court, rendered narrower by fallen stones and heaps of rubbish;
+part of it choking up the mouth of a ruined subterranean passage,
+that once communicated (or is said to have done so) with another
+castle on the opposite bank of the river.&nbsp; Close to this
+court-yard is a dungeon&mdash;we stood within it, in another
+minute&mdash;in the dismal tower <i>des oubliettes</i>, where
+Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by an iron chain to the very wall
+that stands there now, but shut out from the sky which now looks
+down into it.&nbsp; A few steps brought us to the Cachots, in
+which the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined for
+forty-eight hours after their capture, without food or drink,
+that their constancy might be shaken, even before they were
+confronted with their gloomy judges.&nbsp; The day has not got in
+there yet.&nbsp; They are still small cells, shut in by four
+unyielding, close, hard walls; still profoundly dark; still
+massively doored and fastened, as of old.</p>
+<p>Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into
+a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of
+the Holy Office.&nbsp; The place where the tribunal sat, was
+plain.&nbsp; The platform might have been removed but
+yesterday.&nbsp; Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan
+having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition
+chambers!&nbsp; But it was, and may be traced there yet.</p>
+<p>High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering
+replies of the accused were heard and noted down.&nbsp; Many of
+them had been brought out of the very cell we had just looked
+into, so awfully; along the same stone passage.&nbsp; We had
+trodden in their very footsteps.</p>
+<p>I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires,
+when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny
+finger, but the handle of a key, upon her lip.&nbsp; She invites
+me, with a jerk, to follow her.&nbsp; I do so.&nbsp; She leads me
+out into a room adjoining&mdash;a rugged room, with a
+funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top, to the bright
+day.&nbsp; I ask her what it is.&nbsp; She folds her arms, leers
+hideously, and stares.&nbsp; I ask again.&nbsp; She glances
+round, to see that all the little company are there; sits down
+upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a
+fiend, &lsquo;La Salle de la Question!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The Chamber of Torture!&nbsp; And the roof was made of that
+shape to stifle the victim&rsquo;s cries!&nbsp; Oh Goblin,
+Goblin, let us think of this awhile, in silence.&nbsp; Peace,
+Goblin!&nbsp; Sit with your short arms crossed on your short
+legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then
+flame out again.</p>
+<p>Minutes!&nbsp; Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock,
+when, with her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of
+the chamber, describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy
+blows.&nbsp; Thus it ran round! cries Goblin.&nbsp; Mash, mash,
+mash!&nbsp; An endless routine of heavy hammers.&nbsp; Mash,
+mash, mash! upon the sufferer&rsquo;s limbs.&nbsp; See the stone
+trough! says Goblin.&nbsp; For the water torture!&nbsp; Gurgle,
+swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer&rsquo;s honour!&nbsp; Suck
+the bloody rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at
+every breath you draw!&nbsp; And when the executioner plucks it
+out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God&rsquo;s own Image,
+know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on
+the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to
+heal: who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness,
+dumbness, madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never
+stretched His blessed hand out, but to give relief and ease!</p>
+<p>See! cries Goblin.&nbsp; There the furnace was.&nbsp; There
+they made the irons red-hot.&nbsp; Those holes supported the
+sharp stake, on which the tortured persons hung poised: dangling
+with their whole weight from the roof.&nbsp; &lsquo;But;&rsquo;
+and Goblin whispers this; &lsquo;Monsieur has heard of this
+tower?&nbsp; Yes?&nbsp; Let Monsieur look down, then!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of
+Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the
+wall.&nbsp; Monsieur looks in.&nbsp; Downward to the bottom,
+upward to the top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower: very dismal,
+very dark, very cold.&nbsp; The Executioner of the Inquisition,
+says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung those
+who were past all further torturing, down here.&nbsp; &lsquo;But
+look! does Monsieur see the black stains on the
+wall?&rsquo;&nbsp; A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin&rsquo;s
+keen eye, shows Monsieur&mdash;and would without the aid of the
+directing key&mdash;where they are.&nbsp; &lsquo;What are
+they?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Blood!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here,
+sixty persons: men and women (&lsquo;and priests,&rsquo; says
+Goblin, &lsquo;priests&rsquo;): were murdered, and hurled, the
+dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit, where a quantity of
+quick-lime was tumbled down upon their bodies.&nbsp; Those
+ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one
+stone of the strong building in which the deed was done, remains
+upon another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as
+plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is
+now.</p>
+<p>Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the
+cruel deed should be committed in this place!&nbsp; That a part
+of the atrocities and monstrous institutions, which had been, for
+scores of years, at work, to change men&rsquo;s nature, should in
+its last service, tempt them with the ready means of gratifying
+their furious and beastly rage!&nbsp; Should enable them to show
+themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great,
+solemn, legal establishment, in the height of its power!&nbsp; No
+worse!&nbsp; Much better.&nbsp; They used the Tower of the
+Forgotten, in the name of Liberty&mdash;their liberty; an
+earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the Bastile moats
+and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many evidences of its
+unwholesome bringing-up&mdash;but the Inquisition used it in the
+name of Heaven.</p>
+<p>Goblin&rsquo;s finger is lifted; and she steals out again,
+into the Chapel of the Holy Office.&nbsp; She stops at a certain
+part of the flooring.&nbsp; Her great effect is at hand.&nbsp;
+She waits for the rest.&nbsp; She darts at the brave Courier, who
+is explaining something; hits him a sounding rap on the hat with
+the largest key; and bids him be silent.&nbsp; She assembles us
+all, round a little trap-door in the floor, as round a grave.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Voil&agrave;!&rsquo; she darts down at the ring, and
+flings the door open with a crash, in her goblin energy, though
+it is no light weight.&nbsp; &lsquo;Voil&agrave; les
+oubliettes!&nbsp; Voil&agrave; les oubliettes!&nbsp;
+Subterranean! Frightful!&nbsp; Black!&nbsp; Terrible!&nbsp;
+Deadly!&nbsp; Les oubliettes de l&rsquo;Inquisition!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the
+vaults, where these forgotten creatures, with recollections of
+the world outside: of wives, friends, children, brothers: starved
+to death, and made the stones ring with their unavailing
+groans.&nbsp; But, the thrill I felt on seeing the accursed wall
+below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in through
+its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory and triumph.&nbsp;
+I felt exalted with the proud delight of living in these
+degenerate times, to see it.&nbsp; As if I were the hero of some
+high achievement!&nbsp; The light in the doleful vaults was
+typical of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in
+God&rsquo;s name, but which is not yet at its noon!&nbsp; It
+cannot look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight,
+than to a traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically,
+treading down the darkness of that Infernal Well.</p>
+<h2><a name="page233"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+233</span>AVIGNON TO GENOA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Goblin</span>, having shown <i>les
+oubliettes</i>, felt that her great <i>coup</i> was struck.&nbsp;
+She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her
+arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.</p>
+<p>When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house,
+under the outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history
+of the building.&nbsp; Her cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted by
+small windows, sunk in the thick wall&mdash;in the softened
+light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little counter by the
+door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household
+implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a
+sober-looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with
+Goblin,) knitting at the door&mdash;looked exactly like a picture
+by <span class="smcap">Ostade</span>.</p>
+<p>I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of
+dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from
+it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given me the
+assurance.&nbsp; The immense thickness and giddy height of the
+walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great
+extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning
+aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder.&nbsp;
+The recollection of its opposite old uses: an impregnable
+fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of
+torture, the court of the Inquisition: at one and the same time,
+a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood: gives to
+every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and imparts new
+meaning to its incongruities.&nbsp; I could think of little,
+however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the
+dungeons.&nbsp; The palace coming down to be the lounging-place
+of noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk, and
+common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its
+dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to
+rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of
+its chambers of cruelty&mdash;that was its desolation and
+defeat!&nbsp; If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart,
+I should have felt that not that light, nor all the light in all
+the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sunbeams in its
+secret council-chamber, and its prisons.</p>
+<p>Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from
+the little history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite
+appropriate to itself, connected with its adventures.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of
+Pierre de Lude, the Pope&rsquo;s legate, seriously insulted some
+distinguished ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge,
+seized the young man, and horribly mutilated him.&nbsp; For
+several years the legate kept <i>his</i> revenge within his own
+breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification
+at last.&nbsp; He even made, in the fulness of time, advances
+towards a complete reconciliation; and when their apparent
+sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in
+this palace, certain families, whole families, whom he sought to
+exterminate.&nbsp; The utmost gaiety animated the repast; but the
+measures of the legate were well taken.&nbsp; When the dessert
+was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the
+announcement that a strange ambassador solicited an extraordinary
+audience.&nbsp; The legate, excusing himself, for the moment, to
+his guests, retired, followed by his officers.&nbsp; Within a few
+minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced to ashes:
+the whole of that wing of the building having been blown into the
+air with a terrible explosion!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with
+churches just now), we left Avignon that afternoon.&nbsp; The
+heat being very great, the roads outside the walls were strewn
+with people fast asleep in every little slip of shade, and with
+lazy groups, half asleep and half awake, who were waiting until
+the sun should be low enough to admit of their playing bowls
+among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road.&nbsp; The
+harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were
+treading out the corn in the fields.&nbsp; We came, at dusk, upon
+a wild and hilly country, once famous for brigands; and travelled
+slowly up a steep ascent.&nbsp; So we went on, until eleven at
+night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of
+Marseilles) to sleep.</p>
+<p>The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the
+light and heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and
+the town was very clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that
+when I walked out at noon it was like coming suddenly from the
+darkened room into crisp blue fire.&nbsp; The air was so very
+clear, that distant hills and rocky points appeared within an
+hour&rsquo;s walk; while the town immediately at hand&mdash;with
+a kind of blue wind between me and it&mdash;seemed to be white
+hot, and to be throwing off a fiery air from the surface.</p>
+<p>We left this town towards evening, and took the road to
+Marseilles.&nbsp; A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close;
+and the vines powdered white.&nbsp; At nearly all the cottage
+doors, women were peeling and slicing onions into earthen bowls
+for supper.&nbsp; So they had been doing last night all the way
+from Avignon.&nbsp; We passed one or two shady dark
+ch&acirc;teaux, surrounded by trees, and embellished with cool
+basins of water: which were the more refreshing to behold, from
+the great scarcity of such residences on the road we had
+travelled.&nbsp; As we approached Marseilles, the road began to
+be covered with holiday people.&nbsp; Outside the public-houses
+were parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards, and
+(once) dancing.&nbsp; But dust, dust, dust, everywhere.&nbsp; We
+went on, through a long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with
+people; having on our left a dreary slope of land, on which the
+country-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always staring white,
+are jumbled and heaped without the slightest order: backs,
+fronts, sides, and gables towards all points of the compass;
+until, at last, we entered the town.</p>
+<p>I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and
+foul; and I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and
+disagreeable place.&nbsp; But the prospect, from the fortified
+heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks
+and islands, is most delightful.&nbsp; These heights are a
+desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons&mdash;as an
+escape from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a
+great harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse
+of innumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot
+weather, is dreadful in the last degree.</p>
+<p>There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets;
+with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and
+shirts of orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps,
+great beards, and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English
+hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses.&nbsp; There were the
+townspeople sitting in clusters on the pavement, or airing
+themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up and down
+the closest and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds
+of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way,
+constantly.&nbsp; In the very heart of all this stir and uproar,
+was the common madhouse; a low, contracted, miserable building,
+looking straight upon the street, without the smallest screen or
+court-yard; where chattering mad-men and mad-women were peeping
+out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below, while the
+sun, darting fiercely aslant into their little cells, seemed to
+dry up their brains, and worry them, as if they were baited by a
+pack of dogs.</p>
+<p>We were pretty well accommodated at the H&ocirc;tel du
+Paradis, situated in a narrow street of very high houses, with a
+hairdresser&rsquo;s shop opposite, exhibiting in one of its
+windows two full-length waxen ladies, twirling round and round:
+which so enchanted the hairdresser himself, that he and his
+family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement
+outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy
+dignity.&nbsp; The family had retired to rest when we went to
+bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab
+slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out
+before him, and evidently couldn&rsquo;t bear to have the
+shutters put up.</p>
+<p>Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all
+nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds:
+fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of
+merchandise.&nbsp; Taking one of a great number of lively little
+boats with gay-striped awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns
+of great ships, under tow-ropes and cables, against and among
+other boats, and very much too near the sides of vessels that
+were faint with oranges, to the <i>Marie Antoinette</i>, a
+handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the
+harbour.&nbsp; By-and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy
+&lsquo;trifle from the Pantechnicon,&rsquo; on a flat barge,
+bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a prodigious
+quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside; and by
+five o&rsquo;clock we were steaming out in the open sea.&nbsp;
+The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an
+awning on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of
+the sea and sky unspeakable.</p>
+<p>We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along,
+within a few miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its
+place) nearly all day.&nbsp; We could see Genoa before three; and
+watching it as it gradually developed its splendid amphitheatre,
+terrace rising above terrace, garden above garden, palace above
+palace, height upon height, was ample occupation for us, till we
+ran into the stately harbour.&nbsp; Having been duly astonished,
+here, by the sight of a few Cappucini monks, who were watching
+the fair-weighing of some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to
+Albaro, two miles distant, where we had engaged a house.</p>
+<p>The way lay through the main streets, but not through the
+Strada Nuova, or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets
+of palaces.&nbsp; I never in my life was so dismayed!&nbsp; The
+wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the
+unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of
+Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon
+the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close
+than any in St. Giles&rsquo;s or old Paris; in and out of which,
+not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great
+fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of
+resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or
+pillar, to anything one had ever seen before; and the
+disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly confounded
+me.&nbsp; I fell into a dismal reverie.&nbsp; I am conscious of a
+feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins&rsquo;
+shrines at the street corners&mdash;of great numbers of friars,
+monks, and soldiers&mdash;of vast red curtains, waving in the
+doorways of the churches&mdash;of always going up hill, and yet
+seeing every other street and passage going higher up&mdash;of
+fruit-stalls, with fresh lemons and oranges hanging in garlands
+made of vine-leaves&mdash;of a guard-house, and a
+drawbridge&mdash;and some gateways&mdash;and vendors of iced
+water, sitting with little trays upon the margin of the
+kennel&mdash;and this is all the consciousness I had, until I was
+set down in a rank, dull, weedy court-yard, attached to a kind of
+pink jail; and was told I lived there.</p>
+<p>I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an
+attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to
+look back upon the city with affection as connected with many
+hours of happiness and quiet!&nbsp; But these are my first
+impressions honestly set down; and how they changed, I will set
+down too.&nbsp; At present, let us breathe after this long-winded
+journey.</p>
+<h2><a name="page238"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+238</span>GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> first impressions of such a
+place as <span class="smcap">Albaro</span>, the suburb of Genoa,
+where I am now, as my American friends would say,
+&lsquo;located,&rsquo; can hardly fail, I should imagine, to be
+mournful and disappointing.&nbsp; It requires a little time and
+use to overcome the feeling of depression consequent, at first,
+on so much ruin and neglect.&nbsp; Novelty, pleasant to most
+people, is particularly delightful, I think, to me.&nbsp; I am
+not easily dispirited when I have the means of pursuing my own
+fancies and occupations; and I believe I have some natural
+aptitude for accommodating myself to circumstances.&nbsp; But, as
+yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes and corners of the
+neighbourhood, in a perpetual state of forlorn surprise; and
+returning to my villa: the Villa Bagnerello (it sounds romantic,
+but Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by): have sufficient
+occupation in pondering over my new experiences, and comparing
+them, very much to my own amusement, with my expectations, until
+I wander out again.</p>
+<p>The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive
+name for the mansion: is in one of the most splendid situations
+imaginable.&nbsp; The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue
+Mediterranean, lies stretched out near at hand; monstrous old
+desolate houses and palaces are dotted all about; lofty hills,
+with their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with strong forts
+perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the left;
+and in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a
+ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks on
+the sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day
+long in partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes,
+trained on a rough trellis-work across the narrow paths.</p>
+<p>This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow,
+that when we arrived at the Custom-house, we found the people
+here had <i>taken the measure</i> of the narrowest among them,
+and were waiting to apply it to the carriage; which ceremony was
+gravely performed in the street, while we all stood by in
+breathless suspense.&nbsp; It was found to be a very tight fit,
+but just a possibility, and no more&mdash;as I am reminded every
+day, by the sight of various large holes which it punched in the
+walls on either side as it came along.&nbsp; We are more
+fortunate, I am told, than an old lady, who took a house in these
+parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in <i>her</i> carriage in
+a lane; and as it was impossible to open one of the doors, she
+was obliged to submit to the indignity of being hauled through
+one of the little front windows, like a harlequin.</p>
+<p>When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come to an
+archway, imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate&mdash;my
+gate.&nbsp; The rusty old gate has a bell to correspond, which
+you ring as long as you like, and which nobody answers, as it has
+no connection whatever with the house.&nbsp; But there is a rusty
+old knocker, too&mdash;very loose, so that it slides round when
+you touch it&mdash;and if you learn the trick of it, and knock
+long enough, somebody comes.&nbsp; The brave Courier comes, and
+gives you admittance.&nbsp; You walk into a seedy little garden,
+all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens; cross it,
+enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked marble
+staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a vaulted roof
+and whitewashed walls: not unlike a great Methodist chapel.&nbsp;
+This is the <i>sala</i>.&nbsp; It has five windows and five
+doors, and is decorated with pictures which would gladden the
+heart of one of those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as
+a sign, a picture divided, like death and the lady, at the top of
+the old ballad: which always leaves you in a state of uncertainty
+whether the ingenious professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied
+the other.&nbsp; The furniture of this <i>sala</i> is a sort of
+red brocade.&nbsp; All the chairs are immovable, and the sofa
+weighs several tons.</p>
+<p>On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are
+dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a
+multiplicity of doors and windows.&nbsp; Up-stairs are divers
+other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and down-stairs is another
+kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange contrivances for
+burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical laboratory.&nbsp;
+There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms, where the
+servants in this hot July, may escape from the heat of the fire,
+and where the brave Courier plays all sorts of musical
+instruments of his own manufacture, all the evening long.&nbsp; A
+mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim, bare house it is,
+as ever I beheld or thought of.</p>
+<p>There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the
+drawing-room; and under this terrace, and forming one side of the
+little garden, is what used to be the stable.&nbsp; It is now a
+cow-house, and has three cows in it, so that we get new milk by
+the bucketful.&nbsp; There is no pasturage near, and they never
+go out, but are constantly lying down, and surfeiting themselves
+with vine-leaves&mdash;perfect Italian cows enjoying the <i>dolce
+far&rsquo; niente</i> all day long.&nbsp; They are presided over,
+and slept with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son; two
+burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and feet, who wear, each, a
+shirt, a pair of trousers, and a red sash, with a relic, or some
+sacred charm like the bonbon off a twelfth-cake, hanging round
+the neck.&nbsp; The old man is very anxious to convert me to the
+Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently.&nbsp; We sit upon a
+stone by the door, sometimes in the evening, like Robinson Crusoe
+and Friday reversed; and he generally relates, towards my
+conversion, an abridgment of the History of Saint
+Peter&mdash;chiefly, I believe, from the unspeakable delight he
+has in his imitation of the cock.</p>
+<p>The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you must
+keep the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you
+mad; and when the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows,
+or the mosquitoes would tempt you to commit suicide.&nbsp; So at
+this time of the year, you don&rsquo;t see much of the prospect
+within doors.&nbsp; As for the flies, you don&rsquo;t mind
+them.&nbsp; Nor the fleas, whose size is prodigious, and whose
+name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house to that extent
+that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily, drawn
+by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.&nbsp; The rats are
+kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean cats, who roam
+about the garden for that purpose.&nbsp; The lizards, of course,
+nobody cares for; they play in the sun, and don&rsquo;t
+bite.&nbsp; The little scorpions are merely curious.&nbsp; The
+beetles are rather late, and have not appeared yet.&nbsp; The
+frogs are company.&nbsp; There is a preserve of them in the
+grounds of the next villa; and after nightfall, one would think
+that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going up and
+down a wet stone pavement without a moment&rsquo;s
+cessation.&nbsp; That is exactly the noise they make.</p>
+<p>The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore,
+was dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist.&nbsp;
+I believe there is a legend that Saint John&rsquo;s bones were
+received there, with various solemnities, when they were first
+brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses them to this day.&nbsp;
+When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they are brought out
+and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never fail to
+calm.&nbsp; In consequence of this connection of Saint John with
+the city, great numbers of the common people are christened
+Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese
+patois &lsquo;Batcheetcha,&rsquo; like a sneeze.&nbsp; To hear
+everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a Sunday, or
+festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a little
+singular and amusing to a stranger.</p>
+<p>The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose
+walls (outside walls, I mean) are profusely painted with all
+sorts of subjects, grim and holy.&nbsp; But time and the sea-air
+have nearly obliterated them; and they look like the entrance to
+Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day.&nbsp; The court-yards of these
+houses are overgrown with grass and weeds; all sorts of hideous
+patches cover the bases of the statues, as if they were afflicted
+with a cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty; and the
+iron bars outside the lower windows are all tumbling down.&nbsp;
+Firewood is kept in halls where costly treasures might be heaped
+up, mountains high; waterfalls are dry and choked; fountains, too
+dull to play, and too lazy to work, have just enough recollection
+of their identity, in their sleep, to make the neighbourhood
+damp; and the sirocco wind is often blowing over all these things
+for days together, like a gigantic oven out for a holiday.</p>
+<p>Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the
+<i>Virgin&rsquo;s mother</i>, when the young men of the
+neighbourhood, having worn green wreaths of the vine in some
+procession or other, bathed in them, by scores.&nbsp; It looked
+very odd and pretty.&nbsp; Though I am bound to confess (not
+knowing of the festa at that time), that I thought, and was quite
+satisfied, they wore them as horses do&mdash;to keep the flies
+off.</p>
+<p>Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St.
+Nazaro.&nbsp; One of the Albaro young men brought two large
+bouquets soon after breakfast, and coming up-stairs into the
+great <i>sala</i>, presented them himself.&nbsp; This was a
+polite way of begging for a contribution towards the expenses of
+some music in the Saint&rsquo;s honour, so we gave him whatever
+it may have been, and his messenger departed: well
+satisfied.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock in the evening we went to
+the church&mdash;close at hand&mdash;a very gaudy place, hung all
+over with festoons and bright draperies, and filled, from the
+altar to the main door, with women, all seated.&nbsp; They wear
+no bonnets here, simply a long white veil&mdash;the
+&lsquo;mezzero;&rsquo; and it was the most gauzy,
+ethereal-looking audience I ever saw.&nbsp; The young women are
+not generally pretty, but they walk remarkably well, and in their
+personal carriage and the management of their veils, display much
+innate grace and elegance.&nbsp; There were some men present: not
+very many: and a few of these were kneeling about the aisles,
+while everybody else tumbled over them.&nbsp; Innumerable tapers
+were burning in the church; the bits of silver and tin about the
+saints (especially in the Virgin&rsquo;s necklace) sparkled
+brilliantly; the priests were seated about the chief altar; the
+organ played away, lustily, and a full band did the like; while a
+conductor, in a little gallery opposite to the band, hammered
+away on the desk before him, with a scroll; and a tenor, without
+any voice, sang.&nbsp; The band played one way, the organ played
+another, the singer went a third, and the unfortunate conductor
+banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on some principle of
+his own: apparently well satisfied with the whole
+performance.&nbsp; I never did hear such a discordant din.&nbsp;
+The heat was intense all the time.</p>
+<p>The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their
+shoulders (they never put them on), were playing bowls, and
+buying sweetmeats, immediately outside the church.&nbsp; When
+half-a-dozen of them finished a game, they came into the aisle,
+crossed themselves with the holy water, knelt on one knee for an
+instant, and walked off again to play another game at
+bowls.&nbsp; They are remarkably expert at this diversion, and
+will play in the stony lanes and streets, and on the most uneven
+and disastrous ground for such a purpose, with as much nicety as
+on a billiard-table.&nbsp; But the most favourite game is the
+national one of Mora, which they pursue with surprising ardour,
+and at which they will stake everything they possess.&nbsp; It is
+a destructive kind of gambling, requiring no accessories but the
+ten fingers, which are always&mdash;I intend no pun&mdash;at
+hand.&nbsp; Two men play together.&nbsp; One calls a
+number&mdash;say the extreme one, ten.&nbsp; He marks what
+portion of it he pleases by throwing out three, or four, or five
+fingers; and his adversary has, in the same instant, at hazard,
+and without seeing his hand, to throw out as many fingers, as
+will make the exact balance.&nbsp; Their eyes and hands become so
+used to this, and act with such astonishing rapidity, that an
+uninitiated bystander would find it very difficult, if not
+impossible, to follow the progress of the game.&nbsp; The
+initiated, however, of whom there is always an eager group
+looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity; and as they
+are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of a
+dispute, and are frequently divided in their partisanship, it is
+often a very noisy proceeding.&nbsp; It is never the quietest
+game in the world; for the numbers are always called in a loud
+sharp voice, and follow as close upon each other as they can be
+counted.&nbsp; On a holiday evening, standing at a window, or
+walking in a garden, or passing through the streets, or
+sauntering in any quiet place about the town, you will hear this
+game in progress in a score of wine-shops at once; and looking
+over any vineyard walk, or turning almost any corner, will come
+upon a knot of players in full cry.&nbsp; It is observable that
+most men have a propensity to throw out some particular number
+oftener than another; and the vigilance with which two sharp-eyed
+players will mutually endeavour to detect this weakness, and
+adapt their game to it, is very curious and entertaining.&nbsp;
+The effect is greatly heightened by the universal suddenness and
+vehemence of gesture; two men playing for half a farthing with an
+intensity as all-absorbing as if the stake were life.</p>
+<p>Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some
+member of the Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of
+Jesuits for their summer quarters.&nbsp; I walked into its
+dismantled precincts the other evening about sunset, and
+couldn&rsquo;t help pacing up and down for a little time,
+drowsily taking in the aspect of the place: which is repeated
+hereabouts in all directions.</p>
+<p>I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of
+a weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third
+side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the
+neighbouring hills, the fourth.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe there
+was an uncracked stone in the whole pavement.&nbsp; In the centre
+was a melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked
+exactly as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and
+afterwards powdered.&nbsp; The stables, coach-houses, offices,
+were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted.</p>
+<p>Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their
+latches; windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and
+was lying about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession
+of the out-buildings, that I couldn&rsquo;t help thinking of the
+fairy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed
+retainers, waiting to be changed back again.&nbsp; One old Tom in
+particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye (a poor
+relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came prowling
+round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that
+I might be the hero come to marry the lady, and set all
+to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he suddenly gave a grim
+snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous tail, that he
+couldn&rsquo;t get into the little hole where he lived, but was
+obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had
+gone down together.</p>
+<p>In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
+colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut;
+but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone,
+and <i>that</i> was shut up too.&nbsp; The house: a wandering,
+echoing, thundering barrack of a place, with the lower windows
+barred up, as usual, was wide open at the door: and I have no
+doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed, and gone dead, and
+nobody a bit the wiser.&nbsp; Only one suite of rooms on an upper
+floor was tenanted; and from one of these, the voice of a
+young-lady vocalist, practising bravura lustily, came flaunting
+out upon the silent evening.</p>
+<p>I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint,
+with avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and
+water in stone basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy,
+straggling, under grown or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of
+all sorts of slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable
+life.&nbsp; There was nothing bright in the whole scene but a
+firefly&mdash;one solitary firefly&mdash;showing against the dark
+bushes like the last little speck of the departed Glory of the
+house; and even it went flitting up and down at sudden angles,
+and leaving a place with a jerk, and describing an irregular
+circle, and returning to the same place with a twitch that
+startled one: as if it were looking for the rest of the Glory,
+and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had become of it.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows
+of my dismal entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into
+familiar forms and substances; and I already began to think that
+when the time should come, a year hence, for closing the long
+holiday and turning back to England, I might part from Genoa with
+anything but a glad heart.</p>
+<p>It is a place that &lsquo;grows upon you&rsquo; every
+day.&nbsp; There seems to be always something to find out in
+it.&nbsp; There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to
+walk about in.&nbsp; You can lose your way (what a comfort that
+is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn
+up again, under the most unexpected and surprising
+difficulties.&nbsp; It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things
+that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and
+offensive, break upon the view at every turn.</p>
+<p>They who would know how beautiful the country immediately
+surrounding Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top
+of Monte Faccio, or, at least, ride round the city walls: a feat
+more easily performed.&nbsp; No prospect can be more diversified
+and lovely than the changing views of the harbour, and the
+valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and the Bizagno, from
+the heights along which the strongly fortified walls are carried,
+like the great wall of China in little.&nbsp; In not the least
+picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen of a real
+Genoese tavern, where the visitor may derive good entertainment
+from real Genoese dishes, such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German
+sausages, strong of garlic, sliced and eaten with fresh green
+figs; cocks&rsquo; combs and sheep-kidneys, chopped up with
+mutton chops and liver; small pieces of some unknown part of a
+calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and served up in a great
+dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of that kind.&nbsp;
+They often get wine at these suburban Trattorie, from France and
+Spain and Portugal, which is brought over by small captains in
+little trading-vessels.&nbsp; They buy it at so much a bottle,
+without asking what it is, or caring to remember if anybody tells
+them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of which they label
+one Champagne, and the other Madeira.&nbsp; The various opposite
+flavours, qualities, countries, ages, and vintages that are
+comprised under these two general heads is quite
+extraordinary.&nbsp; The most limited range is probably from cool
+Gruel up to old Marsala, and down again to apple Tea.</p>
+<p>The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any
+thoroughfare can well be, where people (even Italian people) are
+supposed to live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and
+there a kind of well, or breathing-place.&nbsp; The houses are
+immensely high, painted in all sorts of colours, and are in every
+stage and state of damage, dirt, and lack of repair.&nbsp; They
+are commonly let off in floors, or flats, like the houses in the
+old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris.&nbsp; There are
+few street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part,
+looked upon as public property; and any moderately enterprising
+scavenger might make a fine fortune by now and then clearing them
+out.&nbsp; As it is impossible for coaches to penetrate into
+these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded and otherwise, for
+hire in divers places.&nbsp; A great many private chairs are also
+kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
+trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of
+great lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame.&nbsp; The
+sedans and lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long
+strings of patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their
+little bells through these confined streets all day long.&nbsp;
+They follow them, as regularly as the stars the sun.</p>
+<p>When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova
+and the Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day,
+when I first saw it underneath the brightest and most intensely
+blue of summer skies: which its narrow perspective of immense
+mansions, reduced to a tapering and most precious strip of
+brightness, looking down upon the heavy shade below!&nbsp; A
+brightness not too common, even in July and August, to be well
+esteemed: for, if the Truth must out, there were not eight blue
+skies in as many midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the
+morning; when, looking out to sea, the water and the firmament
+were one world of deep and brilliant blue.&nbsp; At other times,
+there were clouds and haze enough to make an Englishman grumble
+in his own climate.</p>
+<p>The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some
+of them, within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke!&nbsp; The
+great, heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over
+tier: with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering
+high up&mdash;a huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules,
+massively barred lower windows, immense public staircases, thick
+marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming,
+echoing vaulted chambers: among which the eye wanders again, and
+again, and again, as every palace is succeeded by
+another&mdash;the terrace gardens between house and house, with
+green arches of the vine, and groves of orange-trees, and
+blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty feet above
+the street&mdash;the painted halls, mouldering, and blotting, and
+rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in beautiful
+colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry&mdash;the
+faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and
+crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches,
+and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than
+elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a
+more recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out
+what seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a
+sun-dial&mdash;the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces
+(but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces
+looking down into close by-ways&mdash;the magnificent and
+innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street of
+stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming
+with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children
+and whole worlds of dirty people&mdash;make up, altogether, such
+a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet
+so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide
+awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication
+to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about
+him.&nbsp; A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the
+inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure
+of an extravagant reality!</p>
+<p>The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied,
+all at once, is characteristic.&nbsp; For instance, the English
+Banker (my excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in a
+good-sized Palazzo in the Strada Nuova.&nbsp; In the hall (every
+inch of which is elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as a
+police-station in London), a hook-nosed Saracen&rsquo;s Head with
+an immense quantity of black hair (there is a man attached to it)
+sells walking-sticks.&nbsp; On the other side of the doorway, a
+lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress (wife to the
+Saracen&rsquo;s Head, I believe) sells articles of her own
+knitting; and sometimes flowers.&nbsp; A little further in, two
+or three blind men occasionally beg.&nbsp; Sometimes, they are
+visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart, but who has
+such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
+well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the
+ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight
+of cellar-steps to speak to somebody.&nbsp; A little further in,
+a few men, perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they
+may be chairmen waiting for their absent freight.&nbsp; If so,
+they have brought their chairs in with them, and there
+<i>they</i> stand also.&nbsp; On the left of the hall is a little
+room: a hatter&rsquo;s shop.&nbsp; On the first floor, is the
+English bank.&nbsp; On the first floor also, is a whole house,
+and a good large residence too.&nbsp; Heaven knows what there may
+be above that; but when you are there, you have only just begun
+to go up-stairs.&nbsp; And yet, coming down-stairs again,
+thinking of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the
+back of the hall, instead of turning the other way, to get into
+the street again; it bangs behind you, making the dismallest and
+most lonesome echoes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the
+same house) which seems to have been unvisited by human foot, for
+a hundred years.&nbsp; Not a sound disturbs its repose.&nbsp; Not
+a head, thrust out of any of the grim, dark, jealous windows,
+within sight, makes the weeds in the cracked pavement faint of
+heart, by suggesting the possibility of there being hands to grub
+them up.&nbsp; Opposite to you, is a giant figure carved in
+stone, reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial
+rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of a leaden
+pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down the
+rocks.&nbsp; But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than
+this channel is now.&nbsp; He seems to have given his urn, which
+is nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a
+sepulchral child, &lsquo;All gone!&rsquo; to have lapsed into a
+stony silence.</p>
+<p>In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of
+great size notwithstanding, and extremely high.&nbsp; They are
+very dirty: quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and
+emit a peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese,
+kept in very hot blankets.&nbsp; Notwithstanding the height of
+the houses, there would seem to have been a lack of room in the
+City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere.&nbsp; Wherever it
+has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a crack or
+corner, in it has gone.&nbsp; If there be a nook or angle in the
+wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any
+sort, there you are sure to find some kind of habitation: looking
+as if it had grown there, like a fungus.&nbsp; Against the
+Government House, against the old Senate House, round about any
+large building, little shops stick so close, like parasite vermin
+to the great carcase.&nbsp; And for all this, look where you may:
+up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere: there are irregular
+houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down, leaning
+against their neighbours, crippling themselves or their friends
+by some means or other, until one, more irregular than the rest,
+chokes up the way, and you can&rsquo;t see any further.</p>
+<p>One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is
+down by the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being
+associated with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our
+arrival, has stamped it deeper in my mind.&nbsp; Here, again, the
+houses are very high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed
+shapes, and have (as most of the houses have) something hanging
+out of a great many windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on
+the breeze.&nbsp; Sometimes, it is a curtain; sometimes, it is a
+carpet; sometimes, it is a bed; sometimes, a whole line-full of
+clothes; but there is almost always something.&nbsp; Before the
+basement of these houses, is an arcade over the pavement: very
+massive, dark, and low, like an old crypt.&nbsp; The stone, or
+plaster, of which it is made, has turned quite black; and against
+every one of these black piles, all sorts of filth and garbage
+seem to accumulate spontaneously.&nbsp; Beneath some of the
+arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta establish their
+stalls, which are by no means inviting.&nbsp; The offal of a
+fish-market, near at hand&mdash;that is to say, of a back lane,
+where people sit upon the ground and on various old bulk-heads
+and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to dispose
+of&mdash;and of a vegetable market, constructed on the same
+principle&mdash;are contributed to the decoration of this
+quarter; and as all the mercantile business is transacted here,
+and it is crowded all day, it has a very decided flavour about
+it.&nbsp; The Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods brought in
+from foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold and taken
+out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here also; and
+two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to
+search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and
+Ladies.&nbsp; For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to
+yield to the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way: that
+is to say, by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose
+folds of its dress.&nbsp; So Sanctity and Beauty may, by no
+means, enter.</p>
+<p>The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the
+importation of a few Priests of prepossessing appearance.&nbsp;
+Every fourth or fifth man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk;
+and there is pretty sure to be at least one itinerant
+ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney carriage on the
+neighbouring roads.&nbsp; I have no knowledge, elsewhere, of more
+repulsive countenances than are to be found among these
+gentry.&nbsp; If Nature&rsquo;s handwriting be at all legible,
+greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor,
+could hardly be observed among any class of men in the world.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Pepys</span> once heard a clergyman
+assert in his sermon, in illustration of his respect for the
+Priestly office, that if he could meet a Priest and angel
+together, he would salute the Priest first.&nbsp; I am rather of
+the opinion of <span class="smcap">Petrarch</span>, who, when his
+pupil <span class="smcap">Boccaccio</span> wrote to him in great
+tribulation, that he had been visited and admonished for his
+writings by a Carthusian Friar who claimed to be a messenger
+immediately commissioned by Heaven for that purpose, replied,
+that for his own part, he would take the liberty of testing the
+reality of the commission by personal observation of the
+Messenger&rsquo;s face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and
+discourse.&nbsp; I cannot but believe myself, from similar
+observation, that many unaccredited celestial messengers may be
+seen skulking through the streets of Genoa, or droning away their
+lives in other Italian towns.</p>
+<p>Perhaps the Cappucc&iacute;ni, though not a learned body, are,
+as an order, the best friends of the people.&nbsp; They seem to
+mingle with them more immediately, as their counsellors and
+comforters; and to go among them more, when they are sick; and to
+pry less than some other orders, into the secrets of families,
+for the purpose of establishing a baleful ascendency over their
+weaker members; and to be influenced by a less fierce desire to
+make converts, and once made, to let them go to ruin, soul and
+body.&nbsp; They may be seen, in their coarse dress, in all parts
+of the town at all times, and begging in the markets early in the
+morning.&nbsp; The Jesuits too, muster strong in the streets, and
+go slinking noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats.</p>
+<p>In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades
+congregate.&nbsp; There is a street of jewellers, and there is a
+row of booksellers; but even down in places where nobody ever
+can, or ever could, penetrate in a carriage, there are mighty old
+palaces shut in among the gloomiest and closest walls, and almost
+shut out from the sun.&nbsp; Very few of the tradesmen have any
+idea of setting forth their goods, or disposing them for
+show.&nbsp; If you, a stranger, want to buy anything, you usually
+look round the shop till you see it; then clutch it, if it be
+within reach, and inquire how much.&nbsp; Everything is sold at
+the most unlikely place.&nbsp; If you want coffee, you go to a
+sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will probably find it
+behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps, in some
+sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison,
+and Genoa&rsquo;s law were death to any that uttered it.</p>
+<p>Most of the apothecaries&rsquo; shops are great
+lounging-places.&nbsp; Here, grave men with sticks, sit down in
+the shade for hours together, passing a meagre Genoa paper from
+hand to hand, and talking, drowsily and sparingly, about the
+News.&nbsp; Two or three of these are poor physicians, ready to
+proclaim themselves on an emergency, and tear off with any
+messenger who may arrive.&nbsp; You may know them by the way in
+which they stretch their necks to listen, when you enter; and by
+the sigh with which they fall back again into their dull corners,
+on finding that you only want medicine.&nbsp; Few people lounge
+in the barbers&rsquo; shops; though they are very numerous, as
+hardly any man shaves himself.&nbsp; But the apothecary&rsquo;s
+has its group of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with
+their hands folded over the tops of their sticks.&nbsp; So still
+and quiet, that either you don&rsquo;t see them in the darkened
+shop, or mistake them&mdash;as I did one ghostly man in
+bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a stopper&mdash;for Horse
+Medicine.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting
+themselves, as their ancestors were of putting houses, in every
+available inch of space in and about the town.&nbsp; In all the
+lanes and alleys, and up every little ascent, and on every dwarf
+wall, and on every flight of steps, they cluster like bees.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile (and especially on festa-days) the bells of the
+churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known form of
+sound, but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle,
+dingle: with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which
+is maddening.&nbsp; This performance is usually achieved by a boy
+up in the steeple, who takes hold of the clapper, or a little
+rope attached to it, and tries to dingle louder than every other
+boy similarly employed.&nbsp; The noise is supposed to be
+particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but looking up into the
+steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus
+engaged, one might very naturally mistake them for the Enemy.</p>
+<p>Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous.&nbsp; All
+the shops were shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays;
+and one night, all the houses in the neighbourhood of a
+particular church were illuminated, while the church itself was
+lighted, outside, <a name="page250"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+250</span>with torches; and a grove of blazing links was erected,
+in an open space outside one of the city gates.&nbsp; This part
+of the ceremony is prettier and more singular a little way in the
+country, where you can trace the illuminated cottages all the way
+up a steep hill-side; and where you pass festoons of tapers,
+wasting away in the starlight night, before some lonely little
+house upon the road.</p>
+<p>On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in
+whose honour the festa is holden, very gaily.&nbsp;
+Gold-embroidered festoons of different colours, hang from the
+arches; the altar furniture is set forth; and sometimes, even the
+lofty pillars are swathed from top to bottom in tight-fitting
+draperies.&nbsp; The cathedral is dedicated to St. Lorenzo.&nbsp;
+On St. Lorenzo&rsquo;s day, we went into it, just as the sun was
+setting.&nbsp; Although these decorations are usually in very
+indifferent taste, the effect, just then, was very superb
+indeed.&nbsp; For the whole building was dressed in red; and the
+sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red curtain in the
+chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own.&nbsp; When the
+sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except
+for a few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small
+dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and
+effective.&nbsp; But, sitting in any of the churches towards
+evening, is like a mild dose of opium.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p250b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Italian Romance"
+title=
+"Italian Romance"
+src="images/p250s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the
+dressing of the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for
+the tapers.&nbsp; If there be any left (which seldom happens, I
+believe), the souls in Purgatory get the benefit of it.&nbsp;
+They are also supposed to have the benefit of the exertions of
+certain small boys, who shake money-boxes before some mysterious
+little buildings like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up
+close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an image and
+some flowers inside.</p>
+<p>Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small
+house, with an altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for
+the benefit of the souls in Purgatory.&nbsp; Still further to
+stimulate the charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the
+plaster, on either side of the grated door, representing a select
+party of souls, frying.&nbsp; One of them has a grey moustache,
+and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken out
+of a hairdresser&rsquo;s window and cast into the furnace.&nbsp;
+There he is: a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for
+ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire,
+for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions) of
+the poor Genoese.</p>
+<p>They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to
+dance on their holidays: the staple places of entertainment among
+the women, being the churches and the public walks.&nbsp; They
+are very good-tempered, obliging, and industrious.&nbsp; Industry
+has not made them clean, for their habitations are extremely
+filthy, and their usual occupation on a fine Sunday morning, is
+to sit at their doors, hunting in each other&rsquo;s heads.&nbsp;
+But their dwellings are so close and confined that if those parts
+of the city had been beaten down by Massena in the time of the
+terrible Blockade, it would have at least occasioned one public
+benefit among many misfortunes.</p>
+<p>The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly
+washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and
+ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this
+dirt, who wears them when they are clean.&nbsp; The custom is to
+lay the wet linen which is being operated upon, on a smooth
+stone, and hammer away at it, with a flat wooden mallet.&nbsp;
+This they do, as furiously as if they were revenging themselves
+on dress in general for being connected with the Fall of
+Mankind.</p>
+<p>It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at
+these times, or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby,
+tightly swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous
+quantity of wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or
+finger.&nbsp; This custom (which we often see represented in old
+pictures) is universal among the common people.&nbsp; A child is
+left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or is
+accidentally knocked off a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is
+hung up to a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at
+an English rag-shop, without the least inconvenience to
+anybody.</p>
+<p>I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the
+little country church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the
+city, while a baptism took place.&nbsp; I saw the priest, and an
+attendant with a large taper, and a man, and a woman, and some
+others; but I had no more idea, until the ceremony was all over,
+that it was a baptism, or that the curious little stiff
+instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the course of
+the ceremony, by the handle&mdash;like a short poker&mdash;was a
+child, than I had that it was my own christening.&nbsp; I
+borrowed the child afterwards, for a minute or two (it was lying
+across the font then), and found it very red in the face but
+perfectly quiet, and not to be bent on any terms.&nbsp; The
+number of cripples in the streets, soon ceased to surprise
+me.</p>
+<p>There are plenty of Saints&rsquo; and Virgin&rsquo;s Shrines,
+of course; generally at the corners of streets.&nbsp; The
+favourite memento to the Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting,
+representing a peasant on his knees, with a spade and some other
+agricultural implements beside him; and the Madonna, with the
+Infant Saviour in her arms, appearing to him in a cloud.&nbsp;
+This is the legend of the Madonna della Guardia: a chapel on a
+mountain within a few miles, which is in high repute.&nbsp; It
+seems that this peasant lived all alone by himself, tilling some
+land atop of the mountain, where, being a devout man, he daily
+said his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for his hut was a
+very poor one.&nbsp; Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to
+him, as in the picture, and said, &lsquo;Why do you pray in the
+open air, and without a priest?&rsquo;&nbsp; The peasant
+explained because there was neither priest nor church at
+hand&mdash;a very uncommon complaint indeed in Italy.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I should wish, then,&rsquo; said the Celestial Visitor,
+&lsquo;to have a chapel built here, in which the prayers of the
+Faithful may be offered up.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;But, Santissima
+Madonna,&rsquo; said the peasant, &lsquo;I am a poor man; and
+chapels cannot be built without money.&nbsp; They must be
+supported, too, Santissima; for to have a chapel and not support
+it liberally, is a wickedness&mdash;a deadly sin.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visitor.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Go!&rsquo; said she.&nbsp; &lsquo;There is such a village
+in the valley on the left, and such another village in the valley
+on the right, and such another village elsewhere, that will
+gladly contribute to the building of a chapel.&nbsp; Go to
+them!&nbsp; Relate what you have seen; and do not doubt that
+sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel, or that
+it will, afterwards, be handsomely maintained.&rsquo;&nbsp; All
+of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite true.&nbsp; And in
+proof of this prediction and revelation, there is the chapel of
+the Madonna della Guardia, rich and flourishing at this day.</p>
+<p>The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly
+be exaggerated.&nbsp; The church of the Annunciata especially:
+built, like many of the others, at the cost of one noble family,
+and now in slow progress of repair: from the outer door to the
+utmost height of the high cupola, is so elaborately painted and
+set in gold, that it looks (as <span class="smcap">Simond</span>
+describes it, in his charming book on Italy) like a great
+enamelled snuff-box.&nbsp; Most of the richer churches contain
+some beautiful pictures, or other embellishments of great price,
+almost universally set, side by side, with sprawling effigies of
+maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever seen.</p>
+<p>It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the
+popular mind, and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but there is
+very little tenderness for the <i>bodies</i> of the dead
+here.&nbsp; For the very poor, there are, immediately outside one
+angle of the walls, and behind a jutting point of the
+fortification, near the sea, certain common pits&mdash;one for
+every day in the year&mdash;which all remain closed up, until the
+turn of each comes for its daily reception of dead bodies.&nbsp;
+Among the troops in the town, there are usually some Swiss: more
+or less.&nbsp; When any of these die, they are buried out of a
+fund maintained by such of their countrymen as are resident in
+Genoa.&nbsp; Their providing coffins for these men is matter of
+great astonishment to the authorities.</p>
+<p>Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent
+splashing down of dead people in so many wells, is bad.&nbsp; It
+surrounds Death with revolting associations, that insensibly
+become connected with those whom Death is approaching.&nbsp;
+Indifference and avoidance are the natural result; and all the
+softening influences of the great sorrow are harshly
+disturbed.</p>
+<p>There is a ceremony when an old Cavali&eacute;re or the like,
+expires, of erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to
+represent his bier; covering them over with a pall of black
+velvet; putting his hat and sword on the top; making a little
+square of seats about the whole; and sending out formal
+invitations to his friends and acquaintances to come and sit
+there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal Altar,
+decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose.</p>
+<p>When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of
+death, their nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into
+the country for a little change, and leaving the body to be
+disposed of, without any superintendence from them.&nbsp; The
+procession is usually formed, and the coffin borne, and the
+funeral conducted, by a body of persons called a
+Confrat&eacute;rnita, who, as a kind of voluntary penance,
+undertake to perform these offices, in regular rotation, for the
+dead; but who, mingling something of pride with their humility,
+are dressed in a loose garment covering their whole person, and
+wear a hood concealing the face; with breathing-holes and
+apertures for the eyes.&nbsp; The effect of this costume is very
+ghastly: especially in the case of a certain Blue
+Confrat&eacute;rnita belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of
+them, are very ugly customers, and who look&mdash;suddenly
+encountered in their pious ministration in the streets&mdash;as
+if they were Ghoules or Demons, bearing off the body for
+themselves.</p>
+<p>Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on
+many Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of
+establishing a current account with Heaven, on which to draw, too
+easily, for future bad actions, or as an expiation for past
+misdeeds, it must be admitted to be a good one, and a practical
+one, and one involving unquestionably good works.&nbsp; A
+voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed
+penance (not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks to
+such and such a stone in the pavement of the cathedral; or than a
+vow to the Madonna to wear nothing but blue for a year or
+two.&nbsp; This is supposed to give great delight above; blue
+being (as is well known) the Madonna&rsquo;s favourite
+colour.&nbsp; Women who have devoted themselves to this act of
+Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.</p>
+<p>There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now
+rarely opened.&nbsp; The most important&mdash;the Carlo Felice:
+the opera-house of Genoa&mdash;is a very splendid, commodious,
+and beautiful theatre.&nbsp; A company of comedians were acting
+there, when we arrived: and soon after their departure, a
+second-rate opera company came.&nbsp; The great season is not
+until the carnival time&mdash;in the spring.&nbsp; Nothing
+impressed me, so much, in my visits here (which were pretty
+numerous) as the uncommonly hard and cruel character of the
+audience, who resent the slightest defect, take nothing
+good-humouredly, seem to be always lying in wait for an
+opportunity to hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the
+actors.</p>
+<p>But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they
+are allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are
+resolved to make the most of this opportunity.</p>
+<p>There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are
+allowed the privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next
+to nothing: gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these
+gentlemen being insisted on, by the Governor, in all public or
+semi-public entertainments.&nbsp; They are lofty critics in
+consequence, and infinitely more exacting than if they made the
+unhappy manager&rsquo;s fortune.</p>
+<p>The <span class="smcap">Teatro Diurno</span>, or Day Theatre,
+is a covered stage in the open air, where the performances take
+place by daylight, in the cool of the afternoon; commencing at
+four or five o&rsquo;clock, and lasting, some three hours.&nbsp;
+It is curious, sitting among the audience, to have a fine view of
+the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see the neighbours at
+their windows looking on, and to hear the bells of the churches
+and convents ringing at most complete cross-purposes with the
+scene.&nbsp; Beyond this, and the novelty of seeing a play in the
+fresh pleasant air, with the darkening evening closing in, there
+is nothing very exciting or characteristic in the
+performances.&nbsp; The actors are indifferent; and though they
+sometimes represent one of Goldoni&rsquo;s comedies, the staple
+of the Drama is French.&nbsp; Anything like nationality is
+dangerous to despotic governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered
+kings.</p>
+<p>The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti&mdash;a famous company
+from Milan&mdash;is, without any exception, the drollest
+exhibition I ever beheld in my life.&nbsp; I never saw anything
+so exquisitely ridiculous.&nbsp; They <i>look</i> between four
+and five feet high, but are really much smaller; for when a
+musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the stage, it
+becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an actor.&nbsp;
+They usually play a comedy, and a ballet.&nbsp; The comic man in
+the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel.&nbsp;
+There never was such a locomotive actor, since the world
+began.&nbsp; Great pains are taken with him.&nbsp; He has extra
+joints in his legs: and a practical eye, with which he winks at
+the pit, in a manner that is absolutely insupportable to a
+stranger, but which the initiated audience, mainly composed of
+the common people, receive (so they do everything else) quite as
+a matter of course, and as if he were a man.&nbsp; His spirits
+are prodigious.&nbsp; He continually shakes his legs, and winks
+his eye.&nbsp; And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who
+sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his
+daughter in the regular conventional way, who is
+tremendous.&nbsp; No one would suppose it possible that anything
+short of a real man could be so tedious.&nbsp; It is the triumph
+of art.</p>
+<p>In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the
+very hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries
+to soothe her.&nbsp; They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa!
+in the regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of
+musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and knocking
+himself off his legs at every blow.&nbsp; These failing to
+delight her, dancers appear.&nbsp; Four first; then two;
+<i>the</i> two; the flesh-coloured two.&nbsp; The way in which
+they dance; the height to which they spring; the impossible and
+inhuman extent to which they pirouette; the revelation of their
+preposterous legs; the coming down with a pause, on the very tips
+of their toes, when the music requires it; the gentleman&rsquo;s
+retiring up, when it is the lady&rsquo;s turn; and the
+lady&rsquo;s retiring up, when it is the gentleman&rsquo;s turn;
+the final passion of a pas-de-deux; and the going off with a
+bound!&mdash;I shall never see a real ballet, with a composed
+countenance again.</p>
+<p>I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called
+&lsquo;St. Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.&rsquo;&nbsp; It
+began by the disclosure of Napoleon, with an immense head, seated
+on a sofa in his chamber at St. Helena; to whom his valet entered
+with this obscure announcement:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Sir Yew ud se on Low?&rsquo; (the <i>ow</i>, as in
+cow).</p>
+<p>Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a
+perfect mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a
+monstrously disproportionate face, and a great clump for the
+lower-jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdurate nature.&nbsp;
+He began his system of persecution, by calling his prisoner
+&lsquo;General Buonaparte;&rsquo; to which the latter replied,
+with the deepest tragedy, &lsquo;Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me
+not thus.&nbsp; Repeat that phrase and leave me!&nbsp; I am
+Napoleon, Emperor of France!&rsquo;&nbsp; Sir Yew ud se on,
+nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of
+the British Government, regulating the state he should preserve,
+and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his attendants to
+four or five persons.&nbsp; &lsquo;Four or five for
+<i>me</i>!&rsquo; said Napoleon.&nbsp; &lsquo;Me!&nbsp; One
+hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command; and this
+English officer talks of four or five for <i>me</i>!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Throughout the piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real
+Napoleon, and was, for ever, having small soliloquies by himself)
+was very bitter on &lsquo;these English officers,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;these English soldiers;&rsquo; to the great satisfaction
+of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to have Low
+bullied; and who, whenever Low said &lsquo;General
+Buonaparte&rsquo; (which he always did: always receiving the same
+correction), quite execrated him.&nbsp; It would be hard to say
+why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise with Napoleon,
+Heaven knows.</p>
+<p>There was no plot at all, except that a French officer,
+disguised as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape;
+and being discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnanimously
+refused to steal his freedom, was immediately ordered off by Low
+to be hanged.&nbsp; In two very long speeches, which Low made
+memorable, by winding up with &lsquo;Yas!&rsquo;&mdash;to show
+that he was English&mdash;which brought down thunders of
+applause.&nbsp; Napoleon was so affected by this catastrophe,
+that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out by two
+other puppets.&nbsp; Judging from what followed, it would appear
+that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him,
+in a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where
+a lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little
+children, who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent
+end; the last word on his lips being &lsquo;Vatterlo.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It was unspeakably ludicrous.&nbsp; Buonaparte&rsquo;s boots
+were so wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous
+things of their own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting
+under tables, and dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away
+with him, out of all human knowledge, when he was in full
+speech&mdash;mischances which were not rendered the less absurd,
+by a settled melancholy depicted in his face.&nbsp; To put an end
+to one conference with Low, he had to go to a table, and read a
+book: when it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see his
+body bending over the volume, like a boot-jack, and his
+sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.&nbsp; He was
+prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his shirt,
+and his little hands outside the coverlet.&nbsp; So was Dr.
+Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
+Mawworm&rsquo;s, who, in consequence of some derangement of his
+wires, hovered about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical
+opinions in the air.&nbsp; He was almost as good as Low, though
+the latter was great at all times&mdash;a decided brute and
+villain, beyond all possibility of mistake.&nbsp; Low was
+especially fine at the last, when, hearing the doctor and the
+valet say, &lsquo;The Emperor is dead!&rsquo; he pulled out his
+watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by exclaiming, with
+characteristic brutality, &lsquo;Ha! ha!&nbsp; Eleven minutes to
+six!&nbsp; The General dead! and the spy hanged!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+This brought the curtain down, triumphantly.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a
+lovelier residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the
+Fishponds, whither we removed as soon as our three months&rsquo;
+tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.</p>
+<p>It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof
+from the town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own,
+adorned with statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces,
+walks of orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and
+camellias.&nbsp; All its apartments are beautiful in their
+proportions and decorations; but the great hall, some fifty feet
+in height, with three large windows at the end, overlooking the
+whole town of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea,
+affords one of the most fascinating and delightful prospects in
+the world.&nbsp; Any house more cheerful and habitable than the
+great rooms are, within, it would be difficult to conceive; and
+certainly nothing more delicious than the scene without, in
+sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.&nbsp; It is more
+like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave and
+sober lodging.</p>
+<p>How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of
+the wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their
+fresh colouring as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one
+floor, or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms,
+is a spacious promenade; or how there are corridors and
+bed-chambers above, which we never use and rarely visit, and
+scarcely know the way through; or how there is a view of a
+perfectly different character on each of the four sides of the
+building; matters little.&nbsp; But that prospect from the hall
+is like a vision to me.&nbsp; I go back to it, in fancy, as I
+have done in calm reality a hundred times a day; and stand there,
+looking out, with the sweet scents from the garden rising up
+about me, in a perfect dream of happiness.</p>
+<p>There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many
+churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny
+sky; and down below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary
+convent parapet, fashioned like a gallery, with an iron across at
+the end, where sometimes early in the morning, I have seen a
+little group of dark-veiled nuns gliding sorrowfully to and fro,
+and stopping now and then to peep down upon the waking world in
+which they have no part.&nbsp; Old Monte Faccio, brightest of
+hills in good weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is
+here, upon the left.&nbsp; The Fort within the walls (the good
+King built it to command the town, and beat the houses of the
+Genoese about their ears, in case they should be discontented)
+commands that height upon the right.&nbsp; The broad sea lies
+beyond, in front there; and that line of coast, beginning by the
+light-house, and tapering away, a mere speck in the rosy
+distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads to Nice.&nbsp;
+The garden near at hand, among the roofs and houses: all red with
+roses and fresh with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola&mdash;a
+public promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the
+white veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round,
+and round, and round, in state-clothes and coaches at least, if
+not in absolute wisdom.&nbsp; Within a stone&rsquo;s-throw, as it
+seems, the audience of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned
+this way.&nbsp; But as the stage is hidden, it is very odd,
+without a knowledge of the cause, to see their faces changed so
+suddenly from earnestness to laughter; and odder still, to hear
+the rounds upon rounds of applause, rattling in the evening air,
+to which the curtain falls.&nbsp; But, being Sunday night, they
+act their best and most attractive play.&nbsp; And now, the sun
+is going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green, and
+golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and to the
+ringing of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at once, without a
+twilight.&nbsp; Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa, and on the
+country road; and the revolving lanthorn out at sea there,
+flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and portico,
+illuminates it as if there were a bright moon bursting from
+behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity.&nbsp; And
+this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid
+it after dark, and think it haunted.</p>
+<p>My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but
+nothing worse, I will engage.&nbsp; The same Ghost will
+occasionally sail away, as I did one pleasant autumn evening,
+into the bright prospect, and sniff the morning air at
+Marseilles.</p>
+<p>The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers
+outside his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the
+window, with the natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to
+twirl, and were languishing, stock still, with their beautiful
+faces addressed to blind corners of the establishment, where it
+was impossible for admirers to penetrate.</p>
+<p>The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen
+hours, and we were going to run back again by the Cornice road
+from Nice: not being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of
+the beautiful towns that rise in picturesque white clusters from
+among the olive woods, and rocks, and hills, upon the margin of
+the Sea.</p>
+<p>The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight
+o&rsquo;clock, was very small, and so crowded with goods that
+there was scarcely room to move; neither was there anything to
+cat on board, except bread; nor to drink, except coffee.&nbsp;
+But being due at Nice at about eight or so in the morning, this
+was of no consequence; so when we began to wink at the bright
+stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their winking at us, we
+turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little cabin, and
+slept soundly till morning.</p>
+<p>The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was
+built, it was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice
+Harbour, where we very little expected anything but
+breakfast.&nbsp; But we were laden with wool.&nbsp; Wool must not
+remain in the Custom-house at Marseilles more than twelve months
+at a stretch, without paying duty.&nbsp; It is the custom to make
+fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this law; to take it
+somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out; bring it
+straight back again; and warehouse it, as a new cargo, for nearly
+twelve months longer.&nbsp; This wool of ours, had come
+originally from some place in the East.&nbsp; It was recognised
+as Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour.&nbsp;
+Accordingly, the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people,
+which had come off to greet us, were warned away by the
+authorities; we were declared in quarantine; and a great flag was
+solemnly run up to the mast-head on the wharf, to make it known
+to all the town.</p>
+<p>It was a very hot day indeed.&nbsp; We were unshaved,
+unwashed, undressed, unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity
+of lying blistering in a lazy harbour, with the town looking on
+from a respectful distance, all manner of whiskered men in cocked
+hats discussing our fate at a remote guard-house, with gestures
+(we looked very hard at them through telescopes) expressive of a
+week&rsquo;s detention at least: and nothing whatever the matter
+all the time.&nbsp; But even in this crisis the brave Courier
+achieved a triumph.&nbsp; He telegraphed somebody (<i>I</i> saw
+nobody) either naturally connected with the hotel, or put <i>en
+rapport</i> with the establishment for that occasion only.&nbsp;
+The telegraph was answered, and in half an hour or less, there
+came a loud shout from the guard-house.&nbsp; The captain was
+wanted.&nbsp; Everybody helped the captain into his boat.&nbsp;
+Everybody got his luggage, and said we were going.&nbsp; The
+captain rowed away, and disappeared behind a little jutting
+corner of the Galley-slaves&rsquo; Prison: and presently came
+back with something, very sulkily.&nbsp; The brave Courier met
+him at the side, and received the something as its rightful
+owner.&nbsp; It was a wicker basket, folded in a linen cloth; and
+in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some salt
+fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so of
+peaches, and a few other trifles.&nbsp; When we had selected our
+own breakfast, the brave Courier invited a chosen party to
+partake of these refreshments, and assured them that they need
+not be deterred by motives of delicacy, as he would order a
+second basket to be furnished at their expense.&nbsp; Which he
+did&mdash;no one knew how&mdash;and by-and-by, the captain being
+again summoned, again sulkily returned with another something;
+over which my popular attendant presided as before: carving with
+a clasp-knife, his own personal property, something smaller than
+a Roman sword.</p>
+<p>The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected
+supplies; but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman,
+who got drunk in five minutes, and a sturdy Cappucc&iacute;no
+Friar, who had taken everybody&rsquo;s fancy mightily, and was
+one of the best friars in the world, I verily believe.</p>
+<p>He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing
+beard; and was a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty.&nbsp;
+He had come up to us, early in the morning, and inquired whether
+we were sure to be at Nice by eleven; saying that he particularly
+wanted to know, because if we reached it by that time he would
+have to perform Mass, and must deal with the consecrated wafer,
+fasting; whereas, if there were no chance of his being in time,
+he would immediately breakfast.&nbsp; He made this communication,
+under the idea that the brave Courier was the captain; and indeed
+he looked much more like it than anybody else on board.&nbsp;
+Being assured that we should arrive in good time, he fasted, and
+talked, fasting, to everybody, with the most charming good
+humour; answering jokes at the expense of friars, with other
+jokes at the expense of laymen, and saying that, friar as he was,
+he would engage to take up the two strongest men on board, one
+after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the
+deck.&nbsp; Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he
+could have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man,
+even in the Cappucc&iacute;no dress, which is the ugliest and
+most ungainly that can well be.</p>
+<p>All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman,
+who gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to
+commiserate him as one who might have been born a Frenchman
+himself, but for an unfortunate destiny.&nbsp; Although his
+patronage was such as a mouse might bestow upon a lion, he had a
+vast opinion of its condescension; and in the warmth of that
+sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe, to slap the Friar on the
+back.</p>
+<p>When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass: the
+Friar went to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold meat
+and bread, drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars,
+taking snuff, sustaining an uninterrupted conversation with all
+hands, and occasionally running to the boat&rsquo;s side and
+hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence that we
+<i>must</i> be got out of this quarantine somehow or other, as he
+had to take part in a great religious procession in the
+afternoon.&nbsp; After this, he would come back, laughing lustily
+from pure good humour: while the Frenchman wrinkled his small
+face into ten thousand creases, and said how droll it was, and
+what a brave boy was that Friar!&nbsp; At length the heat of the
+sun without, and the wine within, made the Frenchman
+sleepy.&nbsp; So, in the noontide of his patronage of his
+gigantic prot&eacute;g&eacute;, he lay down among the wool, and
+began to snore.</p>
+<p>It was four o&rsquo;clock before we were released; and the
+Frenchman, dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when
+the Friar went ashore.&nbsp; As soon as we were free, we all
+hurried away, to wash and dress, that we might make a decent
+appearance at the procession; and I saw no more of the Frenchman
+until we took up our station in the main street to see it pass,
+when he squeezed himself into a front place, elaborately
+renovated; threw back his little coat, to show a broad-barred
+velvet waistcoat, sprinkled all over with stars; then adjusted
+himself and his cane so as utterly to bewilder and transfix the
+Friar, when he should appear.</p>
+<p>The procession was a very long one, and included an immense
+number of people divided into small parties; each party chanting
+nasally, on its own account, without reference to any other, and
+producing a most dismal result.&nbsp; There were angels, crosses,
+Virgins carried on flat boards surrounded by Cupids, crowns,
+saints, missals, infantry, tapers, monks, nuns, relics,
+dignitaries of the church in green hats, walking under crimson
+parasols: and, here and there, a species of sacred street-lamp
+hoisted on a pole.&nbsp; We looked out anxiously for the
+Cappucc&iacute;ni, and presently their brown robes and corded
+girdles were seen coming on, in a body.</p>
+<p>I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that
+when the Friar saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would
+mentally exclaim, &lsquo;Is that my Patron!&nbsp; <i>That</i>
+distinguished man!&rsquo; and would be covered with
+confusion.&nbsp; Ah! never was the Frenchman so deceived.&nbsp;
+As our friend the Cappucc&iacute;no advanced, with folded arms,
+he looked straight into the visage of the little Frenchman, with
+a bland, serene, composed abstraction, not to be described.&nbsp;
+There was not the faintest trace of recognition or amusement on
+his features; not the smallest consciousness of bread and meat,
+wine, snuff, or cigars.&nbsp; &lsquo;C&rsquo;est
+lui-m&ecirc;me,&rsquo; I heard the little Frenchman say, in some
+doubt.&nbsp; Oh yes, it was himself.&nbsp; It was not his brother
+or his nephew, very like him.&nbsp; It was he.&nbsp; He walked in
+great state: being one of the Superiors of the Order: and looked
+his part to admiration.&nbsp; There never was anything so perfect
+of its kind as the contemplative way in which he allowed his
+placid gaze to rest on us, his late companions, as if he had
+never seen us in his life and didn&rsquo;t see us then.&nbsp; The
+Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat at last, but the Friar
+still passed on, with the same imperturbable serenity; and the
+broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd, was seen no
+more.</p>
+<p>The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that
+shook all the windows in the town.&nbsp; Next afternoon we
+started for Genoa, by the famed Cornice road.</p>
+<p>The half-French, half-Italian Vettur&iacute;no, who undertook,
+with his little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither
+in three days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose
+light-heartedness and singing propensities knew no bounds as long
+as we went on smoothly.&nbsp; So long, he had a word and a smile,
+and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and
+ends of the Sonnambula for all the echoes.&nbsp; So long, he went
+jingling through every little village, with bells on his horses
+and rings in his ears: a very meteor of gallantry and
+cheerfulness.&nbsp; But, it was highly characteristic to see him
+under a slight reverse of circumstances, when, in one part of the
+journey, we came to a narrow place where a waggon had broken down
+and stopped up the road.&nbsp; His hands were twined in his hair
+immediately, as if a combination of all the direst accidents in
+life had suddenly fallen on his devoted head.&nbsp; He swore in
+French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down, beating his feet
+on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair.&nbsp; There were
+various carters and mule-drivers assembled round the broken
+waggon, and at last some man of an original turn of mind,
+proposed that a general and joint effort should be made to get
+things to-rights again, and clear the way&mdash;an idea which I
+verily believe would never have presented itself to our friend,
+though we had remained there until now.&nbsp; It was done at no
+great cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands
+were wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to
+lighten his misery.&nbsp; The moment he was on his box once more,
+and clattering briskly down hill, he returned to the Sonnambula
+and the peasant girls, as if it were not in the power of
+misfortune to depress him.</p>
+<p>Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on
+this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many
+of them are very miserable.&nbsp; The streets are narrow, dark,
+and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old
+women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the
+top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely
+ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen
+straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or crooning
+together in by-corners, they are like a population of
+Witches&mdash;except that they certainly are not to be suspected
+of brooms or any other instrument of cleanliness.&nbsp; Neither
+are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in
+the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they
+always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads
+and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.</p>
+<p>These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however:
+nestling, with their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on
+steep hill-sides, or built upon the brink of noble bays: are
+charming.&nbsp; The vegetation is, everywhere, luxuriant and
+beautiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel feature in the novel
+scenery.&nbsp; In one town, San Remo&mdash;a most extraordinary
+place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble
+underneath the whole town&mdash;there are pretty terrace gardens;
+in other towns, there is the clang of shipwrights&rsquo; hammers,
+and the building of small vessels on the beach.&nbsp; In some of
+the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at anchor.&nbsp;
+In every case, each little group of houses presents, in the
+distance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanciful
+shapes.</p>
+<p>The road itself&mdash;now high above the glittering sea, which
+breaks against the foot of the precipice: now turning inland to
+sweep the shore of a bay: now crossing the stony bed of a
+mountain stream: now low down on the beach: now winding among
+riven rocks of many forms and colours: now chequered by a
+solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built, in old
+time, to protect the coast from the invasions of the Barbary
+Corsairs&mdash;presents new beauties every moment.&nbsp; When its
+own striking scenery is passed, and it trails on through a long
+line of suburb, lying on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the
+changing glimpses of that noble city and its harbour, awaken a
+new source of interest; freshened by every huge, unwieldy,
+half-inhabited old house in its outskirts: and coming to its
+climax when the city gate is reached, and all Genoa with its
+beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the
+view.</p>
+<h2><a name="page264"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 264</span>TO
+PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA</h2>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">strolled</span> away from Genoa on the
+6th of November, bound for a good many places (England among
+them), but first for Piacenza; for which town I started in the
+<i>coup&eacute;</i> of a machine something like a travelling
+caravan, in company with the brave Courier, and a lady with a
+large dog, who howled dolefully, at intervals, all night.&nbsp;
+It was very wet, and very cold; very dark, and very dismal; we
+travelled at the rate of barely four miles an hour, and stopped
+nowhere for refreshment.&nbsp; At ten o&rsquo;clock next morning,
+we changed coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in
+another coach (the body whereof would have been small for a fly),
+in company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his
+companion&mdash;who carried their breviaries and other books, and
+who, in the exertion of getting into the coach, had made a gash
+of pink leg between his black stocking and his black knee-shorts,
+that reminded one of Hamlet in Ophelia&rsquo;s closet, only it
+was visible on both legs&mdash;a provincial Avvoc&aacute;to; and
+a gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and singular
+sheen upon it, which I never observed in the human subject
+before.&nbsp; In this way we travelled on, until four
+o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon; the roads being still very heavy,
+and the coach very slow.&nbsp; To mend the matter, the old priest
+was troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a
+terrible yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the
+united efforts of the company; the coach always stopping for him,
+with great gravity.&nbsp; This disorder, and the roads, formed
+the main subject of conversation.&nbsp; Finding, in the
+afternoon, that the <i>coup&eacute;</i> had discharged two
+people, and had only one passenger inside&mdash;a monstrous ugly
+Tuscan, with a great purple moustache, of which no man could see
+the ends when he had his hat on&mdash;I took advantage of its
+better accommodation, and in company with this gentleman (who was
+very conversational and good-humoured) travelled on, until nearly
+eleven o&rsquo;clock at night, when the driver reported that he
+couldn&rsquo;t think of going any farther, and we accordingly
+made a halt at a place called Stradella.</p>
+<p>The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard
+where our coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and
+firewood, were all heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that
+you didn&rsquo;t know, and couldn&rsquo;t have taken your oath,
+which was a fowl and which was a cart.&nbsp; We followed a sleepy
+man with a flaring torch, into a great, cold room, where there
+were two immensely broad beds, on what looked like two immensely
+broad deal dining-tables; another deal table of similar
+dimensions in the middle of the bare floor; four windows; and two
+chairs.&nbsp; Somebody said it was my room; and I walked up and
+down it, for half an hour or so, staring at the Tuscan, the old
+priest, the young priest, and the Avvoc&aacute;to (Red-Nose lived
+in the town, and had gone home), who sat upon their beds, and
+stared at me in return.</p>
+<p>The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the
+proceedings, is interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he
+had been cooking) that supper is ready; and to the priest&rsquo;s
+chamber (the next room and the counterpart of mine) we all
+adjourn.&nbsp; The first dish is a cabbage, boiled with a great
+quantity of rice in a tureen full of water, and flavoured with
+cheese.&nbsp; It is so hot, and we are so cold, that it appears
+almost jolly.&nbsp; The second dish is some little bits of pork,
+fried with pigs&rsquo; kidneys.&nbsp; The third, two red
+fowls.&nbsp; The fourth, two little red turkeys.&nbsp; The fifth,
+a huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I don&rsquo;t know what
+else; and this concludes the entertainment.</p>
+<p>Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the
+dampest, the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the
+middle of such a quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood
+taking a winter walk.&nbsp; He kindles this heap in a twinkling,
+and produces a jorum of hot brandy and water; for that bottle of
+his keeps company with the seasons, and now holds nothing but the
+purest <i>eau de vie</i>.&nbsp; When he has accomplished this
+feat, he retires for the night; and I hear him, for an hour
+afterwards, and indeed until I fall asleep, making jokes in some
+outhouse (apparently under the pillow), where he is smoking
+cigars with a party of confidential friends.&nbsp; He never was
+in the house in his life before; but he knows everybody
+everywhere, before he has been anywhere five minutes; and is
+certain to have attracted to himself, in the meantime, the
+enthusiastic devotion of the whole establishment.</p>
+<p>This is at twelve o&rsquo;clock at night.&nbsp; At four
+o&rsquo;clock next morning, he is up again, fresher than a
+full-blown rose; making blazing fires without the least authority
+from the landlord; producing mugs of scalding coffee when nobody
+else can get anything but cold water; and going out into the dark
+streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on the chance of somebody
+with a cow getting up to supply it.&nbsp; While the horses are
+&lsquo;coming,&rsquo; I stumble out into the town too.&nbsp; It
+seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold damp wind blowing
+in and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of
+pattern.&nbsp; But it is profoundly dark, and raining heavily;
+and I shouldn&rsquo;t know it to-morrow, if I were taken there to
+try.&nbsp; Which Heaven forbid.</p>
+<p>The horses arrive in about an hour.&nbsp; In the interval, the
+driver swears; sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan
+oaths.&nbsp; Sometimes, when it is a long, compound oath, he
+begins with Christianity and merges into Paganism.&nbsp; Various
+messengers are despatched; not so much after the horses, as after
+each other; for the first messenger never comes back, and all the
+rest imitate him.&nbsp; At length the horses appear, surrounded
+by all the messengers; some kicking them, and some dragging them,
+and all shouting abuse to them.&nbsp; Then, the old priest, the
+young priest, the Avvoc&aacute;to, the Tuscan, and all of us,
+take our places; and sleepy voices proceeding from the doors of
+extraordinary hutches in divers parts of the yard, cry out
+&lsquo;Addio corri&egrave;re mio!&nbsp; Buon&rsquo;
+vi&aacute;ggio, corri&egrave;re!&rsquo;&nbsp; Salutations which
+the courier, with his face one monstrous grin, returns in like
+manner as we go jolting and wallowing away, through the mud.</p>
+<p>At Piacenza, which was four or five hours&rsquo; journey from
+the inn at Stradella, we broke up our little company before the
+hotel door, with divers manifestations of friendly feeling on all
+sides.&nbsp; The old priest was taken with the cramp again,
+before he had got half-way down the street; and the young priest
+laid the bundle of books on a door-step, while he dutifully
+rubbed the old gentleman&rsquo;s legs.&nbsp; The client of the
+Avvoc&aacute;to was waiting for him at the yard-gate, and kissed
+him on each cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am afraid
+he had either a very bad case, or a scantily-furnished
+purse.&nbsp; The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went
+loitering off, carrying his hat in his hand that he might the
+better trail up the ends of his dishevelled moustache.&nbsp; And
+the brave Courier, as he and I strolled away to look about us,
+began immediately to entertain me with the private histories and
+family affairs of the whole party.</p>
+<p>A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is.&nbsp; A deserted,
+solitary, grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up
+trenches, which afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that
+wander about them; and streets of stern houses, moodily frowning
+at the other houses over the way.&nbsp; The sleepiest and
+shabbiest of soldiery go wandering about, with the double curse
+of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their misfitting
+regimentals; the dirtiest of children play with their impromptu
+toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters; and the gauntest
+of dogs trot in and out of the dullest of archways, in perpetual
+search of something to eat, which they never seem to find.&nbsp;
+A mysterious and solemn Palace, guarded by two colossal statues,
+twin Genii of the place, stands gravely in the midst of the idle
+town; and the king with the marble legs, who flourished in the
+time of the thousand and one Nights, might live contentedly
+inside of it, and never have the energy, in his upper half of
+flesh and blood, to want to come out.</p>
+<p>What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is,
+to ramble through these places gone to sleep and basking in the
+sun!&nbsp; Each, in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy,
+dreary, God-forgotten towns in the wide world, the chief.&nbsp;
+Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used to be, and where a
+noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman station here, I
+became aware that I have never known till now, what it is to be
+lazy.&nbsp; A dormouse must surely be in very much the same
+condition before he retires under the wool in his cage; or a
+tortoise before he buries himself.</p>
+<p>I feel that I am getting rusty.&nbsp; That any attempt to
+think, would be accompanied with a creaking noise.&nbsp; That
+there is nothing, anywhere, to be done, or needing to be
+done.&nbsp; That there is no more human progress, motion, effort,
+or advancement, of any kind beyond this.&nbsp; That the whole
+scheme stopped here centuries ago, and laid down to rest until
+the Day of Judgment.</p>
+<p>Never while the brave Courier lives!&nbsp; Behold him jingling
+out of Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest
+posting-chaise ever seen, so that he looks out of the front
+window as if he were peeping over a garden wall; while the
+postilion, concentrated essence of all the shabbiness of Italy,
+pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to touch his
+hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than
+himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch&rsquo;s show outside the
+town.</p>
+<p>In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on
+trellis-work, supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in
+themselves, are anything but picturesque.&nbsp; But, here, they
+twine them around trees, and let them trail among the hedges; and
+the vineyards are full of trees, regularly planted for this
+purpose, each with its own vine twining and clustering about
+it.&nbsp; Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest
+red; and never was anything so enchantingly graceful and full of
+beauty.&nbsp; Through miles of these delightful forms and
+colours, the road winds its way.&nbsp; The wild festoons, the
+elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of all shapes; the
+fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them prisoners in
+sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon the
+ground; how rich and beautiful they are!&nbsp; And every now and
+then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and garlanded
+together: as if they had taken hold of one another, and were
+coming dancing down the field!</p>
+<p>Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
+consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less
+note.&nbsp; Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the
+Cathedral, Baptistery, and Campanile&mdash;ancient buildings, of
+a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters
+and dreamy-looking creatures carved in marble and red
+stone&mdash;are clustered in a noble and magnificent
+repose.&nbsp; Their silent presence was only invaded, when I saw
+them, by the twittering of the many birds that were flying in and
+out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in the
+architecture, where they had made their nests.&nbsp; They were
+busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into
+the sunny air of Heaven.&nbsp; Not so the worshippers within, who
+were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the
+same kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads
+bowed down, in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in
+Genoa and everywhere else.</p>
+<p>The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is
+covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and
+depressing influence.&nbsp; It is miserable to see great works of
+art&mdash;something of the Souls of Painters&mdash;perishing and
+fading away, like human forms.&nbsp; This cathedral is odorous
+with the rotting of Correggio&rsquo;s frescoes in the
+Cupola.&nbsp; Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at
+one time.&nbsp; Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now;
+but such a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of
+foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled together:
+no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest
+delirium.</p>
+<p>There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the roof
+supported by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to
+be at least one beggar in ambush: to say nothing of the tombs and
+secluded altars.&nbsp; From every one of these lurking-places,
+such crowds of phantom-looking men and women, leading other men
+and women with twisted limbs, or chattering jaws, or paralytic
+gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity, came
+hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral
+above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower
+church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or
+exhibited a more confounding display of arms and legs.</p>
+<p>There is Petrarch&rsquo;s Monument, too; and there is the
+Baptistery, with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there
+is a gallery containing some very remarkable pictures, whereof a
+few were being copied by hairy-faced artists, with little velvet
+caps more off their heads than on.&nbsp; There is the Farnese
+Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles of decay
+that ever was seen&mdash;a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering
+away.</p>
+<p>It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the
+lower seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great
+heavy chambers; rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote
+in their proud state.&nbsp; Such desolation as has fallen on this
+theatre, enhanced in the spectator&rsquo;s fancy by its gay
+intention and design, none but worms can be familiar with.&nbsp;
+A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was acted
+here.&nbsp; The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof; the
+boxes are dropping down, wasting away, and only tenanted by rats;
+damp and mildew smear the faded colours, and make spectral maps
+upon the panels; lean rags are dangling down where there were gay
+festoons on the Proscenium; the stage has rotted so, that a
+narrow wooden gallery is thrown across it, or it would sink
+beneath the tread, and bury the visitor in the gloomy depth
+beneath.&nbsp; The desolation and decay impress themselves on all
+the senses.&nbsp; The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy
+taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost
+sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the
+rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as
+time will seam and roughen a smooth hand.&nbsp; If ever Ghosts
+act plays, they act them on this ghostly stage.</p>
+<p>It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where
+the darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting
+the main street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable
+by the bright sky, so wonderfully blue.&nbsp; I passed from all
+the glory of the day, into a dim cathedral, where High Mass was
+performing, feeble tapers were burning, people were kneeling in
+all directions before all manner of shrines, and officiating
+priests were crooning the usual chant, in the usual, low, dull,
+drawling, melancholy tone.</p>
+<p>Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town,
+this same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the
+centre of the same torpid, listless system, I came out by another
+door, and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the
+shrillest trumpet that ever was blown.&nbsp; Immediately, came
+tearing round the corner, an equestrian company from Paris:
+marshalling themselves under the walls of the church, and
+flouting, with their horses&rsquo; heels, the griffins, lions,
+tigers, and other monsters in stone and marble, decorating its
+exterior.&nbsp; First, there came a stately nobleman with a great
+deal of hair, and no hat, bearing an enormous banner, on which
+was inscribed, <span class="smcap">Mazeppa</span>! <span
+class="smcap">to-night</span>!&nbsp; Then, a Mexican chief, with
+a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder, like Hercules.&nbsp;
+Then, six or eight Roman chariots: each with a beautiful lady in
+extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally pink tights, erect
+within: shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in which there was
+a latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for which I
+couldn&rsquo;t account, until, as the open back of each chariot
+presented itself, I saw the immense difficulty with which the
+pink legs maintained their perpendicular, over the uneven
+pavement of the town: which gave me quite a new idea of the
+ancient Romans and Britons.&nbsp; The procession was brought to a
+close, by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations,
+riding two and two, and haughtily surveying the tame population
+of Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally condescended to
+scatter largesse in the form of a few handbills.&nbsp; After
+caracolling among the lions and tigers, and proclaiming that
+evening&rsquo;s entertainments with blast of trumpet, it then
+filed off, by the other end of the square, and left a new and
+greatly increased dulness behind.</p>
+<p>When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the
+shrill trumpet was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last
+horse was hopelessly round the corner, the people who had come
+out of the church to stare at it, went back again.&nbsp; But one
+old lady, kneeling on the pavement within, near the door, had
+seen it all, and had been immensely interested, without getting
+up; and this old lady&rsquo;s eye, at that juncture, I happened
+to catch: to our mutual confusion.&nbsp; She cut our
+embarrassment very short, however, by crossing herself devoutly,
+and going down, at full length, on her face, before a figure in a
+fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which was so like one of the
+procession-figures, that perhaps at this hour she may think the
+whole appearance a celestial vision.&nbsp; Anyhow, I must
+certainly have forgiven her her interest in the Circus, though I
+had been her Father Confessor.</p>
+<p>There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder,
+in the cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no effort to
+see the bucket (kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena
+took away from the people of Bologna in the fourteenth century,
+and about which there was war made and a mock-heroic poem by
+<span class="smcap">Tassone</span>, too.&nbsp; Being quite
+content, however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast,
+in imagination, on the bucket within; and preferring to loiter in
+the shade of the tall Campanile, and about the cathedral; I have
+no personal knowledge of this bucket, even at the present
+time.</p>
+<p>Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the
+Guide-Book) would have considered that we had half done justice
+to the wonders of Modena.&nbsp; But it is such a delight to me to
+leave new scenes behind, and still go on, encountering newer
+scenes&mdash;and, moreover, I have such a perverse disposition in
+respect of sights that are cut, and dried, and
+dictated&mdash;that I fear I sin against similar authorities in
+every place I visit.</p>
+<p>Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I
+found myself walking next Sunday morning, among the stately
+marble tombs and colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants,
+and escorted by a little Cicerone of that town, who was
+excessively anxious for the honour of the place, and most
+solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments: whereas
+he was never tired of extolling the good ones.&nbsp; Seeing this
+little man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have
+nothing in his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking wistfully
+at a certain plot of grass, I asked him who was buried
+there.&nbsp; &lsquo;The poor people, Signore,&rsquo; he said,
+with a shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at
+me&mdash;for he always went on a little before, and took off his
+hat to introduce every new monument.&nbsp; &lsquo;Only the poor,
+Signore!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very cheerful.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very
+lively.&nbsp; How green it is, how cool!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s like a
+meadow!&nbsp; There are five,&rsquo;&mdash;holding up all the
+fingers of his right hand to express the number, which an Italian
+peasant will always do, if it be within the compass of his ten
+fingers,&mdash;&lsquo;there are five of my little children buried
+there, Signore; just there; a little to the right.&nbsp;
+Well!&nbsp; Thanks to God!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very cheerful.&nbsp;
+How green it is, how cool it is!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s quite a
+meadow!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for
+him, took a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made
+a little bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such
+a subject, and partly in memory of the children and of his
+favourite saint.&nbsp; It was as unaffected and as perfectly
+natural a little bow, as ever man made.&nbsp; Immediately
+afterwards, he took his hat off altogether, and begged to
+introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his teeth
+shone brighter than before.</p>
+<h2><a name="page272"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+272</span>THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> was such a very smart
+official in attendance at the Cemetery where the little Cicerone
+had buried his children, that when the little Cicerone suggested
+to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in presenting
+this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a
+couple of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked
+incredulously at his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made
+uniform, and dazzling buttons, and rebuked the little Cicerone
+with a grave shake of the head.&nbsp; For, in splendour of
+appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy Usher of the
+Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler would
+say, &lsquo;such a thing as tenpence&rsquo; away with him, seemed
+monstrous.&nbsp; He took it in excellent part, however, when I
+made bold to give it him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a
+flourish that would have been a bargain at double the money.</p>
+<p>It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the
+people&mdash;at all events he was doing so; and when I compared
+him, like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, &lsquo;with the Institutions
+of my own beloved country, I could not refrain from tears of
+pride and exultation.&rsquo;&nbsp; He had no pace at all; no more
+than a tortoise.&nbsp; He loitered as the people loitered, that
+they might gratify their curiosity; and positively allowed them,
+now and then, to read the inscriptions on the tombs.&nbsp; He was
+neither shabby, nor insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant.&nbsp;
+He spoke his own language with perfect propriety, and seemed to
+consider himself, in his way, a kind of teacher of the people,
+and to entertain a just respect both for himself and them.&nbsp;
+They would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster
+Abbey, than they would let the people in (as they do at Bologna)
+to see the monuments for nothing. <a name="citation272"></a><a
+href="#footnote272" class="citation">[272]</a></p>
+<p>Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky; with
+heavy arcades over the footways of the older streets, and lighter
+and more cheerful archways in the newer portions of the
+town.&nbsp; Again, brown piles of sacred buildings, with more
+birds flying in and out of chinks in the stones; and more
+snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars.&nbsp; Again, rich
+churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells, priests
+in bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths,
+crosses, images, and artificial flowers.</p>
+<p>There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a
+pleasant gloom upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and
+separate impression in the mind, among a crowd of cities, though
+it were not still further marked in the traveller&rsquo;s
+remembrance by the two brick leaning towers (sufficiently
+unsightly in themselves, it must be acknowledged), inclining
+cross-wise as if they were bowing stiffly to each other&mdash;a
+most extraordinary termination to the perspective of some of the
+narrow streets.&nbsp; The colleges, and churches too, and
+palaces: and above all the academy of Fine Arts, where there are
+a host of interesting pictures, especially by <span
+class="smcap">Guido</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Domenichino</span>, and <span
+class="smcap">Ludovico Caracci</span>: give it a place of its own
+in the memory.&nbsp; Even though these were not, and there were
+nothing else to remember it by, the great Meridian on the
+pavement of the church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark
+the time among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and
+pleasant interest.</p>
+<p>Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an
+inundation which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was
+quartered up at the top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room
+which I never could find: containing a bed, big enough for a
+boarding-school, which I couldn&rsquo;t fall asleep in.&nbsp; The
+chief among the waiters who visited this lonely retreat, where
+there was no other company but the swallows in the broad eaves
+over the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the
+English; and the subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord
+Byron.&nbsp; I made the discovery by accidentally remarking to
+him, at breakfast, that the matting with which the floor was
+covered, was very comfortable at that season, when he immediately
+replied that Milor Beeron had been much attached to that kind of
+matting.&nbsp; Observing, at the same moment, that I took no
+milk, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, that Milor Beeron had never
+touched it.&nbsp; At first, I took it for granted, in my
+innocence, that he had been one of the Beeron servants; but no,
+he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking about my Lord, to
+English gentlemen; that was all.&nbsp; He knew all about him, he
+said.&nbsp; In proof of it, he connected him with every possible
+topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was grown on
+an estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was the
+very model of his.&nbsp; When I left the inn, he coupled with his
+final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by which
+I was going, had been Milor Beeron&rsquo;s favourite ride; and
+before the horse&rsquo;s feet had well begun to clatter on the
+pavement, he ran briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to tell some
+other Englishman in some other solitary room that the guest who
+had just departed was Lord Beeron&rsquo;s living image.</p>
+<p>I had entered Bologna by night&mdash;almost midnight&mdash;and
+all along the road thither, after our entrance into the Papal
+territory: which is not, in any part, supremely well governed,
+Saint Peter&rsquo;s keys being rather rusty now; the driver had
+so worried about the danger of robbers in travelling after dark,
+and had so infected the brave Courier, and the two had been so
+constantly stopping and getting up and down to look after a
+portmanteau which was tied on behind, that I should have felt
+almost obliged to any one who would have had the goodness to take
+it away.&nbsp; Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left
+Bologna, we should start so as not to arrive at Ferrara later
+than eight at night; and a delightful afternoon and evening
+journey it was, albeit through a flat district which gradually
+became more marshy from the overflow of brooks and rivers in the
+recent heavy rains.</p>
+<p>At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses
+rested, I arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those
+singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed
+perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now.&nbsp;
+There was not much in it.&nbsp; In the blood red light, there was
+a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind; upon
+its margin a few trees.&nbsp; In the foreground was a group of
+silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge,
+and looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the
+distance, a deep bell; the shade of approaching night on
+everything.&nbsp; If I had been murdered there, in some former
+life, I could not have seemed to remember the place more
+thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood; and
+the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so
+strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I
+could forget it.</p>
+<p>More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara,
+than any city of the solemn brotherhood!&nbsp; The grass so grows
+up in the silent streets, that any one might make hay there,
+literally, while the sun shines.&nbsp; But the sun shines with
+diminished cheerfulness in grim Ferrara; and the people are so
+few who pass and re-pass through the places, that the flesh of
+its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and growing in the
+squares.</p>
+<p>I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always
+lives next door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor
+feel as if the beating hammers were his own heart, palpitating
+with a deadly energy!&nbsp; I wonder why jealous corridors
+surround the bedroom on all sides, and fill it with unnecessary
+doors that can&rsquo;t be shut, and will not open, and abut on
+pitchy darkness!&nbsp; I wonder why it is not enough that these
+distrustful genii stand agape at one&rsquo;s dreams all night,
+but there must also be round open portholes, high in the wall,
+suggestive, when a mouse or rat is heard behind the wainscot, of
+a somebody scraping the wall with his toes, in his endeavours to
+reach one of these portholes and look in!&nbsp; I wonder why the
+faggots are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony
+of heat when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of
+cold and suffocation at all other times!&nbsp; I wonder, above
+all, why it is the great feature of domestic architecture in
+Italian inns, that all the fire goes up the chimney, except the
+smoke!</p>
+<p>The answer matters little.&nbsp; Coppersmiths, doors,
+portholes, smoke, and faggots, are welcome to me.&nbsp; Give me
+the smiling face of the attendant, man or woman; the courteous
+manner; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased; the
+light-hearted, pleasant, simple air&mdash;so many jewels set in
+dirt&mdash;and I am theirs again to-morrow!</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Ariosto&rsquo;s</span> house, <span
+class="smcap">Tasso&rsquo;s</span> prison, a rare old Gothic
+cathedral, and more churches of course, are the sights of
+Ferrara.&nbsp; But the long silent streets, and the dismantled
+palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners, and where rank weeds
+are slowly creeping up the long-untrodden stairs, are the best
+sights of all.</p>
+<p>The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise
+one fine morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it seemed
+unreal and spectral.&nbsp; It was no matter that the people were
+not yet out of bed; for if they had all been up and busy, they
+would have made but little difference in that desert of a
+place.&nbsp; It was best to see it, without a single figure in
+the picture; a city of the dead, without one solitary
+survivor.&nbsp; Pestilence might have ravaged streets, squares,
+and market-places; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses,
+battered down their doors and windows, and made breaches in their
+roofs.&nbsp; In one part, a great tower rose into the air; the
+only landmark in the melancholy view.&nbsp; In another, a
+prodigious castle, with a moat about it, stood aloof: a sullen
+city in itself.&nbsp; In the black dungeons of this castle,
+Parisina and her lover were beheaded in the dead of night.&nbsp;
+The red light, beginning to shine when I looked back upon it,
+stained its walls without, as they have, many a time, been
+stained within, in old days; but for any sign of life they gave,
+the castle and the city might have been avoided by all human
+creatures, from the moment when the axe went down upon the last
+of the two lovers: and might have never vibrated to another
+sound</p>
+<blockquote><p>Beyond the blow that to the block<br />
+Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running
+fiercely, we crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so
+came into the Austrian territory, and resumed our journey:
+through a country of which, for some miles, a great part was
+under water.&nbsp; The brave Courier and the soldiery had first
+quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our eternal
+passport.&nbsp; But this was a daily relaxation with the Brave,
+who was always stricken deaf when shabby functionaries in uniform
+came, as they constantly did come, plunging out of wooden boxes
+to look at it&mdash;or in other words to beg&mdash;and who, stone
+deaf to my entreaties that the man might have a trifle given him,
+and we resume our journey in peace, was wont to sit reviling the
+functionary in broken English: while the unfortunate man&rsquo;s
+face was a portrait of mental agony framed in the coach window,
+from his perfect ignorance of what was being said to his
+disparagement.</p>
+<p>There was a postilion, in the course of this day&rsquo;s
+journey, as wild and savagely good-looking a vagabond as you
+would desire to see.&nbsp; He was a tall, stout-made,
+dark-complexioned fellow, with a profusion of shaggy black hair
+hanging all over his face, and great black whiskers stretching
+down his throat.&nbsp; His dress was a torn suit of rifle green,
+garnished here and there with red; a steeple-crowned hat,
+innocent of nap, with a broken and bedraggled feather stuck in
+the band; and a flaming red neckerchief hanging on his
+shoulders.&nbsp; He was not in the saddle, but reposed, quite at
+his ease, on a sort of low foot-board in front of the postchaise,
+down amongst the horses&rsquo; tails&mdash;convenient for having
+his brains kicked out, at any moment.&nbsp; To this Brigand, the
+brave Courier, when we were at a reasonable trot, happened to
+suggest the practicability of going faster.&nbsp; He received the
+proposal with a perfect yell of derision; brandished his whip
+about his head (such a whip! it was more like a home-made bow);
+flung up his heels, much higher than the horses; and disappeared,
+in a paroxysm, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the
+axle-tree.&nbsp; I fully expected to see him lying in the road, a
+hundred yards behind, but up came the steeple-crowned hat again,
+next minute, and he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining
+himself with the idea, and crying, &lsquo;Ha, ha! what
+next!&nbsp; Oh the devil!&nbsp; Faster too!&nbsp;
+Shoo&mdash;hoo&mdash;o&mdash;o!&rsquo;&nbsp; (This last
+ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.)&nbsp; Being anxious
+to reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured,
+by-and-by, to repeat the experiment on my own account.&nbsp; It
+produced exactly the same effect.&nbsp; Round flew the whip with
+the same scornful flourish, up came the heels, down went the
+steeple-crowned hat, and presently he reappeared, reposing as
+before and saying to himself, &lsquo;Ha ha! what next!&nbsp;
+Faster too!&nbsp; Oh the devil!&nbsp;
+Shoo&mdash;hoo&mdash;o&mdash;o!&rsquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 277</span>AN
+ITALIAN DREAM</h2>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">had</span> been travelling, for some
+days; resting very little in the night, and never in the
+day.&nbsp; The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that
+had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a
+crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my
+mind, as I travelled on, by a solitary road.&nbsp; At intervals,
+some one among them would stop, as it were, in its restless
+flitting to and fro, and enable me to look at it, quite steadily,
+and behold it in full distinctness.&nbsp; After a few moments, it
+would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern; and while I saw
+some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some not at
+all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen,
+lingering behind it, and coming through it.&nbsp; This was no
+sooner visible than, in its turn, it melted into something
+else.</p>
+<p>At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old
+rugged churches of Modena.&nbsp; As I recognised the curious
+pillars with grim monsters for their bases, I seemed to see them,
+standing by themselves in the quiet square at Padua, where there
+were the staid old University, and the figures, demurely gowned,
+grouped here and there in the open space about it.&nbsp; Then, I
+was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city, admiring
+the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and
+orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before.&nbsp; In their
+stead arose, immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most
+obstinate of all these objects, failed to hold its ground, a
+minute, before the monstrous moated castle of Ferrara, which,
+like an illustration to a wild romance, came back again in the
+red sunrise, lording it over the solitary, grass-grown, withered
+town.&nbsp; In short, I had that incoherent but delightful jumble
+in my brain, which travellers are apt to have, and are indolently
+willing to encourage.&nbsp; Every shake of the coach in which I
+sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new
+recollection out of its place, and to jerk some other new
+recollection into it; and in this state I fell asleep.</p>
+<p>I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping
+of the coach.&nbsp; It was now quite night, and we were at the
+waterside.&nbsp; There lay here, a black boat, with a little
+house or cabin in it of the same mournful colour.&nbsp; When I
+had taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled, by two men,
+towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea.</p>
+<p>Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind.&nbsp; It
+ruffled the water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds
+flying before the stars.&nbsp; I could not but think how strange
+it was, to be floating away at that hour: leaving the land
+behind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea.&nbsp; It
+soon began to burn brighter; and from being one light became a
+cluster of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the water, as the
+boat approached towards them by a dreamy kind of track, marked
+out upon the sea by posts and piles.</p>
+<p>We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when
+I heard it rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at
+hand.&nbsp; Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a
+something black and massive&mdash;like a shore, but lying close
+and flat upon the water, like a raft&mdash;which we were gliding
+past.&nbsp; The chief of the two rowers said it was a
+burial-place.</p>
+<p>Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out
+there, in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as
+it should recede in our path, when it was quickly shut out from
+my view.&nbsp; Before I knew by what, or how, I found that we
+were gliding up a street&mdash;a phantom street; the houses
+rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding
+on beneath their windows.&nbsp; Lights were shining from some of
+these casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream with
+their reflected rays, but all was profoundly silent.</p>
+<p>So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our
+course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing
+with water.&nbsp; Some of the corners where our way branched off,
+were so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long
+slender boat to turn them; but the rowers, with a low melodious
+cry of warning, sent it skimming on without a pause.&nbsp;
+Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed
+the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours)
+would come flitting past us like a dark shadow.&nbsp; Other
+boats, of the same sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to
+painted pillars, near to dark mysterious doors that opened
+straight upon the water.&nbsp; Some of these were empty; in some,
+the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I saw some figures coming
+down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace: gaily
+dressed, and attended by torch-bearers.&nbsp; It was but a
+glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the
+boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us: one of the
+many bridges that perplexed the Dream: blotted them out,
+instantly.&nbsp; On we went, floating towards the heart of this
+strange place&mdash;with water all about us where never water was
+elsewhere&mdash;clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately
+buildings growing out of it&mdash;and, everywhere, the same
+extraordinary silence.&nbsp; Presently, we shot across a broad
+and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious
+paved quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated
+showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction
+and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of
+hoarfrost or gossamer&mdash;and where, for the first time, I saw
+people walking&mdash;arrived at a flight of steps leading from
+the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through
+corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest;
+listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the
+window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.</p>
+<p>The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its
+freshness, motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water;
+its clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words can
+tell.&nbsp; But, from my window, I looked down on boats and
+barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on groups of busy
+sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on wide quays,
+strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on great
+ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on islands,
+crowned with gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses
+glittered in the light, atop of wondrous churches, springing from
+the sea!&nbsp; Going down upon the margin of the green sea,
+rolling on before the door, and filling all the streets, I came
+upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and such grandeur, that
+all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison with its absorbing
+loveliness.</p>
+<p>It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the
+rest, in the deep ocean.&nbsp; On its broad bosom, was a Palace,
+more majestic and magnificent in its old age, than all the
+buildings of the earth, in the high prime and fulness of their
+youth.&nbsp; Cloisters and galleries: so light, they might have
+been the work of fairy hands: so strong that centuries had
+battered them in vain: wound round and round this palace, and
+enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant
+fancies of the East.&nbsp; At no great distance from its porch, a
+lofty tower, standing by itself, and rearing its proud head,
+alone, into the sky, looked out upon the Adriatic Sea.&nbsp; Near
+to the margin of the stream, were two ill-omened pillars of red
+granite; one having on its top, a figure with a sword and shield;
+the other, a winged lion.&nbsp; Not far from these again, a
+second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even
+here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming
+with gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a
+mimic sun revolving in its course around them: while above, two
+bronze giants hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell.&nbsp;
+An oblong square of lofty houses of the whitest stone, surrounded
+by a light and beautiful arcade, formed part of this enchanted
+scene; and, here and there, gay masts for flags rose, tapering,
+from the pavement of the unsubstantial ground.</p>
+<p>I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among
+its many arches: traversing its whole extent.&nbsp; A grand and
+dreamy structure, of immense proportions; golden with old
+mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense;
+costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering
+through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased saints;
+rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
+woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and
+lengthened distances; shining with silver lamps and winking
+lights; unreal, fantastic, solemn, inconceivable
+throughout.&nbsp; I thought I entered the old palace; pacing
+silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old rulers of
+this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures, from
+the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on
+canvas, fought and conquered as of old.&nbsp; I thought I
+wandered through its halls of state and triumph&mdash;bare and
+empty now!&mdash;and musing on its pride and might, extinct: for
+that was past; all past: heard a voice say, &lsquo;Some tokens of
+its ancient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall, may
+be traced here, yet!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms,
+communicating with a prison near the palace; separated from it by
+a lofty bridge crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed,
+The Bridge of Sighs.</p>
+<p>But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the
+lions&rsquo; mouths&mdash;now toothless&mdash;where, in the
+distempered horror of my sleep, I thought denunciations of
+innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been dropped through,
+many a time, when the night was dark.&nbsp; So, when I saw the
+council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination,
+and the door by which they passed out, when they were
+condemned&mdash;a door that never closed upon a man with life and
+hope before him&mdash;my heart appeared to die within me.</p>
+<p>It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended
+from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of
+dismal, awful, horrible stone cells.&nbsp; They were quite
+dark.&nbsp; Each had a loop-hole in its massive wall, where, in
+the old time, every day, a torch was placed&mdash;I
+dreamed&mdash;to light the prisoner within, for half an
+hour.&nbsp; The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays,
+had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults.&nbsp;
+I saw them.&nbsp; For their labour with a rusty nail&rsquo;s
+point, had outlived their agony and them, through many
+generations.</p>
+<p>One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than
+four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered
+it.&nbsp; Hard by, another, and a dismal one, whereto, at
+midnight, the confessor came&mdash;a monk brown-robed, and
+hooded&mdash;ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but in the
+midnight of that murky prison, Hope&rsquo;s extinguisher, and
+Murder&rsquo;s herald.&nbsp; I had my foot upon the spot, where,
+at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and
+struck my hand upon the guilty door&mdash;low-browed and
+stealthy&mdash;through which the lumpish sack was carried out
+into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to
+cast a net.</p>
+<p>Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it:
+licking the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and
+slime within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and
+crevices, as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop:
+furnishing a smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the
+secret victims of the State&mdash;a road so ready that it went
+along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel
+officer&mdash;flowed the same water that filled this Dream of
+mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.</p>
+<p>Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought,
+the Giant&rsquo;s&mdash;I had some imaginary recollection of an
+old man abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it,
+when he heard the bell, proclaiming his successor&mdash;I glided
+off, in one of the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal
+guarded by four marble lions.&nbsp; To make my Dream more
+monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon
+its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown
+language; so that their purport was a mystery to all men.</p>
+<p>There was little sound of hammers in this place for building
+ships, and little work in progress; for the greatness of the city
+was no more, as I have said.&nbsp; Indeed, it seemed a very wreck
+found drifting on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its
+honourable stations, and strangers standing at its helm.&nbsp; A
+splendid barge in which its ancient chief had gone forth,
+pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I
+thought, no more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model, made
+from recollection like the city&rsquo;s greatness; and it told of
+what had been (so are the strong and weak confounded in the dust)
+almost as eloquently as the massive pillars, arches, roofs,
+reared to overshadow stately ships that had no other shadow now,
+upon the water or the earth.</p>
+<p>An armoury was there yet.&nbsp; Plundered and despoiled; but
+an armoury.&nbsp; With a fierce standard taken from the Turks,
+drooping in the dull air of its cage.&nbsp; Rich suits of mail
+worn by great warriors were hoarded there; crossbows and bolts;
+quivers full of arrows; spears; swords, daggers, maces, shields,
+and heavy-headed axes.&nbsp; Plates of wrought steel and iron, to
+make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales; and one
+spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to do
+its office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned
+darts.</p>
+<p>One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of
+torture horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and
+crush men&rsquo;s bones, and tear and twist them with the torment
+of a thousand deaths.&nbsp; Before it, were two iron helmets,
+with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth upon the
+heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small
+knob or anvil, where the directing devil could repose his elbow
+at his ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to the
+lamentations and confessions of the wretch within.&nbsp; There
+was that grim resemblance in them to the human shape&mdash;they
+were such moulds of sweating faces, pained and cramped&mdash;that
+it was difficult to think them empty; and terrible distortions
+lingering within them, seemed to follow me, when, taking to my
+boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or public walk in the
+sea, where there were grass and trees.&nbsp; But I forgot them
+when I stood upon its farthest brink&mdash;I stood there, in my
+dream&mdash;and looked, along the ripple, to the setting sun;
+before me, in the sky and on the deep, a crimson flush; and
+behind me the whole city resolving into streaks of red and
+purple, on the water.</p>
+<p>In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little
+heed of time, and had but little understanding of its
+flight.&nbsp; But there were days and nights in it; and when the
+sun was high, and when the rays of lamps were crooked in the
+running water, I was still afloat, I thought: plashing the
+slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as my
+black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.</p>
+<p>Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast
+palaces, I wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle,
+through labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed
+apartments where the furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was
+mouldering away.&nbsp; Pictures were there, replete with such
+enduring beauty and expression: with such passion, truth and
+power: that they seemed so many young and fresh realities among a
+host of spectres.&nbsp; I thought these, often intermingled with
+the old days of the city: with its beauties, tyrants, captains,
+patriots, merchants, counters, priests: nay, with its very
+stones, and bricks, and public places; all of which lived again,
+about me, on the walls.&nbsp; Then, coming down some marble
+staircase where the water lapped and oozed against the lower
+steps, I passed into my boat again, and went on in my dream.</p>
+<p>Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with
+plane and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving
+straight upon the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away
+before me in a tangled heap.&nbsp; Past open doors, decayed and
+rotten from long steeping in the wet, through which some scanty
+patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual shadows on
+the pavement with its trembling leaves.&nbsp; Past quays and
+terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and
+repassing, and where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on
+flag-stones and on flights of steps.&nbsp; Past bridges, where
+there were idlers too; loitering and looking over.&nbsp; Below
+stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the loftiest
+windows of the loftiest houses.&nbsp; Past plots of garden,
+theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of
+architecture&mdash;Gothic&mdash;Saracenic&mdash;fanciful with all
+the fancies of all times and countries.&nbsp; Past buildings that
+were high, and low, and black, and white, and straight, and
+crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.&nbsp; Twining among a
+tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last into a
+Grand Canal!&nbsp; There, in the errant fancy of my dream, I saw
+old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with
+shops and humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to
+know for Desdemona&rsquo;s, leaned down through a latticed blind
+to pluck a flower.&nbsp; And, in the dream, I thought that
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s spirit was abroad upon the water somewhere:
+stealing through the city.</p>
+<p>At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the
+Virgin, in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof,
+I fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of
+cheerful light, and that its whole arcade was thronged with
+people; while crowds were diverting themselves in splendid
+coffee-houses opening from it&mdash;which were never shut, I
+thought, but open all night long.&nbsp; When the bronze giants
+struck the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and
+animation of the city were all centred here; and as I rowed away,
+abreast the silent quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there,
+with sleeping boatmen wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at
+full length upon the stones.</p>
+<p>But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons
+sucking at their walls, and welling up into the secret places of
+the town: crept the water always.&nbsp; Noiseless and watchful:
+coiled round and round it, in its many folds, like an old
+serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when people should look
+down into its depths for any stone of the old city that had
+claimed to be its mistress.</p>
+<p>Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place
+at Verona.&nbsp; I have, many and many a time, thought since, of
+this strange Dream upon the water: half-wondering if it lie there
+yet, and if its name be <span class="smcap">Venice</span>.</p>
+<h2><a name="page284"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 284</span>BY
+VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO
+SWITZERLAND</h2>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">had</span> been half afraid to go to
+Verona, lest it should at all put me out of conceit with Romeo
+and Juliet.&nbsp; But, I was no sooner come into the old
+market-place, than the misgiving vanished.&nbsp; It is so
+fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an
+extraordinary and rich variety of fantastic buildings, that there
+could be nothing better at the core of even this romantic town:
+scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful of stories.</p>
+<p>It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place,
+to the House of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most
+miserable little inn.&nbsp; Noisy vettur&iacute;ni and muddy
+market-carts were disputing possession of the yard, which was
+ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered
+geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a
+doorway, who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the
+moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and been at
+large in those times.&nbsp; The orchard fell into other hands,
+and was parted off many years ago; but there used to be one
+attached to the house&mdash;or at all events there may have,
+been,&mdash;and the hat (Capp&ecirc;llo) the ancient cognizance
+of the family, may still be seen, carved in stone, over the
+gateway of the yard.&nbsp; The geese, the market-carts, their
+drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the way of the story, it
+must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter to have
+found the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the
+disused rooms.&nbsp; But the hat was unspeakably comfortable; and
+the place where the garden used to be, hardly less so.&nbsp;
+Besides, the house is a distrustful, jealous-looking house as one
+would desire to see, though of a very moderate size.&nbsp; So I
+was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion of old
+Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my acknowledgments
+to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the Padrona of
+the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at the
+geese; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one
+particular of being very great indeed in the &lsquo;Family&rsquo;
+way.</p>
+<p>From Juliet&rsquo;s home, to Juliet&rsquo;s tomb, is a
+transition as natural to the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself,
+or to the proudest Juliet that ever has taught the torches to
+burn bright in any time.&nbsp; So, I went off, with a guide, to
+an old, old garden, once belonging to an old, old convent, I
+suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a
+bright-eyed woman who was washing clothes, went down some walks
+where fresh plants and young flowers were prettily growing among
+fragments of old wall, and ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown a
+little tank, or water-trough, which the bright-eyed
+woman&mdash;drying her arms upon her &lsquo;kerchief, called
+&lsquo;La tomba di Giulietta la sfortun&aacute;ta.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+With the best disposition in the world to believe, I could do no
+more than believe that the bright-eyed woman believed; so I gave
+her that much credit, and her customary fee in ready money.&nbsp;
+It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that
+Juliet&rsquo;s resting-place was forgotten.&nbsp; However
+consolatory it may have been to Yorick&rsquo;s Ghost, to hear the
+feet upon the pavement overhead, and, twenty times a day, the
+repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet to lie out of the
+track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as come to
+graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.</p>
+<p>Pleasant Verona!&nbsp; With its beautiful old palaces, and
+charming country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and
+stately, balustraded galleries.&nbsp; With its Roman gates, still
+spanning the fair street, and casting, on the sunlight of to-day,
+the shade of fifteen hundred years ago.&nbsp; With its
+marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture, and
+quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and
+Capulets once resounded,</p>
+<blockquote><p>And made Verona&rsquo;s ancient citizens<br />
+Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,<br />
+To wield old partizans.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great
+castle, waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so
+cheerful!&nbsp; Pleasant Verona!</p>
+<p>In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Br&aacute;&mdash;a spirit
+of old time among the familiar realities of the passing
+hour&mdash;is the great Roman Amphitheatre.&nbsp; So well
+preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is
+there, unbroken.&nbsp; Over certain of the arches, the old Roman
+numerals may yet be seen; and there are corridors, and
+staircases, and subterranean passages for beasts, and winding
+ways, above ground and below, as when the fierce thousands
+hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of the
+arena.&nbsp; Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of
+the walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small
+dealers of one kind or other; and there are green weeds, and
+leaves, and grass, upon the parapet.&nbsp; But little else is
+greatly changed.</p>
+<p>When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and
+had gone up to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the
+lovely panorama closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into
+the building, it seemed to lie before me like the inside of a
+prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim
+and a shallow crown; the plaits being represented by the
+four-and-forty rows of seats.&nbsp; The comparison is a homely
+and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was
+irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless.</p>
+<p>An equestrian troop had been there, a short time
+before&mdash;the same troop, I dare say, that appeared to the old
+lady in the church at Modena&mdash;and had scooped out a little
+ring at one end of the area; where their performances had taken
+place, and where the marks of their horses&rsquo; feet were still
+fresh.&nbsp; I could not but picture to myself, a handful of
+spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone
+seats, and a spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello
+funny, with the grim walls looking on.&nbsp; Above all, I thought
+how strangely those Roman mutes would gaze upon the favourite
+comic scene of the travelling English, where a British nobleman
+(Lord John), with a very loose stomach: dressed in a blue-tailed
+coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a white hat:
+comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an English
+lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red
+spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up
+parasol.</p>
+<p>I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day,
+and could have walked there until now, I think.&nbsp; In one
+place, there was a very pretty modern theatre, where they had
+just performed the opera (always popular in Verona) of Romeo and
+Juliet.&nbsp; In another there was a collection, under a
+colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains, presided over
+by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic himself;
+for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he had
+unlocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he
+described the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them: he was
+so very old.&nbsp; In another place, there was a gallery of
+pictures: so abominably bad, that it was quite delightful to see
+them mouldering away.&nbsp; But anywhere: in the churches, among
+the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down beside the
+river: it was always pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance
+always will be.</p>
+<p>I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that
+night&mdash;of course, no Englishman had ever read it there,
+before&mdash;and set out for Mantua next day at sunrise,
+repeating to myself (in the <i>coup&eacute;</i> of an omnibus,
+and next to the conductor, who was reading the Mysteries of
+Paris),</p>
+<blockquote><p>There is no world without Verona&rsquo;s walls<br
+/>
+But purgatory, torture, hell itself.<br />
+Hence-banished is banished from the world,<br />
+And world&rsquo;s exile is death&mdash;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty
+miles after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy
+and boldness.</p>
+<p>Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I
+wonder!&nbsp; Did it wind through pasture land as green, bright
+with the same glancing streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of
+graceful trees!&nbsp; Those purple mountains lay on the horizon,
+then, for certain; and the dresses of these peasant girls, who
+wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English
+&lsquo;life-preserver&rsquo; through their hair behind, can
+hardly be much changed.&nbsp; The hopeful feeling of so bright a
+morning, and so exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger,
+even to an exiled lover&rsquo;s breast; and Mantua itself must
+have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and walls,
+and water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial
+omnibus.&nbsp; He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps,
+over two rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long,
+covered, wooden bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind,
+approached the rusty gate of stagnant Mantua.</p>
+<p>If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his
+place of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came
+together in a perfect fitness of things.&nbsp; It may have been
+more stirring then, perhaps.&nbsp; If so, the Apothecary was a
+man in advance of his time, and knew what Mantua would be, in
+eighteen hundred and forty-four.&nbsp; He fasted much, and that
+assisted him in his foreknowledge.</p>
+<p>I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own
+room arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a
+modest little tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery
+surrounding a court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man
+looked in, to inquire if the gentleman would have a Cicerone to
+show the town.&nbsp; His face was so very wistful and anxious, in
+the half-opened doorway, and there was so much poverty expressed
+in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in the thread-bare
+worsted glove with which he held it&mdash;not expressed the less,
+because these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped
+on&mdash;that I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed
+him.&nbsp; I engaged him on the instant, and he stepped in
+directly.</p>
+<p>While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he
+stood, beaming by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing
+my hat with his arm.&nbsp; If his fee had been as many napoleons
+as it was francs, there could not have shot over the twilight of
+his shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as lighted up the whole man,
+now that he was hired.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well!&rsquo; said I, when I was ready, &lsquo;shall we
+go out now?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;If the gentleman pleases.&nbsp; It is a beautiful
+day.&nbsp; A little fresh, but charming; altogether
+charming.&nbsp; The gentleman will allow me to open the
+door.&nbsp; This is the Inn Yard.&nbsp; The court-yard of the
+Golden Lion!&nbsp; The gentleman will please to mind his footing
+on the stairs.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>We were now in the street.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;This is the street of the Golden Lion.&nbsp; This, the
+outside of the Golden Lion.&nbsp; The interesting window up
+there, on the first Piano, where the pane of glass is broken, is
+the window of the gentleman&rsquo;s chamber!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if
+there were much to see in Mantua.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Well!&nbsp; Truly, no.&nbsp; Not much!&nbsp; So,
+so,&rsquo; he said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Many churches?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No.&nbsp; Nearly all suppressed by the
+French.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Monasteries or convents?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;No.&nbsp; The French again!&nbsp; Nearly all suppressed
+by Napoleon.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Much business?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Very little business.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Many strangers?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Ah Heaven!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>I thought he would have fainted.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder,
+what shall we do next?&rsquo; said I.</p>
+<p>He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his
+chin timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a light
+had broken on his mind, yet with a humble appeal to my
+forbearance that was perfectly irresistible:</p>
+<p>&lsquo;We can take a little turn about the town,
+Signore!&rsquo;&nbsp; (Si pu&ograve; far &rsquo;un p&iacute;ccolo
+g&iacute;ro della citta).</p>
+<p>It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the
+proposal, so we set off together in great good-humour.&nbsp; In
+the relief of his mind, he opened his heart, and gave up as much
+of Mantua as a Cicerone could.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;One must eat,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;but, bah! it was a
+dull place, without doubt!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa
+Andrea&mdash;a noble church&mdash;and of an inclosed portion of
+the pavement, about which tapers were burning, and a few people
+kneeling, and under which is said to be preserved the Sangreal of
+the old Romances.&nbsp; This church disposed of, and another
+after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the Museum,
+which was shut up.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was all the same,&rsquo; he
+said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Bah!&nbsp; There was not much
+inside!&rsquo;&nbsp; Then, we went to see the Piazza del Diavolo,
+built by the Devil (for no particular purpose) in a single night;
+then, the Piazza Virgiliana; then, the statue of
+Virgil&mdash;<i>our</i> Poet, my little friend said, plucking up
+a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on one
+side.&nbsp; Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which
+a picture-gallery was approached.&nbsp; The moment the gate of
+this retreat was opened, some five hundred geese came waddling
+round us, stretching out their necks, and clamouring in the most
+hideous manner, as if they were ejaculating, &lsquo;Oh!
+here&rsquo;s somebody come to see the Pictures!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t
+go up!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t go up!&rsquo;&nbsp; While we went up,
+they waited very quietly about the door in a crowd, cackling to
+one another occasionally, in a subdued tone; but the instant we
+appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and setting
+up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, &lsquo;What, you
+would go, would you!&nbsp; What do you think of it!&nbsp; How do
+you like it!&rsquo; they attended us to the outer gate, and cast
+us forth, derisively, into Mantua.</p>
+<p>The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to these,
+Pork to the learned Pig.&nbsp; What a gallery it was!&nbsp; I
+would take their opinion on a question of art, in preference to
+the discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.</p>
+<p>Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus
+ignominiouly escorted thither, my little friend was plainly
+reduced to the &lsquo;p&iacute;ccolo g&iacute;ro,&rsquo; or
+little circuit of the town, he had formerly proposed.&nbsp; But
+my suggestion that we should visit the Palazzo T&egrave; (of
+which I had heard a great deal, as a strange wild place) imparted
+new life to him, and away we went.</p>
+<p>The secret of the length of Midas&rsquo;s ears, would have
+been more extensively known, if that servant of his, who
+whispered it to the reeds, had lived in Mantua, where there are
+reeds and rushes enough to have published it to all the
+world.&nbsp; The Palazzo T&egrave; stands in a swamp, among this
+sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular a place as I ever
+saw.</p>
+<p>Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary.&nbsp; Not
+for its dampness, though it is very damp.&nbsp; Nor for its
+desolate condition, though it is as desolate and neglected as
+house can be.&nbsp; But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares
+with which its interior has been decorated (among other subjects
+of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano.&nbsp; There is a
+leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens
+of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another
+room, so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous
+how any man can have imagined such creatures.&nbsp; In the
+chamber in which they abound, these monsters, with swollen faces
+and cracked cheeks, and every kind of distortion of look and
+limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight of falling
+buildings, and being overwhelmed in the ruins; upheaving masses
+of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly striving to
+sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon their
+heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad and
+demoniacal destruction.&nbsp; The figures are immensely large,
+and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring
+is harsh and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like (I
+should imagine) a violent rush of blood to the head of the
+spectator, than any real picture set before him by the hand of an
+artist.&nbsp; This apoplectic performance was shown by a
+sickly-looking woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say,
+to the bad air of the marshes; but it was difficult to help
+feeling as if she were too much haunted by the Giants, and they
+were frightening her to death, all alone in that exhausted
+cistern of a Palace, among the reeds and rushes, with the mists
+hovering about outside, and stalking round and round it
+continually.</p>
+<p>Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street,
+some suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing
+at all: all as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of
+tumbling down bodily.&nbsp; The marshy town was so intensely dull
+and flat, that the dirt upon it seemed not to have come there in
+the ordinary course, but to have settled and mantled on its
+surface as on standing water.&nbsp; And yet there were some
+business-dealings going on, and some profits realising; for there
+were arcades full of Jews, where those extraordinary people were
+sitting outside their shops, contemplating their stores of
+stuffs, and woollens, and bright handkerchiefs, and trinkets: and
+looking, in all respects, as wary and business-like, as their
+brethren in Houndsditch, London.</p>
+<p>Having selected a Vettur&iacute;no from among the neighbouring
+Christians, who agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and a
+half, and to start, next morning, as soon as the gates were
+opened, I returned to the Golden Lion, and dined luxuriously in
+my own room, in a narrow passage between two bedsteads:
+confronted by a smoky fire, and backed up by a chest of
+drawers.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock next morning, we were
+jingling in the dark through the wet cold mist that enshrouded
+the town; and, before noon, the driver (a native of Mantua, and
+sixty years of age or thereabouts) began <i>to ask the way</i> to
+Milan.</p>
+<p>It lay through Bozzolo; formerly a little republic, and now
+one of the most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns: where the
+landlord of the miserable inn (God bless him! it was his weekly
+custom) was distributing infinitesimal coins among a clamorous
+herd of women and children, whose rags were fluttering in the
+wind and rain outside his door, where they were gathered to
+receive his charity.&nbsp; It lay through mist, and mud, and
+rain, and vines trained low upon the ground, all that day and the
+next; the first sleeping-place being Cremona, memorable for its
+dark brick churches, and immensely high tower, the
+Torrazzo&mdash;to say nothing of its violins, of which it
+certainly produces none in these degenerate days; and the second,
+Lodi.&nbsp; Then we went on, through more mud, mist, and rain,
+and marshy ground: and through such a fog, as Englishmen, strong
+in the faith of their own grievances, are apt to believe is
+nowhere to be found but in their own country, until we entered
+the paved streets of Milan.</p>
+<p>The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far-famed
+Cathedral might as well have been at Bombay, for anything that
+could be seen of it at that time.&nbsp; But as we halted to
+refresh, for a few days then, and returned to Milan again next
+summer, I had ample opportunities of seeing the glorious
+structure in all its majesty and beauty.</p>
+<p>All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it!&nbsp;
+There are many good and true saints in the calendar, but San
+Carlo Borromeo has&mdash;if I may quote Mrs. Primrose on such a
+subject&mdash;&lsquo;my warm heart.&rsquo;&nbsp; A charitable
+doctor to the sick, a munificent friend to the poor, and this,
+not in any spirit of blind bigotry, but as the bold opponent of
+enormous abuses in the Romish church, I honour his memory.&nbsp;
+I honour it none the less, because he was nearly slain by a
+priest, suborned, by priests, to murder him at the altar: in
+acknowledgment of his endeavours to reform a false and
+hypocritical brotherhood of monks.&nbsp; Heaven shield all
+imitators of San Carlo Borromeo as it shielded him!&nbsp; A
+reforming Pope would need a little shielding, even now.</p>
+<p>The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo
+Borromeo is preserved, presents as striking and as ghastly a
+contrast, perhaps, as any place can show.&nbsp; The tapers which
+are lighted down there, flash and gleam on alti-rilievi in gold
+and silver, delicately wrought by skilful hands, and representing
+the principal events in the life of the saint.&nbsp; Jewels, and
+precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side.&nbsp; A
+windlass slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it,
+in a gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through
+alabaster, the shrivelled mummy of a man: the pontifical robes
+with which it is adorned, radiant with diamonds, emeralds,
+rubies: every costly and magnificent gem.&nbsp; The shrunken heap
+of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more pitiful
+than if it lay upon a dung-hill.&nbsp; There is not a ray of
+imprisoned light in all the flash and fire of jewels, but seems
+to mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once.&nbsp; Every thread
+of silk in the rich vestments seems only a provision from the
+worms that spin, for the behoof of worms that propagate in
+sepulchres.</p>
+<p>In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of Santa Maria
+delle Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps, better known than any
+other in the world: the Last Supper, by Leonardo da
+Vinci&mdash;with a door cut through it by the intelligent
+Dominican friars, to facilitate their operations at
+dinner-time.</p>
+<p>I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of painting, and
+have no other means of judging of a picture than as I see it
+resembling and refining upon nature, and presenting graceful
+combinations of forms and colours.&nbsp; I am, therefore, no
+authority whatever, in reference to the &lsquo;touch&rsquo; of
+this or that master; though I know very well (as anybody may, who
+chooses to think about the matter) that few very great masters
+can possibly have painted, in the compass of their lives,
+one-half of the pictures that bear their names, and that are
+recognised by many aspirants to a reputation for taste, as
+undoubted originals.&nbsp; But this, by the way.&nbsp; Of the
+Last Supper, I would simply observe, that in its beautiful
+composition and arrangement, there it is, at Milan, a wonderful
+picture; and that, in its original colouring, or in its original
+expression of any single face or feature, there it is not.&nbsp;
+Apart from the damage it has sustained from damp, decay, or
+neglect, it has been (as Barry shows) so retouched upon, and
+repainted, and that so clumsily, that many of the heads are, now,
+positive deformities, with patches of paint and plaster sticking
+upon them like wens, and utterly distorting the expression.&nbsp;
+Where the original artist set that impress of his genius on a
+face, which, almost in a line or touch, separated him from meaner
+painters and made him what he was, succeeding bunglers, filling
+up, or painting across seams and cracks, have been quite unable
+to imitate his hand; and putting in some scowls, or frowns, or
+wrinkles, of their own, have blotched and spoiled the work.&nbsp;
+This is so well established as an historical fact, that I should
+not repeat it, at the risk of being tedious, but for having
+observed an English gentleman before the picture, who was at
+great pains to fall into what I may describe as mild convulsions,
+at certain minute details of expression which are not left in
+it.&nbsp; Whereas, it would be comfortable and rational for
+travellers and critics to arrive at a general understanding that
+it cannot fail to have been a work of extraordinary merit, once:
+when, with so few of its original beauties remaining, the
+grandeur of the general design is yet sufficient to sustain it,
+as a piece replete with interest and dignity.</p>
+<p>We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due course, and a
+fine city it is, though not so unmistakably Italian as to possess
+the characteristic qualities of many towns far less important in
+themselves.&nbsp; The Corso, where the Milanese gentry ride up
+and down in carriages, and rather than not do which, they would
+half starve themselves at home, is a most noble public promenade,
+shaded by long avenues of trees.&nbsp; In the splendid theatre of
+La Scala, there was a ballet of action performed after the opera,
+under the title of Prometheus: in the beginning of which, some
+hundred or two of men and women represented our mortal race
+before the refinements of the arts and sciences, and loves and
+graces, came on earth to soften them.&nbsp; I never saw anything
+more effective.&nbsp; Generally speaking, the pantomimic action
+of the Italians is more remarkable for its sudden and impetuous
+character than for its delicate expression, but, in this case,
+the drooping monotony: the weary, miserable, listless, moping
+life: the sordid passions and desires of human creatures,
+destitute of those elevating influences to which we owe so much,
+and to whose promoters we render so little: were expressed in a
+manner really powerful and affecting.&nbsp; I should have thought
+it almost impossible to present such an idea so strongly on the
+stage, without the aid of speech.</p>
+<p>Milan soon lay behind us, at five o&rsquo;clock in the
+morning; and before the golden statue on the summit of the
+cathedral spire was lost in the blue sky, the Alps, stupendously
+confused in lofty peaks and ridges, clouds and snow, were
+towering in our path.</p>
+<p>Still, we continued to advance toward them until nightfall;
+and, all day long, the mountain tops presented strangely shifting
+shapes, as the road displayed them in different points of
+view.&nbsp; The beautiful day was just declining, when we came
+upon the Lago Maggiore, with its lovely islands.&nbsp; For
+however fanciful and fantastic the Isola Bella may be, and is, it
+still is beautiful.&nbsp; Anything springing out of that blue
+water, with that scenery around it, must be.</p>
+<p>It was ten o&rsquo;clock at night when we got to Domo
+d&rsquo;Ossola, at the foot of the Pass of the Simplon.&nbsp; But
+as the moon was shining brightly, and there was not a cloud in
+the starlit sky, it was no time for going to bed, or going
+anywhere but on.&nbsp; So, we got a little carriage, after some
+delay, and began the ascent.</p>
+<p>It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five feet
+thick in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new
+drift was already deep), the air was piercing cold.&nbsp; But,
+the serenity of the night, and the grandeur of the road, with its
+impenetrable shadows, and deep glooms, and its sudden turns into
+the shining of the moon and its incessant roar of falling water,
+rendered the journey more and more sublime at every step.</p>
+<p>Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleeping in
+the moonlight, the road began to wind among dark trees, and after
+a time emerged upon a barer region, very steep and toilsome,
+where the moon shone bright and high.&nbsp; By degrees, the roar
+of water grew louder; and the stupendous track, after crossing
+the torrent by a bridge, struck in between two massive
+perpendicular walls of rock that quite shut out the moonlight,
+and only left a few stars shining in the narrow strip of sky
+above.&nbsp; Then, even this was lost, in the thick darkness of a
+cavern in the rock, through which the way was pierced; the
+terrible cataract thundering and roaring close below it, and its
+foam and spray hanging, in a mist, about the entrance.&nbsp;
+Emerging from this cave, and coming again into the moonlight, and
+across a dizzy bridge, it crept and twisted upward, through the
+Gorge of Gondo, savage and grand beyond description, <a
+name="page294"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 294</span>with
+smooth-fronted precipices, rising up on either hand, and almost
+meeting overhead.&nbsp; Thus we went, climbing on our rugged way,
+higher and higher all night, without a moment&rsquo;s weariness:
+lost in the contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous
+heights and depths, the fields of smooth snow lying, in the
+clefts and hollows, and the fierce torrents thundering headlong
+down the deep abyss.</p>
+<p>Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen wind
+was blowing fiercely.&nbsp; Having, with some trouble, awakened
+the inmates of a wooden house in this solitude: round which the
+wind was howling dismally, catching up the snow in wreaths and
+hurling it away: we got some breakfast in a room built of rough
+timbers, but well warmed by a stove, and well contrived (as it
+had need to be) for keeping out the bitter storms.&nbsp; A sledge
+being then made ready, and four horses harnessed to it, we went,
+ploughing, through the snow.&nbsp; Still upward, but now in the
+cold light of morning, and with the great white desert on which
+we travelled, plain and clear.</p>
+<p>We were well upon the summit of the mountain: and had before
+us the rude cross of wood, denoting its greatest altitude above
+the sea: when the light of the rising sun, struck, all at once,
+upon the waste of snow, and turned it a deep red.&nbsp; The
+lonely grandeur of the scene was then at its height.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p294b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Chiffonier"
+title=
+"The Chiffonier"
+src="images/p294s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>As we went sledging on, there came out of the Hospice founded
+by Napoleon, a group of Peasant travellers, with staves and
+knapsacks, who had rested there last night: attended by a Monk or
+two, their hospitable entertainers, trudging slowly forward with
+them, for company&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; It was pleasant to give
+them good morning, and pretty, looking back a long way after
+them, to see them looking back at us, and hesitating presently,
+when one of our horses stumbled and fell, whether or no they
+should return and help us.&nbsp; But he was soon up again, with
+the assistance of a rough waggoner whose team had stuck fast
+there too; and when we had helped him out of his difficulty, in
+return, we left him slowly ploughing towards them, and went
+slowly and swiftly forward, on the brink of a steep precipice,
+among the mountain pines.</p>
+<p>Taking to our wheels again, soon afterwards, we began rapidly
+to descend; passing under everlasting glaciers, by means of
+arched galleries, hung with clusters of dripping icicles; under
+and over foaming waterfalls; near places of refuge, and galleries
+of shelter against sudden danger; through caverns over whose
+arched roofs the avalanches slide, in spring, and bury themselves
+in the unknown gulf beneath.&nbsp; Down, over lofty bridges, and
+through horrible ravines: a little shifting speck in the vast
+desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite rocks; down
+through the deep Gorge of the Saltine, and deafened by the
+torrent plunging madly down, among the riven blocks of rock, into
+the level country, far below.&nbsp; Gradually down, by zig-zag
+roads, lying between an upward and a downward precipice, into
+warmer weather, calmer air, and softer scenery, until there lay
+before us, glittering like gold or silver in the thaw and
+sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow, domes and
+church-spires of a Swiss town.</p>
+<p>The business of these recollections being with Italy, and my
+business, consequently, being to scamper back thither as fast as
+possible, I will not recall (though I am sorely tempted) how the
+Swiss villages, clustered at the feet of Giant mountains, looked
+like playthings; or how confusedly the houses were heaped and
+piled together; or how there were very narrow streets to shut the
+howling winds out in the winter-time; and broken bridges, which
+the impetuous torrents, suddenly released in spring, had swept
+away.&nbsp; Or how there were peasant women here, with great
+round fur caps: looking, when they peeped out of casements and
+only their heads were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to
+the Lord Mayor of London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the
+smooth lake of Geneva, was beautiful to see; or how the statue of
+Saint Peter in the street at Fribourg, grasps the largest key
+that ever was beheld; or how Fribourg is illustrious for its two
+suspension bridges, and its grand cathedral organ.</p>
+<p>Or how, between that town and B&acirc;le, the road meandered
+among thriving villages of wooden cottages, with overhanging
+thatched roofs, and low protruding windows, glazed with small
+round panes of glass like crown-pieces; or how, in every little
+Swiss homestead, with its cart or waggon carefully stowed away
+beside the house, its little garden, stock of poultry, and groups
+of red-cheeked children, there was an air of comfort, very new
+and very pleasant after Italy; or how the dresses of the women
+changed again, and there were no more sword-bearers to be seen;
+and fair white stomachers, and great black, fan-shaped,
+gauzy-looking caps, prevailed instead.</p>
+<p>Or how the country by the Jura mountains, sprinkled with snow,
+and lighted by the moon, and musical with falling water, was
+delightful; or how, below the windows of the great hotel of the
+Three Kings at B&acirc;le, the swollen Rhine ran fast and green;
+or how, at Strasbourg, it was quite as fast but not as green: and
+was said to be foggy lower down: and, at that late time of the
+year, was a far less certain means of progress, than the highway
+road to Paris.</p>
+<p>Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic
+Cathedral, and its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and
+gables, made a little gallery of quaint and interesting views; or
+how a crowd was gathered inside the cathedral at noon, to see the
+famous mechanical clock in motion, striking twelve.&nbsp; How,
+when it struck twelve, a whole army of puppets went through many
+ingenious evolutions; and, among them, a huge puppet-cock,
+perched on the top, crowed twelve times, loud and clear.&nbsp; Or
+how it was wonderful to see this cock at great pains to clap its
+wings, and strain its throat; but obviously having no connection
+whatever with its own voice; which was deep within the clock, a
+long way down.</p>
+<p>Or how the road to Paris, was one sea of mud, and thence to
+the coast, a little better for a hard frost.&nbsp; Or how the
+cliffs of Dover were a pleasant sight, and England was so
+wonderfully neat&mdash;though dark, and lacking colour on a
+winter&rsquo;s day, it must be conceded.</p>
+<p>Or how, a few days afterwards, it was cool, re-crossing the
+channel, with ice upon the decks, and snow lying pretty deep in
+France.&nbsp; Or how the Malle Poste scrambled through the snow,
+headlong, drawn in the hilly parts by any number of stout horses
+at a canter; or how there were, outside the Post-office Yard in
+Paris, before daybreak, extraordinary adventurers in heaps of
+rags, groping in the snowy streets with little rakes, in search
+of odds and ends.</p>
+<p>Or how, between Paris and Marseilles, the snow being then
+exceeding deep, a thaw came on, and the mail waded rather than
+rolled for the next three hundred miles or so; breaking springs
+on Sunday nights, and putting out its two passengers to warm and
+refresh themselves pending the repairs, in miserable
+billiard-rooms, where hairy company, collected about stoves, were
+playing cards; the cards being very like
+themselves&mdash;extremely limp and dirty.</p>
+<p>Or how there was detention at Marseilles from stress of
+weather; and steamers were advertised to go, which did not go; or
+how the good Steam-packet Charlemagne at length put out, and met
+such weather that now she threatened to run into Toulon, and now
+into Nice, but, the wind moderating, did neither, but ran on into
+Genoa harbour instead, where the familiar Bells rang sweetly in
+my ear.&nbsp; Or how there was a travelling party on board, of
+whom one member was very ill in the cabin next to mine, and being
+ill was cross, and therefore declined to give up the Dictionary,
+which he kept under his pillow; thereby obliging his companions
+to come down to him, constantly, to ask what was the Italian for
+a lump of sugar&mdash;a glass of brandy and
+water&mdash;what&rsquo;s o&rsquo;clock? and so forth: which he
+always insisted on looking out, with his own sea-sick eyes,
+declining to entrust the book to any man alive.</p>
+<p>Like <span class="smcap">Grumio</span>, I might have told you,
+in detail, all this and something more&mdash;but to as little
+purpose&mdash;were I not deterred by the remembrance that my
+business is with Italy.&nbsp; Therefore, like <span
+class="smcap">Grumio&rsquo;s</span> story, &lsquo;it shall die in
+oblivion.&rsquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page297"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 297</span>TO
+ROME BY PISA AND SIENA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is nothing in Italy, more
+beautiful to me, than the coast-road between Genoa and
+Spezzia.&nbsp; On one side: sometimes far below, sometimes nearly
+on a level with the road, and often skirted by broken rocks of
+many shapes: there is the free blue sea, with here and there a
+picturesque felucca gliding slowly on; on the other side are
+lofty hills, ravines besprinkled with white cottages, patches of
+dark olive woods, country churches with their light open towers,
+and country houses gaily painted.&nbsp; On every bank and knoll
+by the wayside, the wild cactus and aloe flourish in exuberant
+profusion; and the gardens of the bright villages along the road,
+are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with clusters of the
+Belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter with golden
+oranges and lemons.</p>
+<p>Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by
+fishermen; and it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled up
+on the beach, making little patches of shade, where they lie
+asleep, or where the women and children sit romping and looking
+out to sea, while they mend their nets upon the shore.&nbsp;
+There is one town, Camoglia, with its little harbour on the sea,
+hundreds of feet below the road; where families of mariners live,
+who, time out of mind, have owned coasting-vessels in that place,
+and have traded to Spain and elsewhere.&nbsp; Seen from the road
+above, it is like a tiny model on the margin of the dimpled
+water, shining in the sun.&nbsp; Descended into, by the winding
+mule-tracks, it is a perfect miniature of a primitive seafaring
+town; the saltest, roughest, most piratical little place that
+ever was seen.&nbsp; Great rusty iron rings and mooring-chains,
+capstans, and fragments of old masts and spars, choke up the way;
+hardy rough-weather boats, and seamen&rsquo;s clothing, flutter
+in the little harbour or are drawn out on the sunny stones to
+dry; on the parapet of the rude pier, a few amphibious-looking
+fellows lie asleep, with their legs dangling over the wall, as
+though earth or water were all one to them, and if they slipped
+in, they would float away, dozing comfortably among the fishes;
+the church is bright with trophies of the sea, and votive
+offerings, in commemoration of escape from storm and
+shipwreck.&nbsp; The dwellings not immediately abutting on the
+harbour are approached by blind low archways, and by crooked
+steps, as if in darkness and in difficulty of access they should
+be like holds of ships, or inconvenient cabins under water; and
+everywhere, there is a smell of fish, and sea-weed, and old
+rope.</p>
+<p>The coast-road whence Camoglia is descried so far below, is
+famous, in the warm season, especially in some parts near Genoa,
+for fire-flies.&nbsp; Walking there on a dark night, I have seen
+it made one sparkling firmament by these beautiful insects: so
+that the distant stars were pale against the flash and glitter
+that spangled every olive wood and hill-side, and pervaded the
+whole air.</p>
+<p>It was not in such a season, however, that we traversed this
+road on our way to Rome.&nbsp; The middle of January was only
+just past, and it was very gloomy and dark weather; very wet
+besides.&nbsp; In crossing the fine pass of Bracco, we
+encountered such a storm of mist and rain, that we travelled in a
+cloud the whole way.&nbsp; There might have been no Mediterranean
+in the world, for anything that we saw of it there, except when a
+sudden gust of wind, clearing the mist before it, for a moment,
+showed the agitated sea at a great depth below, lashing the
+distant rocks, and spouting up its foam furiously.&nbsp; The rain
+was incessant; every brook and torrent was greatly swollen; and
+such a deafening leaping, and roaring, and thundering of water, I
+never heard the like of in my life.</p>
+<p>Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra, an
+unbridged river on the high-road to Pisa, was too high to be
+safely crossed in the Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait until the
+afternoon of next day, when it had, in some degree,
+subsided.&nbsp; Spezzia, however, is a good place to tarry at; by
+reason, firstly, of its beautiful bay; secondly, of its ghostly
+Inn; thirdly, of the head-dress of the women, who wear, on one
+side of their head, a small doll&rsquo;s straw hat, stuck on to
+the hair; which is certainly the oddest and most roguish
+head-gear that ever was invented.</p>
+<p>The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat&mdash;the passage
+is not by any means agreeable, when the current is swollen and
+strong&mdash;we arrived at Carrara, within a few hours.&nbsp; In
+good time next morning, we got some ponies, and went out to see
+the marble quarries.</p>
+<p>They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of
+lofty hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by
+being abruptly strangled by Nature.&nbsp; The quarries, &lsquo;or
+caves,&rsquo; as they call them there, are so many openings, high
+up in the hills, on either side of these passes, where they blast
+and excavate for marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make
+a man&rsquo;s fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great
+expense of working what is worth nothing.&nbsp; Some of these
+caves were opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left
+them to this hour.&nbsp; Many others are being worked at this
+moment; others are to be begun to-morrow, next week, next month;
+others are unbought, unthought of; and marble enough for more
+ages than have passed since the place was resorted to, lies
+hidden everywhere: patiently awaiting its time of discovery.</p>
+<p>As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having
+left your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower
+down) you hear, every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a
+low tone, more silent than the previous silence, a melancholy
+warning bugle,&mdash;a signal to the miners to withdraw.&nbsp;
+Then, there is a thundering, and echoing from hill to hill, and
+perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of rock into the air;
+and on you toil again until some other bugle sounds, in a new
+direction, and you stop directly, lest you should come within the
+range of the new explosion.</p>
+<p>There were numbers of men, working high up in these
+hills&mdash;on the sides&mdash;clearing away, and sending down
+the broken masses of stone and earth, to make way for the blocks
+of marble that had been discovered.&nbsp; As these came rolling
+down from unseen hands into the narrow valley, I could not help
+thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen) where the
+Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where the merchants from the
+heights above, flung down great pieces of meat for the diamonds
+to stick to.&nbsp; There were no eagles here, to darken the sun
+in their swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as wild and
+fierce as if there had been hundreds.</p>
+<p>But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however
+immense the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of
+its institutions, pave that road: repair it, watch it, keep it
+going!&nbsp; Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky
+bed, beset with great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes,
+winding down the middle of this valley; and <i>that</i> being the
+road&mdash;because it was the road five hundred years ago!&nbsp;
+Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to
+this hour, and drawn, as they used to be, five hundred years ago,
+by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred years
+ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in twelve months, by
+the suffering and agony of this cruel work!&nbsp; Two pair, four
+pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size;
+down it must come, this way.&nbsp; In their struggling from stone
+to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die
+frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for their
+passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are
+crushed to death beneath the wheels.&nbsp; But it was good five
+hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a railroad down
+one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be
+flat blasphemy.</p>
+<p>When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a
+pair of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it),
+coming down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the
+heavy yoke, to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts&mdash;and
+who faced backwards: not before him&mdash;as the very Devil of
+true despotism.&nbsp; He had a great rod in his hand, with an
+iron point; and when they could plough and force their way
+through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a
+stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on their heads,
+screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard
+or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all these
+persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they
+stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to
+an abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and
+smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the
+precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above
+his head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved
+something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and
+blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noontide of his
+triumph.</p>
+<p>Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that
+afternoon&mdash;for it is a great workshop, full of
+beautifully-finished copies in marble, of almost every figure,
+group, and bust, we know&mdash;it seemed, at first, so strange to
+me that those exquisite shapes, replete with grace, and thought,
+and delicate repose, should grow out of all this toil, and sweat,
+and torture!&nbsp; But I soon found a parallel to it, and an
+explanation of it, in every virtue that springs up in miserable
+ground, and every good thing that has its birth in sorrow and
+distress.&nbsp; And, looking out of the sculptor&rsquo;s great
+window, upon the marble mountains, all red and glowing in the
+decline of day, but stern and solemn to the last, I thought, my
+God! how many quarries of human hearts and souls, capable of far
+more beautiful results, are left shut up and mouldering away:
+while pleasure-travellers through life, avert their faces, as
+they pass, and shudder at the gloom and ruggedness that conceal
+them!</p>
+<p>The then reigning Duke of Modena, to whom this territory in
+part belonged, claimed the proud distinction of being the only
+sovereign in Europe who had not recognised Louis-Philippe as King
+of the French!&nbsp; He was not a wag, but quite in
+earnest.&nbsp; He was also much opposed to railroads; and if
+certain lines in contemplation by other potentates, on either
+side of him, had been executed, would have probably enjoyed the
+satisfaction of having an omnibus plying to and fro across his
+not very vast dominions, to forward travellers from one terminus
+to another.</p>
+<p>Carrara, shut in by great hills, is very picturesque and
+bold.&nbsp; Few tourists stay there; and the people are nearly
+all connected, in one way or other, with the working of
+marble.&nbsp; There are also villages among the caves, where the
+workmen live.&nbsp; It contains a beautiful little Theatre, newly
+built; and it is an interesting custom there, to form the chorus
+of labourers in the marble quarries, who are self-taught and sing
+by ear.&nbsp; I heard them in a comic opera, and in an act of
+&lsquo;Norma;&rsquo; and they acquitted themselves very well;
+unlike the common people of Italy generally, who (with some
+exceptions among the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of tune, and
+have very disagreeable singing voices.</p>
+<p>From the summit of a lofty hill beyond Carrara, the first view
+of the fertile plain in which the town of Pisa lies&mdash;with
+Leghorn, a purple spot in the flat distance&mdash;is
+enchanting.&nbsp; Nor is it only distance that lends enchantment
+to the view; for the fruitful country, and rich woods of
+olive-trees through which the road subsequently passes, render it
+delightful.</p>
+<p>The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for a long
+time we could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower, all awry
+in the uncertain light; the shadowy original of the old pictures
+in school-books, setting forth &lsquo;The Wonders of the
+World.&rsquo;&nbsp; Like most things connected in their first
+associations with school-books and school-times, it was too
+small.&nbsp; I felt it keenly.&nbsp; It was nothing like so high
+above the wall as I had hoped.&nbsp; It was another of the many
+deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the corner of
+St. Paul&rsquo;s Churchyard, London.&nbsp; <i>His</i> Tower was a
+fiction, but this was a reality&mdash;and, by comparison, a short
+reality.&nbsp; Still, it looked very well, and very strange, and
+was quite as much out of the perpendicular as Harris had
+represented it to be.&nbsp; The quiet air of Pisa too; the big
+guard-house at the gate, with only two little soldiers in it; the
+streets with scarcely any show of people in them; and the Arno,
+flowing quaintly through the centre of the town; were
+excellent.&nbsp; So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr.
+Harris (remembering his good intentions), but forgave him before
+dinner, and went out, full of confidence, to see the Tower next
+morning.</p>
+<p>I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected to see
+it, casting its long shadow on a public street where people came
+and went all day.&nbsp; It was a surprise to me to find it in a
+grave retired place, apart from the general resort, and carpeted
+with smooth green turf.&nbsp; But, the group of buildings,
+clustered on and about this verdant carpet: comprising the Tower,
+the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Church of the Campo Santo:
+is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful in the whole world;
+and from being clustered there, together, away from the ordinary
+transactions and details of the town, they have a singularly
+venerable and impressive character.&nbsp; It is the architectural
+essence of a rich old city, with all its common life and common
+habitations pressed out, and filtered away.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Simond</span> compares the Tower to the
+usual pictorial representations in children&rsquo;s books of the
+Tower of Babel.&nbsp; It is a happy simile, and conveys a better
+idea of the building than chapters of laboured description.&nbsp;
+Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the structure;
+nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance.&nbsp;
+In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy
+staircase), the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the
+summit, it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a
+ship that has heeled over, through the action of an
+ebb-tide.&nbsp; The effect <i>upon the low side</i>, so to
+speak&mdash;looking over from the gallery, and seeing the shaft
+recede to its base&mdash;is very startling; and I saw a nervous
+traveller hold on to the Tower involuntarily, after glancing
+down, as if he had some idea of propping it up.&nbsp; The view
+within, from the ground&mdash;looking up, as through a slanted
+tube&mdash;is also very curious.&nbsp; It certainly inclines as
+much as the most sanguine tourist could desire.&nbsp; The natural
+impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were about to
+recline upon the grass below it, to rest, and contemplate the
+adjacent buildings, would probably be, not to take up their
+position under the leaning side; it is so very much aslant.</p>
+<p>The manifold beauties of the Cathedral and Baptistery need no
+recapitulation from me; though in this case, as in a hundred
+others, I find it difficult to separate my own delight in
+recalling them, from your weariness in having them
+recalled.&nbsp; There is a picture of St. Agnes, by Andrea del
+Sarto, in the former, and there are a variety of rich columns in
+the latter, that tempt me strongly.</p>
+<p>It is, I hope, no breach of my resolution not to be tempted
+into elaborate descriptions, to remember the Campo Santo; where
+grass-grown graves are dug in earth brought more than six hundred
+years ago, from the Holy Land; and where there are, surrounding
+them, such cloisters, with such playing lights and shadows
+falling through their delicate tracery on the stone pavement, as
+surely the dullest memory could never forget.&nbsp; On the walls
+of this solemn and lovely place, are ancient frescoes, very much
+obliterated and decayed, but very curious.&nbsp; As usually
+happens in almost any collection of paintings, of any sort, in
+Italy, where there are many heads, there is, in one of them, a
+striking accidental likeness of Napoleon.&nbsp; At one time, I
+used to please my fancy with the speculation whether these old
+painters, at their work, had a foreboding knowledge of the man
+who would one day arise to wreak such destruction upon art: whose
+soldiers would make targets of great pictures, and stable their
+horses among triumphs of architecture.&nbsp; But the same
+Corsican face is so plentiful in some parts of Italy at this day,
+that a more commonplace solution of the coincidence is
+unavoidable.</p>
+<p>If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its
+Tower, it may claim to be, at least, the second or third in right
+of its beggars.&nbsp; They waylay the unhappy visitor at every
+turn, escort him to every door he enters at, and lie in wait for
+him, with strong reinforcements, at every door by which they know
+he must come out.&nbsp; The grating of the portal on its hinges
+is the signal for a general shout, and the moment he appears, he
+is hemmed in, and fallen on, by heaps of rags and personal
+distortions.&nbsp; The beggars seem to embody all the trade and
+enterprise of Pisa.&nbsp; Nothing else is stirring, but warm
+air.&nbsp; Going through the streets, the fronts of the sleepy
+houses look like backs.&nbsp; They are all so still and quiet,
+and unlike houses with people in them, that the greater part of
+the city has the appearance of a city at daybreak, or during a
+general siesta of the population.&nbsp; Or it is yet more like
+those backgrounds of houses in common prints, or old engravings,
+where windows and doors are squarely indicated, and one figure (a
+beggar of course) is seen walking off by itself into illimitable
+perspective.</p>
+<p>Not so Leghorn (made illustrious by <span
+class="smcap">Smollett&rsquo;s</span> grave), which is a
+thriving, business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idleness is
+shouldered out of the way by commerce.&nbsp; The regulations
+observed there, in reference to trade and merchants, are very
+liberal and free; and the town, of course, benefits by
+them.&nbsp; Leghorn had a bad name in connection with stabbers,
+and with some justice it must be allowed; for, not many years
+ago, there was an assassination club there, the members of which
+bore no ill-will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people
+(quite strangers to them) in the streets at night, for the
+pleasure and excitement of the recreation.&nbsp; I think the
+president of this amiable society was a shoemaker.&nbsp; He was
+taken, however, and the club was broken up.&nbsp; It would,
+probably, have disappeared in the natural course of events,
+before the railroad between Leghorn and Pisa, which is a good
+one, and has already begun to astonish Italy with a precedent of
+punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improvement&mdash;the most
+dangerous and heretical astonisher of all.&nbsp; There must have
+been a slight sensation, as of earthquake, surely, in the
+Vatican, when the first Italian railroad was thrown open.</p>
+<p>Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered
+Vettur&iacute;no, and his four horses, to take us on to Rome, we
+travelled through pleasant Tuscan villages and cheerful scenery
+all day.&nbsp; The roadside crosses in this part of Italy are
+numerous and curious.&nbsp; There is seldom a figure on the
+cross, though there is sometimes a face, but they are remarkable
+for being garnished with little models in wood, of every possible
+object that can be connected with the Saviour&rsquo;s
+death.&nbsp; The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his
+Master thrice, is usually perched on the tip-top; and an
+ornithological phenomenon he generally is.&nbsp; Under him, is
+the inscription.&nbsp; Then, hung on to the cross-beam, are the
+spear, the reed with the sponge of vinegar and water at the end,
+the coat without seam for which the soldiers cast lots, the
+dice-box with which they threw for it, the hammer that drove in
+the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the ladder which was
+set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the instrument of
+flagellation, the lanthorn with which Mary went to the tomb (I
+suppose), and the sword with which Peter smote the servant of the
+high priest,&mdash;a perfect toy-shop of little objects, repeated
+at every four or five miles, all along the highway.</p>
+<p>On the evening of the second day from Pisa, we reached the
+beautiful old city of Siena.&nbsp; There was what they called a
+Carnival, in progress; but, as its secret lay in a score or two
+of melancholy people walking up and down the principal street in
+common toy-shop masks, and being more melancholy, if possible,
+than the same sort of people in England, I say no more of
+it.&nbsp; We went off, betimes next morning, to see the
+Cathedral, which is wonderfully picturesque inside and out,
+especially the latter&mdash;also the market-place, or great
+Piazza, which is a large square, with a great broken-nosed
+fountain in it: some quaint Gothic houses: and a high square
+brick tower; <i>outside</i> the top of which&mdash;a curious
+feature in such views in Italy&mdash;hangs an enormous
+bell.&nbsp; It is like a bit of Venice, without the water.&nbsp;
+There are some curious old Palazzi in the town, which is very
+ancient; and without having (for me) the interest of Verona, or
+Genoa, it is very dreamy and fantastic, and most interesting.</p>
+<p>We went on again, as soon as we had seen these things, and
+going over a rather bleak country (there had been nothing but
+vines until now: mere walking-sticks at that season of the year),
+stopped, as usual, between one and two hours in the middle of the
+day, to rest the horses; that being a part of every
+Vettur&iacute;no contract.&nbsp; We then went on again, through a
+region gradually becoming bleaker and wilder, until it became as
+bare and desolate as any Scottish moors.&nbsp; Soon after dark,
+we halted for the night, at the osteria of La Scala: a perfectly
+lone house, where the family were sitting round a great fire in
+the kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or four feet high,
+and big enough for the roasting of an ox.&nbsp; On the upper, and
+only other floor of this hotel, there was a great, wild, rambling
+s&aacute;la, with one very little window in a by-corner, and four
+black doors opening into four black bedrooms in various
+directions.&nbsp; To say nothing of another large black door,
+opening into another large black s&aacute;la, with the staircase
+coming abruptly through a kind of trap-door in the floor, and the
+rafters of the roof looming above: a suspicious little press
+skulking in one obscure corner: and all the knives in the house
+lying about in various directions.&nbsp; The fireplace was of the
+purest Italian architecture, so that it was perfectly impossible
+to see it for the smoke.&nbsp; The waitress was like a dramatic
+brigand&rsquo;s wife, and wore the same style of dress upon her
+head.&nbsp; The dogs barked like mad; the echoes returned the
+compliments bestowed upon them; there was not another house
+within twelve miles; and things had a dreary, and rather a
+cut-throat, appearance.</p>
+<p>They were not improved by rumours of robbers having come out,
+strong and boldly, within a few nights; and of their having
+stopped the mail very near that place.&nbsp; They were known to
+have waylaid some travellers not long before, on Mount Vesuvius
+itself, and were the talk at all the roadside inns.&nbsp; As they
+were no business of ours, however (for we had very little with us
+to lose), we made ourselves merry on the subject, and were very
+soon as comfortable as need be.&nbsp; We had the usual dinner in
+this solitary house; and a very good dinner it is, when you are
+used to it.&nbsp; There is something with a vegetable or some
+rice in it which is a sort of shorthand or arbitrary character
+for soup, and which tastes very well, when you have flavoured it
+with plenty of grated cheese, lots of salt, and abundance of
+pepper.&nbsp; There is the half fowl of which this soup has been
+made.&nbsp; There is a stewed pigeon, with the gizzards and
+livers of himself and other birds stuck all round him.&nbsp;
+There is a bit of roast beef, the size of a small French
+roll.&nbsp; There are a scrap of Parmesan cheese, and five little
+withered apples, all huddled together on a small plate, and
+crowding one upon the other, as if each were trying to save
+itself from the chance of being eaten.&nbsp; Then there is
+coffee; and then there is bed.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t mind brick
+floors; you don&rsquo;t mind yawning doors, nor banging windows;
+you don&rsquo;t mind your own horses being stabled under the bed:
+and so close, that every time a horse coughs or sneezes, he wakes
+you.&nbsp; If you are good-humoured to the people about you, and
+speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word for it you may
+be well entertained in the very worst Italian Inn, and always in
+the most obliging manner, and may go from one end of the country
+to the other (despite all stories to the contrary) without any
+great trial of your patience anywhere.&nbsp; Especially, when you
+get such wine in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte
+Pulciano.</p>
+<p>It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we went, for
+twelve miles, over a country as barren, as stony, and as wild, as
+Cornwall in England, until we came to Radicofani, where there is
+a ghostly, goblin inn: once a hunting-seat, belonging to the
+Dukes of Tuscany.&nbsp; It is full of such rambling corridors,
+and gaunt rooms, that all the murdering and phantom tales that
+ever were written might have originated in that one house.&nbsp;
+There are some horrible old Palazzi in Genoa: one in particular,
+not unlike it, outside: but there is a winding, creaking, wormy,
+rustling, door-opening, foot-on-staircase-falling character about
+this Radicofani Hotel, such as I never saw, anywhere else.&nbsp;
+The town, such as it is, hangs on a hill-side above the house,
+and in front of it.&nbsp; The inhabitants are all beggars; and as
+soon as they see a carriage coming, they swoop down upon it, like
+so many birds of prey.</p>
+<p>When we got on the mountain pass, which lies beyond this
+place, the wind (as they had forewarned us at the inn) was so
+terrific, that we were obliged to take my other half out of the
+carriage, lest she should be blown over, carriage and all, and to
+hang to it, on the windy side (as well as we could for laughing),
+to prevent its going, Heaven knows where.&nbsp; For mere force of
+wind, this land-storm might have competed with an Atlantic gale,
+and had a reasonable chance of coming off victorious.&nbsp; The
+blast came sweeping down great gullies in a range of mountains on
+the right: so that we looked with positive awe at a great morass
+on the left, and saw that there was not a bush or twig to hold
+by.&nbsp; It seemed as if, once blown from our feet, we must be
+swept out to sea, or away into space.&nbsp; There was snow, and
+hail, and rain, and lightning, and thunder; and there were
+rolling mists, travelling with incredible velocity.&nbsp; It was
+dark, awful, and solitary to the last degree; there were
+mountains above mountains, veiled in angry clouds; and there was
+such a wrathful, rapid, violent, tumultuous hurry, everywhere, as
+rendered the scene unspeakably exciting and grand.</p>
+<p>It was a relief to get out of it, notwithstanding; and to
+cross even the dismal, dirty Papal Frontier.&nbsp; After passing
+through two little towns; in one of which, Acquapendente, there
+was also a &lsquo;Carnival&rsquo; in progress: consisting of one
+man dressed and masked as a woman, and one woman dressed and
+masked as a man, walking ankle-deep, through the muddy streets,
+in a very melancholy manner: we came, at dusk, within sight of
+the Lake of Bolsena, on whose bank there is a little town of the
+same name, much celebrated for malaria.&nbsp; With the exception
+of this poor place, there is not a cottage on the banks of the
+lake, or near it (for nobody dare sleep there); not a boat upon
+its waters; not a stick or stake to break the dismal monotony of
+seven-and-twenty watery miles.&nbsp; We were late in getting in,
+the roads being very bad from heavy rains; and, after dark, the
+dulness of the scene was quite intolerable.</p>
+<p>We entered on a very different, and a finer scene of
+desolation, next night, at sunset.&nbsp; We had passed through
+Montefiaschone (famous for its wine) and Viterbo (for its
+fountains): and after climbing up a long hill of eight or ten
+miles&rsquo; extent, came suddenly upon the margin of a solitary
+lake: in one part very beautiful, with a luxuriant wood; in
+another, very barren, and shut in by bleak volcanic hills.&nbsp;
+Where this lake flows, there stood, of old, a city.&nbsp; It was
+swallowed up one day; and in its stead, this water rose.&nbsp;
+There are ancient traditions (common to many parts of the world)
+of the ruined city having been seen below, when the water was
+clear; but however that may be, from this spot of earth it
+vanished.&nbsp; The ground came bubbling up above it; and the
+water too; and here they stand, like ghosts on whom the other
+world closed suddenly, and who have no means of getting back
+again.&nbsp; They seem to be waiting the course of ages, for the
+next earthquake in that place; when they will plunge below the
+ground, at its first yawning, and be seen no more.&nbsp; The
+unhappy city below, is not more lost and dreary, than these
+fire-charred hills and the stagnant water, above.&nbsp; The red
+sun looked strangely on them, as with the knowledge that they
+were made for caverns and darkness; and the melancholy water
+oozed and sucked the mud, and crept quietly among the marshy
+grass and reeds, as if the overthrow of all the ancient towers
+and housetops, and the death of all the ancient people born and
+bred there, were yet heavy on its conscience.</p>
+<p>A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a
+little town like a large pig-sty, where we passed the
+night.&nbsp; Next morning at seven o&rsquo;clock, we started for
+Rome.</p>
+<p>As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the
+Campagna Romana; an undulating flat (as you know), where few
+people can live; and where, for miles and miles, there is nothing
+to relieve the terrible monotony and gloom.&nbsp; Of all kinds of
+country that could, by possibility, lie outside the gates of
+Rome, this is the aptest and fittest burial-ground for the Dead
+City.&nbsp; So sad, so quiet, so sullen; so secret in its
+covering up of great masses of ruin, and hiding them; so like the
+waste places into which the men possessed with devils used to go
+and howl, and rend themselves, in the old days of
+Jerusalem.&nbsp; We had to traverse thirty miles of this
+Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing
+nothing but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking
+shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped
+to the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep.&nbsp; At
+the end of that distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and
+to get some lunch, in a common malaria-shaken, despondent little
+public-house, whose every inch of wall and beam, inside, was
+(according to custom) painted and decorated in a way so miserable
+that every room looked like the wrong side of another room, and,
+with its wretched imitation of drapery, and lop-sided little
+daubs of lyres, seemed to have been plundered from behind the
+scenes of some travelling circus.</p>
+<p>When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfect
+fever, to strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after another mile
+or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it
+looked like&mdash;I am half afraid to write the word&mdash;like
+LONDON!!!&nbsp; There it lay, under a thick cloud, with
+innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up
+into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome.&nbsp; I swear,
+that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it
+was so like London, at that distance, that if you could have
+shown it me, in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing
+else.</p>
+<h2><a name="page308"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+308</span>ROME</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> entered the Eternal City, at
+about four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, on the thirtieth of
+January, by the Porta del Popolo, and came immediately&mdash;it
+was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain&mdash;on the
+skirts of the Carnival.&nbsp; We did not, then, know that we were
+only looking at the fag end of the masks, who were driving slowly
+round and round the Piazza until they could find a promising
+opportunity for falling into the stream of carriages, and
+getting, in good time, into the thick of the festivity; and
+coming among them so abruptly, all travel-stained and weary, was
+not coming very well prepared to enjoy the scene.</p>
+<p>We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles
+before.&nbsp; It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and
+hurrying on between its worn-away and miry banks, had a promising
+aspect of desolation and ruin.&nbsp; The masquerade dresses on
+the fringe of the Carnival, did great violence to this
+promise.&nbsp; There were no great ruins, no solemn tokens of
+antiquity, to be seen;&mdash;they all lie on the other side of
+the city.&nbsp; There seemed to be long streets of commonplace
+shops and houses, such as are to be found in any European town;
+there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a
+multitude of chattering strangers.&nbsp; It was no more <i>my</i>
+Rome: the Rome of anybody&rsquo;s fancy, man or boy; degraded and
+fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than
+the Place de la Concorde in Paris is.&nbsp; A cloudy sky, a dull
+cold rain, and muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for
+this: and I confess to having gone to bed, that night, in a very
+indifferent humour, and with a very considerably quenched
+enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St.
+Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It looked immense in the distance, but
+distinctly and decidedly small, by comparison, on a near
+approach.&nbsp; The beauty of the Piazza, on which it stands,
+with its clusters of exquisite columns, and its gushing
+fountains&mdash;so fresh, so broad, and free, and
+beautiful&mdash;nothing can exaggerate.&nbsp; The first burst of
+the interior, in all its expansive majesty and glory: and, most
+of all, the looking up into the Dome: is a sensation never to be
+forgotten.&nbsp; But, there were preparations for a Festa; the
+pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent
+frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the
+subterranean chapel: which is before it: in the centre of the
+church: were like a goldsmith&rsquo;s shop, or one of the opening
+scenes in a very lavish pantomime.&nbsp; And though I had as high
+a sense of the beauty of the building (I hope) as it is possible
+to entertain, I felt no very strong emotion.&nbsp; I have been
+infinitely more affected in many English cathedrals when the
+organ has been playing, and in many English country churches when
+the congregation have been singing.&nbsp; I had a much greater
+sense of mystery and wonder, in the Cathedral of San Mark at
+Venice.</p>
+<p>When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour
+staring up into the dome: and would not have &lsquo;gone
+over&rsquo; the Cathedral then, for any money), we said to the
+coachman, &lsquo;Go to the Coliseum.&rsquo;&nbsp; In a quarter of
+an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.</p>
+<p>It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so
+suggestive and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a
+moment&mdash;actually in passing in&mdash;they who will, may have
+the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with
+thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a
+whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there, as no
+language can describe.&nbsp; Its solitude, its awful beauty, and
+its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger the next moment,
+like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he
+be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected
+with his own affections and afflictions.</p>
+<p>To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and
+arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the
+long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday,
+springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance
+produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their
+nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight
+filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in the
+centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin,
+ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine,
+Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the
+C&aelig;sars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and
+gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old
+city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.&nbsp; It
+is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand,
+majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.&nbsp; Never, in its
+bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and
+running over with the lustiest life, have moved one&rsquo;s
+heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin.&nbsp;
+<span class="smcap">God</span> be thanked: a ruin!</p>
+<p>As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among
+graves: so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants
+of the old mythology and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of
+the fierce and cruel Roman people.&nbsp; The Italian face changes
+as the visitor approaches the city; its beauty becomes devilish;
+and there is scarcely one countenance in a hundred, among the
+common people in the streets, that would not be at home and happy
+in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow.</p>
+<p>Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can
+imagine in its full and awful grandeur!&nbsp; We wandered out
+upon the Appian Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined
+tombs and broken walls, with here and there a desolate and
+uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus, where the course
+of the chariots, the stations of the judges, competitors, and
+spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old time: past
+the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclosure, hedge, or stake,
+wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where on that side of
+Rome, nothing is to be beheld but Ruin.&nbsp; Except where the
+distant Apennines bound the view upon the left, the whole wide
+prospect is one field of ruin.&nbsp; Broken aqueducts, left in
+the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken
+temples; broken tombs.&nbsp; A desert of decay, sombre and
+desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone
+that strews the ground.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>On Sunday, the Pope assisted in the performance of High Mass
+at St. Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The effect of the Cathedral on my
+mind, on that second visit, was exactly what it was at first, and
+what it remains after many visits.&nbsp; It is not religiously
+impressive or affecting.&nbsp; It is an immense edifice, with no
+one point for the mind to rest upon; and it tires itself with
+wandering round and round.&nbsp; The very purpose of the place,
+is not expressed in anything you see there, unless you examine
+its details&mdash;and all examination of details is incompatible
+with the place itself.&nbsp; It might be a Pantheon, or a Senate
+House, or a great architectural trophy, having no other object
+than an architectural triumph.&nbsp; There is a black statue of
+St. Peter, to be sure, under a red canopy; which is larger than
+life and which is constantly having its great toe kissed by good
+Catholics.&nbsp; You cannot help seeing that: it is so very
+prominent and popular.&nbsp; But it does not heighten the effect
+of the temple, as a work of art; and it is not
+expressive&mdash;to me at least&mdash;of its high purpose.</p>
+<p>A large space behind the altar, was fitted up with boxes,
+shaped like those at the Italian Opera in England, but in their
+decoration much more gaudy.&nbsp; In the centre of the kind of
+theatre thus railed off, was a canopied dais with the
+Pope&rsquo;s chair upon it.&nbsp; The pavement was covered with a
+carpet of the brightest green; and what with this green, and the
+intolerable reds and crimsons, and gold borders of the hangings,
+the whole concern looked like a stupendous Bonbon.&nbsp; On
+either side of the altar, was a large box for lady
+strangers.&nbsp; These were filled with ladies in black dresses
+and black veils.&nbsp; The gentlemen of the Pope&rsquo;s guard,
+in red coats, leather breeches, and jack-boots, guarded all this
+reserved space, with drawn swords that were very flashy in every
+sense; and from the altar all down the nave, a broad lane was
+kept clear by the Pope&rsquo;s Swiss guard, who wear a quaint
+striped surcoat, and striped tight legs, and carry halberds like
+those which are usually shouldered by those theatrical
+supernumeraries, who never <i>can</i> get off the stage fast
+enough, and who may be generally observed to linger in the
+enemy&rsquo;s camp after the open country, held by the opposite
+forces, has been split up the middle by a convulsion of
+Nature.</p>
+<p>I got upon the border of the green carpet, in company with a
+great many other gentlemen, attired in black (no other passport
+is necessary), and stood there at my ease, during the performance
+of Mass.&nbsp; The singers were in a crib of wirework (like a
+large meat-safe or bird-cage) in one corner; and sang most
+atrociously.&nbsp; All about the green carpet, there was a slowly
+moving crowd of people: talking to each other: staring at the
+Pope through eye-glasses; defrauding one another, in moments of
+partial curiosity, out of precarious seats on the bases of
+pillars: and grinning hideously at the ladies.&nbsp; Dotted here
+and there, were little knots of friars (Frances-c&aacute;ni, or
+Cappucc&iacute;ni, in their coarse brown dresses and peaked
+hoods) making a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics of
+higher degree, and having their humility gratified to the utmost,
+by being shouldered about, and elbowed right and left, on all
+sides.&nbsp; Some of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas, and
+stained garments: having trudged in from the country.&nbsp; The
+faces of the greater part were as coarse and heavy as their
+dress; their dogged, stupid, monotonous stare at all the glory
+and splendour, having something in it, half miserable, and half
+ridiculous.</p>
+<p>Upon the green carpet itself, and gathered round the altar,
+was a perfect army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold,
+purple, violet, white, and fine linen.&nbsp; Stragglers from
+these, went to and fro among the crowd, conversing two and two,
+or giving and receiving introductions, and exchanging
+salutations; other functionaries in black gowns, and other
+functionaries in court-dresses, were similarly engaged.&nbsp; In
+the midst of all these, and stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out,
+and the extreme restlessness of the Youth of England, who were
+perpetually wandering about, some few steady persons in black
+cassocks, who had knelt down with their faces to the wall, and
+were poring over their missals, became, unintentionally, a sort
+of humane man-traps, and with their own devout legs, tripped up
+other people&rsquo;s by the dozen.</p>
+<p>There was a great pile of candles lying down on the floor near
+me, which a very old man in a rusty black gown with an open-work
+tippet, like a summer ornament for a fireplace in tissue-paper,
+made himself very busy in dispensing to all the ecclesiastics:
+one a-piece.&nbsp; They loitered about with these for some time,
+under their arms like walking-sticks, or in their hands like
+truncheons.&nbsp; At a certain period of the ceremony, however,
+each carried his candle up to the Pope, laid it across his two
+knees to be blessed, took it back again, and filed off.&nbsp;
+This was done in a very attenuated procession, as you may
+suppose, and occupied a long time.&nbsp; Not because it takes
+long to bless a candle through and through, but because there
+were so many candles to be blessed.&nbsp; At last they were all
+blessed: and then they were all lighted; and then the Pope was
+taken up, chair and all, and carried round the church.</p>
+<p>I must say, that I never saw anything, out of November, so
+like the popular English commemoration of the fifth of that
+month.&nbsp; A bundle of matches and a lantern, would have made
+it perfect.&nbsp; Nor did the Pope, himself, at all mar the
+resemblance, though he has a pleasant and venerable face; for, as
+this part of the ceremony makes him giddy and sick, he shuts his
+eyes when it is performed: and having his eyes shut and a great
+mitre on his head, and his head itself wagging to and fro as they
+shook him in carrying, he looked as if his mask were going to
+tumble off.&nbsp; The two immense fans which are always borne,
+one on either side of him, accompanied him, of course, on this
+occasion.&nbsp; As they carried him along, he blessed the people
+with the mystic sign; and as he passed them, they kneeled
+down.&nbsp; When he had made the round of the church, he was
+brought back again, and if I am not mistaken, this performance
+was repeated, in the whole, three times.&nbsp; There was,
+certainly nothing solemn or effective in it; and certainly very
+much that was droll and tawdry.&nbsp; But this remark applies to
+the whole ceremony, except the raising of the Host, when every
+man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his
+naked sword on the ground; which had a fine effect.</p>
+<p>The next time I saw the cathedral, was some two or three weeks
+afterwards, when I climbed up into the ball; and then, the
+hangings being taken down, and the carpet taken up, but all the
+framework left, the remnants of these decorations looked like an
+exploded cracker.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>The Friday and Saturday having been solemn Festa days, and
+Sunday being always a <i>dies non</i> in carnival proceedings, we
+had looked forward, with some impatience and curiosity, to the
+beginning of the new week: Monday and Tuesday being the two last
+and best days of the Carnival.</p>
+<p>On the Monday afternoon at one or two o&rsquo;clock, there
+began to be a great rattling of carriages into the court-yard of
+the hotel; a hurrying to and fro of all the servants in it; and,
+now and then, a swift shooting across some doorway or balcony, of
+a straggling stranger in a fancy dress: not yet sufficiently well
+used to the same, to wear it with confidence, and defy public
+opinion.&nbsp; All the carriages were open, and had the linings
+carefully covered with white cotton or calico, to prevent their
+proper decorations from being spoiled by the incessant pelting of
+sugar-plums; and people were packing and cramming into every
+vehicle as it waited for its occupants, enormous sacks and
+baskets full of these conf&eacute;tti, together with such heaps
+of flowers, tied up in little nosegays, that some carriages were
+not only brimful of flowers, but literally running over:
+scattering, at every shake and jerk of the springs, some of their
+abundance on the ground.&nbsp; Not to be behindhand in these
+essential particulars, we caused two very respectable sacks of
+sugar-plums (each about three feet high) and a large
+clothes-basket full of flowers to be conveyed into our hired
+barouche, with all speed.&nbsp; And from our place of
+observation, in one of the upper balconies of the hotel, we
+contemplated these arrangements with the liveliest
+satisfaction.&nbsp; The carriages now beginning to take up their
+company, and move away, we got into ours, and drove off too,
+armed with little wire masks for our faces; the sugar-plums, like
+Falstaff&rsquo;s adulterated sack, having lime in their
+composition.</p>
+<p>The Corso is a street a mile long; a street of shops, and
+palaces, and private houses, sometimes opening into a broad
+piazza.&nbsp; There are verandahs and balconies, of all shapes
+and sizes, to almost every house&mdash;not on one story alone,
+but often to one room or another on every story&mdash;put there
+in general with so little order or regularity, that if, year
+after year, and season after season, it had rained balconies,
+hailed balconies, snowed balconies, blown balconies, they could
+scarcely have come into existence in a more disorderly
+manner.</p>
+<p>This is the great fountain-head and focus of the
+Carnival.&nbsp; But all the streets in which the Carnival is
+held, being vigilantly kept by dragoons, it is necessary for
+carriages, in the first instance, to pass, in line, down another
+thoroughfare, and so come into the Corso at the end remote from
+the Pi&aacute;zza del Popolo; which is one of its
+terminations.&nbsp; Accordingly, we fell into the string of
+coaches, and, for some time, jogged on quietly enough; now
+crawling on at a very slow walk; now trotting half-a-dozen yards;
+now backing fifty; and now stopping altogether: as the pressure
+in front obliged us.&nbsp; If any impetuous carriage dashed out
+of the rank and clattered forward, with the wild idea of getting
+on faster, it was suddenly met, or overtaken, by a trooper on
+horseback, who, deaf as his own drawn sword to all remonstrances,
+immediately escorted it back to the very end of the row, and made
+it a dim speck in the remotest perspective.&nbsp; Occasionally,
+we interchanged a volley of conf&eacute;tti with the carriage
+next in front, or the carriage next behind; but as yet, this
+capturing of stray and errant coaches by the military, was the
+chief amusement.</p>
+<p>Presently, we came into a narrow street, where, besides one
+line of carriages going, there was another line of carriages
+returning.&nbsp; Here the sugar-plums and the nosegays began to
+fly about, pretty smartly; and I was fortunate enough to observe
+one gentleman attired as a Greek warrior, catch a light-whiskered
+brigand on the nose (he was in the very act of tossing up a
+bouquet to a young lady in a first-floor window) with a precision
+that was much applauded by the bystanders.&nbsp; As this
+victorious Greek was exchanging a facetious remark with a stout
+gentleman in a doorway&mdash;one-half black and one-half white,
+as if he had been peeled up the middle&mdash;who had offered him
+his congratulations on this achievement, he received an orange
+from a housetop, full on his left ear, and was much surprised,
+not to say discomfited.&nbsp; Especially, as he was standing up
+at the time; and in consequence of the carriage moving on
+suddenly, at the same moment, staggered ignominiously, and buried
+himself among his flowers.</p>
+<p>Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress, brought us
+to the Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as the
+whole scene there, it would be difficult to imagine.&nbsp; From
+all the innumerable balconies: from the remotest and highest, no
+less than from the lowest and nearest: hangings of bright red,
+bright green, bright blue, white and gold, were fluttering in the
+brilliant sunlight.&nbsp; From windows, and from parapets, and
+tops of houses, streamers of the richest colours, and draperies
+of the gaudiest and most sparkling hues, were floating out upon
+the street.&nbsp; The buildings seemed to have been literally
+turned inside out, and to have all their gaiety towards the
+highway.&nbsp; Shop-fronts were taken down, and the windows
+filled with company, like boxes at a shining theatre; doors were
+carried off their hinges, and long tapestried groves, hung with
+garlands of flowers and evergreens, displayed within;
+builders&rsquo; scaffoldings were gorgeous temples, radiant in
+silver, gold, and crimson; and in every nook and corner, from the
+pavement to the chimney-tops, where women&rsquo;s eyes could
+glisten, there they danced, and laughed, and sparkled, like the
+light in water.&nbsp; Every sort of bewitching madness of dress
+was there.&nbsp; Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old
+stomachers, more wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish
+pelisses, strained and tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek
+caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how;
+every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its
+illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by
+its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old
+aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome,
+upon their sturdy arches, that morning.</p>
+<p>The carriages were now three abreast; in broader places four;
+often stationary for a long time together, always one close mass
+of variegated brightness; showing, the whole street-full, through
+the storm of flowers, like flowers of a larger growth
+themselves.&nbsp; In some, the horses were richly caparisoned in
+magnificent trappings; in others they were decked from head to
+tail, with flowing ribbons.&nbsp; Some were driven by coachmen
+with enormous double faces: one face leering at the horses: the
+other cocking its extraordinary eyes into the carriage: and both
+rattling again, under the hail of sugar-plums.&nbsp; Other
+drivers were attired as women, wearing long ringlets and no
+bonnets, and looking more ridiculous in any real difficulty with
+the horses (of which, in such a concourse, there were a great
+many) than tongue can tell, or pen describe.&nbsp; Instead of
+sitting <i>in</i> the carriages, upon the seats, the handsome
+Roman women, to see and to be seen the better, sit in the heads
+of the barouches, at this time of general licence, with their
+feet upon the cushions&mdash;and oh, the flowing skirts and
+dainty waists, the blessed shapes and laughing faces, the free,
+good-humoured, gallant figures that they make! There were great
+vans, too, full of handsome girls&mdash;thirty, or more together,
+perhaps&mdash;and the broadsides that were poured into, and
+poured out of, these fairy fire-shops, splashed the air with
+flowers and bon-bons for ten minutes at a time.&nbsp; Carriages,
+delayed long in one place, would begin a deliberate engagement
+with other carriages, or with people at the lower windows; and
+the spectators at some upper balcony or window, joining in the
+fray, and attacking both parties, would empty down great bags of
+conf&eacute;tti, that descended like a cloud, and in an instant
+made them white as millers.&nbsp; Still, carriages on carriages,
+dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds,
+without end.&nbsp; Men and boys clinging to the wheels of
+coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and
+diving in among the horses&rsquo; feet to pick up scattered
+flowers to sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest generally)
+in fantastic exaggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng
+through enormous eye-glasses, and always transported with an
+ecstasy of love, on the discovery of any particularly old lady at
+a window; long strings of Policinelli, laying about them with
+blown bladders at the ends of sticks; a waggon-full of madmen,
+screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full of grave
+mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a
+party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful
+of sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals
+with pigs&rsquo; faces, and lions&rsquo; tails, carried under
+their arms, or worn gracefully over their shoulders; carriages on
+carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon
+crowds, without end.&nbsp; Not many actual characters sustained,
+or represented, perhaps, considering the number dressed, but the
+main pleasure of the scene consisting in its perfect good temper;
+in its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety; and in its
+entire abandonment to the mad humour of the time&mdash;an
+abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the
+steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle in flowers and
+sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them all, and thinks of
+nothing else till half-past four o&rsquo;clock, when he is
+suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the
+whole business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound,
+and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street.</p>
+<p>How it ever <i>is</i> cleared for the race that takes place at
+five, or how the horses ever go through the race, without going
+over the people, is more than I can say.&nbsp; But the carriages
+get out into the by-streets, or up into the Pi&aacute;zza del
+Popolo, and some people sit in temporary galleries in the latter
+place, and tens of thousands line the Corso on both sides, when
+the horses are brought out into the Pi&aacute;zza&mdash;to the
+foot of that same column which, for centuries, looked down upon
+the games and chariot-races in the Circus Maximus.</p>
+<p>At a given signal they are started off.&nbsp; Down the live
+lane, the whole length of the Corso, they fly like the wind:
+riderless, as all the world knows: with shining ornaments upon
+their backs, and twisted in their plaited manes: and with heavy
+little balls stuck full of spikes, dangling at their sides, to
+goad them on.&nbsp; The jingling of these trappings, and the
+rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the dash and fury
+of their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very cannon
+that are fired&mdash;these noises are nothing to the roaring of
+the multitude: their shouts: the clapping of their hands.&nbsp;
+But it is soon over&mdash;almost instantaneously.&nbsp; More
+cannon shake the town.&nbsp; The horses have plunged into the
+carpets put across the street to stop them; the goal is reached;
+the prizes are won (they are given, in part, by the poor Jews, as
+a compromise for not running foot-races themselves); and there is
+an end to that day&rsquo;s sport.</p>
+<p>But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last
+day but one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height
+of glittering colour, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that
+the bare recollection of it makes me giddy at this moment.&nbsp;
+The same diversions, greatly heightened and intensified in the
+ardour with which they are pursued, go on until the same
+hour.&nbsp; The race is repeated; the cannon are fired; the
+shouting and clapping of hands are renewed; the cannon are fired
+again; the race is over; and the prizes are won.&nbsp; But the
+carriages: ankle-deep with sugar-plums within, and so be-flowered
+and dusty without, as to be hardly recognisable for the same
+vehicles that they were, three hours ago: instead of scampering
+off in all directions, throng into the Corso, where they are soon
+wedged together in a scarcely moving mass.&nbsp; For the
+diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the
+Carnival, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers like what
+are called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily on
+every side, &lsquo;Moccoli, Moccoli!&nbsp; Ecco
+Moccoli!&rsquo;&mdash;a new item in the tumult; quite abolishing
+that other item of &lsquo;Ecco Fi&oacute;ri!&nbsp; Ecco
+Fior-r-r!&rsquo; which has been making itself audible over all
+the rest, at intervals, the whole day through.</p>
+<p>As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one
+dull, heavy, uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights
+begin flashing, here and there: in the windows, on the housetops,
+in the balconies, in the carriages, in the hands of the
+foot-passengers: little by little: gradually, gradually: more and
+more: until the whole long street is one great glare and blaze of
+fire.&nbsp; Then, everybody present has but one engrossing
+object; that is, to extinguish other people&rsquo;s candles, and
+to keep his own alight; and everybody: man, woman, or child,
+gentleman or lady, prince or peasant, native or foreigner: yells
+and screams, and roars incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued,
+&lsquo;Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccolo!&rsquo;&nbsp; (Without a
+light!&nbsp; Without a light!) until nothing is heard but a
+gigantic chorus of those two words, mingled with peals of
+laughter.</p>
+<p>The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordinary
+that can be imagined.&nbsp; Carriages coming slowly by, with
+everybody standing on the seats or on the box, holding up their
+lights at arms&rsquo; length, for greater safety; some in paper
+shades; some with a bunch of undefended little tapers, kindled
+altogether; some with blazing torches; some with feeble little
+candles; men on foot, creeping along, among the wheels, watching
+their opportunity, to make a spring at some particular light, and
+dash it out; other people climbing up into carriages, to get hold
+of them by main force; others, chasing some unlucky wanderer,
+round and round his own coach, to blow out the light he has
+begged or stolen somewhere, before he can ascend to his own
+company, and enable them to light their extinguished tapers;
+others, with their hats off, at a carriage-door, humbly
+beseeching some kind-hearted lady to oblige them with a light for
+a cigar, and when she is in the fulness of doubt whether to
+comply or no, blowing out the candle she is guarding so tenderly
+with her little hand; other people at the windows, fishing for
+candles with lines and hooks, or letting down long willow-wands
+with handkerchiefs at the end, and flapping them out,
+dexterously, when the bearer is at the height of his triumph,
+others, biding their time in corners, with immense extinguishers
+like halberds, and suddenly coming down upon glorious torches;
+others, gathered round one coach, and sticking to it; others,
+raining oranges and nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or
+regularly storming a pyramid of men, holding up one man among
+them, who carries one feeble little wick above his head, with
+which he defies them all!&nbsp; Senza Moccolo!&nbsp; Senza
+Moccolo!&nbsp; Beautiful women, standing up in coaches, pointing
+in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping their hands, as
+they pass on, crying, &lsquo;Senza Moccolo!&nbsp; Senza
+Moccolo!&rsquo;; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay
+dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some
+repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning
+over, some shrinking back&mdash;delicate arms and
+bosoms&mdash;graceful figures&mdash;glowing lights, fluttering
+dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza
+Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!&mdash;when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry,
+and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the
+church steeples, and the Carnival is over in an instant&mdash;put
+out like a taper, with a breath!</p>
+<p>There was a masquerade at the theatre at night, as dull and
+senseless as a London one, and only remarkable for the summary
+way in which the house was cleared at eleven o&rsquo;clock: which
+was done by a line of soldiers forming along the wall, at the
+back of the stage, and sweeping the whole company out before
+them, like a broad broom.&nbsp; The game of the Moccoletti (the
+word, in the singular, Moccoletto, is the diminutive of Moccolo,
+and means a little lamp or candlesnuff) is supposed by some to be
+a ceremony of burlesque mourning for the death of the Carnival:
+candles being indispensable to Catholic grief.&nbsp; But whether
+it be so, or be a remnant of the ancient Saturnalia, or an
+incorporation of both, or have its origin in anything else, I
+shall always remember it, and the frolic, as a brilliant and most
+captivating sight: no less remarkable for the unbroken
+good-humour of all concerned, down to the very lowest (and among
+those who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men
+and boys), than for its innocent vivacity.&nbsp; For, odd as it
+may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and
+personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as
+any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there
+seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general,
+almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of
+with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a whole
+year.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Availing ourselves of a part of the quiet interval between the
+termination of the Carnival and the beginning of the Holy Week:
+when everybody had run away from the one, and few people had yet
+begun to run back again for the other: we went conscientiously to
+work, to see Rome.&nbsp; And, by dint of going out early every
+morning, and coming back late every evening, and labouring hard
+all day, I believe we made acquaintance with every post and
+pillar in the city, and the country round; and, in particular,
+explored so many churches, that I abandoned that part of the
+enterprise at last, before it was half finished, lest I should
+never, of my own accord, go to church again, as long as I
+lived.&nbsp; But, I managed, almost every day, at one time or
+other, to get back to the Coliseum, and out upon the open
+Campagna, beyond the Tomb of Cecilia Metella.</p>
+<p>We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company of
+English Tourists, with whom I had an ardent, but ungratified
+longing, to establish a speaking acquaintance.&nbsp; They were
+one Mr. Davis, and a small circle of friends.&nbsp; It was
+impossible not to know Mrs. Davis&rsquo;s name, from her being
+always in great request among her party, and her party being
+everywhere.&nbsp; During the Holy Week, they were in every part
+of every scene of every ceremony.&nbsp; For a fortnight or three
+weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and every church, and
+every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I hardly ever observed
+Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment.&nbsp; Deep underground,
+high up in St. Peter&rsquo;s, out on the Campagna, and stifling
+in the Jews&rsquo; quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the
+same.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think she ever saw anything, or ever
+looked at anything; and she had always lost something out of a
+straw hand-basket, and was trying to find it, with all her might
+and main, among an immense quantity of English halfpence, which
+lay, like sands upon the sea-shore, at the bottom of it.&nbsp;
+There was a professional Cicerone always attached to the party
+(which had been brought over from London, fifteen or twenty
+strong, by contract), and if he so much as looked at Mrs. Davis,
+she invariably cut him short by saying, &lsquo;There, God bless
+the man, don&rsquo;t worrit me!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t understand a
+word you say, and shouldn&rsquo;t if you was to talk till you was
+black in the face!&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Davis always had a
+snuff-coloured great-coat on, and carried a great green umbrella
+in his hand, and had a slow curiosity constantly devouring him,
+which prompted him to do extraordinary things, such as taking the
+covers off urns in tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they
+were pickles&mdash;and tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule
+of his umbrella, and saying, with intense thoughtfulness,
+&lsquo;Here&rsquo;s a B you see, and there&rsquo;s a R, and this
+is the way we goes on in; is it!&rsquo;&nbsp; His antiquarian
+habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of the rest;
+and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the party in general,
+was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost.&nbsp; This
+caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and at
+the most improper seasons.&nbsp; And when he came, slowly
+emerging out of some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful Ghoule,
+saying &lsquo;Here I am!&rsquo; Mrs. Davis invariably replied,
+&lsquo;You&rsquo;ll be buried alive in a foreign country, Davis,
+and it&rsquo;s no use trying to prevent you!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been
+brought from London in about nine or ten days.&nbsp; Eighteen
+hundred years ago, the Roman legions under Claudius, protested
+against being led into Mr. and Mrs. Davis&rsquo;s country, urging
+that it lay beyond the limits of the world.</p>
+<p>Among what may be called the Cubs or minor Lions of Rome,
+there was one that amused me mightily.&nbsp; It is always to be
+found there; and its den is on the great flight of steps that
+lead from the Piazza di Sp&aacute;gna, to the church of
+Tr&iacute;nita del Monte.&nbsp; In plainer words, these steps are
+the great place of resort for the artists&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Models,&rsquo; and there they are constantly waiting to be
+hired.&nbsp; The first time I went up there, I could not conceive
+why the faces seemed familiar to me; why they appeared to have
+beset me, for years, in every possible variety of action and
+costume; and how it came to pass that they started up before me,
+in Rome, in the broad day, like so many saddled and bridled
+nightmares.&nbsp; I soon found that we had made acquaintance, and
+improved it, for several years, on the walls of various
+Exhibition Galleries.&nbsp; There is one old gentleman, with long
+white hair and an immense beard, who, to my knowledge, has gone
+half through the catalogue of the Royal Academy.&nbsp; This is
+the venerable, or patriarchal model.&nbsp; He carries a long
+staff; and every knot and twist in that staff I have seen,
+faithfully delineated, innumerable times.&nbsp; There is another
+man in a blue cloak, who always pretends to be asleep in the sun
+(when there is any), and who, I need not say, is always very wide
+awake, and very attentive to the disposition of his legs.&nbsp;
+This is the <i>dolce far&rsquo; niente</i> model.&nbsp; There is
+another man in a brown cloak, who leans against a wall, with his
+arms folded in his mantle, and looks out of the corners of his
+eyes: which are just visible beneath his broad slouched
+hat.&nbsp; This is the assassin model.&nbsp; There is another
+man, who constantly looks over his own shoulder, and is always
+going away, but never does.&nbsp; This is the haughty, or
+scornful model.&nbsp; As to Domestic Happiness, and Holy
+Families, they should come very cheap, for there are lumps of
+them, all up the steps; and the cream of the thing is, that they
+are all the falsest vagabonds in the world, especially made up
+for the purpose, and having no counterparts in Rome or any other
+part of the habitable globe.</p>
+<p>My recent mention of the Carnival, reminds me of its being
+said to be a mock mourning (in the ceremony with which it
+closes), for the gaieties and merry-makings before Lent; and this
+again reminds me of the real funerals and mourning processions of
+Rome, which, like those in most other parts of Italy, are
+rendered chiefly remarkable to a Foreigner, by the indifference
+with which the mere clay is universally regarded, after life has
+left it.&nbsp; And this is not from the survivors having had time
+to dissociate the memory of the dead from their well-remembered
+appearance and form on earth; for the interment follows too
+speedily after death, for that: almost always taking place within
+four-and-twenty hours, and, sometimes, within twelve.</p>
+<p>At Rome, there is the same arrangement of Pits in a great,
+bleak, open, dreary space, that I have already described as
+existing in Genoa.&nbsp; When I visited it, at noonday, I saw a
+solitary coffin of plain deal: uncovered by any shroud or pall,
+and so slightly made, that the hoof of any wandering mule would
+have crushed it in: carelessly tumbled down, all on one side, on
+the door of one of the pits&mdash;and there left, by itself, in
+the wind and sunshine.&nbsp; &lsquo;How does it come to be left
+here?&rsquo; I asked the man who showed me the place.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;It was brought here half an hour ago, Signore,&rsquo; he
+said.&nbsp; I remembered to have met the procession, on its
+return: straggling away at a good round pace.&nbsp; &lsquo;When
+will it be put in the pit?&rsquo; I asked him.&nbsp; &lsquo;When
+the cart comes, and it is opened to-night,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;How much does it cost to be brought here in this way,
+instead of coming in the cart?&rsquo; I asked him.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Ten scudi,&rsquo; he said (about two pounds,
+two-and-sixpence, English).&nbsp; &lsquo;The other bodies, for
+whom nothing is paid, are taken to the church of the Santa Maria
+della Consol&aacute;zione,&rsquo; he continued, &lsquo;and
+brought here altogether, in the cart at night.&rsquo;&nbsp; I
+stood, a moment, looking at the coffin, which had two initial
+letters scrawled upon the top; and turned away, with an
+expression in my face, I suppose, of not much liking its exposure
+in that manner: for he said, shrugging his shoulders with great
+vivacity, and giving a pleasant smile, &lsquo;But he&rsquo;s
+dead, Signore, he&rsquo;s dead.&nbsp; Why not?&rsquo;</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Among the innumerable churches, there is one I must select for
+separate mention.&nbsp; It is the church of the Ara Coeli,
+supposed to be built on the site of the old Temple of Jupiter
+Feretrius; and approached, on one side, by a long steep flight of
+steps, which seem incomplete without some group of bearded
+soothsayers on the top.&nbsp; It is remarkable for the possession
+of a miraculous Bamb&iacute;no, or wooden doll, representing the
+Infant Saviour; and I first saw this miraculous Bamb&iacute;no,
+in legal phrase, in manner following, that is to say:</p>
+<p>We had strolled into the church one afternoon, and were
+looking down its long vista of gloomy pillars (for all these
+ancient churches built upon the ruins of old temples, are dark
+and sad), when the Brave came running in, with a grin upon his
+face that stretched it from ear to ear, and implored us to follow
+him, without a moment&rsquo;s delay, as they were going to show
+the Bamb&iacute;no to a select party.&nbsp; We accordingly
+hurried off to a sort of chapel, or sacristy, hard by the chief
+altar, but not in the church itself, where the select party,
+consisting of two or three Catholic gentlemen and ladies (not
+Italians), were already assembled: and where one hollow-cheeked
+young monk was lighting up divers candles, while another was
+putting on some clerical robes over his coarse brown habit.&nbsp;
+The candles were on a kind of altar, and above it were two
+delectable figures, such as you would see at any English fair,
+representing the Holy Virgin, and Saint Joseph, as I suppose,
+bending in devotion over a wooden box, or coffer; which was
+shut.</p>
+<p>The hollow-cheeked monk, number One, having finished lighting
+the candles, went down on his knees, in a corner, before this
+set-piece; and the monk number Two, having put on a pair of
+highly ornamented and gold-bespattered gloves, lifted down the
+coffer, with great reverence, and set it on the altar.&nbsp;
+Then, with many genuflexions, and muttering certain prayers, he
+opened it, and let down the front, and took off sundry coverings
+of satin and lace from the inside.&nbsp; The ladies had been on
+their knees from the commencement; and the gentlemen now dropped
+down devoutly, as he exposed to view a little wooden doll, in
+face very like General Tom Thumb, the American Dwarf: gorgeously
+dressed in satin and gold lace, and actually blazing with rich
+jewels.&nbsp; There was scarcely a spot upon its little breast,
+or neck, or stomach, but was sparkling with the costly offerings
+of the Faithful.&nbsp; Presently, he lifted it out of the box,
+and carrying it round among the kneelers, set its face against
+the forehead of every one, and tendered its clumsy foot to them
+to kiss&mdash;a ceremony which they all performed down to a dirty
+little ragamuffin of a boy who had walked in from the
+street.&nbsp; When this was done, he laid it in the box again:
+and the company, rising, drew near, and commended the jewels in
+whispers.&nbsp; In good time, he replaced the coverings, shut up
+the box, put it back in its place, locked up the whole concern
+(Holy Family and all) behind a pair of folding-doors; took off
+his priestly vestments; and received the customary &lsquo;small
+charge,&rsquo; while his companion, by means of an extinguisher
+fastened to the end of a long stick, put out the lights, one
+after another.&nbsp; The candles being all extinguished, and the
+money all collected, they retired, and so did the spectators.</p>
+<p>I met this same Bamb&iacute;no, in the street a short time
+afterwards, going, in great state, to the house of some sick
+person.&nbsp; It is taken to all parts of Rome for this purpose,
+constantly; but, I understand that it is not always as successful
+as could be wished; for, making its appearance at the bedside of
+weak and nervous people in extremity, accompanied by a numerous
+escort, it not unfrequently frightens them to death.&nbsp; It is
+most popular in cases of child-birth, where it has done such
+wonders, that if a lady be longer than usual in getting through
+her difficulties, a messenger is despatched, with all speed, to
+solicit the immediate attendance of the Bamb&iacute;no.&nbsp; It
+is a very valuable property, and much confided
+in&mdash;especially by the religious body to whom it belongs.</p>
+<p>I am happy to know that it is not considered immaculate, by
+some who are good Catholics, and who are behind the scenes, from
+what was told me by the near relation of a Priest, himself a
+Catholic, and a gentleman of learning and intelligence.&nbsp;
+This Priest made my informant promise that he would, on no
+account, allow the Bamb&iacute;no to be borne into the bedroom of
+a sick lady, in whom they were both interested.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;For,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;if they (the monks) trouble
+her with it, and intrude themselves into her room, it will
+certainly kill her.&rsquo;&nbsp; My informant accordingly looked
+out of the window when it came; and, with many thanks, declined
+to open the door.&nbsp; He endeavoured, in another case of which
+he had no other knowledge than such as he gained as a passer-by
+at the moment, to prevent its being carried into a small
+unwholesome chamber, where a poor girl was dying.&nbsp; But, he
+strove against it unsuccessfully, and she expired while the crowd
+were pressing round her bed.</p>
+<p>Among the people who drop into St. Peter&rsquo;s at their
+leisure, to kneel on the pavement, and say a quiet prayer, there
+are certain schools and seminaries, priestly and otherwise, that
+come in, twenty or thirty strong.&nbsp; These boys always kneel
+down in single file, one behind the other, with a tall grim
+master in a black gown, bringing up the rear: like a pack of
+cards arranged to be tumbled down at a touch, with a
+disproportionately large Knave of clubs at the end.&nbsp; When
+they have had a minute or so at the chief altar, they scramble
+up, and filing off to the chapel of the Madonna, or the
+sacrament, flop down again in the same order; so that if anybody
+did stumble against the master, a general and sudden overthrow of
+the whole line must inevitably ensue.</p>
+<p>The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible.&nbsp;
+The same monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going
+on; the same dark building, darker from the brightness of the
+street without; the same lamps dimly burning; the selfsame people
+kneeling here and there; turned towards you, from one altar or
+other, the same priest&rsquo;s back, with the same large cross
+embroidered on it; however different in size, in shape, in
+wealth, in architecture, this church is from that, it is the same
+thing still.&nbsp; There are the same dirty beggars stopping in
+their muttered prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples
+exhibiting their deformity at the doors; the same blind men,
+rattling little pots like kitchen pepper-castors: their
+depositories for alms; the same preposterous crowns of silver
+stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins in
+crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a
+head-dress bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent
+miles of landscape; the same favourite shrine or figure,
+smothered with little silver hearts and crosses, and the like:
+the staple trade and show of all the jewellers; the same odd
+mixture of respect and indecorum, faith and phlegm: kneeling on
+the stones, and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers
+to beg a little, or to pursue some other worldly matter: and then
+kneeling down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the
+point where it was interrupted.&nbsp; In one church, a kneeling
+lady got up from her prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card,
+as a teacher of Music; and in another, a sedate gentleman with a
+very thick walking-staff, arose from his devotions to belabour
+his dog, who was growling at another dog: and whose yelps and
+howls resounded through the church, as his master quietly
+relapsed into his former train of meditation&mdash;keeping his
+eye upon the dog, at the same time, nevertheless.</p>
+<p>Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contributions
+of the Faithful, in some form or other.&nbsp; Sometimes, it is a
+money-box, set up between the worshipper, and the wooden
+life-size figure of the Redeemer; sometimes, it is a little chest
+for the maintenance of the Virgin; sometimes, an appeal on behalf
+of a popular Bamb&iacute;no; sometimes, a bag at the end of a
+long stick, thrust among the people here and there, and
+vigilantly jingled by an active Sacristan; but there it always
+is, and, very often, in many shapes in the same church, and doing
+pretty well in all.&nbsp; Nor, is it wanting in the open
+air&mdash;the streets and roads&mdash;for, often as you are
+walking along, thinking about anything rather than a tin
+canister, that object pounces out upon you from a little house by
+the wayside; and on its top is painted, &lsquo;For the Souls in
+Purgatory;&rsquo; an appeal which the bearer repeats a great many
+times, as he rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles the
+cracked bell which his sanguine disposition makes an organ
+of.</p>
+<p>And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar
+sanctity, bear the inscription, &lsquo;Every Mass performed at
+this altar frees a soul from Purgatory.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have never
+been able to find out the charge for one of these services, but
+they should needs be expensive.&nbsp; There are several Crosses
+in Rome too, the kissing of which, confers indulgences for
+varying terms.&nbsp; That in the centre of the Coliseum, is worth
+a hundred days; and people may be seen kissing it from morning to
+night.&nbsp; It is curious that some of these crosses seem to
+acquire an arbitrary popularity: this very one among them.&nbsp;
+In another part of the Coliseum there is a cross upon a marble
+slab, with the inscription, &lsquo;Who kisses this cross shall be
+entitled to Two hundred and forty days&rsquo;
+indulgence.&rsquo;&nbsp; But I saw no one person kiss it, though,
+day after day, I sat in the arena, and saw scores upon scores of
+peasants pass it, on their way to kiss the other.</p>
+<p>To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches,
+would be the wildest occupation in the world.&nbsp; But St.
+Stefano Rotondo, a damp, mildewed vault of an old church in the
+outskirts of Rome, will always struggle uppermost in my mind, by
+reason of the hideous paintings with which its walls are
+covered.&nbsp; These represent the martyrdoms of saints and early
+Christians; and such a panorama of horror and butchery no man
+could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig
+raw, for supper.&nbsp; Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried,
+grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs,
+buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with
+hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers,
+their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken,
+their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake,
+or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the
+mildest subjects.&nbsp; So insisted on, and laboured at, besides,
+that every sufferer gives you the same occasion for wonder as
+poor old Duncan awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his
+having so much blood in him.</p>
+<p>There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what
+is said to have been&mdash;and very possibly may have
+been&mdash;the dungeon of St. Peter.&nbsp; This chamber is now
+fitted up as an oratory, dedicated to that saint; and it lives,
+as a distinct and separate place, in my recollection, too.&nbsp;
+It is very small and low-roofed; and the dread and gloom of the
+ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as if they had come up
+in a dark mist through the floor.&nbsp; Hanging on the walls,
+among the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at once
+strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the
+place&mdash;rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers
+instruments of violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use,
+and hung up to propitiate offended Heaven: as if the blood upon
+them would drain off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry
+with.&nbsp; It is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and
+the dungeons below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and
+naked; that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream:
+and in the vision of great churches which come rolling past me
+like a sea, it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no
+other wave, and does not flow on with the rest.</p>
+<p>It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are
+entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city.&nbsp;
+Many churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size,
+which, in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of
+temples, and what not: but I do not speak of them.&nbsp; Beneath
+the church of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a
+terrific range of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have
+another outlet underneath the Coliseum&mdash;tremendous
+darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth and
+unexplorable, where the dull torches, flashed by the attendants,
+glimmer down long ranges of distant vaults branching to the right
+and left, like streets in a city of the dead; and show the cold
+damp stealing down the walls, drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the
+pools of water that lie here and there, and never saw, or never
+will see, one ray of the sun.&nbsp; Some accounts make these the
+prisons of the wild beasts destined for the amphitheatre; some
+the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some, both.&nbsp; But
+the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the upper
+range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
+Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the
+wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the
+<a name="page326"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 326</span>night
+and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon and
+life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,
+their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!</p>
+<p>Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate
+of San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the
+catacombs of Rome&mdash;quarries in the old time, but afterwards
+the hiding-places of the Christians.&nbsp; These ghastly passages
+have been explored for twenty miles; and form a chain of
+labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.</p>
+<p>A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only
+guide, down into this profound and dreadful place.&nbsp; The
+narrow ways and openings hither and thither, coupled with the
+dead and heavy air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any
+recollection of the track by which we had come: and I could not
+help thinking &lsquo;Good Heaven, if, in a sudden fit of madness,
+he should dash the torches out, or if he should be seized with a
+fit, what would become of us!&rsquo;&nbsp; On we wandered, among
+martyrs&rsquo; graves: passing great subterranean vaulted roads,
+diverging in all directions, and choked up with heaps of stones,
+that thieves and murderers may not take refuge there, and form a
+population under Rome, even worse than that which lives between
+it and the sun.&nbsp; Graves, graves, graves; Graves of men, of
+women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
+persecutors, &lsquo;We are Christians!&nbsp; We are
+Christians!&rsquo; that they might be murdered with their
+parents; Graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly cut into their
+stone boundaries, and little niches, made to hold a vessel of the
+martyrs&rsquo; blood; Graves of some who lived down here, for
+years together, ministering to the rest, and preaching truth, and
+hope, and comfort, from the rude altars, that bear witness to
+their fortitude at this hour; more roomy graves, but far more
+terrible, where hundreds, being surprised, were hemmed in and
+walled up: buried before Death, and killed by slow
+starvation.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our
+splendid churches,&rsquo; said the friar, looking round upon us,
+as we stopped to rest in one of the low passages, with bones and
+dust surrounding us on every side.&nbsp; &lsquo;They are
+here!&nbsp; Among the Martyrs&rsquo; Graves!&rsquo;&nbsp; He was
+a gentle, earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I
+thought how Christian men have dealt with one another; how,
+perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted down and
+tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and
+oppressed each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing
+any that this Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet
+lingering in it, and how these great and constant hearts would
+have been shaken&mdash;how they would have quailed and
+drooped&mdash;if a foreknowledge of the deeds that professing
+Christians would commit in the Great Name for which they died,
+could have rent them with its own unutterable anguish, on the
+cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful fire.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p326b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"In the Catacombs"
+title=
+"In the Catacombs"
+src="images/p326s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that
+remain apart, and keep their separate identity.&nbsp; I have a
+fainter recollection, sometimes of the relics; of the fragments
+of the pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the
+portion of the table that was spread for the Last Supper; of the
+well at which the woman of Samaria gave water to Our Saviour; of
+two columns from the house of Pontius Pilate; of the stone to
+which the Sacred hands were bound, when the scourging was
+performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone
+below it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set
+a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable
+might, and stop them for an instant, as they flit before
+me.&nbsp; The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings
+of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered
+pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and forced,
+like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches;
+of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and ridiculous; of
+kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and sometimes
+(but not often) of a swelling organ: of Madonne, with their
+breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a
+modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired
+in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their
+withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with
+chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round
+the pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and
+preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some high
+window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the
+church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the
+echoes of the roof.&nbsp; Then my tired memory comes out upon a
+flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in
+the light; and strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and
+palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was
+beheaded here.&nbsp; Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a
+Bavarian countess, travelling as a pilgrim to Rome&mdash;alone
+and on foot, of course&mdash;and performing, it is said, that act
+of piety for the fourth time.&nbsp; He saw her change a piece of
+gold at Viterbo, where he lived; followed her; bore her company
+on her journey for some forty miles or more, on the treacherous
+pretext of protecting her; attacked her, in the fulfilment of his
+unrelenting purpose, on the Campagna, within a very short
+distance of Rome, near to what is called (but what is not) the
+Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat her to death with her own
+pilgrim&rsquo;s staff.&nbsp; He was newly married, and gave some
+of her apparel to his wife: saying that he had bought it at a
+fair.&nbsp; She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess
+passing through their town, recognised some trifle as having
+belonged to her.&nbsp; Her husband then told her what he had
+done.&nbsp; She, in confession, told a priest; and the man was
+taken, within four days after the commission of the murder.</p>
+<p>There are no fixed times for the administration of justice, or
+its execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had been in
+prison ever since.&nbsp; On the Friday, as he was dining with the
+other prisoners, they came and told him he was to be beheaded
+next morning, and took him away.&nbsp; It is very unusual to
+execute in Lent; but his crime being a very bad one, it was
+deemed advisable to make an example of him at that time, when
+great numbers of pilgrims were coming towards Rome, from all
+parts, for the Holy Week.&nbsp; I heard of this on the Friday
+evening, and saw the bills up at the churches, calling on the
+people to pray for the criminal&rsquo;s soul.&nbsp; So, I
+determined to go, and see him executed.</p>
+<p>The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half
+o&rsquo;clock, Roman time: or a quarter before nine in the
+forenoon.&nbsp; I had two friends with me; and as we did not know
+but that the crowd might be very great, we were on the spot by
+half-past seven.&nbsp; The place of execution was near the church
+of San Giovanni decoll&aacute;to (a doubtful compliment to Saint
+John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back streets without
+any footway, of which a great part of Rome is composed&mdash;a
+street of rotten houses, which do not seem to belong to anybody,
+and do not seem to have ever been inhabited, and certainly were
+never built on any plan, or for any particular purpose, and have
+no window-sashes, and are a little like deserted breweries, and
+might be warehouses but for having nothing in them.&nbsp;
+Opposite to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was
+built.&nbsp; An untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking thing
+of course: some seven feet high, perhaps: with a tall,
+gallows-shaped frame rising above it, in which was the knife,
+charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all ready to descend, and
+glittering brightly in the morning sun, whenever it looked out,
+now and then, from behind a cloud.</p>
+<p>There were not many people lingering about; and these were
+kept at a considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of
+the Pope&rsquo;s dragoons.&nbsp; Two or three hundred
+foot-soldiers were under arms, standing at ease in clusters here
+and there; and the officers were walking up and down in twos and
+threes, chatting together, and smoking cigars.</p>
+<p>At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would
+be a dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of
+vegetable refuse, but for such things being thrown anywhere and
+everywhere in Rome, and favouring no particular sort of
+locality.&nbsp; We got into a kind of wash-house, belonging to a
+dwelling-house on this spot; and standing there in an old cart,
+and on a heap of cartwheels piled against the wall, looked,
+through a large grated window, at the scaffold, and straight down
+the street beyond it until, in consequence of its turning off
+abruptly to the left, our perspective was brought to a sudden
+termination, and had a corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for
+its crowning feature.</p>
+<p>Nine o&rsquo;clock struck, and ten o&rsquo;clock struck, and
+nothing happened.&nbsp; All the bells of all the churches rang as
+usual.&nbsp; A little parliament of dogs assembled in the open
+space, and chased each other, in and out among the
+soldiers.&nbsp; Fierce-looking Romans of the lowest class, in
+blue cloaks, russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked, came and went,
+and talked together.&nbsp; Women and children fluttered, on the
+skirts of the scanty crowd.&nbsp; One large muddy spot was left
+quite bare, like a bald place on a man&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; A
+cigar-merchant, with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one
+hand, went up and down, crying his wares.&nbsp; A pastry-merchant
+divided his attention between the scaffold and his
+customers.&nbsp; Boys tried to climb up walls, and tumbled down
+again.&nbsp; Priests and monks elbowed a passage for themselves
+among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of the knife:
+then went away.&nbsp; Artists, in inconceivable hats of the
+middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed
+picturesque scowls about them from their stations in the
+throng.&nbsp; One gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I
+presume) went up and down in a pair of Hessian-boots, with a red
+beard hanging down on his breast, and his long and bright red
+hair, plaited into two tails, one on either side of his head,
+which fell over his shoulders in front of him, very nearly to his
+waist, and were carefully entwined and braided!</p>
+<p>Eleven o&rsquo;clock struck and still nothing happened.&nbsp;
+A rumour got about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not
+confess; in which case, the priests would keep him until the Ave
+Maria (sunset); for it is their merciful custom never finally to
+turn the crucifix away from a man at that pass, as one refusing
+to be shriven, and consequently a sinner abandoned of the
+Saviour, until then.&nbsp; People began to drop off.&nbsp; The
+officers shrugged their shoulders and looked doubtful.&nbsp; The
+dragoons, who came riding up below our window, every now and
+then, to order an unlucky hackney-coach or cart away, as soon as
+it had comfortably established itself, and was covered with
+exulting people (but never before), became imperious, and
+quick-tempered.&nbsp; The bald place hadn&rsquo;t a straggling
+hair upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning the
+perspective, took a world of snuff.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Attention!&rsquo; was among the foot-soldiers
+instantly.&nbsp; They were marched up to the scaffold and formed
+round it.&nbsp; The dragoons galloped to their nearer stations
+too.&nbsp; The guillotine became the centre of a wood of
+bristling bayonets and shining sabres.&nbsp; The people closed
+round nearer, on the flank of the soldiery.&nbsp; A long
+straggling stream of men and boys, who had accompanied the
+procession from the prison, came pouring into the open
+space.&nbsp; The bald spot was scarcely distinguishable from the
+rest.&nbsp; The cigar and pastry-merchants resigned all thoughts
+of business, for the moment, and abandoning themselves wholly to
+pleasure, got good situations in the crowd.&nbsp; The perspective
+ended, now, in a troop of dragoons.&nbsp; And the corpulent
+officer, sword in hand, looked hard at a church close to him,
+which he could see, but we, the crowd, could not.</p>
+<p>After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the
+scaffold from this church; and above their heads, coming on
+slowly and gloomily, the effigy of Christ upon the cross,
+canopied with black.&nbsp; This was carried round the foot of the
+scaffold, to the front, and turned towards the criminal, that he
+might see it to the last.&nbsp; It was hardly in its place, when
+he appeared on the platform, bare-footed; his hands bound; and
+with the collar and neck of his shirt cut away, almost to the
+shoulder.&nbsp; A young man&mdash;six-and-twenty&mdash;vigorously
+made, and well-shaped.&nbsp; Face pale; small dark moustache; and
+dark brown hair.</p>
+<p>He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his
+wife brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her,
+which had occasioned the delay.</p>
+<p>He immediately kneeled down, below the knife.&nbsp; His neck
+fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was
+shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the
+pillory.&nbsp; Immediately below him was a leathern bag.&nbsp;
+And into it his head rolled instantly.</p>
+<p>The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with
+it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite
+knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling
+sound.</p>
+<p>When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it
+was set upon a pole in front&mdash;a little patch of black and
+white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle
+on.&nbsp; The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the
+sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix.&nbsp;
+Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant.&nbsp; It
+was dull, cold, livid, wax.&nbsp; The body also.</p>
+<p>There was a great deal of blood.&nbsp; When we left the
+window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one
+of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help
+the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through
+mire.&nbsp; A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of
+the neck.&nbsp; The head was taken off so close, that it seemed
+as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving
+off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left
+above the shoulder.</p>
+<p>Nobody cared, or was at all affected.&nbsp; There was no
+manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or
+sorrow.&nbsp; My empty pockets were tried, several times, in the
+crowd immediately below the scaffold, as the corpse was being put
+into its coffin.&nbsp; It was an ugly, filthy, careless,
+sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the
+momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.&nbsp; Yes!&nbsp;
+Such a sight has one meaning and one warning.&nbsp; Let me not
+forget it.&nbsp; The speculators in the lottery, station
+themselves at favourable points for counting the gouts of blood
+that spirt out, here or there; and buy that number.&nbsp; It is
+pretty sure to have a run upon it.</p>
+<p>The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the
+scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed.&nbsp;
+The executioner: an outlaw <i>ex officio</i> (what a satire on
+the Punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of
+St. Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair, and the
+show was over.</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the
+Vatican, of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous
+galleries, and staircases, and suites upon suites of immense
+chambers, ranks highest and stands foremost.&nbsp; Many most
+noble statues, and wonderful pictures, are there; nor is it
+heresy to say that there is a considerable amount of rubbish
+there, too.&nbsp; When any old piece of sculpture dug out of the
+ground, finds a place in a gallery because it is old, and without
+any reference to its intrinsic merits: and finds admirers by the
+hundred, because it is there, and for no other reason on earth:
+there will be no lack of objects, very indifferent in the plain
+eyesight of any one who employs so vulgar a property, when he may
+wear the spectacles of Cant for less than nothing, and establish
+himself as a man of taste for the mere trouble of putting them
+on.</p>
+<p>I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my
+natural perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-door,
+in Italy or elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I were
+travelling in the East.&nbsp; I cannot forget that there are
+certain expressions of face, natural to certain passions, and as
+unchangeable in their nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight
+of an eagle.&nbsp; I cannot dismiss from my certain knowledge,
+such commonplace facts as the ordinary proportion of men&rsquo;s
+arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that
+do violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter
+where they may be, I cannot honestly admire them, and think it
+best to say so; in spite of high critical advice that we should
+sometimes feign an admiration, though we have it not.</p>
+<p>Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young
+Waterman representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and
+Perkins&rsquo;s Drayman depicted as an Evangelist, I see nothing
+to commend or admire in the performance, however great its
+reputed Painter.&nbsp; Neither am I partial to libellous Angels,
+who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of
+sprawling monks apparently in liquor.&nbsp; Nor to those Monsieur
+Tonsons of galleries, Saint Francis and Saint Sebastian; both of
+whom I submit should have very uncommon and rare merits, as works
+of art, to justify their compound multiplication by Italian
+Painters.</p>
+<p>It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined
+raptures in which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the
+true appreciation of the really great and transcendent
+works.&nbsp; I cannot imagine, for example, how the resolute
+champion of undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing beauty
+of Titian&rsquo;s great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin
+at Venice; or how the man who is truly affected by the sublimity
+of that exquisite production, or who is truly sensible of the
+beauty of Tintoretto&rsquo;s great picture of the Assembly of the
+Blessed in the same place, can discern in Michael Angelo&rsquo;s
+Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel, any general idea, or one
+pervading thought, in harmony with the stupendous subject.&nbsp;
+He who will contemplate Raphael&rsquo;s masterpiece, the
+Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that
+same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael,
+representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping
+of a great fire by Leo the Fourth&mdash;and who will say that he
+admires them both, as works of extraordinary genius&mdash;must,
+as I think, be wanting in his powers of perception in one of the
+two instances, and, probably, in the high and lofty one.</p>
+<p>It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt
+whether, sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly
+observed, and whether it is quite well or agreeable that we
+should know beforehand, where this figure will be turning round,
+and where that figure will be lying down, and where there will be
+drapery in folds, and so forth.&nbsp; When I observe heads
+inferior to the subject, in pictures of merit, in Italian
+galleries, I do not attach that reproach to the Painter, for I
+have a suspicion that these great men, who were, of necessity,
+very much in the hands of monks and priests, painted monks and
+priests a great deal too often.&nbsp; I frequently see, in
+pictures of real power, heads quite below the story and the
+painter: and I invariably observe that those heads are of the
+Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the Convent
+inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that, in
+such cases, the lameness was not with the painter, but with the
+vanity and ignorance of certain of his employers, who would be
+apostles&mdash;on canvas, at all events.</p>
+<p>The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova&rsquo;s statues; the
+wonderful gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in
+sculpture, both in the Capitol and the Vatican; and the strength
+and fire of many others; are, in their different ways, beyond all
+reach of words.&nbsp; They are especially impressive and
+delightful, after the works of Bernini and his disciples, in
+which the churches of Rome, from St. Peter&rsquo;s downward,
+abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most detestable
+class of productions in the wide world.&nbsp; I would infinitely
+rather (as mere works of art) look upon the three deities of the
+Past, the Present, and the Future, in the Chinese Collection,
+than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose every fold of
+drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein, or artery, is
+as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is like a nest of
+lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other extravagance to
+shame.&nbsp; Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there can be no
+place in the world, where such intolerable abortions, begotten of
+the sculptor&rsquo;s chisel, are to be found in such profusion,
+as in Rome.</p>
+<p>There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the
+Vatican; and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are
+arranged, are painted to represent a starlight sky in the
+Desert.&nbsp; It may seem an odd idea, but it is very
+effective.&nbsp; The grim, half-human monsters from the temples,
+look more grim and monstrous underneath the deep dark blue; it
+sheds a strange uncertain gloomy air on everything&mdash;a
+mystery adapted to the objects; and you leave them, as you find
+them, shrouded in a solemn night.</p>
+<p>In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best
+advantage.&nbsp; There are seldom so many in one place that the
+attention need become distracted, or the eye confused.&nbsp; You
+see them very leisurely; and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of
+people.&nbsp; There are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and
+Rembrandt, and Vandyke; heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and
+Carlo Dolci; various subjects by Correggio, and Murillo, and
+Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and Spagnoletto&mdash;many of which
+it would be difficult, indeed, to praise too highly, or to praise
+enough; such is their tenderness and grace; their noble
+elevation, purity, and beauty.</p>
+<p>The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini,
+is a picture almost impossible to be forgotten.&nbsp; Through the
+transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a
+something shining out, that haunts me.&nbsp; I see it now, as I
+see this paper, or my pen.&nbsp; The head is loosely draped in
+white; the light hair falling down below the linen folds.&nbsp;
+She has turned suddenly towards you; and there is an expression
+in the eyes&mdash;although they are very tender and
+gentle&mdash;as if the wildness of a momentary terror, or
+distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that instant;
+and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a
+desolate earthly helplessness remained.&nbsp; Some stories say
+that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other
+stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her,
+on her way to the scaffold.&nbsp; I am willing to believe that,
+as you see her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the
+crowd, from the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind
+a look which he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside
+him in the concourse.&nbsp; The guilty palace of the Cenci:
+blighting a whole quarter of the town, as it stands withering
+away by grains: had that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch,
+and at its black, blind windows, and flitting up and down its
+dreary stairs, and growing out of the darkness of the ghostly
+galleries.&nbsp; The History is written in the Painting; written,
+in the dying girl&rsquo;s face, by Nature&rsquo;s own hand.&nbsp;
+And oh! how in that one touch she puts to flight (instead of
+making kin) the puny world that claim to be related to her, in
+right of poor conventional forgeries!</p>
+<p>I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue
+at whose base C&aelig;sar fell.&nbsp; A stern, tremendous
+figure!&nbsp; I imagined one of greater finish: of the last
+refinement: full of delicate touches: losing its distinctness, in
+the giddy eyes of one whose blood was ebbing before it, and
+settling into some such rigid majesty as this, as Death came
+creeping over the upturned face.</p>
+<p>The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and
+would be full of interest were it only for the changing views
+they afford, of the wild Campagna.&nbsp; But, every inch of
+ground, in every direction, is rich in associations, and in
+natural beauties.&nbsp; There is Albano, with its lovely lake and
+wooded shore, and with its wine, that certainly has not improved
+since the days of Horace, and in these times hardly justifies his
+panegyric.&nbsp; There is squalid Tivoli, with the river Anio,
+diverted from its course, and plunging down, headlong, some
+eighty feet in search of it.&nbsp; With its picturesque Temple of
+the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor waterfalls glancing
+and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern yawning darkly,
+where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots on, low down
+under beetling rocks.&nbsp; There, too, is the Villa
+d&rsquo;Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy
+pine and cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state.&nbsp;
+Then, there is Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of
+Tusculum, where Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his
+favourite house (some fragments of it may yet be seen there), and
+where Cato was born.&nbsp; We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a
+grey, dull day, when a shrill March wind was blowing, and when
+the scattered stones of the old city lay strewn about the lonely
+eminence, as desolate and dead as the ashes of a long
+extinguished fire.</p>
+<p>One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano,
+fourteen miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there
+by the ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown.&nbsp;
+We started at half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour
+or so were out upon the open Campagna.&nbsp; For twelve miles we
+went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of mounds, and
+heaps, and hills, of ruin.&nbsp; Tombs and temples, overthrown
+and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments;
+great blocks of granite and marble; mouldering arches,
+grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city
+from; lay strewn about us.&nbsp; Sometimes, loose walls, built up
+from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our path;
+sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
+obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves,
+rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to
+advance; but it was always ruin.&nbsp; Now, we tracked a piece of
+the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a
+grassy covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was
+ruin.&nbsp; In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on
+their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind that
+swept towards us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing
+up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin.&nbsp; The unseen larks above
+us, who alone disturbed the awful silence, had their nests in
+ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and
+then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed
+in ruin.&nbsp; The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one
+direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an American
+prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have
+never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have left
+their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished;
+where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their
+Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle
+dust!&nbsp; Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from
+the distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost
+feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the
+sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon
+a ruined world.</p>
+<p>To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition,
+is a fitting close to such a day.&nbsp; The narrow streets,
+devoid of footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps
+of dunghill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped
+dimensions, and their filth, and darkness, with the broad square
+before some haughty church: in the centre of which, a
+hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of
+the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or
+perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown,
+supports a Christian saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul,
+and Trajan to St. Peter.&nbsp; Then, there are the ponderous
+buildings reared from the spoliation of the Coliseum, shutting
+out the moon, like mountains: while here and there, are broken
+arches and rent walls, through which it gushes freely, as the
+life comes pouring from a wound.&nbsp; The little town of
+miserable houses, walled, and shut in by barred gates, is the
+quarter where the Jews are locked up nightly, when the clock
+strikes eight&mdash;a miserable place, densely populated, and
+reeking with bad odours, but where the people are industrious and
+money-getting.&nbsp; In the day-time, as you make your way along
+the narrow streets, you see them all at work: upon the pavement,
+oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing old
+clothes, and driving bargains.</p>
+<p>Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the
+moon once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred
+jets, and rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and
+ear.&nbsp; In the narrow little throat of street, beyond, a
+booth, dressed out with flaring lamps, and boughs of trees,
+attracts a group of sulky Romans round its smoky coppers of hot
+broth, and cauliflower stew; its trays of fried fish, and its
+flasks of wine.&nbsp; As you rattle round the sharply-twisting
+corner, a lumbering sound is heard.&nbsp; The coachman stops
+abruptly, and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by, preceded by a
+man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a priest: the
+latter chaunting as he goes.&nbsp; It is the Dead Cart, with the
+bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the Sacred Field
+outside the walls, where they will be thrown into the pit that
+will be covered with a stone to-night, and sealed up for a
+year.</p>
+<p>But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns
+ancient temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums: it is
+strange to see, how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has
+been blended into some modern structure, and made to serve some
+modern purpose&mdash;a wall, a dwelling-place, a granary, a
+stable&mdash;some use for which it never was designed, and
+associated with which it cannot otherwise than lamely
+assort.&nbsp; It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the
+old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and
+observance: have been incorporated into the worship of Christian
+altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false faith and
+the true are fused into a monstrous union.</p>
+<p>From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a
+squat and stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius)
+makes an opaque triangle in the moonlight.&nbsp; But, to an
+English traveller, it serves to mark the grave of Shelley too,
+whose ashes lie beneath a little garden near it.&nbsp; Nearer
+still, almost within its shadow, lie the bones of Keats,
+&lsquo;whose name is writ in water,&rsquo; that shines brightly
+in the landscape of a calm Italian night.</p>
+<p>The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attractions
+to all visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sunday, I
+would counsel those who go to Rome for its own interest, to avoid
+it at that time.&nbsp; The ceremonies, in general, are of the
+most tedious and wearisome kind; the heat and crowd at every one
+of them, painfully oppressive; the noise, hubbub, and confusion,
+quite distracting.&nbsp; We abandoned the pursuit of these shows,
+very early in the proceedings, and betook ourselves to the Ruins
+again.&nbsp; But, we plunged into the crowd for a share of the
+best of the sights; and what we saw, I will describe to you.</p>
+<p>At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little,
+for by the time we reached it (though we were early) the
+besieging crowd had filled it to the door, and overflowed into
+the adjoining hall, where they were struggling, and squeezing,
+and mutually expostulating, and making great rushes every time a
+lady was brought out faint, as if at least fifty people could be
+accommodated in her vacant standing-room.&nbsp; Hanging in the
+doorway of the chapel, was a heavy curtain, and this curtain,
+some twenty people nearest to it, in their anxiety to hear the
+chaunting of the Miserere, were continually plucking at, in
+opposition to each other, that it might not fall down and stifle
+the sound of the voices.&nbsp; The consequence was, that it
+occasioned the most extraordinary confusion, and seemed to wind
+itself about the unwary, like a Serpent.&nbsp; Now, a lady was
+wrapped up in it, and couldn&rsquo;t be unwound.&nbsp; Now, the
+voice of a stifling gentleman was heard inside it, beseeching to
+be let out.&nbsp; Now, two muffled arms, no man could say of
+which sex, struggled in it as in a sack.&nbsp; Now, it was
+carried by a rush, bodily overhead into the chapel, like an
+awning.&nbsp; Now, it came out the other way, and blinded one of
+the Pope&rsquo;s Swiss Guard, who had arrived, that moment, to
+set things to rights.</p>
+<p>Being seated at a little distance, among two or three of the
+Pope&rsquo;s gentlemen, who were very weary and counting the
+minutes&mdash;as perhaps his Holiness was too&mdash;we had better
+opportunities of observing this eccentric entertainment, than of
+hearing the Miserere.&nbsp; Sometimes, there was a swell of
+mournful voices that sounded very pathetic and sad, and died
+away, into a low strain again; but that was all we heard.</p>
+<p>At another time, there was the Exhibition of Relics in St.
+Peter&rsquo;s, which took place at between six and seven
+o&rsquo;clock in the evening, and was striking from the cathedral
+being dark and gloomy, and having a great many people in
+it.&nbsp; The place into which the relics were brought, one by
+one, by a party of three priests, was a high balcony near the
+chief altar.&nbsp; This was the only lighted part of the
+church.&nbsp; There are always a hundred and twelve lamps burning
+near the altar, and there were two tall tapers, besides, near the
+black statue of St. Peter; but these were nothing in such an
+immense edifice.&nbsp; The gloom, and the general upturning of
+faces to the balcony, and the prostration of true believers on
+the pavement, as shining objects, like pictures or
+looking-glasses, were brought out and shown, had something
+effective in it, despite the very preposterous manner in which
+they were held up for the general edification, and the great
+elevation at which they were displayed; which one would think
+rather calculated to diminish the comfort derivable from a full
+conviction of their being genuine.</p>
+<p>On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament
+from the Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina,
+another chapel in the Vatican;&mdash;a ceremony emblematical of
+the entombment of the Saviour before His Resurrection.&nbsp; We
+waited in a great gallery with a great crowd of people
+(three-fourths of them English) for an hour or so, while they
+were chaunting the Miserere, in the Sistine chapel again.&nbsp;
+Both chapels opened out of the gallery; and the general attention
+was concentrated on the occasional opening and shutting of the
+door of the one for which the Pope was ultimately bound.&nbsp;
+None of these openings disclosed anything more tremendous than a
+man on a ladder, lighting a great quantity of candles; but at
+each and every opening, there was a terrific rush made at this
+ladder and this man, something like (I should think) a charge of
+the heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.&nbsp; The man was never
+brought down, however, nor the ladder; for it performed the
+strangest antics in the world among the crowd&mdash;where it was
+carried by the man, when the candles were all lighted; and
+finally it was stuck up against the gallery wall, in a very
+disorderly manner, just before the opening of the other chapel,
+and the commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach of
+his Holiness.&nbsp; At this crisis, the soldiers of the guard,
+who had been poking the crowd into all sorts of shapes, formed
+down the gallery: and the procession came up, between the two
+lines they made.</p>
+<p>There were a few choristers, and then a great many priests,
+walking two and two, and carrying&mdash;the good-looking priests
+at least&mdash;their lighted tapers, so as to throw the light
+with a good effect upon their faces: for the room was
+darkened.&nbsp; Those who were not handsome, or who had not long
+beards, carried <i>their</i> tapers anyhow, and abandoned
+themselves to spiritual contemplation.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the
+chaunting was very monotonous and dreary.&nbsp; The procession
+passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went
+on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared,
+walking under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered
+Sacrament in both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round
+him, making a brilliant show.&nbsp; The soldiers of the guard
+knelt down as he passed; all the bystanders bowed; and so he
+passed on into the chapel: the white satin canopy being removed
+from over him at the door, and a white satin parasol hoisted over
+his poor old head, in place of it.&nbsp; A few more couples
+brought up the rear, and passed into the chapel also.&nbsp; Then,
+the chapel door was shut; and it was all over; and everybody
+hurried off headlong, as for life or death, to see something
+else, and say it wasn&rsquo;t worth the trouble.</p>
+<p>I think the most popular and most crowded sight (excepting
+those of Easter Sunday and Monday, which are open to all classes
+of people) was the Pope washing the feet of Thirteen men,
+representing the twelve apostles, and Judas Iscariot.&nbsp; The
+place in which this pious office is performed, is one of the
+chapels of St. Peter&rsquo;s, which is gaily decorated for the
+occasion; the thirteen sitting, &lsquo;all of a row,&rsquo; on a
+very high bench, and looking particularly uncomfortable, with the
+eyes of Heaven knows how many English, French, Americans, Swiss,
+Germans, Russians, Swedes, Norwegians, and other foreigners,
+nailed to their faces all the time.&nbsp; They are robed in
+white; and on their heads they wear a stiff white cap, like a
+large English porter-pot, without a handle.&nbsp; Each carries in
+his hand, a nosegay, of the size of a fine cauliflower; and two
+of them, on this occasion, wore spectacles; which, remembering
+the characters they sustained, I thought a droll appendage to the
+costume.&nbsp; There was a great eye to character.&nbsp; St. John
+was represented by a good-looking young man.&nbsp; St. Peter, by
+a grave-looking old gentleman, with a flowing brown beard; and
+Judas Iscariot by such an enormous hypocrite (I could not make
+out, though, whether the expression of his face was real or
+assumed) that if he had acted the part to the death and had gone
+away and hanged himself, he would have left nothing to be
+desired.</p>
+<p>As the two large boxes, appropriated to ladies at this sight,
+were full to the throat, and getting near was hopeless, we posted
+off, along with a great crowd, to be in time at the Table, where
+the Pope, in person, waits on these Thirteen; and after a
+prodigious struggle at the Vatican staircase, and several
+personal conflicts with the Swiss guard, the whole crowd swept
+into the room.&nbsp; It was a long gallery hung with drapery of
+white and red, with another great box for ladies (who are obliged
+to dress in black at these ceremonies, and to wear black veils),
+a royal box for the King of Naples and his party; and the table
+itself, which, set out like a ball supper, and ornamented with
+golden figures of the real apostles, was arranged on an elevated
+platform on one side of the gallery.&nbsp; The counterfeit
+apostles&rsquo; knives and forks were laid out on that side of
+the table which was nearest to the wall, so that they might be
+stared at again, without let or hindrance.</p>
+<p>The body of the room was full of male strangers; the crowd
+immense; the heat very great; and the pressure sometimes
+frightful.&nbsp; It was at its height, when the stream came
+pouring in, from the feet-washing; and then there were such
+shrieks and outcries, that a party of Piedmontese dragoons went
+to the rescue of the Swiss guard, and helped them to calm the
+tumult.</p>
+<p>The ladies were particularly ferocious, in their struggles for
+places.&nbsp; One lady of my acquaintance was seized round the
+waist, in the ladies&rsquo; box, by a strong matron, and hoisted
+out of her place; and there was another lady (in a back row in
+the same box) who improved her position by sticking a large pin
+into the ladies before her.</p>
+<p>The gentlemen about me were remarkably anxious to see what was
+on the table; and one Englishman seemed to have embarked the
+whole energy of his nature in the determination to discover
+whether there was any mustard.&nbsp; &lsquo;By Jupiter
+there&rsquo;s vinegar!&rsquo; I heard him say to his friend,
+after he had stood on tiptoe an immense time, and had been
+crushed and beaten on all sides.&nbsp; &lsquo;And there&rsquo;s
+oil!&nbsp; I saw them distinctly, in cruets!&nbsp; Can any
+gentleman, in front there, see mustard on the table?&nbsp; Sir,
+will you oblige me!&nbsp; <i>Do</i> you see a
+Mustard-Pot?&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The apostles and Judas appearing on the platform, after much
+expectation, were marshalled, in line, in front of the table,
+with Peter at the top; and a good long stare was taken at them by
+the company, while twelve of them took a long smell at their
+nosegays, and Judas&mdash;moving his lips very
+obtrusively&mdash;engaged in inward prayer.&nbsp; Then, the Pope,
+clad in a scarlet robe, and wearing on his head a skull-cap of
+white satin, appeared in the midst of a crowd of Cardinals and
+other dignitaries, and took in his hand a little golden ewer,
+from which he poured a little water over one of Peter&rsquo;s
+hands, while one attendant held a golden basin; a second, a fine
+cloth; a third, Peter&rsquo;s nosegay, which was taken from him
+during the operation.&nbsp; This his Holiness performed, with
+considerable expedition, on every man in the line (Judas, I
+observed, to be particularly overcome by his condescension); and
+then the whole Thirteen sat down to dinner.&nbsp; Grace said by
+the Pope.&nbsp; Peter in the chair.</p>
+<p>There was white wine, and red wine: and the dinner looked very
+good.&nbsp; The courses appeared in portions, one for each
+apostle: and these being presented to the Pope, by Cardinals upon
+their knees, were by him handed to the Thirteen.&nbsp; The manner
+in which Judas grew more white-livered over his victuals, and
+languished, with his head on one side, as if he had no appetite,
+defies all description.&nbsp; Peter was a good, sound, old man,
+and went in, as the saying is, &lsquo;to win;&rsquo; eating
+everything that was given him (he got the best: being first in
+the row) and saying nothing to anybody.&nbsp; The dishes appeared
+to be chiefly composed of fish and vegetables.&nbsp; The Pope
+helped the Thirteen to wine also; and, during the whole dinner,
+somebody read something aloud, out of a large book&mdash;the
+Bible, I presume&mdash;which nobody could hear, and to which
+nobody paid the least attention.&nbsp; The Cardinals, and other
+attendants, smiled to each other, from time to time, as if the
+thing were a great farce; and if they thought so, there is little
+doubt they were perfectly right.&nbsp; His Holiness did what he
+had to do, as a sensible man gets through a troublesome ceremony,
+and seemed very glad when it was all over.</p>
+<p>The Pilgrims&rsquo; Suppers: where lords and ladies waited on
+the Pilgrims, in token of humility, and dried their feet when
+they had been well washed by deputy: were very attractive.&nbsp;
+But, of all the many spectacles of dangerous reliance on outward
+observances, in themselves mere empty forms, none struck me half
+so much as the Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase, which I saw
+several times, but to the greatest advantage, or disadvantage, on
+Good Friday.</p>
+<p>This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps,
+said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate&rsquo;s house and to be
+the identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down
+from the judgment-seat.&nbsp; Pilgrims ascend it, only on their
+knees.&nbsp; It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel,
+reported to be full of relics; into which they peep through some
+iron bars, and then come down again, by one of two side
+staircases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on.</p>
+<p>On Good Friday, there were, on a moderate computation, a
+hundred people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees,
+at one time; while others, who were going up, or had come
+down&mdash;and a few who had done both, and were going up again
+for the second time&mdash;stood loitering in the porch below,
+where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-box, rattled a tin
+canister, with a slit in the top, incessantly, to remind them
+that he took the money.&nbsp; The majority were country-people,
+male and female.&nbsp; There were four or five Jesuit priests,
+however, and some half-dozen well-dressed women.&nbsp; A whole
+school of boys, twenty at least, were about half-way
+up&mdash;evidently enjoying it very much.&nbsp; They were all
+wedged together, pretty closely; but the rest of the company gave
+the boys as wide a berth as possible, in consequence of their
+betraying some recklessness in the management of their boots.</p>
+<p>I never, in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and
+so unpleasant, as this sight&mdash;ridiculous in the absurd
+incidents inseparable from it; and unpleasant in its senseless
+and unmeaning degradation.&nbsp; There are two steps to begin
+with, and then a rather broad landing.&nbsp; The more rigid
+climbers went along this landing on their knees, as well as up
+the stairs; and the figures they cut, in their shuffling progress
+over the level surface, no description can paint.&nbsp; Then, to
+see them watch their opportunity from the porch, and cut in where
+there was a place next the wall!&nbsp; And to see one man with an
+umbrella (brought on purpose, for it was a fine day) hoisting
+himself, unlawfully, from stair to stair!&nbsp; And to observe a
+demure lady of fifty-five or so, looking back, every now and
+then, to assure herself that her legs were properly disposed!</p>
+<p>There were such odd differences in the speed of different
+people, too.&nbsp; Some got on as if they were doing a match
+against time; others stopped to say a prayer on every step.&nbsp;
+This man touched every stair with his forehead, and kissed it;
+that man scratched his head all the way.&nbsp; The boys got on
+brilliantly, and were up and down again before the old lady had
+accomplished her half-dozen stairs.&nbsp; But most of the
+penitents came down, very sprightly and fresh, as having done a
+real good substantial deed which it would take a good deal of sin
+to counterbalance; and the old gentleman in the watch-box was
+down upon them with his canister while they were in this humour,
+I promise you.</p>
+<p>As if such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll
+enough, there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a
+crucifix, resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety and
+unsteady, that whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure,
+with more than usual devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer,
+with more than common readiness (for it served in this respect as
+a second or supplementary canister), it gave a great leap and
+rattle, and nearly shook the attendant lamp out: horribly
+frightening the people further down, and throwing the guilty
+party into unspeakable embarrassment.</p>
+<p>On Easter Sunday, as well as on the preceding Thursday, the
+Pope bestows his benediction on the people, from the balcony in
+front of St. Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp; This Easter Sunday was a day so
+bright and blue: so cloudless, balmy, wonderfully bright: that
+all the previous bad weather vanished from the recollection in a
+moment.&nbsp; I had seen the Thursday&rsquo;s Benediction
+dropping damply on some hundreds of umbrellas, but there was not
+a sparkle then, in all the hundred fountains of Rome&mdash;such
+fountains as they are!&mdash;and on this Sunday morning they were
+running diamonds.&nbsp; The miles of miserable streets through
+which we drove (compelled to a certain course by the Pope&rsquo;s
+dragoons: the Roman police on such occasions) were so full of
+colour, that nothing in them was capable of wearing a faded
+aspect.&nbsp; The common people came out in their gayest dresses;
+the richer people in their smartest vehicles; Cardinals rattled
+to the church of the Poor Fishermen in their state carriages;
+shabby magnificence flaunted its thread-bare liveries and
+tarnished cocked hats, in the sun; and every coach in Rome was
+put in requisition for the Great Piazza of St. Peter&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p>One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at
+least!&nbsp; Yet there was ample room.&nbsp; How many carriages
+were there, I don&rsquo;t know; yet there was room for them too,
+and to spare.&nbsp; The great steps of the church were densely
+crowded.&nbsp; There were many of the Contadini, from Albano (who
+delight in red), in that part of the square, and the mingling of
+bright colours in the crowd was beautiful.&nbsp; Below the steps
+the troops were ranged.&nbsp; In the magnificent proportions of
+the place they looked like a bed of flowers.&nbsp; Sulky Romans,
+lively peasants from the neighbouring country, groups of pilgrims
+from distant parts of Italy, sight-seeing foreigners of all
+nations, made a murmur in the clear air, like so many insects;
+and high above them all, plashing and bubbling, and making
+rainbow colours in the light, the two delicious fountains welled
+and tumbled bountifully.</p>
+<p>A kind of bright carpet was hung over the front of the
+balcony; and the sides of the great window were bedecked with
+crimson drapery.&nbsp; An awning was stretched, too, over the
+top, to screen the old man from the hot rays of the sun.&nbsp; As
+noon approached, all eyes were turned up to this window.&nbsp; In
+due time, the chair was seen approaching to the front, with the
+gigantic fans of peacock&rsquo;s feathers, close behind.&nbsp;
+The doll within it (for the balcony is very high) then rose up,
+and stretched out its tiny arms, while all the male spectators in
+the square uncovered, and some, but not by any means the greater
+part, kneeled down.&nbsp; The guns upon the ramparts of the
+Castle of St. Angelo proclaimed, next moment, that the
+benediction was given; drums beat; trumpets sounded; arms
+clashed; and the great mass below, suddenly breaking into smaller
+heaps, and scattering here and there in rills, was stirred like
+parti-coloured sand.</p>
+<p>What a bright noon it was, as we rode away!&nbsp; The Tiber
+was no longer yellow, but blue.&nbsp; There was a blush on the
+old bridges, that made them fresh and hale again.&nbsp; The
+Pantheon, with its majestic front, all seamed and furrowed like
+an old face, had summer light upon its battered walls.&nbsp;
+Every squalid and desolate hut in the Eternal City (bear witness
+every grim old palace, to the filth and misery of the plebeian
+neighbour that elbows it, as certain as Time has laid its grip on
+its patrician head!) was fresh and new with some ray of the
+sun.&nbsp; The very prison in the crowded street, a whirl of
+carriages and people, had some stray sense of the day, dropping
+through its chinks and crevices: and dismal prisoners who could
+not wind their faces round the barricading of the blocked-up
+windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to the rusty
+bars, turned <i>them</i> towards the overflowing street: as if it
+were a cheerful fire, and could be shared in, that way.</p>
+<p>But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the full
+moon, what a sight it was to see the Great Square full once more,
+and the whole church, from the cross to the ground, lighted with
+innumerable lanterns, tracing out the architecture, and winking
+and shining all round the colonnade of the piazza!&nbsp; And what
+a sense of exultation, joy, delight, it was, when the great bell
+struck half-past seven&mdash;on the instant&mdash;to behold one
+bright red mass of fire, soar gallantly from the top of the
+cupola to the extremest summit of the cross, and the moment it
+leaped into its place, become the signal of a bursting out of
+countless lights, as great, and red, and blazing as itself, from
+every part of the gigantic church; so that every cornice,
+capital, and smallest ornament of stone, expressed itself in
+fire: and the black, solid groundwork of the enormous dome seemed
+to grow transparent as an egg-shell!</p>
+<p>A train of gunpowder, an electric chain&mdash;nothing could be
+fired, more suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumination;
+and when we had got away, and gone upon a distant height, and
+looked towards it two hours afterwards, there it still stood,
+shining and glittering in the calm night like a jewel!&nbsp; Not
+a line of its proportions wanting; not an angle blunted; not an
+atom of its radiance lost.</p>
+<p>The next night&mdash;Easter Monday&mdash;there was a great
+display of fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo.&nbsp; We
+hired a room in an opposite house, and made our way, to our
+places, in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up
+the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so
+loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it
+seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below.&nbsp; There are
+statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great
+vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely on the
+faces of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone
+counterfeits above them.</p>
+<p>The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and
+then, for twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was
+one incessant sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of
+every colour, size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the
+sky, not by ones or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a
+time.&nbsp; The concluding burst&mdash;the Girandola&mdash;was
+like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle,
+without smoke or dust.</p>
+<p>In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had
+dispersed; the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled
+image in the river; and half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of
+lighted candle in their hands: moving here and there, in search
+of anything worth having, that might have been dropped in the
+press: had the whole scene to themselves.</p>
+<p>By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all
+this firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum.&nbsp;
+I had seen it by moonlight before (I could never get through a
+day without going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that
+night is past all telling.&nbsp; The ghostly pillars in the
+Forum; the Triumphal Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous
+masses of ruins which were once their palaces; the grass-grown
+mounds that mark the graves of ruined temples; the stones of the
+Via Sacra, smooth with the tread of feet in ancient Rome; even
+these were dimmed, in their transcendent melancholy, by the dark
+ghost of its bloody holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old
+scene; despoiled by pillaging Popes and fighting Princes, but not
+laid; wringing wild hands of weed, and grass, and bramble; and
+lamenting to the night in every gap and broken arch&mdash;the
+shadow of its awful self, immovable!</p>
+<p>As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our
+way to Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little
+wooden cross had been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim
+Countess was murdered.&nbsp; So, we piled some loose stones about
+it, as the beginning of a mound to her memory, and wondered if we
+should ever rest there again, and look back at Rome.</p>
+<h2><a name="page345"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 345</span>A
+RAPID DIORAMA</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> are bound for Naples!&nbsp; And
+we cross the threshold of the Eternal City at yonder gate, the
+Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the two last objects that
+attract the notice of a departing visitor, and the two first
+objects that attract the notice of an arriving one, are a proud
+church and a decaying ruin&mdash;good emblems of Rome.</p>
+<p>Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a
+bright blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great
+extent of ruin being plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through
+the arches of the broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches
+shining through them in the melancholy distance.&nbsp; When we
+have traversed it, and look back from Albano, its dark,
+undulating surface lies below us like a stagnant lake, or like a
+broad, dull Lethe flowing round the walls of Rome, and separating
+it from all the world!&nbsp; How often have the Legions, in
+triumphant march, gone glittering across that purple waste, so
+silent and unpeopled now!&nbsp; How often has the train of
+captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant city, and
+beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of their
+conqueror!&nbsp; What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad
+in the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered
+marble!&nbsp; What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult,
+and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the
+wild plain where nothing is now heard but the wind, and where the
+solitary lizards gambol unmolested in the sun!</p>
+<p>The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a
+shaggy peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy
+of sheep-skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher
+country where there are trees.&nbsp; The next day brings us on
+the Pontine Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome, and overgrown
+with brushwood, and swamped with water, but with a fine road made
+across them, shaded by a long, long avenue.&nbsp; Here and there,
+we pass a solitary guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted,
+and walled up.&nbsp; Some herdsmen loiter on the banks of the
+stream beside the road, and sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed
+by a man, comes rippling idly along it.&nbsp; A horseman passes
+occasionally, carrying a long gun cross-wise on the saddle before
+him, and attended by fierce dogs; but there is nothing else astir
+save the wind and the shadows, until we come in sight of
+Terracina.</p>
+<p>How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the
+inn so famous in robber stories!&nbsp; How picturesque the great
+crags and points of rock overhanging to-morrow&rsquo;s narrow
+road, where galley-slaves are working in the quarries above, and
+the sentinels who guard them lounge on the sea-shore!&nbsp; All
+night there is the murmur of the sea beneath the stars; and, in
+the morning, just at daybreak, the prospect suddenly becoming
+expanded, as if by a miracle, reveals&mdash;in the far distance,
+across the sea there!&mdash;Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius
+spouting fire!&nbsp; Within a quarter of an hour, the whole is
+gone as if it were a vision in the clouds, and there is nothing
+but the sea and sky.</p>
+<p>The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours&rsquo;
+travelling; and the hungriest of soldiers and custom-house
+officers with difficulty appeased; we enter, by a gateless
+portal, into the first Neapolitan town&mdash;Fondi.&nbsp; Take
+note of Fondi, in the name of all that is wretched and
+beggarly.</p>
+<p>A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the centre of
+the miserable streets, fed by obscene rivulets that trickle from
+the abject houses.&nbsp; There is not a door, a window, or a
+shutter; not a roof, a wall, a post, or a pillar, in all Fondi,
+but is decayed, and crazy, and rotting away.&nbsp; The wretched
+history of the town, with all its sieges and pillages by
+Barbarossa and the rest, might have been acted last year.&nbsp;
+How the gaunt dogs that sneak about the miserable streets, come
+to be alive, and undevoured by the people, is one of the enigmas
+of the world.</p>
+<p>A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are!&nbsp; All
+beggars; but that&rsquo;s nothing.&nbsp; Look at them as they
+gather round.&nbsp; Some, are too indolent to come down-stairs,
+or are too wisely mistrustful of the stairs, perhaps, to venture:
+so stretch out their lean hands from upper windows, and howl;
+others, come flocking about us, fighting and jostling one
+another, and demanding, incessantly, charity for the love of God,
+charity for the love of the Blessed Virgin, charity for the love
+of all the Saints.&nbsp; A group of miserable children, almost
+naked, screaming forth the same petition, discover that they can
+see themselves reflected in the varnish of the carriage, and
+begin to dance and make grimaces, that they may have the pleasure
+of seeing their antics repeated in this mirror.&nbsp; A crippled
+idiot, in the act of striking one of them who drowns his
+clamorous demand for charity, observes his angry counterpart in
+the panel, stops short, and thrusting out his tongue, begins to
+wag his head and chatter.&nbsp; The shrill cry raised at this,
+awakens half-a-dozen wild creatures wrapped in frowsy brown
+cloaks, who are lying on the church-steps with pots and pans for
+sale.&nbsp; These, scrambling up, approach, and beg
+defiantly.&nbsp; &lsquo;I am hungry.&nbsp; Give me
+something.&nbsp; Listen to me, Signor.&nbsp; I am
+hungry!&rsquo;&nbsp; Then, a ghastly old woman, fearful of being
+too late, comes hobbling down the street, stretching out one
+hand, and scratching herself all the way with the other, and
+screaming, long before she can be heard, &lsquo;Charity,
+charity!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go and pray for you directly, beautiful
+lady, if you&rsquo;ll give me charity!&rsquo;&nbsp; Lastly, the
+members of a brotherhood for burying the dead: hideously masked,
+and attired in shabby black robes, white at the skirts, with the
+splashes of many muddy winters: escorted by a dirty priest, and a
+congenial cross-bearer: come hurrying past.&nbsp; Surrounded by
+this motley concourse, we move out of Fondi: bad bright eyes
+glaring at us, out of the darkness of every crazy tenement, like
+glistening fragments of its filth and putrefaction.</p>
+<p>A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong
+eminence, traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old
+town of Itr&iacute;, like a device in pastry, built up, almost
+perpendicularly, on a hill, and approached by long steep flights
+of steps; beautiful Mola di Ga&euml;ta, whose wines, like those
+of Albano, have degenerated since the days of Horace, or his
+taste for wine was bad: which is not likely of one who enjoyed it
+so much, and extolled it so well; another night upon the road at
+St. Agatha; a rest next day at Capua, which is picturesque, but
+hardly so seductive to a traveller now, as the soldiers of
+Pr&aelig;torian Rome were wont to find the ancient city of that
+name; a flat road among vines festooned and looped from tree to
+tree; and Mount Vesuvius close at hand at last!&mdash;its cone
+and summit whitened with snow; and its smoke hanging over it, in
+the heavy atmosphere of the day, like a dense cloud.&nbsp; So we
+go, rattling down hill, into Naples.</p>
+<p>A funeral is coming up the street, towards us.&nbsp; The body,
+on an open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay
+cloth of crimson and gold.&nbsp; The mourners, in white gowns and
+masks.&nbsp; If there be death abroad, life is well represented
+too, for all Naples would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to
+and fro in carriages.&nbsp; Some of these, the common
+Vettur&iacute;no vehicles, are drawn by three horses abreast,
+decked with smart trappings and great abundance of brazen
+ornament, and always going very fast.&nbsp; Not that their loads
+are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people
+inside, four in front, four or five more hanging on behind, and
+two or three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where
+they lie half-suffocated with mud and dust.&nbsp; Exhibitors of
+Punch, buffo singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters
+of stories, a row of cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen,
+drums, and trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders
+within, and admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl
+and bustle.&nbsp; Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways,
+archways, and kennels; the gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing up
+and down in carriages on the Chiaji, or walking in the Public
+Gardens; and quiet letter-writers, perched behind their little
+desks and inkstands under the Portico of the Great Theatre of San
+Carlo, in the public street, are waiting for clients.</p>
+<p>Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written
+to a friend.&nbsp; He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting
+under the corner arch, and makes his bargain.&nbsp; He has
+obtained permission of the sentinel who guards him: who stands
+near, leaning against the wall and cracking nuts.&nbsp; The
+galley-slave dictates in the ear of the letter-writer, what he
+desires to say; and as he can&rsquo;t read writing, looks
+intently in his face, to read there whether he sets down
+faithfully what he is told.&nbsp; After a time, the galley-slave
+becomes discursive&mdash;incoherent.&nbsp; The secretary pauses
+and rubs his chin.&nbsp; The galley-slave is voluble and
+energetic.&nbsp; The secretary, at length, catches the idea, and
+with the air of a man who knows how to word it, sets it down;
+stopping, now and then, to glance back at his text
+admiringly.&nbsp; The galley-slave is silent.&nbsp; The soldier
+stoically cracks his nuts.&nbsp; Is there anything more to say?
+inquires the letter-writer.&nbsp; No more.&nbsp; Then listen,
+friend of mine.&nbsp; He reads it through.&nbsp; The galley-slave
+is quite enchanted.&nbsp; It is folded, and addressed, and given
+to him, and he pays the fee.&nbsp; The secretary falls back
+indolently in his chair, and takes a book.&nbsp; The galley-slave
+gathers up an empty sack.&nbsp; The sentinel throws away a
+handful of nut-shells, shoulders his musket, and away they go
+together.</p>
+<p>Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their
+right hands, when you look at them?&nbsp; Everything is done in
+pantomime in Naples, and that is the conventional sign for
+hunger.&nbsp; A man who is quarrelling with another, yonder, lays
+the palm of his right hand on the back of his left, and shakes
+the two thumbs&mdash;expressive of a donkey&rsquo;s
+ears&mdash;whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation.&nbsp;
+Two people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary
+waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away
+without a word: having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he
+considers it too dear.&nbsp; Two people in carriages, meeting,
+one touches his lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five
+fingers of his right hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air
+with the palm.&nbsp; The other nods briskly, and goes his
+way.&nbsp; He has been invited to a friendly dinner at half-past
+five o&rsquo;clock, and will certainly come.</p>
+<p>All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the
+wrist, with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a
+negative&mdash;the only negative beggars will ever
+understand.&nbsp; But, in Naples, those five fingers are a
+copious language.</p>
+<p>All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
+macaroni-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.&nbsp; But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us
+not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity,
+degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan
+life is inseparably associated!&nbsp; It is not well to find
+Saint Giles&rsquo;s so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so
+attractive.&nbsp; A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do
+not make <i>all</i> the difference between what is interesting
+and what is coarse and odious?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.</p>
+<p>Capri&mdash;once made odious by the deified beast
+Tiberius&mdash;Ischia, Procida, and the thousand distant beauties
+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.&nbsp; The fairest country in the world, is spread about
+us.&nbsp; Whether we turn towards the Miseno shore of the
+splendid watery amphitheatre, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to
+the Grotto del Cane and away to Bai&aelig;: or take the other
+way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one succession of
+delights.&nbsp; In the last-named direction, where, over doors
+and archways, there are countless little images of San Gennaro,
+with his Canute&rsquo;s hand stretched out, to check the fury of
+the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on
+the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built
+upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of
+Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed
+houses, granaries, and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare,
+with its ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in
+the sea upon a heap of rocks.&nbsp; Here, the railroad
+terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken succession
+of enchanting bays, and beautiful scenery, sloping from the
+highest summit of Saint Angelo, the highest neighbouring
+mountain, down to the water&rsquo;s edge&mdash;among vineyards,
+olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards, heaped-up
+rocks, green gorges in the hills&mdash;and by the bases of
+snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome,
+dark-haired women at the doors&mdash;and pass delicious summer
+villas&mdash;to Sorrento, where the Poet Tasso drew his
+inspiration from the beauty surrounding him.&nbsp; Returning, we
+may climb the heights above Castel-a-Mare, and looking down among
+the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun;
+and clusters of white houses in distant Naples, dwindling, in the
+great extent of prospect, down to dice.&nbsp; The coming back to
+the city, by the beach again, at sunset: with the glowing sea on
+one side, and the darkening mountain, with its smoke and flame,
+upon the other: is a sublime conclusion to the glory of the
+day.</p>
+<p>That church by the Porta Capuana&mdash;near the old
+fisher-market in the dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the
+revolt of Masaniello began&mdash;is memorable for having been the
+scene of one of his earliest proclamations to the people, and is
+particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen
+and bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the
+enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins
+there, like a battery of castanets.&nbsp; The cathedral with the
+beautiful door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite
+that once ornamented the temple of Apollo, contains the famous
+sacred blood of San Gennaro or Januarius: which is preserved in
+two phials in a silver tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies
+three times a-year, to the great admiration of the people.&nbsp;
+At the same moment, the stone (distant some miles) where the
+Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red.&nbsp; It is said
+that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes,
+when these miracles occur.</p>
+<p>The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these
+ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem
+waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious
+body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants
+at funerals.&nbsp; Two of these old spectres totter away, with
+lighted tapers, to show the caverns of death&mdash;as unconcerned
+as if they were immortal.&nbsp; They were used as burying-places
+for three hundred years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of
+skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of a great mortality
+occasioned by a plague.&nbsp; In the rest there is nothing but
+dust.&nbsp; They consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors and
+labyrinths, hewn out of the rock.&nbsp; At the end of some of
+these long passages, are unexpected glimpses of the daylight,
+shining down from above.&nbsp; It looks as ghastly and as
+strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the dark vaults: as
+if it, too, were dead and buried.</p>
+<p>The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between
+the city and Vesuvius.&nbsp; The old Campo Santo with its three
+hundred and sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in
+hospitals, and prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends.&nbsp;
+The graceful new cemetery, at no great distance from it, though
+yet unfinished, has already many graves among its shrubs and
+flowers, and airy colonnades.&nbsp; It might be reasonably
+objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious and
+too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it
+here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope
+of ground, exalts and saddens the scene.</p>
+<p>If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with
+its dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
+impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum
+and Pompeii!</p>
+<p>Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and
+look up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter
+and Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries
+open to the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the
+peaceful distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other
+things, in the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the
+Destroyed and the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the
+sun.&nbsp; Then, ramble on, and see, at every turn, the little
+familiar tokens of human habitation and every-day pursuits; the
+chafing of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted
+well; the track of carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street;
+the marks of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the
+wine-shop; the amphor&aelig; in private cellars, stored away so
+many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to this hour&mdash;all
+rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten
+thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury, had
+swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of the
+sea.</p>
+<p>After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the
+eruption, workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone, new
+ornaments for temples and other buildings that had
+suffered.&nbsp; Here lies their work, outside the city gate, as
+if they would return to-morrow.</p>
+<p>In the cellar of Diomede&rsquo;s house, where certain
+skeletons were found huddled together, close to the door, the
+impression of their bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes,
+and became stamped and fixed there, after they had shrunk,
+inside, to scanty bones.&nbsp; So, in the theatre of Herculaneum,
+a comic mask, floating on the stream when it was hot and liquid,
+stamped its mimic features in it as it hardened into stone; and
+now, it turns upon the stranger the fantastic look it turned upon
+the audiences in that same theatre two thousand years ago.</p>
+<p>Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in
+and out of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the
+temples of a religion that has vanished from the earth, and
+finding so many fresh traces of remote antiquity: as if the
+course of Time had been stopped after this desolation, and there
+had been no nights and days, months, years, and centuries, since:
+nothing is more impressive and terrible than the many evidences
+of the searching nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their
+irresistible power, and the impossibility of escaping them.&nbsp;
+In the wine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen
+vessels: displacing the wine and choking them, to the brim, with
+dust.&nbsp; In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the dead from
+the funeral urns, and rained new ruin even into them.&nbsp; The
+mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the skeletons, were stuffed
+with this terrible hail.&nbsp; In Herculaneum, where the flood
+was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled in, like a
+sea.&nbsp; Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at its
+height&mdash;and that is what is called &lsquo;the lava&rsquo;
+here.</p>
+<p>Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of
+which we now stand, looking down, when they came on some of the
+stone benches of the theatre&mdash;those steps (for such they
+seem) at the bottom of the excavation&mdash;and found the buried
+city of Herculaneum.&nbsp; Presently going down, with lighted
+torches, we are perplexed by great walls of monstrous thickness,
+rising up between the benches, shutting out the stage, obtruding
+their shapeless forms in absurd places, confusing the whole plan,
+and making it a disordered dream.&nbsp; We cannot, at first,
+believe, or picture to ourselves, that <span
+class="smcap">This</span> came rolling in, and drowned the city;
+and that all that is not here, has been cut away, by the axe,
+like solid stone.&nbsp; But this perceived and understood, the
+horror and oppression of its presence are indescribable.</p>
+<p>Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of
+both cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as
+fresh and plain, as if they had been executed yesterday.&nbsp;
+Here are subjects of still life, as provisions, dead game,
+bottles, glasses, and the like; familiar classical stories, or
+mythological fables, always forcibly and plainly told; conceits
+of cupids, quarrelling, sporting, working at trades; theatrical
+rehearsals; poets reading their productions to their friends;
+inscriptions chalked upon the walls; political squibs,
+advertisements, rough drawings by schoolboys; everything to
+people and restore the ancient cities, in the fancy of their
+wondering visitor.&nbsp; Furniture, too, you see, of every
+kind&mdash;lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking,
+and cooking; workmen&rsquo;s tools, surgical instruments, tickets
+for the theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of
+keys found clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards
+and warriors; little household bells, yet musical with their old
+domestic tones.</p>
+<p>The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the
+interest of Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect
+fascination.&nbsp; The looking, from either ruined city, into the
+neighbouring grounds overgrown with beautiful vines and luxuriant
+trees; and remembering that house upon house, temple on temple,
+building after building, and street after street, are still lying
+underneath the roots of all the quiet cultivation, waiting to be
+turned up to the light of day; is something so wonderful, so full
+of mystery, so captivating to the imagination, that one would
+think it would be paramount, and yield to nothing else.&nbsp; To
+nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain is the genius of the
+scene.&nbsp; From every indication of the ruin it has worked, we
+look, again, with an absorbing interest to where its smoke is
+rising up into the sky.&nbsp; It is beyond us, as we thread the
+ruined streets: above us, as we stand upon the ruined walls, we
+follow it through every vista of broken columns, as we wander
+through the empty court-yards of the houses; and through the
+garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine.&nbsp; Turning
+away to P&aelig;stum yonder, to see the awful structures built,
+the least aged of them, hundreds of years before the birth of
+Christ, and standing yet, erect in lonely majesty, upon the wild,
+malaria-blighted plain&mdash;we watch Vesuvius as it disappears
+from the prospect, and watch for it again, on our return, with
+the same thrill of interest: as the doom and destiny of all this
+beautiful country, biding its terrible time.</p>
+<p>It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when we
+return from P&aelig;stum, but very cold in the shade: insomuch,
+that although we may lunch, pleasantly, at noon, in the open air,
+by the gate of Pompeii, the neighbouring rivulet supplies thick
+ice for our wine.&nbsp; But, the sun is shining brightly; there
+is not a cloud or speck of vapour in the whole blue sky, looking
+down upon the bay of Naples; and the moon will be at the full
+to-night.&nbsp; No matter that the snow and ice lie thick upon
+the summit of Vesuvius, or that we have been on foot all day at
+Pompeii, or that croakers maintain that strangers should not be
+on the mountain by night, in such an unusual season.&nbsp; Let us
+take advantage of the fine weather; make the best of our way to
+Resina, the little village at the foot of the mountain; prepare
+ourselves, as well as we can, on so short a notice, at the
+guide&rsquo;s house; ascend at once, and have sunset half-way up,
+moonlight at the top, and midnight to come down in!</p>
+<p>At four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible
+uproar in the little stable-yard of Signior Salvatore, the
+recognised head-guide, with the gold band round his cap; and
+thirty under-guides who are all scuffling and screaming at once,
+are preparing half-a-dozen saddled ponies, three litters, and
+some stout staves, for the journey.&nbsp; Every one of the
+thirty, quarrels with the other twenty-nine, and frightens the
+six ponies; and as much of the village as can possibly squeeze
+itself into the little stable-yard, participates in the tumult,
+and gets trodden on by the cattle.</p>
+<p>After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than would
+suffice for the storming of Naples, the procession starts.&nbsp;
+The head-guide, who is liberally paid for all the attendants,
+rides a little in advance of the party; the other thirty guides
+proceed on foot.&nbsp; Eight go forward with the litters that are
+to be used by-and-by; and the remaining two-and-twenty beg.</p>
+<p>We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights
+of stairs, for some time.&nbsp; At length, we leave these, and
+the vineyards on either side of them, and emerge upon a bleak
+bare region where the lava lies confusedly, in enormous rusty
+masses; as if the earth had been ploughed up by burning
+thunderbolts.&nbsp; And now, we halt to see the sun set.&nbsp;
+The change that falls upon the dreary region, and on the whole
+mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes
+on&mdash;and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign
+around, who that has witnessed it, can ever forget!</p>
+<p>It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the broken
+ground, we arrive at the foot of the cone: which is extremely
+steep, and seems to rise, almost perpendicularly, from the spot
+where we dismount.&nbsp; The only light is reflected from the
+snow, deep, hard, and white, with which the cone is
+covered.&nbsp; It is now intensely cold, and the air is
+piercing.&nbsp; The thirty-one have brought no torches, knowing
+that the moon will rise before we reach the top.&nbsp; Two of the
+litters are devoted to the two ladies; the third, to a rather
+heavy gentleman from Naples, whose hospitality and good-nature
+have attached him to the expedition, and determined him to assist
+in doing the honours of the mountain.&nbsp; The rather heavy
+gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by
+half-a-dozen.&nbsp; We who walk, make the best use of our staves;
+and so the whole party begin to labour upward over the
+snow,&mdash;as if they were toiling to the summit of an
+antediluvian Twelfth-cake.</p>
+<p>We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks oddly
+about him when one of the company&mdash;not an Italian, though an
+habitu&eacute; of the mountain for many years: whom we will call,
+for our present purpose, Mr. Pickle of Portici&mdash;suggests
+that, as it is freezing hard, and the usual footing of ashes is
+covered by the snow and ice, it will surely be difficult to
+descend.&nbsp; But the sight of the litters above, tilting up and
+down, and jerking from this side to that, as the bearers
+continually slip and tumble, diverts our attention; more
+especially as the whole length of the rather heavy gentleman is,
+at that moment, presented to us alarmingly foreshortened, with
+his head downwards.</p>
+<p>The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flagging
+spirits of the bearers.&nbsp; Stimulating each other with their
+usual watchword, &lsquo;Courage, friend!&nbsp; It is to eat
+macaroni!&rsquo; they press on, gallantly, for the summit.</p>
+<p>From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of
+light, and pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while
+we have been ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the
+whole white mountain-side, and the broad sea down below, and tiny
+Naples in the distance, and every village in the country
+round.&nbsp; The whole prospect is in this lovely state, when we
+come upon the platform on the mountain-top&mdash;the region of
+Fire&mdash;an exhausted crater formed of great masses of gigantic
+cinders, like blocks of stone from some tremendous waterfall,
+burnt up; from every chink and crevice of which, hot, sulphurous
+smoke is pouring out: while, from another conical-shaped hill,
+the present crater, rising abruptly from this platform at the
+end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth: reddening the
+night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with
+red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the air like
+feathers, and fall down like lead.&nbsp; What words can paint the
+gloom and grandeur of this scene!</p>
+<p>The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from
+the sulphur: the fear of falling down through the crevices in the
+yawning ground; the stopping, every now and then, for somebody
+who is missing in the dark (for the dense smoke now obscures the
+moon); the intolerable noise of the thirty; and the hoarse
+roaring of the mountain; make it a scene of such confusion, at
+the same time, that we reel again.&nbsp; But, dragging the ladies
+through it, and across another exhausted crater to the foot of
+the present Volcano, we approach close to it on the windy side,
+and then sit down among the hot ashes at its foot, and look up in
+silence; faintly estimating the action that is going on within,
+from its being full a hundred feet higher, at this minute, than
+it was six weeks ago.</p>
+<p>There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an
+irresistible desire to get nearer to it.&nbsp; We cannot rest
+long, without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees,
+accompanied by the head-guide, to climb to the brim of the
+flaming crater, and try to look in.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the thirty
+yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and
+call to us to come back; frightening the rest of the party out of
+their wits.</p>
+<p>What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin
+crust of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and
+plunge us in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if
+there be any); and what with the flashing of the fire in our
+faces, and the shower of red-hot ashes that is raining down, and
+the choking smoke and sulphur; we may well feel giddy and
+irrational, like drunken men.&nbsp; But, we contrive to climb up
+to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into the Hell of
+boiling fire below.&nbsp; Then, we all three come rolling down;
+blackened, and singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy: and each
+with his dress alight in half-a-dozen places.</p>
+<p>You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of
+descending, is, by sliding down the ashes: which, forming a
+gradually-increasing ledge below the feet, prevent too rapid a
+descent.&nbsp; But, when we have crossed the two exhausted
+craters on our way back and are come to this precipitous place,
+there is (as Mr. Pickle has foretold) no vestige of ashes to be
+seen; the whole being a smooth sheet of ice.</p>
+<p>In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously join
+hands, and make a chain of men; of whom the foremost beat, as
+well as they can, a rough track with their sticks, down which we
+prepare to follow.&nbsp; The way being fearfully steep, and none
+of the party: even of the thirty: being able to keep their feet
+for six paces together, the ladies are taken out of their
+litters, and placed, each between two careful persons; while
+others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to prevent their
+falling forward&mdash;a necessary precaution, tending to the
+immediate and hopeless dilapidation of their apparel.&nbsp; The
+rather heavy gentleman is abjured to leave his litter too, and be
+escorted in a similar manner; but he resolves to be brought down
+as he was brought up, on the principle that his fifteen bearers
+are not likely to tumble all at once, and that he is safer so,
+than trusting to his own legs.</p>
+<p>In this order, we begin the descent: sometimes on foot,
+sometimes shuffling on the ice: always proceeding much more
+quietly and slowly, than on our upward way: and constantly
+alarmed by the falling among us of somebody from behind, who
+endangers the footing of the whole party, and clings
+pertinaciously to anybody&rsquo;s ankles.&nbsp; It is impossible
+for the litter to be in advance, too, as the track has to be
+made; and its appearance behind us, overhead&mdash;with some one
+or other of the bearers always down, and the rather heavy
+gentleman with his legs always in the air&mdash;is very
+threatening and frightful.&nbsp; We have gone on thus, a very
+little way, painfully and anxiously, but quite merrily, and
+regarding it as a great success&mdash;and have all fallen several
+times, and have all been stopped, somehow or other, as we were
+sliding away&mdash;when Mr. Pickle of Portici, in the act of
+remarking on these uncommon circumstances as quite beyond his
+experience, stumbles, falls, disengages himself, with quick
+presence of mind, from those about him, plunges away head
+foremost, and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the
+cone!</p>
+<p>Sickening as it is to look, and be so powerless to help him, I
+see him there, in the moonlight&mdash;I have had such a dream
+often&mdash;skimming over the white ice, like a
+cannon-ball.&nbsp; Almost at the same moment, there is a cry from
+behind; and a man who has carried a light basket of spare cloaks
+on his head, comes rolling past, at the same frightful speed,
+closely followed by a boy.&nbsp; At this climax of the chapter of
+accidents, the remaining eight-and-twenty vociferate to that
+degree, that a pack of wolves would be music to them!</p>
+<p>Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of
+Portici when we reach the place where we dismounted, and where
+the horses are waiting; but, thank God, sound in limb!&nbsp; And
+never are we likely to be more glad to see a man alive and on his
+feet, than to see him now&mdash;making light of it too, though
+sorely bruised and in great pain.&nbsp; The boy is brought into
+the Hermitage on the Mountain, while we are at supper, with his
+head tied up; and the man is heard of, some hours
+afterwards.&nbsp; He too is bruised and stunned, but has broken
+no bones; the snow having, fortunately, covered all the larger
+blocks of rock and stone, and rendered them harmless.</p>
+<p>After a cheerful meal, and a good rest before a blazing fire,
+we again take horse, and continue our descent to
+Salvatore&rsquo;s house&mdash;very slowly, by reason of our
+bruised friend being hardly able to keep the saddle, or endure
+the pain of motion.&nbsp; Though it is so late at night, or early
+in the morning, all the people of the village are waiting about
+the little stable-yard when we arrive, and looking up the road by
+which we are expected.&nbsp; Our appearance is hailed with a
+great clamour of tongues, and a general sensation for which in
+our modesty we are somewhat at a loss to account, until, turning
+into the yard, we find that one of a party of French gentlemen
+who were on the mountain at the same time is lying on some straw
+in the stable, with a broken limb: looking like Death, and
+suffering great torture; and that we were confidently supposed to
+have encountered some worse accident.</p>
+<p>So &lsquo;well returned, and Heaven be praised!&rsquo; as the
+cheerful Vettur&iacute;no, who has borne us company all the way
+from Pisa, says, with all his heart!&nbsp; And away with his
+ready horses, into sleeping Naples!</p>
+<p>It wakes again to Policinelli and pickpockets, buffo singers
+and beggars, rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and
+universal degradation; airing its Harlequin suit in the sunshine,
+next day and every day; singing, starving, dancing, gaming, on
+the sea-shore; and leaving all labour to the burning mountain,
+which is ever at its work.</p>
+<p>Our English dilettanti would be very pathetic on the subject
+of the national taste, if they could hear an Italian opera half
+as badly sung in England as we may hear the Foscari performed,
+to-night, in the splendid theatre of San Carlo.&nbsp; But, for
+astonishing truth and spirit in seizing and embodying the real
+life about it, the shabby little San Carlino Theatre&mdash;the
+rickety house one story high, with a staring picture outside:
+down among the drums and trumpets, and the tumblers, and the lady
+conjurer&mdash;is without a rival anywhere.</p>
+<p>There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples,
+at which we may take a glance before we go&mdash;the
+Lotteries.</p>
+<p>They prevail in most parts of Italy, but are particularly
+obvious, in their effects and influences, here.&nbsp; They are
+drawn every Saturday.&nbsp; They bring an immense revenue to the
+Government; and diffuse a taste for gambling among the poorest of
+the poor, which is very comfortable to the coffers of the State,
+and very ruinous to themselves.&nbsp; The lowest stake is one
+grain; less than a farthing.&nbsp; One hundred numbers&mdash;from
+one to a hundred, inclusive&mdash;are put into a box.&nbsp; Five
+are drawn.&nbsp; Those are the prizes.&nbsp; I buy three
+numbers.&nbsp; If one of them come up, I win a small prize.&nbsp;
+If two, some hundreds of times my stake.&nbsp; If three, three
+thousand five hundred times my stake.&nbsp; I stake (or play as
+they call it) what I can upon my numbers, and buy what numbers I
+please.&nbsp; The amount I play, I pay at the lottery office,
+where I purchase the ticket; and it is stated on the ticket
+itself.</p>
+<p>Every lottery office keeps a printed book, an Universal
+Lottery Diviner, where every possible accident and circumstance
+is provided for, and has a number against it.&nbsp; For instance,
+let us take two carlini&mdash;about sevenpence.&nbsp; On our way
+to the lottery office, we run against a black man.&nbsp; When we
+get there, we say gravely, &lsquo;The Diviner.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is
+handed over the counter, as a serious matter of business.&nbsp;
+We look at black man.&nbsp; Such a number.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give us
+that.&rsquo;&nbsp; We look at running against a person in the
+street.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give us that.&rsquo;&nbsp; We look at the
+name of the street itself.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give us
+that.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, we have our three numbers.</p>
+<p>If the roof of the theatre of San Carlo were to fall in, so
+many people would play upon the numbers attached to such an
+accident in the Diviner, that the Government would soon close
+those numbers, and decline to run the risk of losing any more
+upon them.&nbsp; This often happens.&nbsp; Not long ago, when
+there was a fire in the King&rsquo;s Palace, there was such a
+desperate run on fire, and king, and palace, that further stakes
+on the numbers attached to those words in the Golden Book were
+forbidden.&nbsp; Every accident or event, is supposed, by the
+ignorant populace, to be a revelation to the beholder, or party
+concerned, in connection with the lottery.&nbsp; Certain people
+who have a talent for dreaming fortunately, are much sought
+after; and there are some priests who are constantly favoured
+with visions of the lucky numbers.</p>
+<p>I heard of a horse running away with a man, and dashing him
+down, dead, at the corner of a street.&nbsp; Pursuing the horse
+with incredible speed, was another man, who ran so fast, that he
+came up, immediately after the accident.&nbsp; He threw himself
+upon his knees beside the unfortunate rider, and clasped his hand
+with an expression of the wildest grief.&nbsp; &lsquo;If you have
+life,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;speak one word to me!&nbsp; If you
+have one gasp of breath left, mention your age for Heaven&rsquo;s
+sake, that I may play that number in the lottery.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>It is four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, and we may go to
+see our lottery drawn.&nbsp; The ceremony takes place every
+Saturday, in the Tribunale, or Court of Justice&mdash;this
+singular, earthy-smelling room, or gallery, as mouldy as an old
+cellar, and as damp as a dungeon.&nbsp; At the upper end is a
+platform, with a large horse-shoe table upon it; and a President
+and Council sitting round&mdash;all judges of the Law.&nbsp; The
+man on the little stool behind the President, is the Capo
+Lazzarone, a kind of tribune of the people, appointed on their
+behalf to see that all is fairly conducted: attended by a few
+personal friends.&nbsp; A ragged, swarthy fellow he is: with long
+matted hair hanging down all over his face: and covered, from
+head to foot, with most unquestionably genuine dirt.&nbsp; All
+the body of the room is filled with the commonest of the
+Neapolitan people: and between them and the platform, guarding
+the steps leading to the latter, is a small body of soldiers.</p>
+<p>There is some delay in the arrival of the necessary number of
+judges; during which, the box, in which the numbers are being
+placed, is a source of the deepest interest.&nbsp; When the box
+is full, the boy who is to draw the numbers out of it becomes the
+prominent feature of the proceedings.&nbsp; He is already dressed
+for his part, in a tight brown Holland coat, with only one (the
+left) sleeve to it, which leaves his right arm bared to the
+shoulder, ready for plunging down into the mysterious chest.</p>
+<p>During the hush and whisper that pervade the room, all eyes
+are turned on this young minister of fortune.&nbsp; People begin
+to inquire his age, with a view to the next lottery; and the
+number of his brothers and sisters; and the age of his father and
+mother; and whether he has any moles or pimples upon him; and
+where, and how many; when the arrival of the last judge but one
+(a little old man, universally dreaded as possessing the Evil
+Eye) makes a slight diversion, and would occasion a greater one,
+but that he is immediately deposed, as a source of interest, by
+the officiating priest, who advances gravely to his place,
+followed by a very dirty little boy, carrying his sacred
+vestments, and a pot of Holy Water.</p>
+<p>Here is the last judge come at last, and now he takes his
+place at the horse-shoe table.</p>
+<p>There is a murmur of irrepressible agitation.&nbsp; In the
+midst of it, the priest puts his head into the sacred vestments,
+and pulls the same over his shoulders.&nbsp; Then he says a
+silent prayer; and dipping a brush into the pot of Holy Water,
+sprinkles it over the box&mdash;and over the boy, and gives them
+a double-barrelled blessing, which the box and the boy are both
+hoisted on the table to receive.&nbsp; The boy remaining on the
+table, the box is now carried round the front of the platform, by
+an attendant, who holds it up and shakes it lustily all the time;
+seeming to say, like the conjurer, &lsquo;There is no deception,
+ladies and gentlemen; keep your eyes upon me, if you
+please!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>At last, the box is set before the boy; and the boy, first
+holding up his naked arm and open hand, dives down into the hole
+(it is made like a ballot-box) and pulls out a number, which is
+rolled up, round something hard, like a bonbon.&nbsp; This he
+hands to the judge next him, who unrolls a little bit, and hands
+it to the President, next to whom he sits.&nbsp; The President
+unrolls it, very slowly.&nbsp; The Capo Lazzarone leans over his
+shoulder.&nbsp; The President holds it up, unrolled, to the Capo
+Lazzarone.&nbsp; The Capo Lazzarone, looking at it eagerly, cries
+out, in a shrill, loud voice, &lsquo;Sessantadue!&rsquo;
+(sixty-two), expressing the two upon his fingers, as he calls it
+out.&nbsp; Alas! the Capo Lazzarone himself has not staked on
+sixty-two.&nbsp; His face is very long, and his eyes roll
+wildly.</p>
+<p>As it happens to be a favourite number, however, it is pretty
+well received, which is not always the case.&nbsp; They are all
+drawn with the same ceremony, omitting the blessing.&nbsp; One
+blessing is enough for the whole multiplication-table.&nbsp; The
+only new incident in the proceedings, is the gradually deepening
+intensity of the change in the Cape Lazzarone, who has,
+evidently, speculated to the very utmost extent of his means; and
+who, when he sees the last number, and finds that it is not one
+of his, clasps his hands, and raises his eyes to the ceiling
+before proclaiming it, as though remonstrating, in a secret
+agony, with his patron saint, for having committed so gross a
+breach of confidence.&nbsp; I hope the Capo Lazzarone may not
+desert him for some other member of the Calendar, but he seems to
+threaten it.</p>
+<p>Where the winners may be, nobody knows.&nbsp; They certainly
+are not present; the general disappointment filling one with pity
+for the poor people.&nbsp; They look: when we stand aside,
+observing them, in their passage through the court-yard down
+below: as miserable as the prisoners in the gaol (it forms a part
+of the building), who are peeping down upon them, from between
+their bars; or, as the fragments of human heads which are still
+dangling in chains outside, in memory of the good old times, when
+their owners were strung up there, for the popular
+edification.</p>
+<p>Away from Naples in a glorious sunrise, by the road to Capua,
+and then on a three days&rsquo; journey along by-roads, that we
+may see, on the way, the monastery of Monte Cassino, which is
+perched on the steep and lofty hill above the little town of San
+Germano, and is lost on a misty morning in the clouds.</p>
+<p>So much the better, for the deep sounding of its bell, which,
+as we go winding up, on mules, towards the convent, is heard
+mysteriously in the still air, while nothing is seen but the grey
+mist, moving solemnly and slowly, like a funeral
+procession.&nbsp; Behold, at length the shadowy pile of building
+close before us: its grey walls and towers dimly seen, though so
+near and so vast: and the raw vapour rolling through its
+cloisters heavily.</p>
+<p>There are two black shadows walking to and fro in the
+quadrangle, near the statues of the Patron Saint and his sister;
+and hopping on behind them, in and out of the old arches, is a
+raven, croaking in answer to the bell, and uttering, at
+intervals, the purest Tuscan.&nbsp; How like a Jesuit he
+looks!&nbsp; There never was a sly and stealthy fellow so at home
+as is this raven, standing now at the refectory door, with his
+head on one side, and pretending to glance another way, while he
+is scrutinizing the visitors keenly, and listening with fixed
+attention.&nbsp; What a dull-headed monk the porter becomes in
+comparison!</p>
+<p>&lsquo;He speaks like us!&rsquo; says the porter: &lsquo;quite
+as plainly.&rsquo;&nbsp; Quite as plainly, Porter.&nbsp; Nothing
+could be more expressive than his reception of the peasants who
+are entering the gate with baskets and burdens.&nbsp; There is a
+roll in his eye, and a chuckle in his throat, which should
+qualify him to be chosen Superior of an Order of Ravens.&nbsp; He
+knows all about it.&nbsp; &lsquo;It&rsquo;s all right,&rsquo; he
+says.&nbsp; &lsquo;We know what we know.&nbsp; Come along, good
+people.&nbsp; Glad to see you!&rsquo;&nbsp; How was this
+extraordinary structure ever built in such a situation, where the
+labour of conveying the stone, and iron, and marble, so great a
+height, must have been prodigious?&nbsp; &lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says
+the raven, welcoming the peasants.&nbsp; How, being despoiled by
+plunder, fire and earthquake, has it risen from its ruins, and
+been again made what we now see it, with its church so sumptuous
+and magnificent?&nbsp; &lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says the raven,
+welcoming the peasants.&nbsp; These people have a miserable
+appearance, and (as usual) are densely ignorant, and all beg,
+while the monks are chaunting in the chapel.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says the raven, &lsquo;Cuckoo!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>So we leave him, chuckling and rolling his eye at the convent
+gate, and wind slowly down again through the cloud.&nbsp; At last
+emerging from it, we come in sight of the village far below, and
+the flat green country intersected by rivulets; which is pleasant
+and fresh to see after the obscurity and haze of the
+convent&mdash;no disrespect to the raven, or the holy friars.</p>
+<p>Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most
+shattered and tattered of villages, where there is not a whole
+window among all the houses, or a whole garment among all the
+peasants, or the least appearance of anything to eat, in any of
+the wretched hucksters&rsquo; shops.&nbsp; The women wear a
+bright red bodice laced before and behind, a white skirt, and the
+Neapolitan head-dress of square folds of linen, primitively meant
+to carry loads on.&nbsp; The men and children wear anything they
+can get.&nbsp; The soldiers are as dirty and rapacious as the
+dogs.&nbsp; The inns are such hobgoblin places, that they are
+infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best hotels in
+Paris.&nbsp; Here is one near Valmontone (that is Valmontone the
+round, walled town on the mount opposite), which is approached by
+a quagmire almost knee-deep.&nbsp; There is a wild colonnade
+below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a
+great long kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form,
+where a party of travellers, with two priests among them, are
+crowding round the fire while their supper is cooking.&nbsp;
+Above stairs, is a rough brick gallery to sit in, with very
+little windows with very small patches of knotty glass in them,
+and all the doors that open from it (a dozen or two) off their
+hinges, and a bare board on tressels for a table, at which thirty
+people might dine easily, and a fireplace large enough in itself
+for a breakfast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze and crackle,
+they illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn in
+charcoal on the whitewashed chimney-sides by previous
+travellers.&nbsp; There is a flaring country lamp on the table;
+and, hovering about it, scratching her thick black hair
+continually, a yellow dwarf of a woman, who stands on tiptoe to
+arrange the hatchet knives, and takes a flying leap to look into
+the water-jug.&nbsp; The beds in the adjoining rooms are of the
+liveliest kind.&nbsp; There is not a solitary scrap of
+looking-glass in the house, and the washing apparatus is
+identical with the cooking utensils.&nbsp; But the yellow dwarf
+sets on the table a good flask of excellent wine, holding a quart
+at least; and produces, among half-a-dozen other dishes,
+two-thirds of a roasted kid, smoking hot.&nbsp; She is as
+good-humoured, too, as dirty, which is saying a great deal.&nbsp;
+So here&rsquo;s long life to her, in the flask of wine, and
+prosperity to the establishment.</p>
+<p>Rome gained and left behind, and with it the Pilgrims who are
+now repairing to their own homes again&mdash;each with his
+scallop shell and staff, and soliciting alms for the love of
+God&mdash;we come, by a fair country, to the Falls of Terni,
+where the whole Velino river dashes, headlong, from a rocky
+height, amidst shining spray and rainbows.&nbsp; Perugia,
+strongly fortified by art and nature, on a lofty eminence, rising
+abruptly from the plain where purple mountains mingle with the
+distant sky, is glowing, on its market-day, with radiant
+colours.&nbsp; They set off its sombre but rich Gothic buildings
+admirably.&nbsp; The pavement of its market-place is strewn with
+country goods.&nbsp; All along the steep hill leading from the
+town, under the town wall, there is a noisy fair of calves,
+lambs, pigs, horses, mules, and oxen.&nbsp; Fowls, geese, and
+turkeys, flutter vigorously among their very hoofs; and buyers,
+sellers, and spectators, clustering everywhere, block up the road
+as we come shouting down upon them.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, there is a ringing sound among our horses.&nbsp; The
+driver stops them.&nbsp; Sinking in his saddle, and casting up
+his eyes to Heaven, he delivers this apostrophe, &lsquo;Oh Jove
+Omnipotent! here is a horse has lost his shoe!&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Notwithstanding the tremendous nature of this accident, and
+the utterly forlorn look and gesture (impossible in any one but
+an Italian Vettur&iacute;no) with which it is announced, it is
+not long in being repaired by a mortal Farrier, by whose
+assistance we reach Castiglione the same night, and Arezzo next
+day.&nbsp; Mass is, of course, performing in its fine cathedral,
+where the sun shines in among the clustered pillars, through rich
+stained-glass windows: half revealing, half concealing the
+kneeling figures on the pavement, and striking out paths of
+spotted light in the long aisles.</p>
+<p>But, how much beauty of another kind is here, when, on a fair
+clear morning, we look, from the summit of a hill, on
+Florence!&nbsp; See where it lies before us in a sun-lighted
+valley, bright with the winding Arno, and shut in by swelling
+hills; its domes, and towers, and palaces, rising from the rich
+country in a glittering heap, and shining in the sun like
+gold!</p>
+<p>Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful
+Florence; and the strong old piles of building make such heaps of
+shadow, on the ground and in the river, that there is another and
+a different city of rich forms and fancies, always lying at our
+feet.&nbsp; Prodigious palaces, constructed for defence, with
+small distrustful windows heavily barred, and walls of great
+thickness formed of huge masses of rough stone, frown, in their
+old sulky state, on every street.&nbsp; In the midst of the
+city&mdash;in the Piazza of the Grand Duke, adorned with
+beautiful statues and the Fountain of Neptune&mdash;rises the
+Palazzo Vecchio, with its enormous overhanging battlements, and
+the Great Tower that watches over the whole town.&nbsp; In its
+court-yard&mdash;worthy of the Castle of Otranto in its ponderous
+gloom&mdash;is a massive staircase that the heaviest waggon and
+the stoutest team of horses might be driven up.&nbsp; Within it,
+is a Great Saloon, faded and tarnished in its stately
+decorations, and mouldering by grains, but recording yet, in
+pictures on its walls, the triumphs of the Medici and the wars of
+the old Florentine people.&nbsp; The prison is hard by, in an
+adjacent court-yard of the building&mdash;a foul and dismal
+place, where some men are shut up close, in small cells like
+ovens; and where others look through bars and beg; where some are
+playing draughts, and some are talking to their friends, who
+smoke, the while, to purify the air; and some are buying wine and
+fruit of women-vendors; and all are squalid, dirty, and vile to
+look at.&nbsp; &lsquo;They are merry enough, Signore,&rsquo; says
+the jailer.&nbsp; &lsquo;They are all blood-stained here,&rsquo;
+he adds, indicating, with his hand, three-fourths of the whole
+building.&nbsp; Before the hour is out, an old man, eighty years
+of age, quarrelling over a bargain with a young girl of
+seventeen, stabs her dead, in the market-place full of bright
+flowers; and is brought in prisoner, to swell the number.</p>
+<p>Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte
+Vecchio&mdash;that bridge which is covered with the shops of
+Jewellers and Goldsmiths&mdash;is a most enchanting feature in
+the scene.&nbsp; The space of one house, in the centre, being
+left open, the view beyond is shown as in a frame; and that
+precious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings, shining
+so quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge, is
+exquisite.&nbsp; Above it, the Gallery of the Grand Duke crosses
+the river.&nbsp; It was built to connect the two Great Palaces by
+a secret passage; and it takes its jealous course among the
+streets and houses, with true despotism: going where it lists,
+and spurning every obstacle away, before it.</p>
+<p>The Grand Duke has a worthier secret passage through the
+streets, in his black robe and hood, as a member of the Compagnia
+della Misericordia, which brotherhood includes all ranks of
+men.&nbsp; If an accident take place, their office is, to raise
+the sufferer, and bear him tenderly to the Hospital.&nbsp; If a
+fire break out, it is one of their functions to repair to the
+spot, and render their assistance and protection.&nbsp; It is,
+also, among their commonest offices, to attend and console the
+sick; and they neither receive money, nor eat, nor drink, in any
+house they visit for this purpose.&nbsp; Those who are on duty
+for the time, are all called together, on a moment&rsquo;s
+notice, by the tolling of the great bell of the Tower; and it is
+said that the Grand Duke has been seen, at this sound, to rise
+from his seat at table, and quietly withdraw to attend the
+summons.</p>
+<p>In this other large Piazza, where an irregular kind of market
+is held, and stores of old iron and other small merchandise are
+set out on stalls, or scattered on the pavement, are grouped
+together, the Cathedral with its great Dome, the beautiful
+Italian Gothic Tower the Campanile, and the Baptistery with its
+wrought bronze doors.&nbsp; And here, a small untrodden square in
+the pavement, is &lsquo;the Stone of <span
+class="smcap">Dante</span>,&rsquo; where (so runs the story) he
+was used to bring his stool, and sit in contemplation.&nbsp; I
+wonder was he ever, in his bitter exile, withheld from cursing
+the very stones in the streets of Florence the ungrateful, by any
+kind remembrance of this old musing-place, and its association
+with gentle thoughts of little Beatrice!</p>
+<p>The chapel of the Medici, the Good and Bad Angels, of
+Florence; the church of Santa Croce where Michael Angelo lies
+buried, and where every stone in the cloisters is eloquent on
+great men&rsquo;s deaths; innumerable churches, often masses of
+unfinished heavy brickwork externally, but solemn and serene
+within; arrest our lingering steps, in strolling through the
+city.</p>
+<p>In keeping with the tombs among the cloisters, is the Museum
+of Natural History, famous through the world for its preparations
+in wax; beginning with models of leaves, seeds, plants, inferior
+animals; and gradually ascending, through separate organs of the
+human frame, up to the whole structure of that wonderful
+creation, exquisitely presented, as in recent death.&nbsp; Few
+admonitions of our frail mortality can be more solemn and more
+sad, or strike so home upon the heart, as the counterfeits of
+Youth and Beauty that are lying there, upon their beds, in their
+last sleep.</p>
+<p>Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the
+convent at Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, <span
+class="smcap">Boccaccio&rsquo;s</span> house, old villas and
+retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glowing in a
+landscape of surpassing beauty steeped in the richest light; are
+spread before us.&nbsp; Returning from so much brightness, how
+solemn and how grand the streets again, with their great, dark,
+mournful palaces, and many legends: not of siege, and war, and
+might, and Iron Hand alone, but of the triumphant growth of
+peaceful Arts and Sciences.</p>
+<p>What light is shed upon the world, at this day, from amidst
+these rugged Palaces of Florence!&nbsp; Here, open to all comers,
+in their beautiful and calm retreats, the ancient Sculptors are
+immortal, side by side with Michael Angelo, Canova, Titian,
+Rembrandt, Raphael, Poets, Historians, Philosophers&mdash;those
+illustrious men of history, beside whom its crowned heads and
+harnessed warriors show so poor and small, and are so soon
+forgotten.&nbsp; Here, the imperishable part of noble minds
+survives, placid and equal, when strongholds of assault and
+defence are overthrown; when the tyranny of the many, or the few,
+or both, is but a tale; when Pride and Power are so much
+cloistered dust.&nbsp; The fire within the stern streets, and
+among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled by rays from
+Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flickering of war is
+extinguished and the household fires of generations have decayed;
+as thousands upon thousands of faces, rigid with the strife and
+passion of the hour, have faded out of the old Squares and public
+haunts, while the nameless Florentine Lady, preserved from
+oblivion by a Painter&rsquo;s hand, yet lives on, in enduring
+grace and youth.</p>
+<p>Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its
+shining Dome is seen no more, go travelling through cheerful
+Tuscany, with a bright remembrance of it; for Italy will be the
+fairer for the recollection.&nbsp; The summer-time being come:
+and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como lying far behind us:
+and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village, near the awful rocks
+and mountains, the everlasting snows and roaring cataracts, of
+the Great Saint Gothard: hearing the Italian tongue for the last
+time on this journey: let us part from Italy, with all its
+miseries and wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the
+beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to
+overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people, naturally
+well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tempered.&nbsp; Years of
+neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change
+their nature and reduce their spirit; miserable jealousies,
+fomented by petty Princes to whom union was destruction, and
+division strength, have been a canker at their root of
+nationality, and have barbarized their language; but the good
+that was in them ever, is in them yet, and a noble people may be,
+one day, raised up from these ashes.&nbsp; Let us entertain that
+hope!&nbsp; And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully,
+because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every stone
+of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the
+lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the
+world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more
+forbearing, and more hopeful, as it rolls!</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">THE END</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">PRINTED
+BY</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS,
+LIMITED,</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">LONDON AND BECCLES.</span></p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1"
+class="footnote">[1]</a>&nbsp; This Project Gutenberg eText
+contains just <i>Pictures from Italy</i>.&nbsp; <i>American
+Notes</i> is also available from Project Gutenberg as a separate
+eText.&mdash;DP.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote216"></a><a href="#citation216"
+class="footnote">[216]</a>&nbsp; This was written in 1846.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote272"></a><a href="#citation272"
+class="footnote">[272]</a>&nbsp; A far more liberal and just
+recognition of the public has arisen in Westminster Abbey since
+this was written.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES FROM ITALY***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
+***** This file should be named 650-h.htm or 650-h.zip******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/6/5/650
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
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+</html>
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+eBook #650 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/650)
diff --git a/old/picit10.txt b/old/picit10.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens
+(#7 in our series by Charles Dickens)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Pictures from Italy
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+Release Date: September, 1996  [EBook #650]
+[This file was first posted on September 17, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PICTURES FROM ITALY ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman & Hall, Ltd. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+PICTURES FROM ITALY
+
+
+
+
+
+THE READER'S PASSPORT
+
+
+
+If the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their
+credentials for the different places which are the subject of its
+author's reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may
+visit them, in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better
+understanding of what they are to expect.
+
+Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of
+studying the history of that interesting country, and the
+innumerable associations entwined about it.  I make but little
+reference to that stock of information; not at all regarding it as
+a necessary consequence of my having had recourse to the storehouse
+for my own benefit, that I should reproduce its easily accessible
+contents before the eyes of my readers.
+
+Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave examination
+into the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country.
+No visitor of that beautiful land can fail to have a strong
+conviction on the subject; but as I chose when residing there, a
+Foreigner, to abstain from the discussion of any such questions
+with any order of Italians, so I would rather not enter on the
+inquiry now.  During my twelve months' occupation of a house at
+Genoa, I never found that authorities constitutionally jealous were
+distrustful of me; and I should be sorry to give them occasion to
+regret their free courtesy, either to myself or any of my
+countrymen.
+
+There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy,
+but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper
+devoted to dissertations on it.  I do not, therefore, though an
+earnest admirer of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length
+on famous Pictures and Statues.
+
+This Book is a series of faint reflections--mere shadows in the
+water--of places to which the imaginations of most people are
+attracted in a greater or less degree, on which mine had dwelt for
+years, and which have some interest for all.  The greater part of
+the descriptions were written on the spot, and sent home, from time
+to time, in private letters.  I do not mention the circumstance as
+an excuse for any defects they may present, for it would be none;
+but as a guarantee to the Reader that they were at least penned in
+the fulness of the subject, and with the liveliest impressions of
+novelty and freshness.
+
+If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader will
+suppose them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the midst of
+the objects of which they treat, and will like them none the worse
+for having such influences of the country upon them.
+
+I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of the
+Roman Catholic faith, on account of anything contained in these
+pages.  I have done my best, in one of my former productions, to do
+justice to them; and I trust, in this, they will do justice to me.
+When I mention any exhibition that impressed me as absurd or
+disagreeable, I do not seek to connect it, or recognise it as
+necessarily connected with, any essentials of their creed.  When I
+treat of the ceremonies of the Holy Week, I merely treat of their
+effect, and do not challenge the good and learned Dr. Wiseman's
+interpretation of their meaning.  When I hint a dislike of
+nunneries for young girls who abjure the world before they have
+ever proved or known it; or doubt the ex officio sanctity of all
+Priests and Friars; I do no more than many conscientious Catholics
+both abroad and at home.
+
+I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and would
+fain hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to
+mar the shadows.  I could never desire to be on better terms with
+all my friends than now, when distant mountains rise, once more, in
+my path.  For I need not hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting
+a brief mistake I made, not long ago, in disturbing the old
+relations between myself and my readers, and departing for a moment
+from my old pursuits, I am about to resume them, joyfully, in
+Switzerland; where during another year of absence, I can at once
+work out the themes I have now in my mind, without interruption:
+and while I keep my English audience within speaking distance,
+extend my knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly attractive to
+me. {1}
+
+This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would be a
+great pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to compare
+impressions with some among the multitudes who will hereafter visit
+the scenes described with interest and delight.
+
+And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my reader's
+portrait, which I hope may be thus supposititiously traced for
+either sex:
+
+Complexion           Fair.
+Eyes                 Very cheerful.
+Nose                 Not supercilious.
+Mouth                Smiling.
+Visage               Beaming.
+General Expression   Extremely agreeable.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--GOING THROUGH FRANCE
+
+
+
+On a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of
+eighteen hundred and forty-four, it was, my good friend, when--
+don't be alarmed; not when two travellers might have been observed
+slowly making their way over that picturesque and broken ground by
+which the first chapter of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained-
+-but when an English travelling-carriage of considerable
+proportions, fresh from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon near
+Belgrave Square, London, was observed (by a very small French
+soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the gate of the
+Hotel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.
+
+I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by
+this carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a
+Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a
+reason for all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the
+big men postilions; which is the invariable rule.  But, they had
+some sort of reason for what they did, I have no doubt; and their
+reason for being there at all, was, as you know, that they were
+going to live in fair Genoa for a year; and that the head of the
+family purposed, in that space of time, to stroll about, wherever
+his restless humour carried him.
+
+And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the
+population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and
+not the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat beside me in the
+person of a French Courier--best of servants and most beaming of
+men!  Truth to say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I,
+who, in the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no
+account at all.
+
+There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris--as we
+rattled near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf--to reproach
+us for our Sunday travelling.  The wine-shops (every second house)
+were driving a roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs
+and tables arranging, outside the cafes, preparatory to the eating
+of ices, and drinking of cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-
+blacks were busy on the bridges; shops were open; carts and waggons
+clattered to and fro; the narrow, up-hill, funnel-like streets
+across the River, were so many dense perspectives of crowd and
+bustle, parti-coloured nightcaps, tobacco-pipes, blouses, large
+boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at that hour denoted a day
+of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family
+pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab; or of some
+contemplative holiday-maker in the freest and easiest dishabille,
+leaning out of a low garret window, watching the drying of his
+newly polished shoes on the little parapet outside (if a
+gentleman), or the airing of her stockings in the sun (if a lady),
+with calm anticipation.
+
+Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which
+surrounds Paris, the first three days of travelling towards
+Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough.  To Sens.  To Avallon.
+To Chalons.  A sketch of one day's proceedings is a sketch of all
+three; and here it is.
+
+We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very long whip,
+and drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint
+Petersburgh in the circle at Astley's or Franconi's:  only he sits
+his own horse instead of standing on him.  The immense jack-boots
+worn by these postilions, are sometimes a century or two old; and
+are so ludicrously disproportionate to the wearer's foot, that the
+spur, which is put where his own heel comes, is generally halfway
+up the leg of the boots.  The man often comes out of the stable-
+yard, with his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out,
+in both hands, one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by
+the side of his horse, with great gravity, until everything is
+ready.  When it is--and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it!--
+he gets into the boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a
+couple of friends; adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the
+labours of innumerable pigeons in the stables; makes all the horses
+kick and plunge; cracks his whip like a madman; shouts 'En route--
+Hi!' and away we go.  He is sure to have a contest with his horse
+before we have gone very far; and then he calls him a Thief, and a
+Brigand, and a Pig, and what not; and beats him about the head as
+if he were made of wood.
+
+There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the
+country, for the first two days.  From a dreary plain, to an
+interminable avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary
+plain again.  Plenty of vines there are in the open fields, but of
+a short low kind, and not trained in festoons, but about straight
+sticks.  Beggars innumerable there are, everywhere; but an
+extraordinarily scanty population, and fewer children than I ever
+encountered.  I don't believe we saw a hundred children between
+Paris and Chalons.  Queer old towns, draw-bridged and walled:  with
+odd little towers at the angles, like grotesque faces, as if the
+wall had put a mask on, and were staring down into the moat; other
+strange little towers, in gardens and fields, and down lanes, and
+in farm-yards:  all alone, and always round, with a peaked roof,
+and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings of all
+sorts; sometimes an hotel de ville, sometimes a guard-house,
+sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a chateau with a rank garden,
+prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped
+turrets, and blink-eyed little casements; are the standard objects,
+repeated over and over again.  Sometimes we pass a village inn,
+with a crumbling wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of out-
+houses; and painted over the gateway, 'Stabling for Sixty Horses;'
+as indeed there might be stabling for sixty score, were there any
+horses to be stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything
+stirring about the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the
+wine inside:  which flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with
+everything else, and certainly is never in a green old age, though
+always so old as to be dropping to pieces.  And all day long,
+strange little narrow waggons, in strings of six or eight, bringing
+cheese from Switzerland, and frequently in charge, the whole line,
+of one man, or even boy--and he very often asleep in the foremost
+cart--come jingling past:  the horses drowsily ringing the bells
+upon their harness, and looking as if they thought (no doubt they
+do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense weight and
+thickness, with a pair of grotesque horns growing out of the
+collar, very much too warm for the Midsummer weather.
+
+Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty
+outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white
+nightcaps; and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking,
+like an idiot's head; and its Young-France passengers staring out
+of window, with beards down to their waists, and blue spectacles
+awfully shading their warlike eyes, and very big sticks clenched in
+their National grasp.  Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of
+passengers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out
+of sight in no time.  Steady old Cures come jolting past, now and
+then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no
+Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in
+solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging
+and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or
+representing real shepherdesses with their flocks--to obtain an
+adequate idea of which pursuit and its followers, in any country,
+it is only necessary to take any pastoral poem, or picture, and
+imagine to yourself whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike
+the descriptions therein contained.
+
+You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally
+do in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the
+horses--twenty-four apiece--have been ringing sleepily in your ears
+for half an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot,
+monotonous, tiresome sort of business; and you have been thinking
+deeply about the dinner you will have at the next stage; when, down
+at the end of the long avenue of trees through which you are
+travelling, the first indication of a town appears, in the shape of
+some straggling cottages:  and the carriage begins to rattle and
+roll over a horribly uneven pavement.  As if the equipage were a
+great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking cottage chimney had
+lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and splutter, as if the
+very devil were in it.  Crack, crack, crack, crack.  Crack-crack-
+crack.  Crick-crack.  Crick-crack.  Helo!  Hola!  Vite!  Voleur!
+Brigand!  Hi hi hi!  En r-r-r-r-r-route!  Whip, wheels, driver,
+stones, beggars, children, crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charite
+pour l'amour de Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick;
+bump, jolt, crack, bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the
+narrow street, down the paved hill on the other side; in the
+gutter; bump, bump; jolt, jog, crick, crick, crick; crack, crack,
+crack; into the shop-windows on the left-hand side of the street,
+preliminary to a sweeping turn into the wooden archway on the
+right; rumble, rumble, rumble; clatter, clatter, clatter; crick,
+crick, crick; and here we are in the yard of the Hotel de l'Ecu
+d'Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted; but sometimes
+making a false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming of it--like
+a firework to the last!
+
+The landlady of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and the landlord
+of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and the femme de chambre of the
+Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with
+a red beard like a bosom friend, who is staying at the Hotel de
+l'Ecu d'Or, is here; and Monsieur le Cure is walking up and down in
+a corner of the yard by himself, with a shovel hat upon his head,
+and a black gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an
+umbrella in the other; and everybody, except Monsieur le Cure, is
+open-mouthed and open-eyed, for the opening of the carriage-door.
+The landlord of the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or, dotes to that extent upon
+the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his coming down from the
+box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends.  'My
+Courier!  My brave Courier!  My friend!  My brother!'  The landlady
+loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the garcon worships
+him.  The Courier asks if his letter has been received?  It has, it
+has.  Are the rooms prepared?  They are, they are.  The best rooms
+for my noble Courier.  The rooms of state for my gallant Courier;
+the whole house is at the service of my best of friends!  He keeps
+his hand upon the carriage-door, and asks some other question to
+enhance the expectation.  He carries a green leathern purse outside
+his coat, suspended by a belt.  The idlers look at it; one touches
+it.  It is full of five-franc pieces.  Murmurs of admiration are
+heard among the boys.  The landlord falls upon the Courier's neck,
+and folds him to his breast.  He is so much fatter than he was, he
+says!  He looks so rosy and so well!
+
+The door is opened.  Breathless expectation.  The lady of the
+family gets out.  Ah sweet lady!  Beautiful lady!  The sister of
+the lady of the family gets out.  Great Heaven, Ma'amselle is
+charming!  First little boy gets out.  Ah, what a beautiful little
+boy!  First little girl gets out.  Oh, but this is an enchanting
+child!  Second little girl gets out.  The landlady, yielding to the
+finest impulse of our common nature, catches her up in her arms!
+Second little boy gets out.  Oh, the sweet boy!  Oh, the tender
+little family!  The baby is handed out.  Angelic baby!  The baby
+has topped everything.  All the rapture is expended on the baby!
+Then the two nurses tumble out; and the enthusiasm swelling into
+madness, the whole family are swept up-stairs as on a cloud; while
+the idlers press about the carriage, and look into it, and walk
+round it, and touch it.  For it is something to touch a carriage
+that has held so many people.  It is a legacy to leave one's
+children.
+
+The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the night,
+which is a great rambling chamber, with four or five beds in it:
+through a dark passage, up two steps, down four, past a pump,
+across a balcony, and next door to the stable.  The other sleeping
+apartments are large and lofty; each with two small bedsteads,
+tastefully hung, like the windows, with red and white drapery.  The
+sitting-room is famous.  Dinner is already laid in it for three;
+and the napkins are folded in cocked-hat fashion.  The floors are
+of red tile.  There are no carpets, and not much furniture to speak
+of; but there is abundance of looking-glass, and there are large
+vases under glass shades, filled with artificial flowers; and there
+are plenty of clocks.  The whole party are in motion.  The brave
+Courier, in particular, is everywhere:  looking after the beds,
+having wine poured down his throat by his dear brother the
+landlord, and picking up green cucumbers--always cucumbers; Heaven
+knows where he gets them--with which he walks about, one in each
+hand, like truncheons.
+
+Dinner is announced.  There is very thin soup; there are very large
+loaves--one apiece; a fish; four dishes afterwards; some poultry
+afterwards; a dessert afterwards; and no lack of wine.  There is
+not much in the dishes; but they are very good, and always ready
+instantly.  When it is nearly dark, the brave Courier, having eaten
+the two cucumbers, sliced up in the contents of a pretty large
+decanter of oil, and another of vinegar, emerges from his retreat
+below, and proposes a visit to the Cathedral, whose massive tower
+frowns down upon the court-yard of the inn.  Off we go; and very
+solemn and grand it is, in the dim light:  so dim at last, that the
+polite, old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan has a feeble little bit of
+candle in his hand, to grope among the tombs with--and looks among
+the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who is searching for his
+own.
+
+Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants of
+the inn are supping in the open air, at a great table; the dish, a
+stew of meat and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in the iron
+cauldron it was boiled in.  They have a pitcher of thin wine, and
+are very merry; merrier than the gentleman with the red beard, who
+is playing billiards in the light room on the left of the yard,
+where shadows, with cues in their hands, and cigars in their
+mouths, cross and recross the window, constantly.  Still the thin
+Cure walks up and down alone, with his book and umbrella.  And
+there he walks, and there the billiard-balls rattle, long after we
+are fast asleep.
+
+We are astir at six next morning.  It is a delightful day, shaming
+yesterday's mud upon the carriage, if anything could shame a
+carriage, in a land where carriages are never cleaned.  Everybody
+is brisk; and as we finish breakfast, the horses come jingling into
+the yard from the Post-house.  Everything taken out of the carriage
+is put back again.  The brave Courier announces that all is ready,
+after walking into every room, and looking all round it, to be
+certain that nothing is left behind.  Everybody gets in.  Everybody
+connected with the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is again enchanted.  The
+brave Courier runs into the house for a parcel containing cold
+fowl, sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands it into the
+coach; and runs back again.
+
+What has he got in his hand now?  More cucumbers?  No.  A long
+strip of paper.  It's the bill.
+
+The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning:  one supporting
+the purse:  another, a mighty good sort of leathern bottle, filled
+to the throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in the house.  He
+never pays the bill till this bottle is full.  Then he disputes it.
+
+He disputes it now, violently.  He is still the landlord's brother,
+but by another father or mother.  He is not so nearly related to
+him as he was last night.  The landlord scratches his head.  The
+brave Courier points to certain figures in the bill, and intimates
+that if they remain there, the Hotel de l'Ecu d'Or is thenceforth
+and for ever an hotel de l'Ecu de cuivre.  The landlord goes into a
+little counting-house.  The brave Courier follows, forces the bill
+and a pen into his hand, and talks more rapidly than ever.  The
+landlord takes the pen.  The Courier smiles.  The landlord makes an
+alteration.  The Courier cuts a joke.  The landlord is
+affectionate, but not weakly so.  He bears it like a man.  He
+shakes hands with his brave brother, but he don't hug him.  Still,
+he loves his brother; for he knows that he will be returning that
+way, one of these fine days, with another family, and he foresees
+that his heart will yearn towards him again.  The brave Courier
+traverses all round the carriage once, looks at the drag, inspects
+the wheels, jumps up, gives the word, and away we go!
+
+It is market morning.  The market is held in the little square
+outside in front of the cathedral.  It is crowded with men and
+women, in blue, in red, in green, in white; with canvassed stalls;
+and fluttering merchandise.  The country people are grouped about,
+with their clean baskets before them.  Here, the lace-sellers;
+there, the butter and egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there,
+the shoe-makers.  The whole place looks as if it were the stage of
+some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a
+picturesque ballet.  And there is the cathedral to boot:  scene-
+like:  all grim, and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold:  just
+splashing the pavement in one place with faint purple drops, as the
+morning sun, entering by a little window on the eastern side,
+struggles through some stained glass panes, on the western.
+
+In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
+kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and
+are again upon the road.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON
+
+
+
+Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the
+bank of the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and
+red paint, that come and go upon it:  which make up a pleasant and
+refreshing scene, after the dusty roads.  But, unless you would
+like to dwell on an enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular
+poplars on it, that look in the distance like so many combs with
+broken teeth:  and unless you would like to pass your life without
+the possibility of going up-hill, or going up anything but stairs:
+you would hardly approve of Chalons as a place of residence.
+
+You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons:  which you
+may reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats,
+in eight hours.
+
+What a city Lyons is!  Talk about people feeling, at certain
+unlucky times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds!  Here is a
+whole town that is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been
+first caught up, like other stones that tumble down from that
+region, out of fens and barren places, dismal to behold!  The two
+great streets through which the two great rivers dash, and all the
+little streets whose name is Legion, were scorching, blistering,
+and sweltering.  The houses, high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten
+as old cheeses, and as thickly peopled.  All up the hills that hem
+the city in, these houses swarm; and the mites inside were lolling
+out of the windows, and drying their ragged clothes on poles, and
+crawling in and out at the doors, and coming out to pant and gasp
+upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among huge piles and
+bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or rather not
+dying till their time should come, in an exhausted receiver.  Every
+manufacturing town, melted into one, would hardly convey an
+impression of Lyons as it presented itself to me:  for all the
+undrained, unscavengered qualities of a foreign town, seemed
+grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a manufacturing one;
+and it bears such fruit as I would go some miles out of my way to
+avoid encountering again.
+
+In the cool of the evening:  or rather in the faded heat of the
+day:  we went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a
+few dogs, were engaged in contemplation.  There was no difference,
+in point of cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the
+streets; and there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth
+aboard ship, with a glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would
+have nothing to say to, on any terms, and which even Westminster
+Abbey might be ashamed of.  If you would know all about the
+architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions,
+endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr. Murray's Guide-
+Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did!
+
+For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock
+in Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in
+connection with that piece of mechanism.  The keeper of the church
+was very anxious it should be shown; partly for the honour of the
+establishment and the town; and partly, perhaps, because of his
+deriving a percentage from the additional consideration.  However
+that may be, it was set in motion, and thereupon a host of little
+doors flew open, and innumerable little figures staggered out of
+them, and jerked themselves back again, with that special
+unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in the gait, which usually
+attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work.  Meanwhile, the
+Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and pointing them out,
+severally, with a wand.  There was a centre puppet of the Virgin
+Mary; and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which another
+and a very ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I
+ever saw accomplished:  instantly flopping back again at sight of
+her, and banging his little door violently after him.  Taking this
+to be emblematic of the victory over Sin and Death, and not at all
+unwilling to show that I perfectly understood the subject, in
+anticipation of the showman, I rashly said, 'Aha!  The Evil Spirit.
+To be sure.  He is very soon disposed of.'  'Pardon, Monsieur,'
+said the Sacristan, with a polite motion of his hand towards the
+little door, as if introducing somebody--'The Angel Gabriel!'
+
+Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down the Arrowy
+Rhone, at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel
+full of merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers
+for our companions:  among whom, the most remarkable was a silly,
+old, meek-faced, garlic-eating, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with
+a dirty scrap of red ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he
+had tied it there to remind himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in
+the farce, ties knots in his pocket-handkerchief.
+
+For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the first
+indications of the Alps, lowering in the distance.  Now, we were
+rushing on beside them:  sometimes close beside them:  sometimes
+with an intervening slope, covered with vineyards.  Villages and
+small towns hanging in mid-air, with great woods of olives seen
+through the light open towers of their churches, and clouds moving
+slowly on, upon the steep acclivity behind them; ruined castles
+perched on every eminence; and scattered houses in the clefts and
+gullies of the hills; made it very beautiful.  The great height of
+these, too, making the buildings look so tiny, that they had all
+the charm of elegant models; their excessive whiteness, as
+contrasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy
+green of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of
+the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture.
+There were ferries out of number, too; bridges; the famous Pont
+d'Esprit, with I don't know how many arches; towns where memorable
+wines are made; Vallence, where Napoleon studied; and the noble
+river, bringing at every winding turn, new beauties into view.
+
+There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of
+Avignon, and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an under-
+done-pie-crust, battlemented wall, that never will be brown, though
+it bake for centuries.
+
+The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the
+brilliant Oleander was in full bloom everywhere.  The streets are
+old and very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings
+stretched from house to house.  Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs,
+curiosities, ancient frames of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly
+tables, saints, virgins, angels, and staring daubs of portraits,
+being exposed for sale beneath, it was very quaint and lively.  All
+this was much set off, too, by the glimpses one caught, through a
+rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet sleepy court-yards, having
+stately old houses within, as silent as tombs.  It was all very
+like one of the descriptions in the Arabian Nights.  The three one-
+eyed Calenders might have knocked at any one of those doors till
+the street rang again, and the porter who persisted in asking
+questions--the man who had the delicious purchases put into his
+basket in the morning--might have opened it quite naturally.
+
+After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the lions.
+Such a delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north, as made the
+walk delightful:  though the pavement-stones, and stones of the
+walls and houses, were far too hot to have a hand laid on them
+comfortably.
+
+We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral:  where
+Mass was performing to an auditory very like that of Lyons, namely,
+several old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog, who had
+marked out for himself a little course or platform for exercise,
+beginning at the altar-rails and ending at the door, up and down
+which constitutional walk he trotted, during the service, as
+methodically and calmly, as any old gentleman out of doors.
+
+It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are sadly
+defaced by time and damp weather; but the sun was shining in,
+splendidly, through the red curtains of the windows, and glittering
+on the altar furniture; and it looked as bright and cheerful as
+need be.
+
+Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was being
+executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to
+observe more closely than I might otherwise have done, a great
+number of votive offerings with which the walls of the different
+chapels were profusely hung.  I will not say decorated, for they
+were very roughly and comically got up; most likely by poor sign-
+painters, who eke out their living in that way.  They were all
+little pictures:  each representing some sickness or calamity from
+which the person placing it there, had escaped, through the
+interposition of his or her patron saint, or of the Madonna; and I
+may refer to them as good specimens of the class generally.  They
+are abundant in Italy.
+
+In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of
+perspective, they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but
+they were oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the
+Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours.  In one, a
+lady was having a toe amputated--an operation which a saintly
+personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to superintend.
+In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim,
+and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on
+it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of
+furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber.  One would never
+have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the
+inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had
+not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in
+one corner, with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor,
+like boot-trees.  Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan,
+promised to restore the patient.  In another case, a lady was in
+the very act of being run over, immediately outside the city walls,
+by a sort of piano-forte van.  But the Madonna was there again.
+Whether the supernatural appearance had startled the horse (a bay
+griffin), or whether it was invisible to him, I don't know; but he
+was galloping away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or
+compunction.  On every picture 'Ex voto' was painted in yellow
+capitals in the sky.
+
+Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are
+evidently among the many compromises made between the false
+religion and the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could
+wish that all the other compromises were as harmless.  Gratitude
+and Devotion are Christian qualities; and a grateful, humble,
+Christian spirit may dictate the observance.
+
+Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of
+which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy
+barrack:  while gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and
+deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed
+bodies of kings.  But we neither went there, to see state rooms,
+nor soldiers' quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some
+money into a prisoners' box outside, whilst the prisoners,
+themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us
+eagerly.  We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which
+the Inquisition used to sit.
+
+A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes,--
+proof that the world hadn't conjured down the devil within her,
+though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in,--
+came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with
+some large keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we
+should go.  How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government
+Officer (concierge du palais a apostolique), and had been, for I
+don't know how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to
+princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how
+she had resided in the palace from an infant,--had been born there,
+if I recollect right,--I needn't relate.  But such a fierce,
+little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld.  She
+was alight and flaming, all the time.  Her action was violent in
+the extreme.  She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the
+purpose.  She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung
+herself into attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for
+mere emphasis:  now whispered as if the Inquisition were there
+still:  now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a
+mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the
+remains of some new horror--looking back and walking stealthily,
+and making horrible grimaces--that might alone have qualified her
+to walk up and down a sick man's counterpane, to the exclusion of
+all other figures, through a whole fever.
+
+Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle soldiers, we
+turned off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our
+admission, and locked again behind us:  and entered a narrow court,
+rendered narrower by fallen stones and heaps of rubbish; part of it
+choking up the mouth of a ruined subterranean passage, that once
+communicated (or is said to have done so) with another castle on
+the opposite bank of the river.  Close to this court-yard is a
+dungeon--we stood within it, in another minute--in the dismal tower
+des oubliettes, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by an iron
+chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out from the
+sky which now looks down into it.  A few steps brought us to the
+Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined
+for forty-eight hours after their capture, without food or drink,
+that their constancy might be shaken, even before they were
+confronted with their gloomy judges.  The day has not got in there
+yet.  They are still small cells, shut in by four unyielding,
+close, hard walls; still profoundly dark; still massively doored
+and fastened, as of old.
+
+Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a
+vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room:  once the chapel of the
+Holy Office.  The place where the tribunal sat, was plain.  The
+platform might have been removed but yesterday.  Conceive the
+parable of the Good Samaritan having been painted on the wall of
+one of these Inquisition chambers!  But it was, and may be traced
+there yet.
+
+High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering replies
+of the accused were heard and noted down.  Many of them had been
+brought out of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully;
+along the same stone passage.  We had trodden in their very
+footsteps.
+
+I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when
+Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger,
+but the handle of a key, upon her lip.  She invites me, with a
+jerk, to follow her.  I do so.  She leads me out into a room
+adjoining--a rugged room, with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof,
+open at the top, to the bright day.  I ask her what it is.  She
+folds her arms, leers hideously, and stares.  I ask again.  She
+glances round, to see that all the little company are there; sits
+down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out,
+like a fiend, 'La Salle de la Question!'
+
+The Chamber of Torture!  And the roof was made of that shape to
+stifle the victim's cries!  Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this
+awhile, in silence.  Peace, Goblin!  Sit with your short arms
+crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five
+minutes, and then flame out again.
+
+Minutes!  Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock, when, with
+her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber,
+describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows.  Thus
+it ran round! cries Goblin.  Mash, mash, mash!  An endless routine
+of heavy hammers.  Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer's limbs.
+See the stone trough! says Goblin.  For the water torture!  Gurgle,
+swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer's honour!  Suck the bloody
+rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath
+you draw!  And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the
+smaller mysteries of God's own Image, know us for His chosen
+servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect
+disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal:  who never
+struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness,
+any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed hand
+out, but to give relief and ease!
+
+See! cries Goblin.  There the furnace was.  There they made the
+irons red-hot.  Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the
+tortured persons hung poised:  dangling with their whole weight
+from the roof.  'But;' and Goblin whispers this; 'Monsieur has
+heard of this tower?  Yes?  Let Monsieur look down, then!'
+
+A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of
+Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the
+wall.  Monsieur looks in.  Downward to the bottom, upward to the
+top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower:  very dismal, very dark, very
+cold.  The Executioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in
+her head to look down also, flung those who were past all further
+torturing, down here.  'But look! does Monsieur see the black
+stains on the wall?'  A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin's keen
+eye, shows Monsieur--and would without the aid of the directing
+key--where they are.  'What are they?'  'Blood!'
+
+In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty
+persons:  men and women ('and priests,' says Goblin, 'priests'):
+were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this
+dreadful pit, where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon
+their bodies.  Those ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no
+more; but while one stone of the strong building in which the deed
+was done, remains upon another, there they will lie in the memories
+of men, as plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the
+wall is now.
+
+Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel
+deed should be committed in this place!  That a part of the
+atrocities and monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores
+of years, at work, to change men's nature, should in its last
+service, tempt them with the ready means of gratifying their
+furious and beastly rage!  Should enable them to show themselves,
+in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great, solemn, legal
+establishment, in the height of its power!  No worse!  Much better.
+They used the Tower of the Forgotten, in the name of Liberty--their
+liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the
+Bastile moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many
+evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up--but the Inquisition used
+it in the name of Heaven.
+
+Goblin's finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the
+Chapel of the Holy Office.  She stops at a certain part of the
+flooring.  Her great effect is at hand.  She waits for the rest.
+She darts at the brave Courier, who is explaining something; hits
+him a sounding rap on the hat with the largest key; and bids him be
+silent.  She assembles us all, round a little trap-door in the
+floor, as round a grave.
+
+'Voila!' she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with
+a crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light weight.
+'Voila les oubliettes!  Voila les oubliettes!  Subterranean!
+Frightful!  Black!  Terrible!  Deadly!  Les oubliettes de
+l'Inquisition!'
+
+My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults,
+where these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world
+outside:  of wives, friends, children, brothers:  starved to death,
+and made the stones ring with their unavailing groans.  But, the
+thrill I felt on seeing the accursed wall below, decayed and broken
+through, and the sun shining in through its gaping wounds, was like
+a sense of victory and triumph.  I felt exalted with the proud
+delight of living in these degenerate times, to see it.  As if I
+were the hero of some high achievement!  The light in the doleful
+vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in, on all
+persecution in God's name, but which is not yet at its noon!  It
+cannot look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight,
+than to a traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading
+down the darkness of that Infernal Well.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--AVIGNON TO GENOA
+
+
+
+Goblin, having shown les oubliettes, felt that her great coup was
+struck.  She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with
+her arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.
+
+When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the
+outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the
+building.  Her cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted by small windows,
+sunk in the thick wall--in the softened light, and with its forge-
+like chimney; its little counter by the door, with bottles, jars,
+and glasses on it; its household implements and scraps of dress
+against the wall; and a sober-looking woman (she must have a
+congenial life of it, with Goblin,) knitting at the door--looked
+exactly like a picture by OSTADE.
+
+I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and
+yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which
+the light, down in the vaults, had given me the assurance.  The
+immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous
+strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building,
+its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous
+irregularity, awaken awe and wonder.  The recollection of its
+opposite old uses:  an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a
+horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition:
+at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion,
+and blood:  gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful
+interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities.  I could
+think of little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in
+the dungeons.  The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of
+noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk, and
+common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty
+windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to rejoice
+at; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of its
+chambers of cruelty--that was its desolation and defeat!  If I had
+seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have felt that
+not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns, could
+waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its
+prisons.
+
+Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the
+little history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite
+appropriate to itself, connected with its adventures.
+
+'An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de
+Lude, the Pope's legate, seriously insulted some distinguished
+ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young
+man, and horribly mutilated him.  For several years the legate kept
+HIS revenge within his own breast, but he was not the less resolved
+upon its gratification at last.  He even made, in the fulness of
+time, advances towards a complete reconciliation; and when their
+apparent sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet,
+in this palace, certain families, whole families, whom he sought to
+exterminate.  The utmost gaiety animated the repast; but the
+measures of the legate were well taken.  When the dessert was on
+the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the announcement that a
+strange ambassador solicited an extraordinary audience.  The
+legate, excusing himself, for the moment, to his guests, retired,
+followed by his officers.  Within a few minutes afterwards, five
+hundred persons were reduced to ashes:  the whole of that wing of
+the building having been blown into the air with a terrible
+explosion!'
+
+After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches
+just now), we left Avignon that afternoon.  The heat being very
+great, the roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast
+asleep in every little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half
+asleep and half awake, who were waiting until the sun should be low
+enough to admit of their playing bowls among the burnt-up trees,
+and on the dusty road.  The harvest here was already gathered in,
+and mules and horses were treading out the corn in the fields.  We
+came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly country, once famous for
+brigands; and travelled slowly up a steep ascent.  So we went on,
+until eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within
+two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.
+
+The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the
+light and heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and the
+town was very clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when
+I walked out at noon it was like coming suddenly from the darkened
+room into crisp blue fire.  The air was so very clear, that distant
+hills and rocky points appeared within an hour's walk; while the
+town immediately at hand--with a kind of blue wind between me and
+it--seemed to be white hot, and to be throwing off a fiery air from
+the surface.
+
+We left this town towards evening, and took the road to Marseilles.
+A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines
+powdered white.  At nearly all the cottage doors, women were
+peeling and slicing onions into earthen bowls for supper.  So they
+had been doing last night all the way from Avignon.  We passed one
+or two shady dark chateaux, surrounded by trees, and embellished
+with cool basins of water:  which were the more refreshing to
+behold, from the great scarcity of such residences on the road we
+had travelled.  As we approached Marseilles, the road began to be
+covered with holiday people.  Outside the public-houses were
+parties smoking, drinking, playing draughts and cards, and (once)
+dancing.  But dust, dust, dust, everywhere.  We went on, through a
+long, straggling, dirty suburb, thronged with people; having on our
+left a dreary slope of land, on which the country-houses of the
+Marseilles merchants, always staring white, are jumbled and heaped
+without the slightest order:  backs, fronts, sides, and gables
+towards all points of the compass; until, at last, we entered the
+town.
+
+I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and foul;
+and I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and
+disagreeable place.  But the prospect, from the fortified heights,
+of the beautiful Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks and islands,
+is most delightful.  These heights are a desirable retreat, for
+less picturesque reasons--as an escape from a compound of vile
+smells perpetually arising from a great harbour full of stagnant
+water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable ships with all
+sorts of cargoes:  which, in hot weather, is dreadful in the last
+degree.
+
+There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with
+red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of
+orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards,
+and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and
+Neapolitan head-dresses.  There were the townspeople sitting in
+clusters on the pavement, or airing themselves on the tops of their
+houses, or walking up and down the closest and least airy of
+Boulevards; and there were crowds of fierce-looking people of the
+lower sort, blocking up the way, constantly.  In the very heart of
+all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse; a low,
+contracted, miserable building, looking straight upon the street,
+without the smallest screen or court-yard; where chattering mad-men
+and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring
+faces below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into their
+little cells, seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if
+they were baited by a pack of dogs.
+
+We were pretty well accommodated at the Hotel du Paradis, situated
+in a narrow street of very high houses, with a hairdresser's shop
+opposite, exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen
+ladies, twirling round and round:  which so enchanted the
+hairdresser himself, that he and his family sat in arm-chairs, and
+in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the
+gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity.  The family had
+retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the
+hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting
+there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently
+couldn't bear to have the shutters put up.
+
+Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all
+nations were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds:
+fruits, wines, oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of
+merchandise.  Taking one of a great number of lively little boats
+with gay-striped awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns of great
+ships, under tow-ropes and cables, against and among other boats,
+and very much too near the sides of vessels that were faint with
+oranges, to the Marie Antoinette, a handsome steamer bound for
+Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbour.  By-and-by, the
+carriage, that unwieldy 'trifle from the Pantechnicon,' on a flat
+barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for a
+prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside;
+and by five o'clock we were steaming out in the open sea.  The
+vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning
+on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea
+and sky unspeakable.
+
+We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along, within a
+few miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its place) nearly
+all day.  We could see Genoa before three; and watching it as it
+gradually developed its splendid amphitheatre, terrace rising above
+terrace, garden above garden, palace above palace, height upon
+height, was ample occupation for us, till we ran into the stately
+harbour.  Having been duly astonished, here, by the sight of a few
+Cappucini monks, who were watching the fair-weighing of some wood
+upon the wharf, we drove off to Albaro, two miles distant, where we
+had engaged a house.
+
+The way lay through the main streets, but not through the Strada
+Nuova, or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets of
+palaces.  I never in my life was so dismayed!  The wonderful
+novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth
+(though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the
+disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another;
+the passages more squalid and more close than any in St. Giles's or
+old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed
+women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing;
+the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop,
+or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before;
+and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly
+confounded me.  I fell into a dismal reverie.  I am conscious of a
+feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins' shrines at
+the street corners--of great numbers of friars, monks, and
+soldiers--of vast red curtains, waving in the doorways of the
+churches--of always going up hill, and yet seeing every other
+street and passage going higher up--of fruit-stalls, with fresh
+lemons and oranges hanging in garlands made of vine-leaves--of a
+guard-house, and a drawbridge--and some gateways--and vendors of
+iced water, sitting with little trays upon the margin of the
+kennel--and this is all the consciousness I had, until I was set
+down in a rank, dull, weedy court-yard, attached to a kind of pink
+jail; and was told I lived there.
+
+I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an
+attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look
+back upon the city with affection as connected with many hours of
+happiness and quiet!  But these are my first impressions honestly
+set down; and how they changed, I will set down too.  At present,
+let us breathe after this long-winded journey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
+
+
+
+The first impressions of such a place as ALBARO, the suburb of
+Genoa, where I am now, as my American friends would say, 'located,'
+can hardly fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and
+disappointing.  It requires a little time and use to overcome the
+feeling of depression consequent, at first, on so much ruin and
+neglect.  Novelty, pleasant to most people, is particularly
+delightful, I think, to me.  I am not easily dispirited when I have
+the means of pursuing my own fancies and occupations; and I believe
+I have some natural aptitude for accommodating myself to
+circumstances.  But, as yet, I stroll about here, in all the holes
+and corners of the neighbourhood, in a perpetual state of forlorn
+surprise; and returning to my villa:  the Villa Bagnerello (it
+sounds romantic, but Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by):  have
+sufficient occupation in pondering over my new experiences, and
+comparing them, very much to my own amusement, with my
+expectations, until I wander out again.
+
+The Villa Bagnerello:  or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name
+for the mansion:  is in one of the most splendid situations
+imaginable.  The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue
+Mediterranean, lies stretched out near at hand; monstrous old
+desolate houses and palaces are dotted all about; lofty hills, with
+their tops often hidden in the clouds, and with strong forts
+perched high up on their craggy sides, are close upon the left; and
+in front, stretching from the walls of the house, down to a ruined
+chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks on the sea-
+shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day long in
+partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained on a
+rough trellis-work across the narrow paths.
+
+This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow, that
+when we arrived at the Custom-house, we found the people here had
+TAKEN THE MEASURE of the narrowest among them, and were waiting to
+apply it to the carriage; which ceremony was gravely performed in
+the street, while we all stood by in breathless suspense.  It was
+found to be a very tight fit, but just a possibility, and no more--
+as I am reminded every day, by the sight of various large holes
+which it punched in the walls on either side as it came along.  We
+are more fortunate, I am told, than an old lady, who took a house
+in these parts not long ago, and who stuck fast in HER carriage in
+a lane; and as it was impossible to open one of the doors, she was
+obliged to submit to the indignity of being hauled through one of
+the little front windows, like a harlequin.
+
+When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come to an
+archway, imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate--my gate.  The
+rusty old gate has a bell to correspond, which you ring as long as
+you like, and which nobody answers, as it has no connection
+whatever with the house.  But there is a rusty old knocker, too--
+very loose, so that it slides round when you touch it--and if you
+learn the trick of it, and knock long enough, somebody comes.  The
+brave Courier comes, and gives you admittance.  You walk into a
+seedy little garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard
+opens; cross it, enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a
+cracked marble staircase, and pass into a most enormous room with a
+vaulted roof and whitewashed walls:  not unlike a great Methodist
+chapel.  This is the sala.  It has five windows and five doors, and
+is decorated with pictures which would gladden the heart of one of
+those picture-cleaners in London who hang up, as a sign, a picture
+divided, like death and the lady, at the top of the old ballad:
+which always leaves you in a state of uncertainty whether the
+ingenious professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied the other.
+The furniture of this sala is a sort of red brocade.  All the
+chairs are immovable, and the sofa weighs several tons.
+
+On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are
+dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bedrooms:  each with a
+multiplicity of doors and windows.  Up-stairs are divers other
+gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and down-stairs is another kitchen,
+which, with all sorts of strange contrivances for burning charcoal,
+looks like an alchemical laboratory.  There are also some half-
+dozen small sitting-rooms, where the servants in this hot July, may
+escape from the heat of the fire, and where the brave Courier plays
+all sorts of musical instruments of his own manufacture, all the
+evening long.  A mighty old, wandering, ghostly, echoing, grim,
+bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought of.
+
+There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the drawing-
+room; and under this terrace, and forming one side of the little
+garden, is what used to be the stable.  It is now a cow-house, and
+has three cows in it, so that we get new milk by the bucketful.
+There is no pasturage near, and they never go out, but are
+constantly lying down, and surfeiting themselves with vine-leaves--
+perfect Italian cows enjoying the dolce far' niente all day long.
+They are presided over, and slept with, by an old man named
+Antonio, and his son; two burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and
+feet, who wear, each, a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a red sash,
+with a relic, or some sacred charm like the bonbon off a twelfth-
+cake, hanging round the neck.  The old man is very anxious to
+convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts me frequently.  We
+sit upon a stone by the door, sometimes in the evening, like
+Robinson Crusoe and Friday reversed; and he generally relates,
+towards my conversion, an abridgment of the History of Saint Peter-
+-chiefly, I believe, from the unspeakable delight he has in his
+imitation of the cock.
+
+The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you must keep
+the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and
+when the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows, or the
+mosquitoes would tempt you to commit suicide.  So at this time of
+the year, you don't see much of the prospect within doors.  As for
+the flies, you don't mind them.  Nor the fleas, whose size is
+prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-
+house to that extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going
+off bodily, drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.  The
+rats are kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean cats, who
+roam about the garden for that purpose.  The lizards, of course,
+nobody cares for; they play in the sun, and don't bite.  The little
+scorpions are merely curious.  The beetles are rather late, and
+have not appeared yet.  The frogs are company.  There is a preserve
+of them in the grounds of the next villa; and after nightfall, one
+would think that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going
+up and down a wet stone pavement without a moment's cessation.
+That is exactly the noise they make.
+
+The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was
+dedicated, once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist.  I believe
+there is a legend that Saint John's bones were received there, with
+various solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for
+Genoa possesses them to this day.  When there is any uncommon
+tempest at sea, they are brought out and exhibited to the raging
+weather, which they never fail to calm.  In consequence of this
+connection of Saint John with the city, great numbers of the common
+people are christened Giovanni Baptista, which latter name is
+pronounced in the Genoese patois 'Batcheetcha,' like a sneeze.  To
+hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha, on a Sunday, or
+festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is not a little
+singular and amusing to a stranger.
+
+The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose walls
+(outside walls, I mean) are profusely painted with all sorts of
+subjects, grim and holy.  But time and the sea-air have nearly
+obliterated them; and they look like the entrance to Vauxhall
+Gardens on a sunny day.  The court-yards of these houses are
+overgrown with grass and weeds; all sorts of hideous patches cover
+the bases of the statues, as if they were afflicted with a
+cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty; and the iron bars
+outside the lower windows are all tumbling down.  Firewood is kept
+in halls where costly treasures might be heaped up, mountains high;
+waterfalls are dry and choked; fountains, too dull to play, and too
+lazy to work, have just enough recollection of their identity, in
+their sleep, to make the neighbourhood damp; and the sirocco wind
+is often blowing over all these things for days together, like a
+gigantic oven out for a holiday.
+
+Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the VIRGIN'S
+MOTHER, when the young men of the neighbourhood, having worn green
+wreaths of the vine in some procession or other, bathed in them, by
+scores.  It looked very odd and pretty.  Though I am bound to
+confess (not knowing of the festa at that time), that I thought,
+and was quite satisfied, they wore them as horses do--to keep the
+flies off.
+
+Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St.
+Nazaro.  One of the Albaro young men brought two large bouquets
+soon after breakfast, and coming up-stairs into the great sala,
+presented them himself.  This was a polite way of begging for a
+contribution towards the expenses of some music in the Saint's
+honour, so we gave him whatever it may have been, and his messenger
+departed:  well satisfied.  At six o'clock in the evening we went
+to the church--close at hand--a very gaudy place, hung all over
+with festoons and bright draperies, and filled, from the altar to
+the main door, with women, all seated.  They wear no bonnets here,
+simply a long white veil--the 'mezzero;' and it was the most gauzy,
+ethereal-looking audience I ever saw.  The young women are not
+generally pretty, but they walk remarkably well, and in their
+personal carriage and the management of their veils, display much
+innate grace and elegance.  There were some men present:  not very
+many:  and a few of these were kneeling about the aisles, while
+everybody else tumbled over them.  Innumerable tapers were burning
+in the church; the bits of silver and tin about the saints
+(especially in the Virgin's necklace) sparkled brilliantly; the
+priests were seated about the chief altar; the organ played away,
+lustily, and a full band did the like; while a conductor, in a
+little gallery opposite to the band, hammered away on the desk
+before him, with a scroll; and a tenor, without any voice, sang.
+The band played one way, the organ played another, the singer went
+a third, and the unfortunate conductor banged and banged, and
+flourished his scroll on some principle of his own:  apparently
+well satisfied with the whole performance.  I never did hear such a
+discordant din.  The heat was intense all the time.
+
+The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their
+shoulders (they never put them on), were playing bowls, and buying
+sweetmeats, immediately outside the church.  When half-a-dozen of
+them finished a game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves
+with the holy water, knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked
+off again to play another game at bowls.  They are remarkably
+expert at this diversion, and will play in the stony lanes and
+streets, and on the most uneven and disastrous ground for such a
+purpose, with as much nicety as on a billiard-table.  But the most
+favourite game is the national one of Mora, which they pursue with
+surprising ardour, and at which they will stake everything they
+possess.  It is a destructive kind of gambling, requiring no
+accessories but the ten fingers, which are always--I intend no pun-
+-at hand.  Two men play together.  One calls a number--say the
+extreme one, ten.  He marks what portion of it he pleases by
+throwing out three, or four, or five fingers; and his adversary
+has, in the same instant, at hazard, and without seeing his hand,
+to throw out as many fingers, as will make the exact balance.
+Their eyes and hands become so used to this, and act with such
+astonishing rapidity, that an uninitiated bystander would find it
+very difficult, if not impossible, to follow the progress of the
+game.  The initiated, however, of whom there is always an eager
+group looking on, devour it with the most intense avidity; and as
+they are always ready to champion one side or the other in case of
+a dispute, and are frequently divided in their partisanship, it is
+often a very noisy proceeding.  It is never the quietest game in
+the world; for the numbers are always called in a loud sharp voice,
+and follow as close upon each other as they can be counted.  On a
+holiday evening, standing at a window, or walking in a garden, or
+passing through the streets, or sauntering in any quiet place about
+the town, you will hear this game in progress in a score of wine-
+shops at once; and looking over any vineyard walk, or turning
+almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in full cry.
+It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out some
+particular number oftener than another; and the vigilance with
+which two sharp-eyed players will mutually endeavour to detect this
+weakness, and adapt their game to it, is very curious and
+entertaining.  The effect is greatly heightened by the universal
+suddenness and vehemence of gesture; two men playing for half a
+farthing with an intensity as all-absorbing as if the stake were
+life.
+
+Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member
+of the Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits
+for their summer quarters.  I walked into its dismantled precincts
+the other evening about sunset, and couldn't help pacing up and
+down for a little time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place:
+which is repeated hereabouts in all directions.
+
+I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a
+weedy, grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third
+side, and a low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the
+neighbouring hills, the fourth.  I don't believe there was an
+uncracked stone in the whole pavement.  In the centre was a
+melancholy statue, so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly
+as if it had been covered with sticking-plaster, and afterwards
+powdered.  The stables, coach-houses, offices, were all empty, all
+ruinous, all utterly deserted.
+
+Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches;
+windows were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying
+about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-
+buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and
+eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be
+changed back again.  One old Tom in particular:  a scraggy brute,
+with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined
+to think):  came prowling round and round me, as if he half
+believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry
+the lady, and set all to-rights; but discovering his mistake, he
+suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked away with such a tremendous
+tail, that he couldn't get into the little hole where he lived, but
+was obliged to wait outside, until his indignation and his tail had
+gone down together.
+
+In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this
+colonnade, some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut;
+but the Jesuits had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and
+THAT was shut up too.  The house:  a wandering, echoing, thundering
+barrack of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was
+wide open at the door:  and I have no doubt I might have gone in,
+and gone to bed, and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser.  Only
+one suite of rooms on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of
+these, the voice of a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura
+lustily, came flaunting out upon the silent evening.
+
+I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with
+avenues, and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in
+stone basins; and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling,
+under grown or over grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of
+slabby, clammy, creeping, and uncomfortable life.  There was
+nothing bright in the whole scene but a firefly--one solitary
+firefly--showing against the dark bushes like the last little speck
+of the departed Glory of the house; and even it went flitting up
+and down at sudden angles, and leaving a place with a jerk, and
+describing an irregular circle, and returning to the same place
+with a twitch that startled one:  as if it were looking for the
+rest of the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what had
+become of it.
+
+
+In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my
+dismal entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar
+forms and substances; and I already began to think that when the
+time should come, a year hence, for closing the long holiday and
+turning back to England, I might part from Genoa with anything but
+a glad heart.
+
+It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day.  There seems to be
+always something to find out in it.  There are the most
+extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in.  You can lose
+your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times
+a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected
+and surprising difficulties.  It abounds in the strangest
+contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent,
+delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
+
+They who would know how beautiful the country immediately
+surrounding Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of
+Monte Faccio, or, at least, ride round the city walls:  a feat more
+easily performed.  No prospect can be more diversified and lovely
+than the changing views of the harbour, and the valleys of the two
+rivers, the Polcevera and the Bizagno, from the heights along which
+the strongly fortified walls are carried, like the great wall of
+China in little.  In not the least picturesque part of this ride,
+there is a fair specimen of a real Genoese tavern, where the
+visitor may derive good entertainment from real Genoese dishes,
+such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German sausages, strong of garlic,
+sliced and eaten with fresh green figs; cocks' combs and sheep-
+kidneys, chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces of
+some unknown part of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and
+served up in a great dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of
+that kind.  They often get wine at these suburban Trattorie, from
+France and Spain and Portugal, which is brought over by small
+captains in little trading-vessels.  They buy it at so much a
+bottle, without asking what it is, or caring to remember if anybody
+tells them, and usually divide it into two heaps; of which they
+label one Champagne, and the other Madeira.  The various opposite
+flavours, qualities, countries, ages, and vintages that are
+comprised under these two general heads is quite extraordinary.
+The most limited range is probably from cool Gruel up to old
+Marsala, and down again to apple Tea.
+
+The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare
+can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to
+live and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind
+of well, or breathing-place.  The houses are immensely high,
+painted in all sorts of colours, and are in every stage and state
+of damage, dirt, and lack of repair.  They are commonly let off in
+floors, or flats, like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh, or
+many houses in Paris.  There are few street doors; the entrance
+halls are, for the most part, looked upon as public property; and
+any moderately enterprising scavenger might make a fine fortune by
+now and then clearing them out.  As it is impossible for coaches to
+penetrate into these streets, there are sedan chairs, gilded and
+otherwise, for hire in divers places.  A great many private chairs
+are also kept among the nobility and gentry; and at night these are
+trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded by bearers of great
+lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame.  The sedans and
+lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings of
+patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells
+through these confined streets all day long.  They follow them, as
+regularly as the stars the sun.
+
+When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces:  the Strada Nuova and
+the Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day, when I
+first saw it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of
+summer skies:  which its narrow perspective of immense mansions,
+reduced to a tapering and most precious strip of brightness,
+looking down upon the heavy shade below!  A brightness not too
+common, even in July and August, to be well esteemed:  for, if the
+Truth must out, there were not eight blue skies in as many
+midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning; when,
+looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world of
+deep and brilliant blue.  At other times, there were clouds and
+haze enough to make an Englishman grumble in his own climate.
+
+The endless details of these rich Palaces:  the walls of some of
+them, within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke!  The great,
+heavy, stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier:
+with here and there, one larger than the rest, towering high up--a
+huge marble platform; the doorless vestibules, massively barred
+lower windows, immense public staircases, thick marble pillars,
+strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary, dreaming, echoing vaulted
+chambers:  among which the eye wanders again, and again, and again,
+as every palace is succeeded by another--the terrace gardens
+between house and house, with green arches of the vine, and groves
+of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
+thirty, forty feet above the street--the painted halls, mouldering,
+and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining
+out in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls
+are dry--the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding
+wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing
+in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than
+elsewhere, by contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more
+recently decorated portion of the front, are stretching out what
+seems to be the semblance of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial-
+-the steep, steep, up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large
+palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close
+by-ways--the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid
+passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the
+vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming
+with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people--make up,
+altogether, such a scene of wonder:  so lively, and yet so dead:
+so noisy, and yet so quiet:  so obtrusive, and yet so shy and
+lowering:  so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep:  that it is a
+sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and
+look about him.  A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the
+inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of
+an extravagant reality!
+
+The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all
+at once, is characteristic.  For instance, the English Banker (my
+excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized
+Palazzo in the Strada Nuova.  In the hall (every inch of which is
+elaborately painted, but which is as dirty as a police-station in
+London), a hook-nosed Saracen's Head with an immense quantity of
+black hair (there is a man attached to it) sells walking-sticks.
+On the other side of the doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief
+for head-dress (wife to the Saracen's Head, I believe) sells
+articles of her own knitting; and sometimes flowers.  A little
+further in, two or three blind men occasionally beg.  Sometimes,
+they are visited by a man without legs, on a little go-cart, but
+who has such a fresh-coloured, lively face, and such a respectable,
+well-conditioned body, that he looks as if he had sunk into the
+ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially, up a flight of
+cellar-steps to speak to somebody.  A little further in, a few men,
+perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they may be
+chairmen waiting for their absent freight.  If so, they have
+brought their chairs in with them, and there THEY stand also.  On
+the left of the hall is a little room:  a hatter's shop.  On the
+first floor, is the English bank.  On the first floor also, is a
+whole house, and a good large residence too.  Heaven knows what
+there may be above that; but when you are there, you have only just
+begun to go up-stairs.  And yet, coming down-stairs again, thinking
+of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the back of the
+hall, instead of turning the other way, to get into the street
+again; it bangs behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome
+echoes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house) which
+seems to have been unvisited by human foot, for a hundred years.
+Not a sound disturbs its repose.  Not a head, thrust out of any of
+the grim, dark, jealous windows, within sight, makes the weeds in
+the cracked pavement faint of heart, by suggesting the possibility
+of there being hands to grub them up.  Opposite to you, is a giant
+figure carved in stone, reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece
+of artificial rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of
+a leaden pipe, which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down
+the rocks.  But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than
+this channel is now.  He seems to have given his urn, which is
+nearly upside down, a final tilt; and after crying, like a
+sepulchral child, 'All gone!' to have lapsed into a stony silence.
+
+In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great
+size notwithstanding, and extremely high.  They are very dirty:
+quite undrained, if my nose be at all reliable:  and emit a
+peculiar fragrance, like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very
+hot blankets.  Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there
+would seem to have been a lack of room in the City, for new houses
+are thrust in everywhere.  Wherever it has been possible to cram a
+tumble-down tenement into a crack or corner, in it has gone.  If
+there be a nook or angle in the wall of a church, or a crevice in
+any other dead wall, of any sort, there you are sure to find some
+kind of habitation:  looking as if it had grown there, like a
+fungus.  Against the Government House, against the old Senate
+House, round about any large building, little shops stick so close,
+like parasite vermin to the great carcase.  And for all this, look
+where you may:  up steps, down steps, anywhere, everywhere:  there
+are irregular houses, receding, starting forward, tumbling down,
+leaning against their neighbours, crippling themselves or their
+friends by some means or other, until one, more irregular than the
+rest, chokes up the way, and you can't see any further.
+
+One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by
+the landing-wharf:  though it may be, that its being associated
+with a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has
+stamped it deeper in my mind.  Here, again, the houses are very
+high, and are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have
+(as most of the houses have) something hanging out of a great many
+windows, and wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze.
+Sometimes, it is a curtain; sometimes, it is a carpet; sometimes,
+it is a bed; sometimes, a whole line-full of clothes; but there is
+almost always something.  Before the basement of these houses, is
+an arcade over the pavement:  very massive, dark, and low, like an
+old crypt.  The stone, or plaster, of which it is made, has turned
+quite black; and against every one of these black piles, all sorts
+of filth and garbage seem to accumulate spontaneously.  Beneath
+some of the arches, the sellers of macaroni and polenta establish
+their stalls, which are by no means inviting.  The offal of a fish-
+market, near at hand--that is to say, of a back lane, where people
+sit upon the ground and on various old bulk-heads and sheds, and
+sell fish when they have any to dispose of--and of a vegetable
+market, constructed on the same principle--are contributed to the
+decoration of this quarter; and as all the mercantile business is
+transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it has a very decided
+flavour about it.  The Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods
+brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold
+and taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here
+also; and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the
+gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and
+Ladies.  For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to
+the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way:  that is to say,
+by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its
+dress.  So Sanctity and Beauty may, by no means, enter.
+
+The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of
+a few Priests of prepossessing appearance.  Every fourth or fifth
+man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure
+to be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every
+hackney carriage on the neighbouring roads.  I have no knowledge,
+elsewhere, of more repulsive countenances than are to be found
+among these gentry.  If Nature's handwriting be at all legible,
+greater varieties of sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could
+hardly be observed among any class of men in the world.
+
+MR. PEPYS once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in
+illustration of his respect for the Priestly office, that if he
+could meet a Priest and angel together, he would salute the Priest
+first.  I am rather of the opinion of PETRARCH, who, when his pupil
+BOCCACCIO wrote to him in great tribulation, that he had been
+visited and admonished for his writings by a Carthusian Friar who
+claimed to be a messenger immediately commissioned by Heaven for
+that purpose, replied, that for his own part, he would take the
+liberty of testing the reality of the commission by personal
+observation of the Messenger's face, eyes, forehead, behaviour, and
+discourse.  I cannot but believe myself, from similar observation,
+that many unaccredited celestial messengers may be seen skulking
+through the streets of Genoa, or droning away their lives in other
+Italian towns.
+
+Perhaps the Cappuccini, though not a learned body, are, as an
+order, the best friends of the people.  They seem to mingle with
+them more immediately, as their counsellors and comforters; and to
+go among them more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some
+other orders, into the secrets of families, for the purpose of
+establishing a baleful ascendency over their weaker members; and to
+be influenced by a less fierce desire to make converts, and once
+made, to let them go to ruin, soul and body.  They may be seen, in
+their coarse dress, in all parts of the town at all times, and
+begging in the markets early in the morning.  The Jesuits too,
+muster strong in the streets, and go slinking noiselessly about, in
+pairs, like black cats.
+
+In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades congregate.  There
+is a street of jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers; but
+even down in places where nobody ever can, or ever could, penetrate
+in a carriage, there are mighty old palaces shut in among the
+gloomiest and closest walls, and almost shut out from the sun.
+Very few of the tradesmen have any idea of setting forth their
+goods, or disposing them for show.  If you, a stranger, want to buy
+anything, you usually look round the shop till you see it; then
+clutch it, if it be within reach, and inquire how much.  Everything
+is sold at the most unlikely place.  If you want coffee, you go to
+a sweetmeat shop; and if you want meat, you will probably find it
+behind an old checked curtain, down half-a-dozen steps, in some
+sequestered nook as hard to find as if the commodity were poison,
+and Genoa's law were death to any that uttered it.
+
+Most of the apothecaries' shops are great lounging-places.  Here,
+grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together,
+passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking,
+drowsily and sparingly, about the News.  Two or three of these are
+poor physicians, ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and
+tear off with any messenger who may arrive.  You may know them by
+the way in which they stretch their necks to listen, when you
+enter; and by the sigh with which they fall back again into their
+dull corners, on finding that you only want medicine.  Few people
+lounge in the barbers' shops; though they are very numerous, as
+hardly any man shaves himself.  But the apothecary's has its group
+of loungers, who sit back among the bottles, with their hands
+folded over the tops of their sticks.  So still and quiet, that
+either you don't see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them--as
+I did one ghostly man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a
+stopper--for Horse Medicine.
+
+On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves,
+as their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch
+of space in and about the town.  In all the lanes and alleys, and
+up every little ascent, and on every dwarf wall, and on every
+flight of steps, they cluster like bees.  Meanwhile (and especially
+on festa-days) the bells of the churches ring incessantly; not in
+peals, or any known form of sound, but in a horrible, irregular,
+jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle:  with a sudden stop at every
+fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening.  This performance is
+usually achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes hold of the
+clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle
+louder than every other boy similarly employed.  The noise is
+supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but looking
+up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young
+Christians thus engaged, one might very naturally mistake them for
+the Enemy.
+
+Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous.  All the shops
+were shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays; and one
+night, all the houses in the neighbourhood of a particular church
+were illuminated, while the church itself was lighted, outside,
+with torches; and a grove of blazing links was erected, in an open
+space outside one of the city gates.  This part of the ceremony is
+prettier and more singular a little way in the country, where you
+can trace the illuminated cottages all the way up a steep hill-
+side; and where you pass festoons of tapers, wasting away in the
+starlight night, before some lonely little house upon the road.
+
+On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in whose
+honour the festa is holden, very gaily.  Gold-embroidered festoons
+of different colours, hang from the arches; the altar furniture is
+set forth; and sometimes, even the lofty pillars are swathed from
+top to bottom in tight-fitting draperies.  The cathedral is
+dedicated to St. Lorenzo.  On St. Lorenzo's day, we went into it,
+just as the sun was setting.  Although these decorations are
+usually in very indifferent taste, the effect, just then, was very
+superb indeed.  For the whole building was dressed in red; and the
+sinking sun, streaming in, through a great red curtain in the chief
+doorway, made all the gorgeousness its own.  When the sun went
+down, and it gradually grew quite dark inside, except for a few
+twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and some small dangling
+silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective.  But, sitting
+in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild dose of
+opium.
+
+With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the
+dressing of the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the
+tapers.  If there be any left (which seldom happens, I believe),
+the souls in Purgatory get the benefit of it.  They are also
+supposed to have the benefit of the exertions of certain small
+boys, who shake money-boxes before some mysterious little buildings
+like rural turnpikes, which (usually shut up close) fly open on
+Red-letter days, and disclose an image and some flowers inside.
+
+Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small house,
+with an altar in it, and a stationary money-box:  also for the
+benefit of the souls in Purgatory.  Still further to stimulate the
+charitable, there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either
+side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls,
+frying.  One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of
+grey hair:  as if he had been taken out of a hairdresser's window
+and cast into the furnace.  There he is:  a most grotesque and
+hideously comic old soul:  for ever blistering in the real sun, and
+melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement
+(and the contributions) of the poor Genoese.
+
+They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on
+their holidays:  the staple places of entertainment among the
+women, being the churches and the public walks.  They are very
+good-tempered, obliging, and industrious.  Industry has not made
+them clean, for their habitations are extremely filthy, and their
+usual occupation on a fine Sunday morning, is to sit at their
+doors, hunting in each other's heads.  But their dwellings are so
+close and confined that if those parts of the city had been beaten
+down by Massena in the time of the terrible Blockade, it would have
+at least occasioned one public benefit among many misfortunes.
+
+The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly
+washing clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and
+ditch, that one cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this
+dirt, who wears them when they are clean.  The custom is to lay the
+wet linen which is being operated upon, on a smooth stone, and
+hammer away at it, with a flat wooden mallet.  This they do, as
+furiously as if they were revenging themselves on dress in general
+for being connected with the Fall of Mankind.
+
+It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these
+times, or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly
+swathed up, arms and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of
+wrapper, so that it is unable to move a toe or finger.  This custom
+(which we often see represented in old pictures) is universal among
+the common people.  A child is left anywhere without the
+possibility of crawling away, or is accidentally knocked off a
+shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung up to a hook now and then,
+and left dangling like a doll at an English rag-shop, without the
+least inconvenience to anybody.
+
+I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little
+country church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city,
+while a baptism took place.  I saw the priest, and an attendant
+with a large taper, and a man, and a woman, and some others; but I
+had no more idea, until the ceremony was all over, that it was a
+baptism, or that the curious little stiff instrument, that was
+passed from one to another, in the course of the ceremony, by the
+handle--like a short poker--was a child, than I had that it was my
+own christening.  I borrowed the child afterwards, for a minute or
+two (it was lying across the font then), and found it very red in
+the face but perfectly quiet, and not to be bent on any terms.  The
+number of cripples in the streets, soon ceased to surprise me.
+
+There are plenty of Saints' and Virgin's Shrines, of course;
+generally at the corners of streets.  The favourite memento to the
+Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting, representing a peasant on his
+knees, with a spade and some other agricultural implements beside
+him; and the Madonna, with the Infant Saviour in her arms,
+appearing to him in a cloud.  This is the legend of the Madonna
+della Guardia:  a chapel on a mountain within a few miles, which is
+in high repute.  It seems that this peasant lived all alone by
+himself, tilling some land atop of the mountain, where, being a
+devout man, he daily said his prayers to the Virgin in the open
+air; for his hut was a very poor one.  Upon a certain day, the
+Virgin appeared to him, as in the picture, and said, 'Why do you
+pray in the open air, and without a priest?'  The peasant explained
+because there was neither priest nor church at hand--a very
+uncommon complaint indeed in Italy.  'I should wish, then,' said
+the Celestial Visitor, 'to have a chapel built here, in which the
+prayers of the Faithful may be offered up.'  'But, Santissima
+Madonna,' said the peasant, 'I am a poor man; and chapels cannot be
+built without money.  They must be supported, too, Santissima; for
+to have a chapel and not support it liberally, is a wickedness--a
+deadly sin.'  This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the
+visitor.  'Go!' said she.  'There is such a village in the valley
+on the left, and such another village in the valley on the right,
+and such another village elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to
+the building of a chapel.  Go to them!  Relate what you have seen;
+and do not doubt that sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect
+my chapel, or that it will, afterwards, be handsomely maintained.'
+All of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite true.  And in
+proof of this prediction and revelation, there is the chapel of the
+Madonna della Guardia, rich and flourishing at this day.
+
+The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be
+exaggerated.  The church of the Annunciata especially:  built, like
+many of the others, at the cost of one noble family, and now in
+slow progress of repair:  from the outer door to the utmost height
+of the high cupola, is so elaborately painted and set in gold, that
+it looks (as SIMOND describes it, in his charming book on Italy)
+like a great enamelled snuff-box.  Most of the richer churches
+contain some beautiful pictures, or other embellishments of great
+price, almost universally set, side by side, with sprawling
+effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever
+seen.
+
+It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular
+mind, and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but there is very
+little tenderness for the BODIES of the dead here.  For the very
+poor, there are, immediately outside one angle of the walls, and
+behind a jutting point of the fortification, near the sea, certain
+common pits--one for every day in the year--which all remain closed
+up, until the turn of each comes for its daily reception of dead
+bodies.  Among the troops in the town, there are usually some
+Swiss:  more or less.  When any of these die, they are buried out
+of a fund maintained by such of their countrymen as are resident in
+Genoa.  Their providing coffins for these men is matter of great
+astonishment to the authorities.
+
+Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent splashing
+down of dead people in so many wells, is bad.  It surrounds Death
+with revolting associations, that insensibly become connected with
+those whom Death is approaching.  Indifference and avoidance are
+the natural result; and all the softening influences of the great
+sorrow are harshly disturbed.
+
+There is a ceremony when an old Cavaliere or the like, expires, of
+erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to represent his bier;
+covering them over with a pall of black velvet; putting his hat and
+sword on the top; making a little square of seats about the whole;
+and sending out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintances
+to come and sit there, and hear Mass:  which is performed at the
+principal Altar, decorated with an infinity of candles for that
+purpose.
+
+When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of death,
+their nearest relations generally walk off:  retiring into the
+country for a little change, and leaving the body to be disposed
+of, without any superintendence from them.  The procession is
+usually formed, and the coffin borne, and the funeral conducted, by
+a body of persons called a Confraternita, who, as a kind of
+voluntary penance, undertake to perform these offices, in regular
+rotation, for the dead; but who, mingling something of pride with
+their humility, are dressed in a loose garment covering their whole
+person, and wear a hood concealing the face; with breathing-holes
+and apertures for the eyes.  The effect of this costume is very
+ghastly:  especially in the case of a certain Blue Confraternita
+belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least of them, are very ugly
+customers, and who look--suddenly encountered in their pious
+ministration in the streets--as if they were Ghoules or Demons,
+bearing off the body for themselves.
+
+Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on many
+Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of establishing a
+current account with Heaven, on which to draw, too easily, for
+future bad actions, or as an expiation for past misdeeds, it must
+be admitted to be a good one, and a practical one, and one
+involving unquestionably good works.  A voluntary service like
+this, is surely better than the imposed penance (not at all an
+infrequent one) of giving so many licks to such and such a stone in
+the pavement of the cathedral; or than a vow to the Madonna to wear
+nothing but blue for a year or two.  This is supposed to give great
+delight above; blue being (as is well known) the Madonna's
+favourite colour.  Women who have devoted themselves to this act of
+Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.
+
+There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now rarely
+opened.  The most important--the Carlo Felice:  the opera-house of
+Genoa--is a very splendid, commodious, and beautiful theatre.  A
+company of comedians were acting there, when we arrived:  and soon
+after their departure, a second-rate opera company came.  The great
+season is not until the carnival time--in the spring.  Nothing
+impressed me, so much, in my visits here (which were pretty
+numerous) as the uncommonly hard and cruel character of the
+audience, who resent the slightest defect, take nothing good-
+humouredly, seem to be always lying in wait for an opportunity to
+hiss, and spare the actresses as little as the actors.
+
+But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they are
+allowed to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are
+resolved to make the most of this opportunity.
+
+There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are
+allowed the privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next
+to nothing:  gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen
+being insisted on, by the Governor, in all public or semi-public
+entertainments.  They are lofty critics in consequence, and
+infinitely more exacting than if they made the unhappy manager's
+fortune.
+
+The TEATRO DIURNO, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open
+air, where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of
+the afternoon; commencing at four or five o'clock, and lasting,
+some three hours.  It is curious, sitting among the audience, to
+have a fine view of the neighbouring hills and houses, and to see
+the neighbours at their windows looking on, and to hear the bells
+of the churches and convents ringing at most complete cross-
+purposes with the scene.  Beyond this, and the novelty of seeing a
+play in the fresh pleasant air, with the darkening evening closing
+in, there is nothing very exciting or characteristic in the
+performances.  The actors are indifferent; and though they
+sometimes represent one of Goldoni's comedies, the staple of the
+Drama is French.  Anything like nationality is dangerous to
+despotic governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
+
+The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti--a famous company from Milan-
+-is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld
+in my life.  I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous.  They
+LOOK between four and five feet high, but are really much smaller;
+for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the
+stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an
+actor.  They usually play a comedy, and a ballet.  The comic man in
+the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel.  There
+never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began.  Great
+pains are taken with him.  He has extra joints in his legs:  and a
+practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that is
+absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
+audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
+everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a
+man.  His spirits are prodigious.  He continually shakes his legs,
+and winks his eye.  And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who
+sits down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his
+daughter in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous.  No
+one would suppose it possible that anything short of a real man
+could be so tedious.  It is the triumph of art.
+
+In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very
+hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to
+soothe her.  They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the
+regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of
+musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and knocking himself
+off his legs at every blow.  These failing to delight her, dancers
+appear.  Four first; then two; THE two; the flesh-coloured two.
+The way in which they dance; the height to which they spring; the
+impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette; the
+revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a
+pause, on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it;
+the gentleman's retiring up, when it is the lady's turn; and the
+lady's retiring up, when it is the gentleman's turn; the final
+passion of a pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!--I shall
+never see a real ballet, with a composed countenance again.
+
+I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called 'St.
+Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.'  It began by the disclosure of
+Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at
+St. Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure
+announcement:
+
+'Sir Yew ud se on Low?' (the ow, as in cow).
+
+Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a
+perfect mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a
+monstrously disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-
+jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdurate nature.  He began his
+system of persecution, by calling his prisoner 'General
+Buonaparte;' to which the latter replied, with the deepest tragedy,
+'Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not thus.  Repeat that phrase and
+leave me!  I am Napoleon, Emperor of France!'  Sir Yew ud se on,
+nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of
+the British Government, regulating the state he should preserve,
+and the furniture of his rooms:  and limiting his attendants to
+four or five persons.  'Four or five for ME!' said Napoleon.  'Me!
+One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command; and this
+English officer talks of four or five for ME!'  Throughout the
+piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was,
+for ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on
+'these English officers,' and 'these English soldiers;' to the
+great satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to
+have Low bullied; and who, whenever Low said 'General Buonaparte'
+(which he always did:  always receiving the same correction), quite
+execrated him.  It would be hard to say why; for Italians have
+little cause to sympathise with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
+
+There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised
+as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being
+discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to
+steal his freedom, was immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged.
+In two very long speeches, which Low made memorable, by winding up
+with 'Yas!'--to show that he was English--which brought down
+thunders of applause.  Napoleon was so affected by this
+catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out
+by two other puppets.  Judging from what followed, it would appear
+that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
+a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a
+lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children,
+who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the
+last word on his lips being 'Vatterlo.'
+
+It was unspeakably ludicrous.  Buonaparte's boots were so
+wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their
+own accord:  doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and
+dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of
+all human knowledge, when he was in full speech--mischances which
+were not rendered the less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted
+in his face.  To put an end to one conference with Low, he had to
+go to a table, and read a book:  when it was the finest spectacle I
+ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume, like a boot-
+jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.
+He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his
+shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet.  So was Dr.
+Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
+Mawworm's, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires,
+hovered about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions
+in the air.  He was almost as good as Low, though the latter was
+great at all times--a decided brute and villain, beyond all
+possibility of mistake.  Low was especially fine at the last, when,
+hearing the doctor and the valet say, 'The Emperor is dead!' he
+pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by
+exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, 'Ha! ha!  Eleven minutes
+to six!  The General dead! and the spy hanged!'  This brought the
+curtain down, triumphantly.
+
+
+There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
+residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds,
+whither we removed as soon as our three months' tenancy of the Pink
+Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
+
+It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the
+town:  surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with
+statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of
+orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias.  All
+its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and decorations;
+but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with three large
+windows at the end, overlooking the whole town of Genoa, the
+harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords one of the most
+fascinating and delightful prospects in the world.  Any house more
+cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it would
+be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than
+the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.
+It is more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave
+and sober lodging.
+
+How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the
+wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh
+colouring as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor,
+or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a
+spacious promenade; or how there are corridors and bed-chambers
+above, which we never use and rarely visit, and scarcely know the
+way through; or how there is a view of a perfectly different
+character on each of the four sides of the building; matters
+little.  But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me.  I
+go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred
+times a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents
+from the garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of
+happiness.
+
+There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many
+churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny
+sky; and down below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary
+convent parapet, fashioned like a gallery, with an iron across at
+the end, where sometimes early in the morning, I have seen a little
+group of dark-veiled nuns gliding sorrowfully to and fro, and
+stopping now and then to peep down upon the waking world in which
+they have no part.  Old Monte Faccio, brightest of hills in good
+weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming on, is here, upon the
+left.  The Fort within the walls (the good King built it to command
+the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese about their ears, in
+case they should be discontented) commands that height upon the
+right.  The broad sea lies beyond, in front there; and that line of
+coast, beginning by the light-house, and tapering away, a mere
+speck in the rosy distance, is the beautiful coast road that leads
+to Nice.  The garden near at hand, among the roofs and houses:  all
+red with roses and fresh with little fountains:  is the Acqua Sola-
+-a public promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the
+white veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round, and
+round, and round, in state-clothes and coaches at least, if not in
+absolute wisdom.  Within a stone's-throw, as it seems, the audience
+of the Day Theatre sit:  their faces turned this way.  But as the
+stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of the cause,
+to see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to
+laughter; and odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of
+applause, rattling in the evening air, to which the curtain falls.
+But, being Sunday night, they act their best and most attractive
+play.  And now, the sun is going down, in such magnificent array of
+red, and green, and golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could
+depict; and to the ringing of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at
+once, without a twilight.  Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa,
+and on the country road; and the revolving lanthorn out at sea
+there, flashing, for an instant, on this palace front and portico,
+illuminates it as if there were a bright moon bursting from behind
+a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity.  And this, so far as I
+know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid it after dark, and
+think it haunted.
+
+My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing
+worse, I will engage.  The same Ghost will occasionally sail away,
+as I did one pleasant autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and
+sniff the morning air at Marseilles.
+
+The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside
+his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with
+the natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were
+languishing, stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to
+blind corners of the establishment, where it was impossible for
+admirers to penetrate.
+
+The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen
+hours, and we were going to run back again by the Cornice road from
+Nice:  not being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the
+beautiful towns that rise in picturesque white clusters from among
+the olive woods, and rocks, and hills, upon the margin of the Sea.
+
+The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o'clock, was
+very small, and so crowded with goods that there was scarcely room
+to move; neither was there anything to cat on board, except bread;
+nor to drink, except coffee.  But being due at Nice at about eight
+or so in the morning, this was of no consequence; so when we began
+to wink at the bright stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their
+winking at us, we turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool
+little cabin, and slept soundly till morning.
+
+The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built,
+it was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice Harbour,
+where we very little expected anything but breakfast.  But we were
+laden with wool.  Wool must not remain in the Custom-house at
+Marseilles more than twelve months at a stretch, without paying
+duty.  It is the custom to make fictitious removals of unsold wool
+to evade this law; to take it somewhere when the twelve months are
+nearly out; bring it straight back again; and warehouse it, as a
+new cargo, for nearly twelve months longer.  This wool of ours, had
+come originally from some place in the East.  It was recognised as
+Eastern produce, the moment we entered the harbour.  Accordingly,
+the gay little Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which had come
+off to greet us, were warned away by the authorities; we were
+declared in quarantine; and a great flag was solemnly run up to the
+mast-head on the wharf, to make it known to all the town.
+
+It was a very hot day indeed.  We were unshaved, unwashed,
+undressed, unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying
+blistering in a lazy harbour, with the town looking on from a
+respectful distance, all manner of whiskered men in cocked hats
+discussing our fate at a remote guard-house, with gestures (we
+looked very hard at them through telescopes) expressive of a week's
+detention at least:  and nothing whatever the matter all the time.
+But even in this crisis the brave Courier achieved a triumph.  He
+telegraphed somebody (_I_ saw nobody) either naturally connected
+with the hotel, or put en rapport with the establishment for that
+occasion only.  The telegraph was answered, and in half an hour or
+less, there came a loud shout from the guard-house.  The captain
+was wanted.  Everybody helped the captain into his boat.  Everybody
+got his luggage, and said we were going.  The captain rowed away,
+and disappeared behind a little jutting corner of the Galley-
+slaves' Prison:  and presently came back with something, very
+sulkily.  The brave Courier met him at the side, and received the
+something as its rightful owner.  It was a wicker basket, folded in
+a linen cloth; and in it were two great bottles of wine, a roast
+fowl, some salt fish chopped with garlic, a great loaf of bread, a
+dozen or so of peaches, and a few other trifles.  When we had
+selected our own breakfast, the brave Courier invited a chosen
+party to partake of these refreshments, and assured them that they
+need not be deterred by motives of delicacy, as he would order a
+second basket to be furnished at their expense.  Which he did--no
+one knew how--and by-and-by, the captain being again summoned,
+again sulkily returned with another something; over which my
+popular attendant presided as before:  carving with a clasp-knife,
+his own personal property, something smaller than a Roman sword.
+
+The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected
+supplies; but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman, who
+got drunk in five minutes, and a sturdy Cappuccino Friar, who had
+taken everybody's fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in
+the world, I verily believe.
+
+He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing beard;
+and was a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty.  He had come up
+to us, early in the morning, and inquired whether we were sure to
+be at Nice by eleven; saying that he particularly wanted to know,
+because if we reached it by that time he would have to perform
+Mass, and must deal with the consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas,
+if there were no chance of his being in time, he would immediately
+breakfast.  He made this communication, under the idea that the
+brave Courier was the captain; and indeed he looked much more like
+it than anybody else on board.  Being assured that we should arrive
+in good time, he fasted, and talked, fasting, to everybody, with
+the most charming good humour; answering jokes at the expense of
+friars, with other jokes at the expense of laymen, and saying that,
+friar as he was, he would engage to take up the two strongest men
+on board, one after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along
+the deck.  Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could
+have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in
+the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that
+can well be.
+
+All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who
+gradually patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate
+him as one who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an
+unfortunate destiny.  Although his patronage was such as a mouse
+might bestow upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its
+condescension; and in the warmth of that sentiment, occasionally
+rose on tiptoe, to slap the Friar on the back.
+
+When the baskets arrived:  it being then too late for Mass:  the
+Friar went to work bravely:  eating prodigiously of the cold meat
+and bread, drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars,
+taking snuff, sustaining an uninterrupted conversation with all
+hands, and occasionally running to the boat's side and hailing
+somebody on shore with the intelligence that we MUST be got out of
+this quarantine somehow or other, as he had to take part in a great
+religious procession in the afternoon.  After this, he would come
+back, laughing lustily from pure good humour:  while the Frenchman
+wrinkled his small face into ten thousand creases, and said how
+droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar!  At length the
+heat of the sun without, and the wine within, made the Frenchman
+sleepy.  So, in the noontide of his patronage of his gigantic
+protege, he lay down among the wool, and began to snore.
+
+It was four o'clock before we were released; and the Frenchman,
+dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar
+went ashore.  As soon as we were free, we all hurried away, to wash
+and dress, that we might make a decent appearance at the
+procession; and I saw no more of the Frenchman until we took up our
+station in the main street to see it pass, when he squeezed himself
+into a front place, elaborately renovated; threw back his little
+coat, to show a broad-barred velvet waistcoat, sprinkled all over
+with stars; then adjusted himself and his cane so as utterly to
+bewilder and transfix the Friar, when he should appear.
+
+The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number
+of people divided into small parties; each party chanting nasally,
+on its own account, without reference to any other, and producing a
+most dismal result.  There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on
+flat boards surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals,
+infantry, tapers, monks, nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in
+green hats, walking under crimson parasols:  and, here and there, a
+species of sacred street-lamp hoisted on a pole.  We looked out
+anxiously for the Cappuccini, and presently their brown robes and
+corded girdles were seen coming on, in a body.
+
+I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the
+Friar saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would mentally
+exclaim, 'Is that my Patron!  THAT distinguished man!' and would be
+covered with confusion.  Ah! never was the Frenchman so deceived.
+As our friend the Cappuccino advanced, with folded arms, he looked
+straight into the visage of the little Frenchman, with a bland,
+serene, composed abstraction, not to be described.  There was not
+the faintest trace of recognition or amusement on his features; not
+the smallest consciousness of bread and meat, wine, snuff, or
+cigars.  'C'est lui-meme,' I heard the little Frenchman say, in
+some doubt.  Oh yes, it was himself.  It was not his brother or his
+nephew, very like him.  It was he.  He walked in great state:
+being one of the Superiors of the Order:  and looked his part to
+admiration.  There never was anything so perfect of its kind as the
+contemplative way in which he allowed his placid gaze to rest on
+us, his late companions, as if he had never seen us in his life and
+didn't see us then.  The Frenchman, quite humbled, took off his hat
+at last, but the Friar still passed on, with the same imperturbable
+serenity; and the broad-barred waistcoat, fading into the crowd,
+was seen no more.
+
+The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that shook all
+the windows in the town.  Next afternoon we started for Genoa, by
+the famed Cornice road.
+
+The half-French, half-Italian Vetturino, who undertook, with his
+little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three
+days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness
+and singing propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on
+smoothly.  So long, he had a word and a smile, and a flick of his
+whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and ends of the
+Sonnambula for all the echoes.  So long, he went jingling through
+every little village, with bells on his horses and rings in his
+ears:  a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness.  But, it was
+highly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse of
+circumstances, when, in one part of the journey, we came to a
+narrow place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the
+road.  His hands were twined in his hair immediately, as if a
+combination of all the direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen
+on his devoted head.  He swore in French, prayed in Italian, and
+went up and down, beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy
+of despair.  There were various carters and mule-drivers assembled
+round the broken waggon, and at last some man of an original turn
+of mind, proposed that a general and joint effort should be made to
+get things to-rights again, and clear the way--an idea which I
+verily believe would never have presented itself to our friend,
+though we had remained there until now.  It was done at no great
+cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing, his hands were
+wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope to lighten
+his misery.  The moment he was on his box once more, and clattering
+briskly down hill, he returned to the Sonnambula and the peasant
+girls, as if it were not in the power of misfortune to depress him.
+
+Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this
+beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them
+are very miserable.  The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the
+inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with
+their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head,
+like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the
+Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim
+doorways with their spindles, or crooning together in by-corners,
+they are like a population of Witches--except that they certainly
+are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument of
+cleanliness.  Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold
+wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means
+ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs,
+with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their
+own tails.
+
+These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however:  nestling,
+with their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill-
+sides, or built upon the brink of noble bays:  are charming.  The
+vegetation is, everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm-
+tree makes a novel feature in the novel scenery.  In one town, San
+Remo--a most extraordinary place, built on gloomy open arches, so
+that one might ramble underneath the whole town--there are pretty
+terrace gardens; in other towns, there is the clang of shipwrights'
+hammers, and the building of small vessels on the beach.  In some
+of the broad bays, the fleets of Europe might ride at anchor.  In
+every case, each little group of houses presents, in the distance,
+some enchanting confusion of picturesque and fanciful shapes.
+
+The road itself--now high above the glittering sea, which breaks
+against the foot of the precipice:  now turning inland to sweep the
+shore of a bay:  now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream:
+now low down on the beach:  now winding among riven rocks of many
+forms and colours:  now chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one
+of a chain of towers built, in old time, to protect the coast from
+the invasions of the Barbary Corsairs--presents new beauties every
+moment.  When its own striking scenery is passed, and it trails on
+through a long line of suburb, lying on the flat sea-shore, to
+Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that noble city and its
+harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened by every huge,
+unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts:  and coming to
+its climax when the city gate is reached, and all Genoa with its
+beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on the
+view.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA
+
+
+
+I strolled away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good
+many places (England among them), but first for Piacenza; for which
+town I started in the coupe of a machine something like a
+travelling caravan, in company with the brave Courier, and a lady
+with a large dog, who howled dolefully, at intervals, all night.
+It was very wet, and very cold; very dark, and very dismal; we
+travelled at the rate of barely four miles an hour, and stopped
+nowhere for refreshment.  At ten o'clock next morning, we changed
+coaches at Alessandria, where we were packed up in another coach
+(the body whereof would have been small for a fly), in company with
+a very old priest; a young Jesuit, his companion--who carried their
+breviaries and other books, and who, in the exertion of getting
+into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg between his black
+stocking and his black knee-shorts, that reminded one of Hamlet in
+Ophelia's closet, only it was visible on both legs--a provincial
+Avvocato; and a gentleman with a red nose that had an uncommon and
+singular sheen upon it, which I never observed in the human subject
+before.  In this way we travelled on, until four o'clock in the
+afternoon; the roads being still very heavy, and the coach very
+slow.  To mend the matter, the old priest was troubled with cramps
+in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible yell every ten
+minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts of the
+company; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity.
+This disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of
+conversation.  Finding, in the afternoon, that the coupe had
+discharged two people, and had only one passenger inside--a
+monstrous ugly Tuscan, with a great purple moustache, of which no
+man could see the ends when he had his hat on--I took advantage of
+its better accommodation, and in company with this gentleman (who
+was very conversational and good-humoured) travelled on, until
+nearly eleven o'clock at night, when the driver reported that he
+couldn't think of going any farther, and we accordingly made a halt
+at a place called Stradella.
+
+The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard where
+our coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and firewood,
+were all heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that you didn't
+know, and couldn't have taken your oath, which was a fowl and which
+was a cart.  We followed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into a
+great, cold room, where there were two immensely broad beds, on
+what looked like two immensely broad deal dining-tables; another
+deal table of similar dimensions in the middle of the bare floor;
+four windows; and two chairs.  Somebody said it was my room; and I
+walked up and down it, for half an hour or so, staring at the
+Tuscan, the old priest, the young priest, and the Avvocato (Red-
+Nose lived in the town, and had gone home), who sat upon their
+beds, and stared at me in return.
+
+The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the proceedings, is
+interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he had been cooking)
+that supper is ready; and to the priest's chamber (the next room
+and the counterpart of mine) we all adjourn.  The first dish is a
+cabbage, boiled with a great quantity of rice in a tureen full of
+water, and flavoured with cheese.  It is so hot, and we are so
+cold, that it appears almost jolly.  The second dish is some little
+bits of pork, fried with pigs' kidneys.  The third, two red fowls.
+The fourth, two little red turkeys.  The fifth, a huge stew of
+garlic and truffles, and I don't know what else; and this concludes
+the entertainment.
+
+Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the
+dampest, the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the
+middle of such a quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood
+taking a winter walk.  He kindles this heap in a twinkling, and
+produces a jorum of hot brandy and water; for that bottle of his
+keeps company with the seasons, and now holds nothing but the
+purest eau de vie.  When he has accomplished this feat, he retires
+for the night; and I hear him, for an hour afterwards, and indeed
+until I fall asleep, making jokes in some outhouse (apparently
+under the pillow), where he is smoking cigars with a party of
+confidential friends.  He never was in the house in his life
+before; but he knows everybody everywhere, before he has been
+anywhere five minutes; and is certain to have attracted to himself,
+in the meantime, the enthusiastic devotion of the whole
+establishment.
+
+This is at twelve o'clock at night.  At four o'clock next morning,
+he is up again, fresher than a full-blown rose; making blazing
+fires without the least authority from the landlord; producing mugs
+of scalding coffee when nobody else can get anything but cold
+water; and going out into the dark streets, and roaring for fresh
+milk, on the chance of somebody with a cow getting up to supply it.
+While the horses are 'coming,' I stumble out into the town too.  It
+seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold damp wind blowing in
+and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of pattern.  But it
+is profoundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn't know it
+to-morrow, if I were taken there to try.  Which Heaven forbid.
+
+The horses arrive in about an hour.  In the interval, the driver
+swears; sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan oaths.
+Sometimes, when it is a long, compound oath, he begins with
+Christianity and merges into Paganism.  Various messengers are
+despatched; not so much after the horses, as after each other; for
+the first messenger never comes back, and all the rest imitate him.
+At length the horses appear, surrounded by all the messengers; some
+kicking them, and some dragging them, and all shouting abuse to
+them.  Then, the old priest, the young priest, the Avvocato, the
+Tuscan, and all of us, take our places; and sleepy voices
+proceeding from the doors of extraordinary hutches in divers parts
+of the yard, cry out 'Addio corriere mio!  Buon' viaggio,
+corriere!'  Salutations which the courier, with his face one
+monstrous grin, returns in like manner as we go jolting and
+wallowing away, through the mud.
+
+At Piacenza, which was four or five hours' journey from the inn at
+Stradella, we broke up our little company before the hotel door,
+with divers manifestations of friendly feeling on all sides.  The
+old priest was taken with the cramp again, before he had got half-
+way down the street; and the young priest laid the bundle of books
+on a door-step, while he dutifully rubbed the old gentleman's legs.
+The client of the Avvocato was waiting for him at the yard-gate,
+and kissed him on each cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I
+am afraid he had either a very bad case, or a scantily-furnished
+purse.  The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went loitering off,
+carrying his hat in his hand that he might the better trail up the
+ends of his dishevelled moustache.  And the brave Courier, as he
+and I strolled away to look about us, began immediately to
+entertain me with the private histories and family affairs of the
+whole party.
+
+A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is.  A deserted, solitary,
+grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches,
+which afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that wander about
+them; and streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other
+houses over the way.  The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go
+wandering about, with the double curse of laziness and poverty,
+uncouthly wrinkling their misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of
+children play with their impromptu toys (pigs and mud) in the
+feeblest of gutters; and the gauntest of dogs trot in and out of
+the dullest of archways, in perpetual search of something to eat,
+which they never seem to find.  A mysterious and solemn Palace,
+guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the place, stands
+gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king with the marble
+legs, who flourished in the time of the thousand and one Nights,
+might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy, in
+his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out.
+
+What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to
+ramble through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun!
+Each, in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreary, God-
+forgotten towns in the wide world, the chief.  Sitting on this
+hillock where a bastion used to be, and where a noisy fortress was,
+in the time of the old Roman station here, I became aware that I
+have never known till now, what it is to be lazy.  A dormouse must
+surely be in very much the same condition before he retires under
+the wool in his cage; or a tortoise before he buries himself.
+
+I feel that I am getting rusty.  That any attempt to think, would
+be accompanied with a creaking noise.  That there is nothing,
+anywhere, to be done, or needing to be done.  That there is no more
+human progress, motion, effort, or advancement, of any kind beyond
+this.  That the whole scheme stopped here centuries ago, and laid
+down to rest until the Day of Judgment.
+
+Never while the brave Courier lives!  Behold him jingling out of
+Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise
+ever seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were
+peeping over a garden wall; while the postilion, concentrated
+essence of all the shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his
+animated conversation, to touch his hat to a blunt-nosed little
+Virgin, hardly less shabby than himself, enshrined in a plaster
+Punch's show outside the town.
+
+In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trellis-work,
+supported on square clumsy pillars, which, in themselves, are
+anything but picturesque.  But, here, they twine them around trees,
+and let them trail among the hedges; and the vineyards are full of
+trees, regularly planted for this purpose, each with its own vine
+twining and clustering about it.  Their leaves are now of the
+brightest gold and deepest red; and never was anything so
+enchantingly graceful and full of beauty.  Through miles of these
+delightful forms and colours, the road winds its way.  The wild
+festoons, the elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of all
+shapes; the fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them
+prisoners in sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite
+shapes upon the ground; how rich and beautiful they are!  And every
+now and then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and
+garlanded together:  as if they had taken hold of one another, and
+were coming dancing down the field!
+
+Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
+consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note.
+Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral,
+Baptistery, and Campanile--ancient buildings, of a sombre brown,
+embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking
+creatures carved in marble and red stone--are clustered in a noble
+and magnificent repose.  Their silent presence was only invaded,
+when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were
+flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in
+the architecture, where they had made their nests.  They were busy,
+rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the
+sunny air of Heaven.  Not so the worshippers within, who were
+listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
+kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed
+down, in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa
+and everywhere else.
+
+The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is
+covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing
+influence.  It is miserable to see great works of art--something of
+the Souls of Painters--perishing and fading away, like human forms.
+This cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Correggio's frescoes
+in the Cupola.  Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at
+one time.  Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such
+a labyrinth of arms and legs:  such heaps of foreshortened limbs,
+entangled and involved and jumbled together:  no operative surgeon,
+gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium.
+
+There is a very interesting subterranean church here:  the roof
+supported by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to
+be at least one beggar in ambush:  to say nothing of the tombs and
+secluded altars.  From every one of these lurking-places, such
+crowds of phantom-looking men and women, leading other men and
+women with twisted limbs, or chattering jaws, or paralytic
+gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity, came
+hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral
+above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower
+church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or
+exhibited a more confounding display of arms and legs.
+
+There is Petrarch's Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery,
+with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery
+containing some very remarkable pictures, whereof a few were being
+copied by hairy-faced artists, with little velvet caps more off
+their heads than on.  There is the Farnese Palace, too; and in it
+one of the dreariest spectacles of decay that ever was seen--a
+grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away.
+
+It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower
+seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy
+chambers; rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their
+proud state.  Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre,
+enhanced in the spectator's fancy by its gay intention and design,
+none but worms can be familiar with.  A hundred and ten years have
+passed, since any play was acted here.  The sky shines in through
+the gashes in the roof; the boxes are dropping down, wasting away,
+and only tenanted by rats; damp and mildew smear the faded colours,
+and make spectral maps upon the panels; lean rags are dangling down
+where there were gay festoons on the Proscenium; the stage has
+rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery is thrown across it, or it
+would sink beneath the tread, and bury the visitor in the gloomy
+depth beneath.  The desolation and decay impress themselves on all
+the senses.  The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste;
+any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are
+muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have
+changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will
+seam and roughen a smooth hand.  If ever Ghosts act plays, they act
+them on this ghostly stage.
+
+It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the
+darkness of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting the
+main street on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by
+the bright sky, so wonderfully blue.  I passed from all the glory
+of the day, into a dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing,
+feeble tapers were burning, people were kneeling in all directions
+before all manner of shrines, and officiating priests were crooning
+the usual chant, in the usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy
+tone.
+
+Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this
+same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre
+of the same torpid, listless system, I came out by another door,
+and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the shrillest
+trumpet that ever was blown.  Immediately, came tearing round the
+corner, an equestrian company from Paris:  marshalling themselves
+under the walls of the church, and flouting, with their horses'
+heels, the griffins, lions, tigers, and other monsters in stone and
+marble, decorating its exterior.  First, there came a stately
+nobleman with a great deal of hair, and no hat, bearing an enormous
+banner, on which was inscribed, MAZEPPA!  TO-NIGHT!  Then, a
+Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club on his shoulder, like
+Hercules.  Then, six or eight Roman chariots:  each with a
+beautiful lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally pink
+tights, erect within:  shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in
+which there was a latent expression of discomposure and anxiety,
+for which I couldn't account, until, as the open back of each
+chariot presented itself, I saw the immense difficulty with which
+the pink legs maintained their perpendicular, over the uneven
+pavement of the town:  which gave me quite a new idea of the
+ancient Romans and Britons.  The procession was brought to a close,
+by some dozen indomitable warriors of different nations, riding two
+and two, and haughtily surveying the tame population of Modena:
+among whom, however, they occasionally condescended to scatter
+largesse in the form of a few handbills.  After caracolling among
+the lions and tigers, and proclaiming that evening's entertainments
+with blast of trumpet, it then filed off, by the other end of the
+square, and left a new and greatly increased dulness behind.
+
+When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the shrill
+trumpet was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse
+was hopelessly round the corner, the people who had come out of the
+church to stare at it, went back again.  But one old lady, kneeling
+on the pavement within, near the door, had seen it all, and had
+been immensely interested, without getting up; and this old lady's
+eye, at that juncture, I happened to catch:  to our mutual
+confusion.  She cut our embarrassment very short, however, by
+crossing herself devoutly, and going down, at full length, on her
+face, before a figure in a fancy petticoat and a gilt crown; which
+was so like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps at this
+hour she may think the whole appearance a celestial vision.
+Anyhow, I must certainly have forgiven her her interest in the
+Circus, though I had been her Father Confessor.
+
+There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, in
+the cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no effort to see
+the bucket (kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena took
+away from the people of Bologna in the fourteenth century, and
+about which there was war made and a mock-heroic poem by TASSONE,
+too.  Being quite content, however, to look at the outside of the
+tower, and feast, in imagination, on the bucket within; and
+preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall Campanile, and about
+the cathedral; I have no personal knowledge of this bucket, even at
+the present time.
+
+Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the
+Guide-Book) would have considered that we had half done justice to
+the wonders of Modena.  But it is such a delight to me to leave new
+scenes behind, and still go on, encountering newer scenes--and,
+moreover, I have such a perverse disposition in respect of sights
+that are cut, and dried, and dictated--that I fear I sin against
+similar authorities in every place I visit.
+
+Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I found
+myself walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs
+and colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted
+by a little Cicerone of that town, who was excessively anxious for
+the honour of the place, and most solicitous to divert my attention
+from the bad monuments:  whereas he was never tired of extolling
+the good ones.  Seeing this little man (a good-humoured little man
+he was, who seemed to have nothing in his face but shining teeth
+and eyes) looking wistfully at a certain plot of grass, I asked him
+who was buried there.  'The poor people, Signore,' he said, with a
+shrug and a smile, and stopping to look back at me--for he always
+went on a little before, and took off his hat to introduce every
+new monument.  'Only the poor, Signore!  It's very cheerful.  It's
+very lively.  How green it is, how cool!  It's like a meadow!
+There are five,'--holding up all the fingers of his right hand to
+express the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it
+be within the compass of his ten fingers,--'there are five of my
+little children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the
+right.  Well!  Thanks to God!  It's very cheerful.  How green it
+is, how cool it is!  It's quite a meadow!'
+
+He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him,
+took a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made a
+little bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a
+subject, and partly in memory of the children and of his favourite
+saint.  It was as unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow,
+as ever man made.  Immediately afterwards, he took his hat off
+altogether, and begged to introduce me to the next monument; and
+his eyes and his teeth shone brighter than before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA
+
+
+
+There was such a very smart official in attendance at the Cemetery
+where the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when the
+little Cicerone suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be
+no offence in presenting this officer, in return for some slight
+extra service, with a couple of pauls (about tenpence, English
+money), I looked incredulously at his cocked hat, wash-leather
+gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling buttons, and rebuked the
+little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head.  For, in splendour
+of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy Usher of the
+Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler would
+say, 'such a thing as tenpence' away with him, seemed monstrous.
+He took it in excellent part, however, when I made bold to give it
+him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that would have
+been a bargain at double the money.
+
+It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the people--
+at all events he was doing so; and when I compared him, like
+Gulliver in Brobdingnag, 'with the Institutions of my own beloved
+country, I could not refrain from tears of pride and exultation.'
+He had no pace at all; no more than a tortoise.  He loitered as the
+people loitered, that they might gratify their curiosity; and
+positively allowed them, now and then, to read the inscriptions on
+the tombs.  He was neither shabby, nor insolent, nor churlish, nor
+ignorant.  He spoke his own language with perfect propriety, and
+seemed to consider himself, in his way, a kind of teacher of the
+people, and to entertain a just respect both for himself and them.
+They would no more have such a man for a Verger in Westminster
+Abbey, than they would let the people in (as they do at Bologna) to
+see the monuments for nothing. {2}
+
+Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky; with heavy
+arcades over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and
+more cheerful archways in the newer portions of the town.  Again,
+brown piles of sacred buildings, with more birds flying in and out
+of chinks in the stones; and more snarling monsters for the bases
+of the pillars.  Again, rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling
+incense, tinkling bells, priests in bright vestments:  pictures,
+tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses, images, and artificial
+flowers.
+
+There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant
+gloom upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and separate
+impression in the mind, among a crowd of cities, though it were not
+still further marked in the traveller's remembrance by the two
+brick leaning towers (sufficiently unsightly in themselves, it must
+be acknowledged), inclining cross-wise as if they were bowing
+stiffly to each other--a most extraordinary termination to the
+perspective of some of the narrow streets.  The colleges, and
+churches too, and palaces:  and above all the academy of Fine Arts,
+where there are a host of interesting pictures, especially by
+GUIDO, DOMENICHINO, and LUDOVICO CARACCI:  give it a place of its
+own in the memory.  Even though these were not, and there were
+nothing else to remember it by, the great Meridian on the pavement
+of the church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark the time
+among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleasant
+interest.
+
+Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an
+inundation which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was
+quartered up at the top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room
+which I never could find:  containing a bed, big enough for a
+boarding-school, which I couldn't fall asleep in.  The chief among
+the waiters who visited this lonely retreat, where there was no
+other company but the swallows in the broad eaves over the window,
+was a man of one idea in connection with the English; and the
+subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron.  I made the
+discovery by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast, that the
+matting with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable at
+that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been
+much attached to that kind of matting.  Observing, at the same
+moment, that I took no milk, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, that
+Milor Beeron had never touched it.  At first, I took it for
+granted, in my innocence, that he had been one of the Beeron
+servants; but no, he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking
+about my Lord, to English gentlemen; that was all.  He knew all
+about him, he said.  In proof of it, he connected him with every
+possible topic, from the Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was
+grown on an estate he had owned), to the big bed itself, which was
+the very model of his.  When I left the inn, he coupled with his
+final bow in the yard, a parting assurance that the road by which I
+was going, had been Milor Beeron's favourite ride; and before the
+horse's feet had well begun to clatter on the pavement, he ran
+briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to tell some other Englishman
+in some other solitary room that the guest who had just departed
+was Lord Beeron's living image.
+
+I had entered Bologna by night--almost midnight--and all along the
+road thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory:  which
+is not, in any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter's keys
+being rather rusty now; the driver had so worried about the danger
+of robbers in travelling after dark, and had so infected the brave
+Courier, and the two had been so constantly stopping and getting up
+and down to look after a portmanteau which was tied on behind, that
+I should have felt almost obliged to any one who would have had the
+goodness to take it away.  Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever
+we left Bologna, we should start so as not to arrive at Ferrara
+later than eight at night; and a delightful afternoon and evening
+journey it was, albeit through a flat district which gradually
+became more marshy from the overflow of brooks and rivers in the
+recent heavy rains.
+
+At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I
+arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental
+operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar
+to me, and which I see distinctly now.  There was not much in it.
+In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just
+stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees.  In the
+foreground was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the
+parapet of a little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now
+down into the water; in the distance, a deep bell; the shade of
+approaching night on everything.  If I had been murdered there, in
+some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place
+more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood; and
+the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so
+strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I
+could forget it.
+
+More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than
+any city of the solemn brotherhood!  The grass so grows up in the
+silent streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while
+the sun shines.  But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in
+grim Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass
+through the places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be
+grass indeed, and growing in the squares.
+
+I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives
+next door to the Hotel, or opposite:  making the visitor feel as if
+the beating hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly
+energy!  I wonder why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all
+sides, and fill it with unnecessary doors that can't be shut, and
+will not open, and abut on pitchy darkness!  I wonder why it is not
+enough that these distrustful genii stand agape at one's dreams all
+night, but there must also be round open portholes, high in the
+wall, suggestive, when a mouse or rat is heard behind the wainscot,
+of a somebody scraping the wall with his toes, in his endeavours to
+reach one of these portholes and look in!  I wonder why the faggots
+are so constructed, as to know of no effect but an agony of heat
+when they are lighted and replenished, and an agony of cold and
+suffocation at all other times!  I wonder, above all, why it is the
+great feature of domestic architecture in Italian inns, that all
+the fire goes up the chimney, except the smoke!
+
+The answer matters little.  Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke,
+and faggots, are welcome to me.  Give me the smiling face of the
+attendant, man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire
+to please and to be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple
+air--so many jewels set in dirt--and I am theirs again to-morrow!
+
+ARIOSTO'S house, TASSO'S prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral, and
+more churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara.  But the long
+silent streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu
+of banners, and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long-
+untrodden stairs, are the best sights of all.
+
+The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise one
+fine morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it seemed
+unreal and spectral.  It was no matter that the people were not yet
+out of bed; for if they had all been up and busy, they would have
+made but little difference in that desert of a place.  It was best
+to see it, without a single figure in the picture; a city of the
+dead, without one solitary survivor.  Pestilence might have ravaged
+streets, squares, and market-places; and sack and siege have ruined
+the old houses, battered down their doors and windows, and made
+breaches in their roofs.  In one part, a great tower rose into the
+air; the only landmark in the melancholy view.  In another, a
+prodigious castle, with a moat about it, stood aloof:  a sullen
+city in itself.  In the black dungeons of this castle, Parisina and
+her lover were beheaded in the dead of night.  The red light,
+beginning to shine when I looked back upon it, stained its walls
+without, as they have, many a time, been stained within, in old
+days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and the city
+might have been avoided by all human creatures, from the moment
+when the axe went down upon the last of the two lovers:  and might
+have never vibrated to another sound
+
+
+Beyond the blow that to the block
+Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.
+
+
+Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running fiercely,
+we crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so came into the
+Austrian territory, and resumed our journey:  through a country of
+which, for some miles, a great part was under water.  The brave
+Courier and the soldiery had first quarrelled, for half an hour or
+more, over our eternal passport.  But this was a daily relaxation
+with the Brave, who was always stricken deaf when shabby
+functionaries in uniform came, as they constantly did come,
+plunging out of wooden boxes to look at it--or in other words to
+beg--and who, stone deaf to my entreaties that the man might have a
+trifle given him, and we resume our journey in peace, was wont to
+sit reviling the functionary in broken English:  while the
+unfortunate man's face was a portrait of mental agony framed in the
+coach window, from his perfect ignorance of what was being said to
+his disparagement.
+
+There was a postilion, in the course of this day's journey, as wild
+and savagely good-looking a vagabond as you would desire to see.
+He was a tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned fellow, with a
+profusion of shaggy black hair hanging all over his face, and great
+black whiskers stretching down his throat.  His dress was a torn
+suit of rifle green, garnished here and there with red; a steeple-
+crowned hat, innocent of nap, with a broken and bedraggled feather
+stuck in the band; and a flaming red neckerchief hanging on his
+shoulders.  He was not in the saddle, but reposed, quite at his
+ease, on a sort of low foot-board in front of the postchaise, down
+amongst the horses' tails--convenient for having his brains kicked
+out, at any moment.  To this Brigand, the brave Courier, when we
+were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest the practicability
+of going faster.  He received the proposal with a perfect yell of
+derision; brandished his whip about his head (such a whip! it was
+more like a home-made bow); flung up his heels, much higher than
+the horses; and disappeared, in a paroxysm, somewhere in the
+neighbourhood of the axle-tree.  I fully expected to see him lying
+in the road, a hundred yards behind, but up came the steeple-
+crowned hat again, next minute, and he was seen reposing, as on a
+sofa, entertaining himself with the idea, and crying, 'Ha, ha! what
+next!  Oh the devil!  Faster too!  Shoo--hoo--o--o!'  (This last
+ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.)  Being anxious to
+reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured, by-and-by,
+to repeat the experiment on my own account.  It produced exactly
+the same effect.  Round flew the whip with the same scornful
+flourish, up came the heels, down went the steeple-crowned hat, and
+presently he reappeared, reposing as before and saying to himself,
+'Ha ha! what next!  Faster too!  Oh the devil!  Shoo--hoo--o--o!'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--AN ITALIAN DREAM
+
+
+
+I had been travelling, for some days; resting very little in the
+night, and never in the day.  The rapid and unbroken succession of
+novelties that had passed before me, came back like half-formed
+dreams; and a crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion
+through my mind, as I travelled on, by a solitary road.  At
+intervals, some one among them would stop, as it were, in its
+restless flitting to and fro, and enable me to look at it, quite
+steadily, and behold it in full distinctness.  After a few moments,
+it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern; and while I saw
+some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some not at
+all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen,
+lingering behind it, and coming through it.  This was no sooner
+visible than, in its turn, it melted into something else.
+
+At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged
+churches of Modena.  As I recognised the curious pillars with grim
+monsters for their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by
+themselves in the quiet square at Padua, where there were the staid
+old University, and the figures, demurely gowned, grouped here and
+there in the open space about it.  Then, I was strolling in the
+outskirts of that pleasant city, admiring the unusual neatness of
+the dwelling-houses, gardens, and orchards, as I had seen them a
+few hours before.  In their stead arose, immediately, the two
+towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all these objects,
+failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous moated
+castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance,
+came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the solitary,
+grass-grown, withered town.  In short, I had that incoherent but
+delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have,
+and are indolently willing to encourage.  Every shake of the coach
+in which I sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new
+recollection out of its place, and to jerk some other new
+recollection into it; and in this state I fell asleep.
+
+I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of
+the coach.  It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside.
+There lay here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of
+the same mournful colour.  When I had taken my seat in this, the
+boat was paddled, by two men, towards a great light, lying in the
+distance on the sea.
+
+Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind.  It ruffled the
+water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before
+the stars.  I could not but think how strange it was, to be
+floating away at that hour:  leaving the land behind, and going on,
+towards this light upon the sea.  It soon began to burn brighter;
+and from being one light became a cluster of tapers, twinkling and
+shining out of the water, as the boat approached towards them by a
+dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.
+
+We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I
+heard it rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at
+hand.  Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a
+something black and massive--like a shore, but lying close and flat
+upon the water, like a raft--which we were gliding past.  The chief
+of the two rowers said it was a burial-place.
+
+Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there,
+in the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should
+recede in our path, when it was quickly shut out from my view.
+Before I knew by what, or how, I found that we were gliding up a
+street--a phantom street; the houses rising on both sides, from the
+water, and the black boat gliding on beneath their windows.  Lights
+were shining from some of these casements, plumbing the depth of
+the black stream with their reflected rays, but all was profoundly
+silent.
+
+So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our
+course through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing
+with water.  Some of the corners where our way branched off, were
+so acute and narrow, that it seemed impossible for the long slender
+boat to turn them; but the rowers, with a low melodious cry of
+warning, sent it skimming on without a pause.  Sometimes, the
+rowers of another black boat like our own, echoed the cry, and
+slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours) would come
+flitting past us like a dark shadow.  Other boats, of the same
+sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near
+to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water.  Some
+of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I
+saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of
+a palace:  gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers.  It was
+but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon
+the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us:  one of
+the many bridges that perplexed the Dream:  blotted them out,
+instantly.  On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange
+place--with water all about us where never water was elsewhere--
+clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings growing
+out of it--and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.
+Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as
+I thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps
+with which it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and
+pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength, but as light
+to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer--and where, for the
+first time, I saw people walking--arrived at a flight of steps
+leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed
+through corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest;
+listening to the black boats stealing up and down below the window
+on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
+
+The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its
+freshness, motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its
+clear blue sky and rustling air; no waking words can tell.  But,
+from my window, I looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails,
+cordage, flags; on groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes
+of these vessels; on wide quays, strewn with bales, casks,
+merchandise of many kinds; on great ships, lying near at hand in
+stately indolence; on islands, crowned with gorgeous domes and
+turrets:  and where golden crosses glittered in the light, atop of
+wondrous churches, springing from the sea!  Going down upon the
+margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling
+all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and
+such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison
+with its absorbing loveliness.
+
+It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest,
+in the deep ocean.  On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic
+and magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the
+earth, in the high prime and fulness of their youth.  Cloisters and
+galleries:  so light, they might have been the work of fairy hands:
+so strong that centuries had battered them in vain:  wound round
+and round this palace, and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous
+in the wild luxuriant fancies of the East.  At no great distance
+from its porch, a lofty tower, standing by itself, and rearing its
+proud head, alone, into the sky, looked out upon the Adriatic Sea.
+Near to the margin of the stream, were two ill-omened pillars of
+red granite; one having on its top, a figure with a sword and
+shield; the other, a winged lion.  Not far from these again, a
+second tower:  richest of the rich in all its decorations:  even
+here, where all was rich:  sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming
+with gold and deepest blue:  the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a
+mimic sun revolving in its course around them:  while above, two
+bronze giants hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell.  An
+oblong square of lofty houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a
+light and beautiful arcade, formed part of this enchanted scene;
+and, here and there, gay masts for flags rose, tapering, from the
+pavement of the unsubstantial ground.
+
+I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its
+many arches:  traversing its whole extent.  A grand and dreamy
+structure, of immense proportions; golden with old mosaics;
+redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense; costly in
+treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron
+bars; holy with the bodies of deceased saints; rainbow-hued with
+windows of stained glass; dark with carved woods and coloured
+marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened distances;
+shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal, fantastic,
+solemn, inconceivable throughout.  I thought I entered the old
+palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old
+rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in
+pictures, from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still
+victorious on canvas, fought and conquered as of old.  I thought I
+wandered through its halls of state and triumph--bare and empty
+now!--and musing on its pride and might, extinct:  for that was
+past; all past:  heard a voice say, 'Some tokens of its ancient
+rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall, may be traced
+here, yet!'
+
+I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms,
+communicating with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a
+lofty bridge crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The
+Bridge of Sighs.
+
+But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions'
+mouths--now toothless--where, in the distempered horror of my
+sleep, I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked
+Council, had been dropped through, many a time, when the night was
+dark.  So, when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were
+taken for examination, and the door by which they passed out, when
+they were condemned--a door that never closed upon a man with life
+and hope before him--my heart appeared to die within me.
+
+It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from
+the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal,
+awful, horrible stone cells.  They were quite dark.  Each had a
+loop-hole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a
+torch was placed--I dreamed--to light the prisoner within, for half
+an hour.  The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had
+scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults.  I saw
+them.  For their labour with a rusty nail's point, had outlived
+their agony and them, through many generations.
+
+One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-
+twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it.  Hard by,
+another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor
+came--a monk brown-robed, and hooded--ghastly in the day, and free
+bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's
+extinguisher, and Murder's herald.  I had my foot upon the spot,
+where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled;
+and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--
+through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and
+rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net.
+
+Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it:  licking
+the rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime
+within:  stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices,
+as if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop:  furnishing a
+smooth road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of
+the State--a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran
+before them, like a cruel officer--flowed the same water that
+filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem one, even at the time.
+
+Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
+Giant's--I had some imaginary recollection of an old man
+abdicating, coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he
+heard the bell, proclaiming his successor--I glided off, in one of
+the dark boats, until we came to an old arsenal guarded by four
+marble lions.  To make my Dream more monstrous and unlikely, one of
+these had words and sentences upon its body, inscribed there, at an
+unknown time, and in an unknown language; so that their purport was
+a mystery to all men.
+
+There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships,
+and little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no
+more, as I have said.  Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found
+drifting on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its honourable
+stations, and strangers standing at its helm.  A splendid barge in
+which its ancient chief had gone forth, pompously, at certain
+periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no more; but, in
+its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection like the
+city's greatness; and it told of what had been (so are the strong
+and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the
+massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships
+that had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth.
+
+An armoury was there yet.  Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury.
+With a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull
+air of its cage.  Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were
+hoarded there; crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears;
+swords, daggers, maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes.  Plates of
+wrought steel and iron, to make the gallant horse a monster cased
+in metal scales; and one spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the
+breast) designed to do its office noiselessly, and made for
+shooting men with poisoned darts.
+
+One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture
+horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men's
+bones, and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand
+deaths.  Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces:
+made to close up tight and smooth upon the heads of living
+sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small knob or anvil,
+where the directing devil could repose his elbow at his ease, and
+listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and confessions
+of the wretch within.  There was that grim resemblance in them to
+the human shape--they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained
+and cramped--that it was difficult to think them empty; and
+terrible distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me,
+when, taking to my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or
+public walk in the sea, where there were grass and trees.  But I
+forgot them when I stood upon its farthest brink--I stood there, in
+my dream--and looked, along the ripple, to the setting sun; before
+me, in the sky and on the deep, a crimson flush; and behind me the
+whole city resolving into streaks of red and purple, on the water.
+
+In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed
+of time, and had but little understanding of its flight.  But there
+were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the
+rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still
+afloat, I thought:  plashing the slippery walls and houses with the
+cleavings of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed
+along the streets.
+
+Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I
+wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through
+labyrinths of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments
+where the furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering
+away.  Pictures were there, replete with such enduring beauty and
+expression:  with such passion, truth and power:  that they seemed
+so many young and fresh realities among a host of spectres.  I
+thought these, often intermingled with the old days of the city:
+with its beauties, tyrants, captains, patriots, merchants,
+counters, priests:  nay, with its very stones, and bricks, and
+public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the walls.
+Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped and
+oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and
+went on in my dream.
+
+Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane
+and chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon
+the water, where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a
+tangled heap.  Past open doors, decayed and rotten from long
+steeping in the wet, through which some scanty patch of vine shone
+green and bright, making unusual shadows on the pavement with its
+trembling leaves.  Past quays and terraces, where women, gracefully
+veiled, were passing and repassing, and where idlers were reclining
+in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on flights of steps.  Past
+bridges, where there were idlers too; loitering and looking over.
+Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height, before the
+loftiest windows of the loftiest houses.  Past plots of garden,
+theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of architecture--Gothic--
+Saracenic--fanciful with all the fancies of all times and
+countries.  Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and
+white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.
+Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out
+at last into a Grand Canal!  There, in the errant fancy of my
+dream, I saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all
+built upon with shops and humming with the tongues of men; a form I
+seemed to know for Desdemona's, leaned down through a latticed
+blind to pluck a flower.  And, in the dream, I thought that
+Shakespeare's spirit was abroad upon the water somewhere:  stealing
+through the city.
+
+At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the
+Virgin, in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I
+fancied that the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of
+cheerful light, and that its whole arcade was thronged with people;
+while crowds were diverting themselves in splendid coffee-houses
+opening from it--which were never shut, I thought, but open all
+night long.  When the bronze giants struck the hour of midnight on
+the bell, I thought the life and animation of the city were all
+centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent quays, I only
+saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen wrapped up
+in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.
+
+But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking
+at their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town:
+crept the water always.  Noiseless and watchful:  coiled round and
+round it, in its many folds, like an old serpent:  waiting for the
+time, I thought, when people should look down into its depths for
+any stone of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress.
+
+Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at
+Verona.  I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this
+strange Dream upon the water:  half-wondering if it lie there yet,
+and if its name be VENICE.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE
+SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND
+
+
+
+I had been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put
+me out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet.  But, I was no sooner come
+into the old market-place, than the misgiving vanished.  It is so
+fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an
+extraordinary and rich variety of fantastic buildings, that there
+could be nothing better at the core of even this romantic town:
+scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful of stories.
+
+It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the
+House of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little
+inn.  Noisy vetturini and muddy market-carts were disputing
+possession of the yard, which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood
+of splashed and bespattered geese; and there was a grim-visaged
+dog, viciously panting in a doorway, who would certainly have had
+Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over the wall, if he had
+existed and been at large in those times.  The orchard fell into
+other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but there used to
+be one attached to the house--or at all events there may have,
+been,--and the hat (Cappello) the ancient cognizance of the family,
+may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard.
+The geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were
+somewhat in the way of the story, it must be confessed; and it
+would have been pleasanter to have found the house empty, and to
+have been able to walk through the disused rooms.  But the hat was
+unspeakably comfortable; and the place where the garden used to be,
+hardly less so.  Besides, the house is a distrustful, jealous-
+looking house as one would desire to see, though of a very moderate
+size.  So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion
+of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my
+acknowledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the
+Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at
+the geese; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one
+particular of being very great indeed in the 'Family' way.
+
+From Juliet's home, to Juliet's tomb, is a transition as natural to
+the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet
+that ever has taught the torches to burn bright in any time.  So, I
+went off, with a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging to an
+old, old convent, I suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered
+gate, by a bright-eyed woman who was washing clothes, went down
+some walks where fresh plants and young flowers were prettily
+growing among fragments of old wall, and ivy-coloured mounds; and
+was shown a little tank, or water-trough, which the bright-eyed
+woman--drying her arms upon her 'kerchief, called 'La tomba di
+Giulietta la sfortunata.'  With the best disposition in the world
+to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright-eyed
+woman believed; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary
+fee in ready money.  It was a pleasure, rather than a
+disappointment, that Juliet's resting-place was forgotten.  However
+consolatory it may have been to Yorick's Ghost, to hear the feet
+upon the pavement overhead, and, twenty times a day, the repetition
+of his name, it is better for Juliet to lie out of the track of
+tourists, and to have no visitors but such as come to graves in
+spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.
+
+Pleasant Verona!  With its beautiful old palaces, and charming
+country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately,
+balustraded galleries.  With its Roman gates, still spanning the
+fair street, and casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of
+fifteen hundred years ago.  With its marble-fitted churches, lofty
+towers, rich architecture, and quaint old quiet thoroughfares,
+where shouts of Montagues and Capulets once resounded,
+
+
+And made Verona's ancient citizens
+Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,
+To wield old partizans.
+
+
+With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle,
+waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful!
+Pleasant Verona!
+
+In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Bra--a spirit of old time
+among the familiar realities of the passing hour--is the great
+Roman Amphitheatre.  So well preserved, and carefully maintained,
+that every row of seats is there, unbroken.  Over certain of the
+arches, the old Roman numerals may yet be seen; and there are
+corridors, and staircases, and subterranean passages for beasts,
+and winding ways, above ground and below, as when the fierce
+thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of the
+arena.  Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the
+walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers
+of one kind or other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and
+grass, upon the parapet.  But little else is greatly changed.
+
+When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had
+gone up to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely
+panorama closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the
+building, it seemed to lie before me like the inside of a
+prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim and
+a shallow crown; the plaits being represented by the four-and-forty
+rows of seats.  The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in
+sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly suggested
+at the moment, nevertheless.
+
+An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before--the same
+troop, I dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at
+Modena--and had scooped out a little ring at one end of the area;
+where their performances had taken place, and where the marks of
+their horses' feet were still fresh.  I could not but picture to
+myself, a handful of spectators gathered together on one or two of
+the old stone seats, and a spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a
+Policinello funny, with the grim walls looking on.  Above all, I
+thought how strangely those Roman mutes would gaze upon the
+favourite comic scene of the travelling English, where a British
+nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach:  dressed in a
+blue-tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a
+white hat:  comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an
+English lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a
+red spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-
+up parasol.
+
+I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and
+could have walked there until now, I think.  In one place, there
+was a very pretty modern theatre, where they had just performed the
+opera (always popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet.  In another
+there was a collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and
+Etruscan remains, presided over by an ancient man who might have
+been an Etruscan relic himself; for he was not strong enough to
+open the iron gate, when he had unlocked it, and had neither voice
+enough to be audible when he described the curiosities, nor sight
+enough to see them:  he was so very old.  In another place, there
+was a gallery of pictures:  so abominably bad, that it was quite
+delightful to see them mouldering away.  But anywhere:  in the
+churches, among the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down
+beside the river:  it was always pleasant Verona, and in my
+remembrance always will be.
+
+I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night--of
+course, no Englishman had ever read it there, before--and set out
+for Mantua next day at sunrise, repeating to myself (in the coupe
+of an omnibus, and next to the conductor, who was reading the
+Mysteries of Paris),
+
+
+There is no world without Verona's walls
+But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
+Hence-banished is banished from the world,
+And world's exile is death -
+
+
+which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty
+miles after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy
+and boldness.
+
+Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I wonder!  Did it
+wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing
+streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees!  Those
+purple mountains lay on the horizon, then, for certain; and the
+dresses of these peasant girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver
+pin like an English 'life-preserver' through their hair behind, can
+hardly be much changed.  The hopeful feeling of so bright a
+morning, and so exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger,
+even to an exiled lover's breast; and Mantua itself must have
+broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and walls, and
+water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial omnibus.  He
+made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two rumbling
+drawbridges; passed through the like long, covered, wooden bridge;
+and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of
+stagnant Mantua.
+
+If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place
+of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together
+in a perfect fitness of things.  It may have been more stirring
+then, perhaps.  If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his
+time, and knew what Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-
+four.  He fasted much, and that assisted him in his foreknowledge.
+
+I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room
+arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest
+little tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery
+surrounding a court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man looked
+in, to inquire if the gentleman would have a Cicerone to show the
+town.  His face was so very wistful and anxious, in the half-opened
+doorway, and there was so much poverty expressed in his faded suit
+and little pinched hat, and in the thread-bare worsted glove with
+which he held it--not expressed the less, because these were
+evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped on--that I would as
+soon have trodden on him as dismissed him.  I engaged him on the
+instant, and he stepped in directly.
+
+While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood,
+beaming by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing my hat
+with his arm.  If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was
+francs, there could not have shot over the twilight of his
+shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as lighted up the whole man, now
+that he was hired.
+
+'Well!' said I, when I was ready, 'shall we go out now?'
+
+'If the gentleman pleases.  It is a beautiful day.  A little fresh,
+but charming; altogether charming.  The gentleman will allow me to
+open the door.  This is the Inn Yard.  The court-yard of the Golden
+Lion!  The gentleman will please to mind his footing on the
+stairs.'
+
+We were now in the street.
+
+'This is the street of the Golden Lion.  This, the outside of the
+Golden Lion.  The interesting window up there, on the first Piano,
+where the pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman's
+chamber!'
+
+Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there
+were much to see in Mantua.
+
+'Well!  Truly, no.  Not much!  So, so,' he said, shrugging his
+shoulders apologetically.
+
+'Many churches?'
+
+'No.  Nearly all suppressed by the French.'
+
+'Monasteries or convents?'
+
+'No.  The French again!  Nearly all suppressed by Napoleon.'
+
+'Much business?'
+
+'Very little business.'
+
+'Many strangers?'
+
+'Ah Heaven!'
+
+I thought he would have fainted.
+
+'Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder, what shall
+we do next?' said I.
+
+He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his chin
+timidly; and then said, glancing in my face as if a light had
+broken on his mind, yet with a humble appeal to my forbearance that
+was perfectly irresistible:
+
+'We can take a little turn about the town, Signore!'  (Si puo far
+'un piccolo giro della citta).
+
+It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the proposal,
+so we set off together in great good-humour.  In the relief of his
+mind, he opened his heart, and gave up as much of Mantua as a
+Cicerone could.
+
+'One must eat,' he said; 'but, bah! it was a dull place, without
+doubt!'
+
+He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa Andrea--a
+noble church--and of an inclosed portion of the pavement, about
+which tapers were burning, and a few people kneeling, and under
+which is said to be preserved the Sangreal of the old Romances.
+This church disposed of, and another after it (the cathedral of San
+Pietro), we went to the Museum, which was shut up.  'It was all the
+same,' he said.  'Bah!  There was not much inside!'  Then, we went
+to see the Piazza del Diavolo, built by the Devil (for no
+particular purpose) in a single night; then, the Piazza Virgiliana;
+then, the statue of Virgil--OUR Poet, my little friend said,
+plucking up a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little
+on one side.  Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which
+a picture-gallery was approached.  The moment the gate of this
+retreat was opened, some five hundred geese came waddling round us,
+stretching out their necks, and clamouring in the most hideous
+manner, as if they were ejaculating, 'Oh! here's somebody come to
+see the Pictures!  Don't go up!  Don't go up!'  While we went up,
+they waited very quietly about the door in a crowd, cackling to one
+another occasionally, in a subdued tone; but the instant we
+appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and setting
+up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, 'What, you would
+go, would you!  What do you think of it!  How do you like it!' they
+attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively, into
+Mantua.
+
+The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to these, Pork
+to the learned Pig.  What a gallery it was!  I would take their
+opinion on a question of art, in preference to the discourses of
+Sir Joshua Reynolds.
+
+Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus
+ignominiouly escorted thither, my little friend was plainly reduced
+to the 'piccolo giro,' or little circuit of the town, he had
+formerly proposed.  But my suggestion that we should visit the
+Palazzo Te (of which I had heard a great deal, as a strange wild
+place) imparted new life to him, and away we went.
+
+The secret of the length of Midas's ears, would have been more
+extensively known, if that servant of his, who whispered it to the
+reeds, had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and rushes enough
+to have published it to all the world.  The Palazzo Te stands in a
+swamp, among this sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular a
+place as I ever saw.
+
+Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary.  Not for its
+dampness, though it is very damp.  Nor for its desolate condition,
+though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be.  But
+chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior
+has been decorated (among other subjects of more delicate
+execution), by Giulio Romano.  There is a leering Giant over a
+certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens of Giants (Titans
+warring with Jove) on the walls of another room, so inconceivably
+ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man can have
+imagined such creatures.  In the chamber in which they abound,
+these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every
+kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering
+under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the
+ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath;
+vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple
+down upon their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every
+kind of mad and demoniacal destruction.  The figures are immensely
+large, and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the
+colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like
+(I should imagine) a violent rush of blood to the head of the
+spectator, than any real picture set before him by the hand of an
+artist.  This apoplectic performance was shown by a sickly-looking
+woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the bad air
+of the marshes; but it was difficult to help feeling as if she were
+too much haunted by the Giants, and they were frightening her to
+death, all alone in that exhausted cistern of a Palace, among the
+reeds and rushes, with the mists hovering about outside, and
+stalking round and round it continually.
+
+Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some
+suppressed church:  now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at
+all:  all as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of
+tumbling down bodily.  The marshy town was so intensely dull and
+flat, that the dirt upon it seemed not to have come there in the
+ordinary course, but to have settled and mantled on its surface as
+on standing water.  And yet there were some business-dealings going
+on, and some profits realising; for there were arcades full of
+Jews, where those extraordinary people were sitting outside their
+shops, contemplating their stores of stuffs, and woollens, and
+bright handkerchiefs, and trinkets:  and looking, in all respects,
+as wary and business-like, as their brethren in Houndsditch,
+London.
+
+Having selected a Vetturino from among the neighbouring Christians,
+who agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and a half, and to
+start, next morning, as soon as the gates were opened, I returned
+to the Golden Lion, and dined luxuriously in my own room, in a
+narrow passage between two bedsteads:  confronted by a smoky fire,
+and backed up by a chest of drawers.  At six o'clock next morning,
+we were jingling in the dark through the wet cold mist that
+enshrouded the town; and, before noon, the driver (a native of
+Mantua, and sixty years of age or thereabouts) began TO ASK THE WAY
+to Milan.
+
+It lay through Bozzolo; formerly a little republic, and now one of
+the most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns:  where the
+landlord of the miserable inn (God bless him! it was his weekly
+custom) was distributing infinitesimal coins among a clamorous herd
+of women and children, whose rags were fluttering in the wind and
+rain outside his door, where they were gathered to receive his
+charity.  It lay through mist, and mud, and rain, and vines trained
+low upon the ground, all that day and the next; the first sleeping-
+place being Cremona, memorable for its dark brick churches, and
+immensely high tower, the Torrazzo--to say nothing of its violins,
+of which it certainly produces none in these degenerate days; and
+the second, Lodi.  Then we went on, through more mud, mist, and
+rain, and marshy ground:  and through such a fog, as Englishmen,
+strong in the faith of their own grievances, are apt to believe is
+nowhere to be found but in their own country, until we entered the
+paved streets of Milan.
+
+The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far-famed
+Cathedral might as well have been at Bombay, for anything that
+could be seen of it at that time.  But as we halted to refresh, for
+a few days then, and returned to Milan again next summer, I had
+ample opportunities of seeing the glorious structure in all its
+majesty and beauty.
+
+All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it!  There are
+many good and true saints in the calendar, but San Carlo Borromeo
+has--if I may quote Mrs. Primrose on such a subject--'my warm
+heart.'  A charitable doctor to the sick, a munificent friend to
+the poor, and this, not in any spirit of blind bigotry, but as the
+bold opponent of enormous abuses in the Romish church, I honour his
+memory.  I honour it none the less, because he was nearly slain by
+a priest, suborned, by priests, to murder him at the altar:  in
+acknowledgment of his endeavours to reform a false and hypocritical
+brotherhood of monks.  Heaven shield all imitators of San Carlo
+Borromeo as it shielded him!  A reforming Pope would need a little
+shielding, even now.
+
+The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo Borromeo is
+preserved, presents as striking and as ghastly a contrast, perhaps,
+as any place can show.  The tapers which are lighted down there,
+flash and gleam on alti-rilievi in gold and silver, delicately
+wrought by skilful hands, and representing the principal events in
+the life of the saint.  Jewels, and precious metals, shine and
+sparkle on every side.  A windlass slowly removes the front of the
+altar; and, within it, in a gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is
+seen, through alabaster, the shrivelled mummy of a man:  the
+pontifical robes with which it is adorned, radiant with diamonds,
+emeralds, rubies:  every costly and magnificent gem.  The shrunken
+heap of poor earth in the midst of this great glitter, is more
+pitiful than if it lay upon a dung-hill.  There is not a ray of
+imprisoned light in all the flash and fire of jewels, but seems to
+mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once.  Every thread of silk
+in the rich vestments seems only a provision from the worms that
+spin, for the behoof of worms that propagate in sepulchres.
+
+In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of Santa Maria
+delle Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps, better known than any
+other in the world:  the Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci--with a
+door cut through it by the intelligent Dominican friars, to
+facilitate their operations at dinner-time.
+
+I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of painting, and have
+no other means of judging of a picture than as I see it resembling
+and refining upon nature, and presenting graceful combinations of
+forms and colours.  I am, therefore, no authority whatever, in
+reference to the 'touch' of this or that master; though I know very
+well (as anybody may, who chooses to think about the matter) that
+few very great masters can possibly have painted, in the compass of
+their lives, one-half of the pictures that bear their names, and
+that are recognised by many aspirants to a reputation for taste, as
+undoubted originals.  But this, by the way.  Of the Last Supper, I
+would simply observe, that in its beautiful composition and
+arrangement, there it is, at Milan, a wonderful picture; and that,
+in its original colouring, or in its original expression of any
+single face or feature, there it is not.  Apart from the damage it
+has sustained from damp, decay, or neglect, it has been (as Barry
+shows) so retouched upon, and repainted, and that so clumsily, that
+many of the heads are, now, positive deformities, with patches of
+paint and plaster sticking upon them like wens, and utterly
+distorting the expression.  Where the original artist set that
+impress of his genius on a face, which, almost in a line or touch,
+separated him from meaner painters and made him what he was,
+succeeding bunglers, filling up, or painting across seams and
+cracks, have been quite unable to imitate his hand; and putting in
+some scowls, or frowns, or wrinkles, of their own, have blotched
+and spoiled the work.  This is so well established as an historical
+fact, that I should not repeat it, at the risk of being tedious,
+but for having observed an English gentleman before the picture,
+who was at great pains to fall into what I may describe as mild
+convulsions, at certain minute details of expression which are not
+left in it.  Whereas, it would be comfortable and rational for
+travellers and critics to arrive at a general understanding that it
+cannot fail to have been a work of extraordinary merit, once:
+when, with so few of its original beauties remaining, the grandeur
+of the general design is yet sufficient to sustain it, as a piece
+replete with interest and dignity.
+
+We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due course, and a fine
+city it is, though not so unmistakably Italian as to possess the
+characteristic qualities of many towns far less important in
+themselves.  The Corso, where the Milanese gentry ride up and down
+in carriages, and rather than not do which, they would half starve
+themselves at home, is a most noble public promenade, shaded by
+long avenues of trees.  In the splendid theatre of La Scala, there
+was a ballet of action performed after the opera, under the title
+of Prometheus:  in the beginning of which, some hundred or two of
+men and women represented our mortal race before the refinements of
+the arts and sciences, and loves and graces, came on earth to
+soften them.  I never saw anything more effective.  Generally
+speaking, the pantomimic action of the Italians is more remarkable
+for its sudden and impetuous character than for its delicate
+expression, but, in this case, the drooping monotony:  the weary,
+miserable, listless, moping life:  the sordid passions and desires
+of human creatures, destitute of those elevating influences to
+which we owe so much, and to whose promoters we render so little:
+were expressed in a manner really powerful and affecting.  I should
+have thought it almost impossible to present such an idea so
+strongly on the stage, without the aid of speech.
+
+Milan soon lay behind us, at five o'clock in the morning; and
+before the golden statue on the summit of the cathedral spire was
+lost in the blue sky, the Alps, stupendously confused in lofty
+peaks and ridges, clouds and snow, were towering in our path.
+
+Still, we continued to advance toward them until nightfall; and,
+all day long, the mountain tops presented strangely shifting
+shapes, as the road displayed them in different points of view.
+The beautiful day was just declining, when we came upon the Lago
+Maggiore, with its lovely islands.  For however fanciful and
+fantastic the Isola Bella may be, and is, it still is beautiful.
+Anything springing out of that blue water, with that scenery around
+it, must be.
+
+It was ten o'clock at night when we got to Domo d'Ossola, at the
+foot of the Pass of the Simplon.  But as the moon was shining
+brightly, and there was not a cloud in the starlit sky, it was no
+time for going to bed, or going anywhere but on.  So, we got a
+little carriage, after some delay, and began the ascent.
+
+It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five feet thick
+in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new drift was
+already deep), the air was piercing cold.  But, the serenity of the
+night, and the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows,
+and deep glooms, and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon
+and its incessant roar of falling water, rendered the journey more
+and more sublime at every step.
+
+Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleeping in the
+moonlight, the road began to wind among dark trees, and after a
+time emerged upon a barer region, very steep and toilsome, where
+the moon shone bright and high.  By degrees, the roar of water grew
+louder; and the stupendous track, after crossing the torrent by a
+bridge, struck in between two massive perpendicular walls of rock
+that quite shut out the moonlight, and only left a few stars
+shining in the narrow strip of sky above.  Then, even this was
+lost, in the thick darkness of a cavern in the rock, through which
+the way was pierced; the terrible cataract thundering and roaring
+close below it, and its foam and spray hanging, in a mist, about
+the entrance.  Emerging from this cave, and coming again into the
+moonlight, and across a dizzy bridge, it crept and twisted upward,
+through the Gorge of Gondo, savage and grand beyond description,
+with smooth-fronted precipices, rising up on either hand, and
+almost meeting overhead.  Thus we went, climbing on our rugged way,
+higher and higher all night, without a moment's weariness:  lost in
+the contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous heights and
+depths, the fields of smooth snow lying, in the clefts and hollows,
+and the fierce torrents thundering headlong down the deep abyss.
+
+Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen wind was
+blowing fiercely.  Having, with some trouble, awakened the inmates
+of a wooden house in this solitude:  round which the wind was
+howling dismally, catching up the snow in wreaths and hurling it
+away:  we got some breakfast in a room built of rough timbers, but
+well warmed by a stove, and well contrived (as it had need to be)
+for keeping out the bitter storms.  A sledge being then made ready,
+and four horses harnessed to it, we went, ploughing, through the
+snow.  Still upward, but now in the cold light of morning, and with
+the great white desert on which we travelled, plain and clear.
+
+We were well upon the summit of the mountain:  and had before us
+the rude cross of wood, denoting its greatest altitude above the
+sea:  when the light of the rising sun, struck, all at once, upon
+the waste of snow, and turned it a deep red.  The lonely grandeur
+of the scene was then at its height.
+
+As we went sledging on, there came out of the Hospice founded by
+Napoleon, a group of Peasant travellers, with staves and knapsacks,
+who had rested there last night:  attended by a Monk or two, their
+hospitable entertainers, trudging slowly forward with them, for
+company's sake.  It was pleasant to give them good morning, and
+pretty, looking back a long way after them, to see them looking
+back at us, and hesitating presently, when one of our horses
+stumbled and fell, whether or no they should return and help us.
+But he was soon up again, with the assistance of a rough waggoner
+whose team had stuck fast there too; and when we had helped him out
+of his difficulty, in return, we left him slowly ploughing towards
+them, and went slowly and swiftly forward, on the brink of a steep
+precipice, among the mountain pines.
+
+Taking to our wheels again, soon afterwards, we began rapidly to
+descend; passing under everlasting glaciers, by means of arched
+galleries, hung with clusters of dripping icicles; under and over
+foaming waterfalls; near places of refuge, and galleries of shelter
+against sudden danger; through caverns over whose arched roofs the
+avalanches slide, in spring, and bury themselves in the unknown
+gulf beneath.  Down, over lofty bridges, and through horrible
+ravines:  a little shifting speck in the vast desolation of ice and
+snow, and monstrous granite rocks; down through the deep Gorge of
+the Saltine, and deafened by the torrent plunging madly down, among
+the riven blocks of rock, into the level country, far below.
+Gradually down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an upward and a
+downward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and softer
+scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver
+in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow,
+domes and church-spires of a Swiss town.
+
+The business of these recollections being with Italy, and my
+business, consequently, being to scamper back thither as fast as
+possible, I will not recall (though I am sorely tempted) how the
+Swiss villages, clustered at the feet of Giant mountains, looked
+like playthings; or how confusedly the houses were heaped and piled
+together; or how there were very narrow streets to shut the howling
+winds out in the winter-time; and broken bridges, which the
+impetuous torrents, suddenly released in spring, had swept away.
+Or how there were peasant women here, with great round fur caps:
+looking, when they peeped out of casements and only their heads
+were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to the Lord Mayor of
+London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the smooth lake of
+Geneva, was beautiful to see; or how the statue of Saint Peter in
+the street at Fribourg, grasps the largest key that ever was
+beheld; or how Fribourg is illustrious for its two suspension
+bridges, and its grand cathedral organ.
+
+Or how, between that town and Bale, the road meandered among
+thriving villages of wooden cottages, with overhanging thatched
+roofs, and low protruding windows, glazed with small round panes of
+glass like crown-pieces; or how, in every little Swiss homestead,
+with its cart or waggon carefully stowed away beside the house, its
+little garden, stock of poultry, and groups of red-cheeked
+children, there was an air of comfort, very new and very pleasant
+after Italy; or how the dresses of the women changed again, and
+there were no more sword-bearers to be seen; and fair white
+stomachers, and great black, fan-shaped, gauzy-looking caps,
+prevailed instead.
+
+Or how the country by the Jura mountains, sprinkled with snow, and
+lighted by the moon, and musical with falling water, was
+delightful; or how, below the windows of the great hotel of the
+Three Kings at Bale, the swollen Rhine ran fast and green; or how,
+at Strasbourg, it was quite as fast but not as green:  and was said
+to be foggy lower down:  and, at that late time of the year, was a
+far less certain means of progress, than the highway road to Paris.
+
+Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic Cathedral,
+and its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and gables, made a
+little gallery of quaint and interesting views; or how a crowd was
+gathered inside the cathedral at noon, to see the famous mechanical
+clock in motion, striking twelve.  How, when it struck twelve, a
+whole army of puppets went through many ingenious evolutions; and,
+among them, a huge puppet-cock, perched on the top, crowed twelve
+times, loud and clear.  Or how it was wonderful to see this cock at
+great pains to clap its wings, and strain its throat; but obviously
+having no connection whatever with its own voice; which was deep
+within the clock, a long way down.
+
+Or how the road to Paris, was one sea of mud, and thence to the
+coast, a little better for a hard frost.  Or how the cliffs of
+Dover were a pleasant sight, and England was so wonderfully neat--
+though dark, and lacking colour on a winter's day, it must be
+conceded.
+
+Or how, a few days afterwards, it was cool, re-crossing the
+channel, with ice upon the decks, and snow lying pretty deep in
+France.  Or how the Malle Poste scrambled through the snow,
+headlong, drawn in the hilly parts by any number of stout horses at
+a canter; or how there were, outside the Post-office Yard in Paris,
+before daybreak, extraordinary adventurers in heaps of rags,
+groping in the snowy streets with little rakes, in search of odds
+and ends.
+
+Or how, between Paris and Marseilles, the snow being then exceeding
+deep, a thaw came on, and the mail waded rather than rolled for the
+next three hundred miles or so; breaking springs on Sunday nights,
+and putting out its two passengers to warm and refresh themselves
+pending the repairs, in miserable billiard-rooms, where hairy
+company, collected about stoves, were playing cards; the cards
+being very like themselves--extremely limp and dirty.
+
+Or how there was detention at Marseilles from stress of weather;
+and steamers were advertised to go, which did not go; or how the
+good Steam-packet Charlemagne at length put out, and met such
+weather that now she threatened to run into Toulon, and now into
+Nice, but, the wind moderating, did neither, but ran on into Genoa
+harbour instead, where the familiar Bells rang sweetly in my ear.
+Or how there was a travelling party on board, of whom one member
+was very ill in the cabin next to mine, and being ill was cross,
+and therefore declined to give up the Dictionary, which he kept
+under his pillow; thereby obliging his companions to come down to
+him, constantly, to ask what was the Italian for a lump of sugar--a
+glass of brandy and water--what's o'clock? and so forth:  which he
+always insisted on looking out, with his own sea-sick eyes,
+declining to entrust the book to any man alive.
+
+Like GRUMIO, I might have told you, in detail, all this and
+something more--but to as little purpose--were I not deterred by
+the remembrance that my business is with Italy.  Therefore, like
+GRUMIO'S story, 'it shall die in oblivion.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA
+
+
+
+There is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-
+road between Genoa and Spezzia.  On one side:  sometimes far below,
+sometimes nearly on a level with the road, and often skirted by
+broken rocks of many shapes:  there is the free blue sea, with here
+and there a picturesque felucca gliding slowly on; on the other
+side are lofty hills, ravines besprinkled with white cottages,
+patches of dark olive woods, country churches with their light open
+towers, and country houses gaily painted.  On every bank and knoll
+by the wayside, the wild cactus and aloe flourish in exuberant
+profusion; and the gardens of the bright villages along the road,
+are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with clusters of the
+Belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter with golden
+oranges and lemons.
+
+Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by
+fishermen; and it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled up on
+the beach, making little patches of shade, where they lie asleep,
+or where the women and children sit romping and looking out to sea,
+while they mend their nets upon the shore.  There is one town,
+Camoglia, with its little harbour on the sea, hundreds of feet
+below the road; where families of mariners live, who, time out of
+mind, have owned coasting-vessels in that place, and have traded to
+Spain and elsewhere.  Seen from the road above, it is like a tiny
+model on the margin of the dimpled water, shining in the sun.
+Descended into, by the winding mule-tracks, it is a perfect
+miniature of a primitive seafaring town; the saltest, roughest,
+most piratical little place that ever was seen.  Great rusty iron
+rings and mooring-chains, capstans, and fragments of old masts and
+spars, choke up the way; hardy rough-weather boats, and seamen's
+clothing, flutter in the little harbour or are drawn out on the
+sunny stones to dry; on the parapet of the rude pier, a few
+amphibious-looking fellows lie asleep, with their legs dangling
+over the wall, as though earth or water were all one to them, and
+if they slipped in, they would float away, dozing comfortably among
+the fishes; the church is bright with trophies of the sea, and
+votive offerings, in commemoration of escape from storm and
+shipwreck.  The dwellings not immediately abutting on the harbour
+are approached by blind low archways, and by crooked steps, as if
+in darkness and in difficulty of access they should be like holds
+of ships, or inconvenient cabins under water; and everywhere, there
+is a smell of fish, and sea-weed, and old rope.
+
+The coast-road whence Camoglia is descried so far below, is famous,
+in the warm season, especially in some parts near Genoa, for fire-
+flies.  Walking there on a dark night, I have seen it made one
+sparkling firmament by these beautiful insects:  so that the
+distant stars were pale against the flash and glitter that spangled
+every olive wood and hill-side, and pervaded the whole air.
+
+It was not in such a season, however, that we traversed this road
+on our way to Rome.  The middle of January was only just past, and
+it was very gloomy and dark weather; very wet besides.  In crossing
+the fine pass of Bracco, we encountered such a storm of mist and
+rain, that we travelled in a cloud the whole way.  There might have
+been no Mediterranean in the world, for anything that we saw of it
+there, except when a sudden gust of wind, clearing the mist before
+it, for a moment, showed the agitated sea at a great depth below,
+lashing the distant rocks, and spouting up its foam furiously.  The
+rain was incessant; every brook and torrent was greatly swollen;
+and such a deafening leaping, and roaring, and thundering of water,
+I never heard the like of in my life.
+
+Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra, an
+unbridged river on the high-road to Pisa, was too high to be safely
+crossed in the Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait until the
+afternoon of next day, when it had, in some degree, subsided.
+Spezzia, however, is a good place to tarry at; by reason, firstly,
+of its beautiful bay; secondly, of its ghostly Inn; thirdly, of the
+head-dress of the women, who wear, on one side of their head, a
+small doll's straw hat, stuck on to the hair; which is certainly
+the oddest and most roguish head-gear that ever was invented.
+
+The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat--the passage is not by
+any means agreeable, when the current is swollen and strong--we
+arrived at Carrara, within a few hours.  In good time next morning,
+we got some ponies, and went out to see the marble quarries.
+
+They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of lofty
+hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by being
+abruptly strangled by Nature.  The quarries, 'or caves,' as they
+call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills, on
+either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for
+marble:  which may turn out good or bad:  may make a man's fortune
+very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working what is
+worth nothing.  Some of these caves were opened by the ancient
+Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour.  Many others are
+being worked at this moment; others are to be begun to-morrow, next
+week, next month; others are unbought, unthought of; and marble
+enough for more ages than have passed since the place was resorted
+to, lies hidden everywhere:  patiently awaiting its time of
+discovery.
+
+As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having left
+your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down)
+you hear, every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a low
+tone, more silent than the previous silence, a melancholy warning
+bugle,--a signal to the miners to withdraw.  Then, there is a
+thundering, and echoing from hill to hill, and perhaps a splashing
+up of great fragments of rock into the air; and on you toil again
+until some other bugle sounds, in a new direction, and you stop
+directly, lest you should come within the range of the new
+explosion.
+
+There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills--on the
+sides--clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone
+and earth, to make way for the blocks of marble that had been
+discovered.  As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the
+narrow valley, I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the
+same sort of glen) where the Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where
+the merchants from the heights above, flung down great pieces of
+meat for the diamonds to stick to.  There were no eagles here, to
+darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as
+wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds.
+
+But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense
+the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its
+institutions, pave that road:  repair it, watch it, keep it going!
+Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with
+great heaps of stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the
+middle of this valley; and THAT being the road--because it was the
+road five hundred years ago!  Imagine the clumsy carts of five
+hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used
+to be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn
+to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are
+now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel
+work!  Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block,
+according to its size; down it must come, this way.  In their
+struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind
+them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for
+their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy,
+are crushed to death beneath the wheels.  But it was good five
+hundred years ago, and it must be good now:  and a railroad down
+one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat
+blasphemy.
+
+When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair
+of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming
+down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke,
+to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts--and who faced backwards:
+not before him--as the very Devil of true despotism.  He had a
+great rod in his hand, with an iron point; and when they could
+plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no
+longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it
+on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got
+them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all
+these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they
+stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to an
+abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and
+smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the
+precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his
+head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved
+something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and
+blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noontide of his
+triumph.
+
+Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that afternoon--for
+it is a great workshop, full of beautifully-finished copies in
+marble, of almost every figure, group, and bust, we know--it
+seemed, at first, so strange to me that those exquisite shapes,
+replete with grace, and thought, and delicate repose, should grow
+out of all this toil, and sweat, and torture!  But I soon found a
+parallel to it, and an explanation of it, in every virtue that
+springs up in miserable ground, and every good thing that has its
+birth in sorrow and distress.  And, looking out of the sculptor's
+great window, upon the marble mountains, all red and glowing in the
+decline of day, but stern and solemn to the last, I thought, my
+God! how many quarries of human hearts and souls, capable of far
+more beautiful results, are left shut up and mouldering away:
+while pleasure-travellers through life, avert their faces, as they
+pass, and shudder at the gloom and ruggedness that conceal them!
+
+The then reigning Duke of Modena, to whom this territory in part
+belonged, claimed the proud distinction of being the only sovereign
+in Europe who had not recognised Louis-Philippe as King of the
+French!  He was not a wag, but quite in earnest.  He was also much
+opposed to railroads; and if certain lines in contemplation by
+other potentates, on either side of him, had been executed, would
+have probably enjoyed the satisfaction of having an omnibus plying
+to and fro across his not very vast dominions, to forward
+travellers from one terminus to another.
+
+Carrara, shut in by great hills, is very picturesque and bold.  Few
+tourists stay there; and the people are nearly all connected, in
+one way or other, with the working of marble.  There are also
+villages among the caves, where the workmen live.  It contains a
+beautiful little Theatre, newly built; and it is an interesting
+custom there, to form the chorus of labourers in the marble
+quarries, who are self-taught and sing by ear.  I heard them in a
+comic opera, and in an act of 'Norma;' and they acquitted
+themselves very well; unlike the common people of Italy generally,
+who (with some exceptions among the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of
+tune, and have very disagreeable singing voices.
+
+From the summit of a lofty hill beyond Carrara, the first view of
+the fertile plain in which the town of Pisa lies--with Leghorn, a
+purple spot in the flat distance--is enchanting.  Nor is it only
+distance that lends enchantment to the view; for the fruitful
+country, and rich woods of olive-trees through which the road
+subsequently passes, render it delightful.
+
+The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for a long time
+we could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower, all awry in the
+uncertain light; the shadowy original of the old pictures in
+school-books, setting forth 'The Wonders of the World.'  Like most
+things connected in their first associations with school-books and
+school-times, it was too small.  I felt it keenly.  It was nothing
+like so high above the wall as I had hoped.  It was another of the
+many deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the corner
+of St. Paul's Churchyard, London.  HIS Tower was a fiction, but
+this was a reality--and, by comparison, a short reality.  Still, it
+looked very well, and very strange, and was quite as much out of
+the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be.  The quiet
+air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the gate, with only two
+little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of people
+in them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the centre of the
+town; were excellent.  So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr.
+Harris (remembering his good intentions), but forgave him before
+dinner, and went out, full of confidence, to see the Tower next
+morning.
+
+I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected to see it,
+casting its long shadow on a public street where people came and
+went all day.  It was a surprise to me to find it in a grave
+retired place, apart from the general resort, and carpeted with
+smooth green turf.  But, the group of buildings, clustered on and
+about this verdant carpet:  comprising the Tower, the Baptistery,
+the Cathedral, and the Church of the Campo Santo:  is perhaps the
+most remarkable and beautiful in the whole world; and from being
+clustered there, together, away from the ordinary transactions and
+details of the town, they have a singularly venerable and
+impressive character.  It is the architectural essence of a rich
+old city, with all its common life and common habitations pressed
+out, and filtered away.
+
+SIMOND compares the Tower to the usual pictorial representations in
+children's books of the Tower of Babel.  It is a happy simile, and
+conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured
+description.  Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the
+structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general
+appearance.  In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an
+easy staircase), the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the
+summit, it becomes so, and gives one the sensation of being in a
+ship that has heeled over, through the action of an ebb-tide.  The
+effect UPON THE LOW SIDE, so to speak--looking over from the
+gallery, and seeing the shaft recede to its base--is very
+startling; and I saw a nervous traveller hold on to the Tower
+involuntarily, after glancing down, as if he had some idea of
+propping it up.  The view within, from the ground--looking up, as
+through a slanted tube--is also very curious.  It certainly
+inclines as much as the most sanguine tourist could desire.  The
+natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were
+about to recline upon the grass below it, to rest, and contemplate
+the adjacent buildings, would probably be, not to take up their
+position under the leaning side; it is so very much aslant.
+
+The manifold beauties of the Cathedral and Baptistery need no
+recapitulation from me; though in this case, as in a hundred
+others, I find it difficult to separate my own delight in recalling
+them, from your weariness in having them recalled.  There is a
+picture of St. Agnes, by Andrea del Sarto, in the former, and there
+are a variety of rich columns in the latter, that tempt me
+strongly.
+
+It is, I hope, no breach of my resolution not to be tempted into
+elaborate descriptions, to remember the Campo Santo; where grass-
+grown graves are dug in earth brought more than six hundred years
+ago, from the Holy Land; and where there are, surrounding them,
+such cloisters, with such playing lights and shadows falling
+through their delicate tracery on the stone pavement, as surely the
+dullest memory could never forget.  On the walls of this solemn and
+lovely place, are ancient frescoes, very much obliterated and
+decayed, but very curious.  As usually happens in almost any
+collection of paintings, of any sort, in Italy, where there are
+many heads, there is, in one of them, a striking accidental
+likeness of Napoleon.  At one time, I used to please my fancy with
+the speculation whether these old painters, at their work, had a
+foreboding knowledge of the man who would one day arise to wreak
+such destruction upon art:  whose soldiers would make targets of
+great pictures, and stable their horses among triumphs of
+architecture.  But the same Corsican face is so plentiful in some
+parts of Italy at this day, that a more commonplace solution of the
+coincidence is unavoidable.
+
+If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its Tower,
+it may claim to be, at least, the second or third in right of its
+beggars.  They waylay the unhappy visitor at every turn, escort him
+to every door he enters at, and lie in wait for him, with strong
+reinforcements, at every door by which they know he must come out.
+The grating of the portal on its hinges is the signal for a general
+shout, and the moment he appears, he is hemmed in, and fallen on,
+by heaps of rags and personal distortions.  The beggars seem to
+embody all the trade and enterprise of Pisa.  Nothing else is
+stirring, but warm air.  Going through the streets, the fronts of
+the sleepy houses look like backs.  They are all so still and
+quiet, and unlike houses with people in them, that the greater part
+of the city has the appearance of a city at daybreak, or during a
+general siesta of the population.  Or it is yet more like those
+backgrounds of houses in common prints, or old engravings, where
+windows and doors are squarely indicated, and one figure (a beggar
+of course) is seen walking off by itself into illimitable
+perspective.
+
+Not so Leghorn (made illustrious by SMOLLETT'S grave), which is a
+thriving, business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idleness is
+shouldered out of the way by commerce.  The regulations observed
+there, in reference to trade and merchants, are very liberal and
+free; and the town, of course, benefits by them.  Leghorn had a bad
+name in connection with stabbers, and with some justice it must be
+allowed; for, not many years ago, there was an assassination club
+there, the members of which bore no ill-will to anybody in
+particular, but stabbed people (quite strangers to them) in the
+streets at night, for the pleasure and excitement of the
+recreation.  I think the president of this amiable society was a
+shoemaker.  He was taken, however, and the club was broken up.  It
+would, probably, have disappeared in the natural course of events,
+before the railroad between Leghorn and Pisa, which is a good one,
+and has already begun to astonish Italy with a precedent of
+punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improvement--the most
+dangerous and heretical astonisher of all.  There must have been a
+slight sensation, as of earthquake, surely, in the Vatican, when
+the first Italian railroad was thrown open.
+
+Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered Vetturino, and his
+four horses, to take us on to Rome, we travelled through pleasant
+Tuscan villages and cheerful scenery all day.  The roadside crosses
+in this part of Italy are numerous and curious.  There is seldom a
+figure on the cross, though there is sometimes a face, but they are
+remarkable for being garnished with little models in wood, of every
+possible object that can be connected with the Saviour's death.
+The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his Master thrice, is
+usually perched on the tip-top; and an ornithological phenomenon he
+generally is.  Under him, is the inscription.  Then, hung on to the
+cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the sponge of vinegar and
+water at the end, the coat without seam for which the soldiers cast
+lots, the dice-box with which they threw for it, the hammer that
+drove in the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the ladder
+which was set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the
+instrument of flagellation, the lanthorn with which Mary went to
+the tomb (I suppose), and the sword with which Peter smote the
+servant of the high priest,--a perfect toy-shop of little objects,
+repeated at every four or five miles, all along the highway.
+
+On the evening of the second day from Pisa, we reached the
+beautiful old city of Siena.  There was what they called a
+Carnival, in progress; but, as its secret lay in a score or two of
+melancholy people walking up and down the principal street in
+common toy-shop masks, and being more melancholy, if possible, than
+the same sort of people in England, I say no more of it.  We went
+off, betimes next morning, to see the Cathedral, which is
+wonderfully picturesque inside and out, especially the latter--also
+the market-place, or great Piazza, which is a large square, with a
+great broken-nosed fountain in it:  some quaint Gothic houses:  and
+a high square brick tower; OUTSIDE the top of which--a curious
+feature in such views in Italy--hangs an enormous bell.  It is like
+a bit of Venice, without the water.  There are some curious old
+Palazzi in the town, which is very ancient; and without having (for
+me) the interest of Verona, or Genoa, it is very dreamy and
+fantastic, and most interesting.
+
+We went on again, as soon as we had seen these things, and going
+over a rather bleak country (there had been nothing but vines until
+now:  mere walking-sticks at that season of the year), stopped, as
+usual, between one and two hours in the middle of the day, to rest
+the horses; that being a part of every Vetturino contract.  We then
+went on again, through a region gradually becoming bleaker and
+wilder, until it became as bare and desolate as any Scottish moors.
+Soon after dark, we halted for the night, at the osteria of La
+Scala:  a perfectly lone house, where the family were sitting round
+a great fire in the kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or
+four feet high, and big enough for the roasting of an ox.  On the
+upper, and only other floor of this hotel, there was a great, wild,
+rambling sala, with one very little window in a by-corner, and four
+black doors opening into four black bedrooms in various directions.
+To say nothing of another large black door, opening into another
+large black sala, with the staircase coming abruptly through a kind
+of trap-door in the floor, and the rafters of the roof looming
+above:  a suspicious little press skulking in one obscure corner:
+and all the knives in the house lying about in various directions.
+The fireplace was of the purest Italian architecture, so that it
+was perfectly impossible to see it for the smoke.  The waitress was
+like a dramatic brigand's wife, and wore the same style of dress
+upon her head.  The dogs barked like mad; the echoes returned the
+compliments bestowed upon them; there was not another house within
+twelve miles; and things had a dreary, and rather a cut-throat,
+appearance.
+
+They were not improved by rumours of robbers having come out,
+strong and boldly, within a few nights; and of their having stopped
+the mail very near that place.  They were known to have waylaid
+some travellers not long before, on Mount Vesuvius itself, and were
+the talk at all the roadside inns.  As they were no business of
+ours, however (for we had very little with us to lose), we made
+ourselves merry on the subject, and were very soon as comfortable
+as need be.  We had the usual dinner in this solitary house; and a
+very good dinner it is, when you are used to it.  There is
+something with a vegetable or some rice in it which is a sort of
+shorthand or arbitrary character for soup, and which tastes very
+well, when you have flavoured it with plenty of grated cheese, lots
+of salt, and abundance of pepper.  There is the half fowl of which
+this soup has been made.  There is a stewed pigeon, with the
+gizzards and livers of himself and other birds stuck all round him.
+There is a bit of roast beef, the size of a small French roll.
+There are a scrap of Parmesan cheese, and five little withered
+apples, all huddled together on a small plate, and crowding one
+upon the other, as if each were trying to save itself from the
+chance of being eaten.  Then there is coffee; and then there is
+bed.  You don't mind brick floors; you don't mind yawning doors,
+nor banging windows; you don't mind your own horses being stabled
+under the bed:  and so close, that every time a horse coughs or
+sneezes, he wakes you.  If you are good-humoured to the people
+about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take my word
+for it you may be well entertained in the very worst Italian Inn,
+and always in the most obliging manner, and may go from one end of
+the country to the other (despite all stories to the contrary)
+without any great trial of your patience anywhere.  Especially,
+when you get such wine in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte
+Pulciano.
+
+It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we went, for
+twelve miles, over a country as barren, as stony, and as wild, as
+Cornwall in England, until we came to Radicofani, where there is a
+ghostly, goblin inn:  once a hunting-seat, belonging to the Dukes
+of Tuscany.  It is full of such rambling corridors, and gaunt
+rooms, that all the murdering and phantom tales that ever were
+written might have originated in that one house.  There are some
+horrible old Palazzi in Genoa:  one in particular, not unlike it,
+outside:  but there is a winding, creaking, wormy, rustling, door-
+opening, foot-on-staircase-falling character about this Radicofani
+Hotel, such as I never saw, anywhere else.  The town, such as it
+is, hangs on a hill-side above the house, and in front of it.  The
+inhabitants are all beggars; and as soon as they see a carriage
+coming, they swoop down upon it, like so many birds of prey.
+
+When we got on the mountain pass, which lies beyond this place, the
+wind (as they had forewarned us at the inn) was so terrific, that
+we were obliged to take my other half out of the carriage, lest she
+should be blown over, carriage and all, and to hang to it, on the
+windy side (as well as we could for laughing), to prevent its
+going, Heaven knows where.  For mere force of wind, this land-storm
+might have competed with an Atlantic gale, and had a reasonable
+chance of coming off victorious.  The blast came sweeping down
+great gullies in a range of mountains on the right:  so that we
+looked with positive awe at a great morass on the left, and saw
+that there was not a bush or twig to hold by.  It seemed as if,
+once blown from our feet, we must be swept out to sea, or away into
+space.  There was snow, and hail, and rain, and lightning, and
+thunder; and there were rolling mists, travelling with incredible
+velocity.  It was dark, awful, and solitary to the last degree;
+there were mountains above mountains, veiled in angry clouds; and
+there was such a wrathful, rapid, violent, tumultuous hurry,
+everywhere, as rendered the scene unspeakably exciting and grand.
+
+It was a relief to get out of it, notwithstanding; and to cross
+even the dismal, dirty Papal Frontier.  After passing through two
+little towns; in one of which, Acquapendente, there was also a
+'Carnival' in progress:  consisting of one man dressed and masked
+as a woman, and one woman dressed and masked as a man, walking
+ankle-deep, through the muddy streets, in a very melancholy manner:
+we came, at dusk, within sight of the Lake of Bolsena, on whose
+bank there is a little town of the same name, much celebrated for
+malaria.  With the exception of this poor place, there is not a
+cottage on the banks of the lake, or near it (for nobody dare sleep
+there); not a boat upon its waters; not a stick or stake to break
+the dismal monotony of seven-and-twenty watery miles.  We were late
+in getting in, the roads being very bad from heavy rains; and,
+after dark, the dulness of the scene was quite intolerable.
+
+We entered on a very different, and a finer scene of desolation,
+next night, at sunset.  We had passed through Montefiaschone
+(famous for its wine) and Viterbo (for its fountains):  and after
+climbing up a long hill of eight or ten miles' extent, came
+suddenly upon the margin of a solitary lake:  in one part very
+beautiful, with a luxuriant wood; in another, very barren, and shut
+in by bleak volcanic hills.  Where this lake flows, there stood, of
+old, a city.  It was swallowed up one day; and in its stead, this
+water rose.  There are ancient traditions (common to many parts of
+the world) of the ruined city having been seen below, when the
+water was clear; but however that may be, from this spot of earth
+it vanished.  The ground came bubbling up above it; and the water
+too; and here they stand, like ghosts on whom the other world
+closed suddenly, and who have no means of getting back again.  They
+seem to be waiting the course of ages, for the next earthquake in
+that place; when they will plunge below the ground, at its first
+yawning, and be seen no more.  The unhappy city below, is not more
+lost and dreary, than these fire-charred hills and the stagnant
+water, above.  The red sun looked strangely on them, as with the
+knowledge that they were made for caverns and darkness; and the
+melancholy water oozed and sucked the mud, and crept quietly among
+the marshy grass and reeds, as if the overthrow of all the ancient
+towers and housetops, and the death of all the ancient people born
+and bred there, were yet heavy on its conscience.
+
+A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a little
+town like a large pig-sty, where we passed the night.  Next morning
+at seven o'clock, we started for Rome.
+
+As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the Campagna
+Romana; an undulating flat (as you know), where few people can
+live; and where, for miles and miles, there is nothing to relieve
+the terrible monotony and gloom.  Of all kinds of country that
+could, by possibility, lie outside the gates of Rome, this is the
+aptest and fittest burial-ground for the Dead City.  So sad, so
+quiet, so sullen; so secret in its covering up of great masses of
+ruin, and hiding them; so like the waste places into which the men
+possessed with devils used to go and howl, and rend themselves, in
+the old days of Jerusalem.  We had to traverse thirty miles of this
+Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing nothing
+but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking shepherd:
+with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped to the chin
+in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep.  At the end of that
+distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch,
+in a common malaria-shaken, despondent little public-house, whose
+every inch of wall and beam, inside, was (according to custom)
+painted and decorated in a way so miserable that every room looked
+like the wrong side of another room, and, with its wretched
+imitation of drapery, and lop-sided little daubs of lyres, seemed
+to have been plundered from behind the scenes of some travelling
+circus.
+
+When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfect fever,
+to strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after another mile or two,
+the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked
+like--I am half afraid to write the word--like LONDON!!!  There it
+lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples,
+and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them
+all, one Dome.  I swear, that keenly as I felt the seeming
+absurdity of the comparison, it was so like London, at that
+distance, that if you could have shown it me, in a glass, I should
+have taken it for nothing else.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--ROME
+
+
+
+We entered the Eternal City, at about four o'clock in the
+afternoon, on the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo,
+and came immediately--it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been
+heavy rain--on the skirts of the Carnival.  We did not, then, know
+that we were only looking at the fag end of the masks, who were
+driving slowly round and round the Piazza until they could find a
+promising opportunity for falling into the stream of carriages, and
+getting, in good time, into the thick of the festivity; and coming
+among them so abruptly, all travel-stained and weary, was not
+coming very well prepared to enjoy the scene.
+
+We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles
+before.  It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and hurrying
+on between its worn-away and miry banks, had a promising aspect of
+desolation and ruin.  The masquerade dresses on the fringe of the
+Carnival, did great violence to this promise.  There were no great
+ruins, no solemn tokens of antiquity, to be seen;--they all lie on
+the other side of the city.  There seemed to be long streets of
+commonplace shops and houses, such as are to be found in any
+European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers
+to and fro; a multitude of chattering strangers.  It was no more MY
+Rome:  the Rome of anybody's fancy, man or boy; degraded and fallen
+and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins:  than the Place
+de la Concorde in Paris is.  A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain, and
+muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for this:  and I confess
+to having gone to bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour,
+and with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm.
+
+Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St. Peter's.
+It looked immense in the distance, but distinctly and decidedly
+small, by comparison, on a near approach.  The beauty of the
+Piazza, on which it stands, with its clusters of exquisite columns,
+and its gushing fountains--so fresh, so broad, and free, and
+beautiful--nothing can exaggerate.  The first burst of the
+interior, in all its expansive majesty and glory:  and, most of
+all, the looking up into the Dome:  is a sensation never to be
+forgotten.  But, there were preparations for a Festa; the pillars
+of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent frippery of red
+and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the subterranean chapel:
+which is before it:  in the centre of the church:  were like a
+goldsmith's shop, or one of the opening scenes in a very lavish
+pantomime.  And though I had as high a sense of the beauty of the
+building (I hope) as it is possible to entertain, I felt no very
+strong emotion.  I have been infinitely more affected in many
+English cathedrals when the organ has been playing, and in many
+English country churches when the congregation have been singing.
+I had a much greater sense of mystery and wonder, in the Cathedral
+of San Mark at Venice.
+
+When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour
+staring up into the dome:  and would not have 'gone over' the
+Cathedral then, for any money), we said to the coachman, 'Go to the
+Coliseum.'  In a quarter of an hour or so, he stopped at the gate,
+and we went in.
+
+It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say:  so
+suggestive and distinct is it at this hour:  that, for a moment--
+actually in passing in--they who will, may have the whole great
+pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces
+staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood,
+and dust going on there, as no language can describe.  Its
+solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon
+the stranger the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in
+his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight,
+not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions.
+
+To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches
+overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass
+growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on
+its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit:  chance produce of the
+seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its
+chinks and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth,
+and the peaceful Cross planted in the centre; to climb into its
+upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the
+triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the
+Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old
+religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome,
+wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its
+people trod.  It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most
+solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.  Never, in
+its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full
+and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one's heart, as
+it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin.  GOD be thanked:  a
+ruin!
+
+As it tops the other ruins:  standing there, a mountain among
+graves:  so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of
+the old mythology and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the
+fierce and cruel Roman people.  The Italian face changes as the
+visitor approaches the city; its beauty becomes devilish; and there
+is scarcely one countenance in a hundred, among the common people
+in the streets, that would not be at home and happy in a renovated
+Coliseum to-morrow.
+
+Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine
+in its full and awful grandeur!  We wandered out upon the Appian
+Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken
+walls, with here and there a desolate and uninhabited house:  past
+the Circus of Romulus, where the course of the chariots, the
+stations of the judges, competitors, and spectators, are yet as
+plainly to be seen as in old time:  past the tomb of Cecilia
+Metella:  past all inclosure, hedge, or stake, wall or fence:  away
+upon the open Campagna, where on that side of Rome, nothing is to
+be beheld but Ruin.  Except where the distant Apennines bound the
+view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one field of ruin.
+Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful
+clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs.  A desert of
+decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with a
+history in every stone that strews the ground.
+
+
+On Sunday, the Pope assisted in the performance of High Mass at St.
+Peter's.  The effect of the Cathedral on my mind, on that second
+visit, was exactly what it was at first, and what it remains after
+many visits.  It is not religiously impressive or affecting.  It is
+an immense edifice, with no one point for the mind to rest upon;
+and it tires itself with wandering round and round.  The very
+purpose of the place, is not expressed in anything you see there,
+unless you examine its details--and all examination of details is
+incompatible with the place itself.  It might be a Pantheon, or a
+Senate House, or a great architectural trophy, having no other
+object than an architectural triumph.  There is a black statue of
+St. Peter, to be sure, under a red canopy; which is larger than
+life and which is constantly having its great toe kissed by good
+Catholics.  You cannot help seeing that:  it is so very prominent
+and popular.  But it does not heighten the effect of the temple, as
+a work of art; and it is not expressive--to me at least--of its
+high purpose.
+
+A large space behind the altar, was fitted up with boxes, shaped
+like those at the Italian Opera in England, but in their decoration
+much more gaudy.  In the centre of the kind of theatre thus railed
+off, was a canopied dais with the Pope's chair upon it.  The
+pavement was covered with a carpet of the brightest green; and what
+with this green, and the intolerable reds and crimsons, and gold
+borders of the hangings, the whole concern looked like a stupendous
+Bonbon.  On either side of the altar, was a large box for lady
+strangers.  These were filled with ladies in black dresses and
+black veils.  The gentlemen of the Pope's guard, in red coats,
+leather breeches, and jack-boots, guarded all this reserved space,
+with drawn swords that were very flashy in every sense; and from
+the altar all down the nave, a broad lane was kept clear by the
+Pope's Swiss guard, who wear a quaint striped surcoat, and striped
+tight legs, and carry halberds like those which are usually
+shouldered by those theatrical supernumeraries, who never CAN get
+off the stage fast enough, and who may be generally observed to
+linger in the enemy's camp after the open country, held by the
+opposite forces, has been split up the middle by a convulsion of
+Nature.
+
+I got upon the border of the green carpet, in company with a great
+many other gentlemen, attired in black (no other passport is
+necessary), and stood there at my ease, during the performance of
+Mass.  The singers were in a crib of wirework (like a large meat-
+safe or bird-cage) in one corner; and sang most atrociously.  All
+about the green carpet, there was a slowly moving crowd of people:
+talking to each other:  staring at the Pope through eye-glasses;
+defrauding one another, in moments of partial curiosity, out of
+precarious seats on the bases of pillars:  and grinning hideously
+at the ladies.  Dotted here and there, were little knots of friars
+(Frances-cani, or Cappuccini, in their coarse brown dresses and
+peaked hoods) making a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics
+of higher degree, and having their humility gratified to the
+utmost, by being shouldered about, and elbowed right and left, on
+all sides.  Some of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas, and
+stained garments:  having trudged in from the country.  The faces
+of the greater part were as coarse and heavy as their dress; their
+dogged, stupid, monotonous stare at all the glory and splendour,
+having something in it, half miserable, and half ridiculous.
+
+Upon the green carpet itself, and gathered round the altar, was a
+perfect army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold, purple,
+violet, white, and fine linen.  Stragglers from these, went to and
+fro among the crowd, conversing two and two, or giving and
+receiving introductions, and exchanging salutations; other
+functionaries in black gowns, and other functionaries in court-
+dresses, were similarly engaged.  In the midst of all these, and
+stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out, and the extreme restlessness
+of the Youth of England, who were perpetually wandering about, some
+few steady persons in black cassocks, who had knelt down with their
+faces to the wall, and were poring over their missals, became,
+unintentionally, a sort of humane man-traps, and with their own
+devout legs, tripped up other people's by the dozen.
+
+There was a great pile of candles lying down on the floor near me,
+which a very old man in a rusty black gown with an open-work
+tippet, like a summer ornament for a fireplace in tissue-paper,
+made himself very busy in dispensing to all the ecclesiastics:  one
+a-piece.  They loitered about with these for some time, under their
+arms like walking-sticks, or in their hands like truncheons.  At a
+certain period of the ceremony, however, each carried his candle up
+to the Pope, laid it across his two knees to be blessed, took it
+back again, and filed off.  This was done in a very attenuated
+procession, as you may suppose, and occupied a long time.  Not
+because it takes long to bless a candle through and through, but
+because there were so many candles to be blessed.  At last they
+were all blessed:  and then they were all lighted; and then the
+Pope was taken up, chair and all, and carried round the church.
+
+I must say, that I never saw anything, out of November, so like the
+popular English commemoration of the fifth of that month.  A bundle
+of matches and a lantern, would have made it perfect.  Nor did the
+Pope, himself, at all mar the resemblance, though he has a pleasant
+and venerable face; for, as this part of the ceremony makes him
+giddy and sick, he shuts his eyes when it is performed:  and having
+his eyes shut and a great mitre on his head, and his head itself
+wagging to and fro as they shook him in carrying, he looked as if
+his mask were going to tumble off.  The two immense fans which are
+always borne, one on either side of him, accompanied him, of
+course, on this occasion.  As they carried him along, he blessed
+the people with the mystic sign; and as he passed them, they
+kneeled down.  When he had made the round of the church, he was
+brought back again, and if I am not mistaken, this performance was
+repeated, in the whole, three times.  There was, certainly nothing
+solemn or effective in it; and certainly very much that was droll
+and tawdry.  But this remark applies to the whole ceremony, except
+the raising of the Host, when every man in the guard dropped on one
+knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the ground; which had
+a fine effect.
+
+The next time I saw the cathedral, was some two or three weeks
+afterwards, when I climbed up into the ball; and then, the hangings
+being taken down, and the carpet taken up, but all the framework
+left, the remnants of these decorations looked like an exploded
+cracker.
+
+The Friday and Saturday having been solemn Festa days, and Sunday
+being always a dies non in carnival proceedings, we had looked
+forward, with some impatience and curiosity, to the beginning of
+the new week:  Monday and Tuesday being the two last and best days
+of the Carnival.
+
+On the Monday afternoon at one or two o'clock, there began to be a
+great rattling of carriages into the court-yard of the hotel; a
+hurrying to and fro of all the servants in it; and, now and then, a
+swift shooting across some doorway or balcony, of a straggling
+stranger in a fancy dress:  not yet sufficiently well used to the
+same, to wear it with confidence, and defy public opinion.  All the
+carriages were open, and had the linings carefully covered with
+white cotton or calico, to prevent their proper decorations from
+being spoiled by the incessant pelting of sugar-plums; and people
+were packing and cramming into every vehicle as it waited for its
+occupants, enormous sacks and baskets full of these confetti,
+together with such heaps of flowers, tied up in little nosegays,
+that some carriages were not only brimful of flowers, but literally
+running over:  scattering, at every shake and jerk of the springs,
+some of their abundance on the ground.  Not to be behindhand in
+these essential particulars, we caused two very respectable sacks
+of sugar-plums (each about three feet high) and a large clothes-
+basket full of flowers to be conveyed into our hired barouche, with
+all speed.  And from our place of observation, in one of the upper
+balconies of the hotel, we contemplated these arrangements with the
+liveliest satisfaction.  The carriages now beginning to take up
+their company, and move away, we got into ours, and drove off too,
+armed with little wire masks for our faces; the sugar-plums, like
+Falstaff's adulterated sack, having lime in their composition.
+
+The Corso is a street a mile long; a street of shops, and palaces,
+and private houses, sometimes opening into a broad piazza.  There
+are verandahs and balconies, of all shapes and sizes, to almost
+every house--not on one story alone, but often to one room or
+another on every story--put there in general with so little order
+or regularity, that if, year after year, and season after season,
+it had rained balconies, hailed balconies, snowed balconies, blown
+balconies, they could scarcely have come into existence in a more
+disorderly manner.
+
+This is the great fountain-head and focus of the Carnival.  But all
+the streets in which the Carnival is held, being vigilantly kept by
+dragoons, it is necessary for carriages, in the first instance, to
+pass, in line, down another thoroughfare, and so come into the
+Corso at the end remote from the Piazza del Popolo; which is one of
+its terminations.  Accordingly, we fell into the string of coaches,
+and, for some time, jogged on quietly enough; now crawling on at a
+very slow walk; now trotting half-a-dozen yards; now backing fifty;
+and now stopping altogether:  as the pressure in front obliged us.
+If any impetuous carriage dashed out of the rank and clattered
+forward, with the wild idea of getting on faster, it was suddenly
+met, or overtaken, by a trooper on horseback, who, deaf as his own
+drawn sword to all remonstrances, immediately escorted it back to
+the very end of the row, and made it a dim speck in the remotest
+perspective.  Occasionally, we interchanged a volley of confetti
+with the carriage next in front, or the carriage next behind; but
+as yet, this capturing of stray and errant coaches by the military,
+was the chief amusement.
+
+Presently, we came into a narrow street, where, besides one line of
+carriages going, there was another line of carriages returning.
+Here the sugar-plums and the nosegays began to fly about, pretty
+smartly; and I was fortunate enough to observe one gentleman
+attired as a Greek warrior, catch a light-whiskered brigand on the
+nose (he was in the very act of tossing up a bouquet to a young
+lady in a first-floor window) with a precision that was much
+applauded by the bystanders.  As this victorious Greek was
+exchanging a facetious remark with a stout gentleman in a doorway--
+one-half black and one-half white, as if he had been peeled up the
+middle--who had offered him his congratulations on this
+achievement, he received an orange from a housetop, full on his
+left ear, and was much surprised, not to say discomfited.
+Especially, as he was standing up at the time; and in consequence
+of the carriage moving on suddenly, at the same moment, staggered
+ignominiously, and buried himself among his flowers.
+
+Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress, brought us to the
+Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as the whole
+scene there, it would be difficult to imagine.  From all the
+innumerable balconies:  from the remotest and highest, no less than
+from the lowest and nearest:  hangings of bright red, bright green,
+bright blue, white and gold, were fluttering in the brilliant
+sunlight.  From windows, and from parapets, and tops of houses,
+streamers of the richest colours, and draperies of the gaudiest and
+most sparkling hues, were floating out upon the street.  The
+buildings seemed to have been literally turned inside out, and to
+have all their gaiety towards the highway.  Shop-fronts were taken
+down, and the windows filled with company, like boxes at a shining
+theatre; doors were carried off their hinges, and long tapestried
+groves, hung with garlands of flowers and evergreens, displayed
+within; builders' scaffoldings were gorgeous temples, radiant in
+silver, gold, and crimson; and in every nook and corner, from the
+pavement to the chimney-tops, where women's eyes could glisten,
+there they danced, and laughed, and sparkled, like the light in
+water.  Every sort of bewitching madness of dress was there.
+Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more
+wicked than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and
+tight as ripe gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging
+to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy,
+pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every
+fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of
+merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire
+had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy arches, that
+morning.
+
+The carriages were now three abreast; in broader places four; often
+stationary for a long time together, always one close mass of
+variegated brightness; showing, the whole street-full, through the
+storm of flowers, like flowers of a larger growth themselves.  In
+some, the horses were richly caparisoned in magnificent trappings;
+in others they were decked from head to tail, with flowing ribbons.
+Some were driven by coachmen with enormous double faces:  one face
+leering at the horses:  the other cocking its extraordinary eyes
+into the carriage:  and both rattling again, under the hail of
+sugar-plums.  Other drivers were attired as women, wearing long
+ringlets and no bonnets, and looking more ridiculous in any real
+difficulty with the horses (of which, in such a concourse, there
+were a great many) than tongue can tell, or pen describe.  Instead
+of sitting IN the carriages, upon the seats, the handsome Roman
+women, to see and to be seen the better, sit in the heads of the
+barouches, at this time of general licence, with their feet upon
+the cushions--and oh, the flowing skirts and dainty waists, the
+blessed shapes and laughing faces, the free, good-humoured, gallant
+figures that they make! There were great vans, too, full of
+handsome girls--thirty, or more together, perhaps--and the
+broadsides that were poured into, and poured out of, these fairy
+fire-shops, splashed the air with flowers and bon-bons for ten
+minutes at a time.  Carriages, delayed long in one place, would
+begin a deliberate engagement with other carriages, or with people
+at the lower windows; and the spectators at some upper balcony or
+window, joining in the fray, and attacking both parties, would
+empty down great bags of confetti, that descended like a cloud, and
+in an instant made them white as millers.  Still, carriages on
+carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon
+crowds, without end.  Men and boys clinging to the wheels of
+coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and
+diving in among the horses' feet to pick up scattered flowers to
+sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic
+exaggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through
+enormous eye-glasses, and always transported with an ecstasy of
+love, on the discovery of any particularly old lady at a window;
+long strings of Policinelli, laying about them with blown bladders
+at the ends of sticks; a waggon-full of madmen, screaming and
+tearing to the life; a coach-full of grave mamelukes, with their
+horse-tail standard set up in the midst; a party of gipsy-women
+engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of sailors; a man-
+monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals with pigs' faces,
+and lions' tails, carried under their arms, or worn gracefully over
+their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses,
+colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.  Not many
+actual characters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering
+the number dressed, but the main pleasure of the scene consisting
+in its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and
+flashing variety; and in its entire abandonment to the mad humour
+of the time--an abandonment so perfect, so contagious, so
+irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner fights up to his middle
+in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest Roman of them all, and
+thinks of nothing else till half-past four o'clock, when he is
+suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not the whole
+business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound, and
+seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street.
+
+How it ever IS cleared for the race that takes place at five, or
+how the horses ever go through the race, without going over the
+people, is more than I can say.  But the carriages get out into the
+by-streets, or up into the Piazza del Popolo, and some people sit
+in temporary galleries in the latter place, and tens of thousands
+line the Corso on both sides, when the horses are brought out into
+the Piazza--to the foot of that same column which, for centuries,
+looked down upon the games and chariot-races in the Circus Maximus.
+
+At a given signal they are started off.  Down the live lane, the
+whole length of the Corso, they fly like the wind:  riderless, as
+all the world knows:  with shining ornaments upon their backs, and
+twisted in their plaited manes:  and with heavy little balls stuck
+full of spikes, dangling at their sides, to goad them on.  The
+jingling of these trappings, and the rattling of their hoofs upon
+the hard stones; the dash and fury of their speed along the echoing
+street; nay, the very cannon that are fired--these noises are
+nothing to the roaring of the multitude:  their shouts:  the
+clapping of their hands.  But it is soon over--almost
+instantaneously.  More cannon shake the town.  The horses have
+plunged into the carpets put across the street to stop them; the
+goal is reached; the prizes are won (they are given, in part, by
+the poor Jews, as a compromise for not running foot-races
+themselves); and there is an end to that day's sport.
+
+But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last day
+but one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height of
+glittering colour, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that the
+bare recollection of it makes me giddy at this moment.  The same
+diversions, greatly heightened and intensified in the ardour with
+which they are pursued, go on until the same hour.  The race is
+repeated; the cannon are fired; the shouting and clapping of hands
+are renewed; the cannon are fired again; the race is over; and the
+prizes are won.  But the carriages:  ankle-deep with sugar-plums
+within, and so be-flowered and dusty without, as to be hardly
+recognisable for the same vehicles that they were, three hours ago:
+instead of scampering off in all directions, throng into the Corso,
+where they are soon wedged together in a scarcely moving mass.  For
+the diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay madness of the
+Carnival, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers like what
+are called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily on
+every side, 'Moccoli, Moccoli!  Ecco Moccoli!'--a new item in the
+tumult; quite abolishing that other item of ' Ecco Fiori!  Ecco
+Fior-r-r!' which has been making itself audible over all the rest,
+at intervals, the whole day through.
+
+As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one dull,
+heavy, uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights begin
+flashing, here and there:  in the windows, on the housetops, in the
+balconies, in the carriages, in the hands of the foot-passengers:
+little by little:  gradually, gradually:  more and more:  until the
+whole long street is one great glare and blaze of fire.  Then,
+everybody present has but one engrossing object; that is, to
+extinguish other people's candles, and to keep his own alight; and
+everybody:  man, woman, or child, gentleman or lady, prince or
+peasant, native or foreigner:  yells and screams, and roars
+incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued, 'Senza Moccolo, Senza
+Moccolo!'  (Without a light!  Without a light!) until nothing is
+heard but a gigantic chorus of those two words, mingled with peals
+of laughter.
+
+The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordinary that
+can be imagined.  Carriages coming slowly by, with everybody
+standing on the seats or on the box, holding up their lights at
+arms' length, for greater safety; some in paper shades; some with a
+bunch of undefended little tapers, kindled altogether; some with
+blazing torches; some with feeble little candles; men on foot,
+creeping along, among the wheels, watching their opportunity, to
+make a spring at some particular light, and dash it out; other
+people climbing up into carriages, to get hold of them by main
+force; others, chasing some unlucky wanderer, round and round his
+own coach, to blow out the light he has begged or stolen somewhere,
+before he can ascend to his own company, and enable them to light
+their extinguished tapers; others, with their hats off, at a
+carriage-door, humbly beseeching some kind-hearted lady to oblige
+them with a light for a cigar, and when she is in the fulness of
+doubt whether to comply or no, blowing out the candle she is
+guarding so tenderly with her little hand; other people at the
+windows, fishing for candles with lines and hooks, or letting down
+long willow-wands with handkerchiefs at the end, and flapping them
+out, dexterously, when the bearer is at the height of his triumph,
+others, biding their time in corners, with immense extinguishers
+like halberds, and suddenly coming down upon glorious torches;
+others, gathered round one coach, and sticking to it; others,
+raining oranges and nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or
+regularly storming a pyramid of men, holding up one man among them,
+who carries one feeble little wick above his head, with which he
+defies them all!  Senza Moccolo!  Senza Moccolo!  Beautiful women,
+standing up in coaches, pointing in derision at extinguished
+lights, and clapping their hands, as they pass on, crying, 'Senza
+Moccolo!  Senza Moccolo!'; low balconies full of lovely faces and
+gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some
+repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning
+over, some shrinking back--delicate arms and bosoms--graceful
+figures--glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza
+Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!--when in the wildest enthusiasm of
+the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from
+the church steeples, and the Carnival is over in an instant--put
+out like a taper, with a breath!
+
+There was a masquerade at the theatre at night, as dull and
+senseless as a London one, and only remarkable for the summary way
+in which the house was cleared at eleven o'clock:  which was done
+by a line of soldiers forming along the wall, at the back of the
+stage, and sweeping the whole company out before them, like a broad
+broom.  The game of the Moccoletti (the word, in the singular,
+Moccoletto, is the diminutive of Moccolo, and means a little lamp
+or candlesnuff) is supposed by some to be a ceremony of burlesque
+mourning for the death of the Carnival:  candles being
+indispensable to Catholic grief.  But whether it be so, or be a
+remnant of the ancient Saturnalia, or an incorporation of both, or
+have its origin in anything else, I shall always remember it, and
+the frolic, as a brilliant and most captivating sight:  no less
+remarkable for the unbroken good-humour of all concerned, down to
+the very lowest (and among those who scaled the carriages, were
+many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent
+vivacity.  For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of
+thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint
+of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly
+be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of
+general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one
+thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a
+whole year.
+
+
+Availing ourselves of a part of the quiet interval between the
+termination of the Carnival and the beginning of the Holy Week:
+when everybody had run away from the one, and few people had yet
+begun to run back again for the other:  we went conscientiously to
+work, to see Rome.  And, by dint of going out early every morning,
+and coming back late every evening, and labouring hard all day, I
+believe we made acquaintance with every post and pillar in the
+city, and the country round; and, in particular, explored so many
+churches, that I abandoned that part of the enterprise at last,
+before it was half finished, lest I should never, of my own accord,
+go to church again, as long as I lived.  But, I managed, almost
+every day, at one time or other, to get back to the Coliseum, and
+out upon the open Campagna, beyond the Tomb of Cecilia Metella.
+
+We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company of English
+Tourists, with whom I had an ardent, but ungratified longing, to
+establish a speaking acquaintance.  They were one Mr. Davis, and a
+small circle of friends.  It was impossible not to know Mrs.
+Davis's name, from her being always in great request among her
+party, and her party being everywhere.  During the Holy Week, they
+were in every part of every scene of every ceremony.  For a
+fortnight or three weeks before it, they were in every tomb, and
+every church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery; and I
+hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment.  Deep
+underground, high up in St. Peter's, out on the Campagna, and
+stifling in the Jews' quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the same.
+I don't think she ever saw anything, or ever looked at anything;
+and she had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket, and
+was trying to find it, with all her might and main, among an
+immense quantity of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon
+the sea-shore, at the bottom of it.  There was a professional
+Cicerone always attached to the party (which had been brought over
+from London, fifteen or twenty strong, by contract), and if he so
+much as looked at Mrs. Davis, she invariably cut him short by
+saying, 'There, God bless the man, don't worrit me!  I don't
+understand a word you say, and shouldn't if you was to talk till
+you was black in the face!'  Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured
+great-coat on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and
+had a slow curiosity constantly devouring him, which prompted him
+to do extraordinary things, such as taking the covers off urns in
+tombs, and looking in at the ashes as if they were pickles--and
+tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule of his umbrella, and
+saying, with intense thoughtfulness, 'Here's a B you see, and
+there's a R, and this is the way we goes on in; is it!'  His
+antiquarian habits occasioned his being frequently in the rear of
+the rest; and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the party in
+general, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost.  This
+caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and at the
+most improper seasons.  And when he came, slowly emerging out of
+some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful Ghoule, saying 'Here I
+am!' Mrs. Davis invariably replied, 'You'll be buried alive in a
+foreign country, Davis, and it's no use trying to prevent you!'
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been brought
+from London in about nine or ten days.  Eighteen hundred years ago,
+the Roman legions under Claudius, protested against being led into
+Mr. and Mrs. Davis's country, urging that it lay beyond the limits
+of the world.
+
+Among what may be called the Cubs or minor Lions of Rome, there was
+one that amused me mightily.  It is always to be found there; and
+its den is on the great flight of steps that lead from the Piazza
+di Spagna, to the church of Trinita del Monte.  In plainer words,
+these steps are the great place of resort for the artists'
+'Models,' and there they are constantly waiting to be hired.  The
+first time I went up there, I could not conceive why the faces
+seemed familiar to me; why they appeared to have beset me, for
+years, in every possible variety of action and costume; and how it
+came to pass that they started up before me, in Rome, in the broad
+day, like so many saddled and bridled nightmares.  I soon found
+that we had made acquaintance, and improved it, for several years,
+on the walls of various Exhibition Galleries.  There is one old
+gentleman, with long white hair and an immense beard, who, to my
+knowledge, has gone half through the catalogue of the Royal
+Academy.  This is the venerable, or patriarchal model.  He carries
+a long staff; and every knot and twist in that staff I have seen,
+faithfully delineated, innumerable times.  There is another man in
+a blue cloak, who always pretends to be asleep in the sun (when
+there is any), and who, I need not say, is always very wide awake,
+and very attentive to the disposition of his legs.  This is the
+dolce far' niente model.  There is another man in a brown cloak,
+who leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and
+looks out of the corners of his eyes:  which are just visible
+beneath his broad slouched hat.  This is the assassin model.  There
+is another man, who constantly looks over his own shoulder, and is
+always going away, but never does.  This is the haughty, or
+scornful model.  As to Domestic Happiness, and Holy Families, they
+should come very cheap, for there are lumps of them, all up the
+steps; and the cream of the thing is, that they are all the falsest
+vagabonds in the world, especially made up for the purpose, and
+having no counterparts in Rome or any other part of the habitable
+globe.
+
+My recent mention of the Carnival, reminds me of its being said to
+be a mock mourning (in the ceremony with which it closes), for the
+gaieties and merry-makings before Lent; and this again reminds me
+of the real funerals and mourning processions of Rome, which, like
+those in most other parts of Italy, are rendered chiefly remarkable
+to a Foreigner, by the indifference with which the mere clay is
+universally regarded, after life has left it.  And this is not from
+the survivors having had time to dissociate the memory of the dead
+from their well-remembered appearance and form on earth; for the
+interment follows too speedily after death, for that:  almost
+always taking place within four-and-twenty hours, and, sometimes,
+within twelve.
+
+At Rome, there is the same arrangement of Pits in a great, bleak,
+open, dreary space, that I have already described as existing in
+Genoa.  When I visited it, at noonday, I saw a solitary coffin of
+plain deal:  uncovered by any shroud or pall, and so slightly made,
+that the hoof of any wandering mule would have crushed it in:
+carelessly tumbled down, all on one side, on the door of one of the
+pits--and there left, by itself, in the wind and sunshine.  'How
+does it come to be left here?' I asked the man who showed me the
+place.  'It was brought here half an hour ago, Signore,' he said.
+I remembered to have met the procession, on its return:  straggling
+away at a good round pace.  'When will it be put in the pit?' I
+asked him.  'When the cart comes, and it is opened to-night,' he
+said.  'How much does it cost to be brought here in this way,
+instead of coming in the cart?' I asked him.  'Ten scudi,' he said
+(about two pounds, two-and-sixpence, English).  'The other bodies,
+for whom nothing is paid, are taken to the church of the Santa
+Maria della Consolazione,' he continued, 'and brought here
+altogether, in the cart at night.'  I stood, a moment, looking at
+the coffin, which had two initial letters scrawled upon the top;
+and turned away, with an expression in my face, I suppose, of not
+much liking its exposure in that manner:  for he said, shrugging
+his shoulders with great vivacity, and giving a pleasant smile,
+'But he's dead, Signore, he's dead.  Why not?'
+
+
+Among the innumerable churches, there is one I must select for
+separate mention.  It is the church of the Ara Coeli, supposed to
+be built on the site of the old Temple of Jupiter Feretrius; and
+approached, on one side, by a long steep flight of steps, which
+seem incomplete without some group of bearded soothsayers on the
+top.  It is remarkable for the possession of a miraculous Bambino,
+or wooden doll, representing the Infant Saviour; and I first saw
+this miraculous Bambino, in legal phrase, in manner following, that
+is to say:
+
+We had strolled into the church one afternoon, and were looking
+down its long vista of gloomy pillars (for all these ancient
+churches built upon the ruins of old temples, are dark and sad),
+when the Brave came running in, with a grin upon his face that
+stretched it from ear to ear, and implored us to follow him,
+without a moment's delay, as they were going to show the Bambino to
+a select party.  We accordingly hurried off to a sort of chapel, or
+sacristy, hard by the chief altar, but not in the church itself,
+where the select party, consisting of two or three Catholic
+gentlemen and ladies (not Italians), were already assembled:  and
+where one hollow-cheeked young monk was lighting up divers candles,
+while another was putting on some clerical robes over his coarse
+brown habit.  The candles were on a kind of altar, and above it
+were two delectable figures, such as you would see at any English
+fair, representing the Holy Virgin, and Saint Joseph, as I suppose,
+bending in devotion over a wooden box, or coffer; which was shut.
+
+The hollow-cheeked monk, number One, having finished lighting the
+candles, went down on his knees, in a corner, before this set-
+piece; and the monk number Two, having put on a pair of highly
+ornamented and gold-bespattered gloves, lifted down the coffer,
+with great reverence, and set it on the altar.  Then, with many
+genuflexions, and muttering certain prayers, he opened it, and let
+down the front, and took off sundry coverings of satin and lace
+from the inside.  The ladies had been on their knees from the
+commencement; and the gentlemen now dropped down devoutly, as he
+exposed to view a little wooden doll, in face very like General Tom
+Thumb, the American Dwarf:  gorgeously dressed in satin and gold
+lace, and actually blazing with rich jewels.  There was scarcely a
+spot upon its little breast, or neck, or stomach, but was sparkling
+with the costly offerings of the Faithful.  Presently, he lifted it
+out of the box, and carrying it round among the kneelers, set its
+face against the forehead of every one, and tendered its clumsy
+foot to them to kiss--a ceremony which they all performed down to a
+dirty little ragamuffin of a boy who had walked in from the street.
+When this was done, he laid it in the box again:  and the company,
+rising, drew near, and commended the jewels in whispers.  In good
+time, he replaced the coverings, shut up the box, put it back in
+its place, locked up the whole concern (Holy Family and all) behind
+a pair of folding-doors; took off his priestly vestments; and
+received the customary 'small charge,' while his companion, by
+means of an extinguisher fastened to the end of a long stick, put
+out the lights, one after another.  The candles being all
+extinguished, and the money all collected, they retired, and so did
+the spectators.
+
+I met this same Bambino, in the street a short time afterwards,
+going, in great state, to the house of some sick person.  It is
+taken to all parts of Rome for this purpose, constantly; but, I
+understand that it is not always as successful as could be wished;
+for, making its appearance at the bedside of weak and nervous
+people in extremity, accompanied by a numerous escort, it not
+unfrequently frightens them to death.  It is most popular in cases
+of child-birth, where it has done such wonders, that if a lady be
+longer than usual in getting through her difficulties, a messenger
+is despatched, with all speed, to solicit the immediate attendance
+of the Bambino.  It is a very valuable property, and much confided
+in--especially by the religious body to whom it belongs.
+
+I am happy to know that it is not considered immaculate, by some
+who are good Catholics, and who are behind the scenes, from what
+was told me by the near relation of a Priest, himself a Catholic,
+and a gentleman of learning and intelligence.  This Priest made my
+informant promise that he would, on no account, allow the Bambino
+to be borne into the bedroom of a sick lady, in whom they were both
+interested.  'For,' said he, 'if they (the monks) trouble her with
+it, and intrude themselves into her room, it will certainly kill
+her.'  My informant accordingly looked out of the window when it
+came; and, with many thanks, declined to open the door.  He
+endeavoured, in another case of which he had no other knowledge
+than such as he gained as a passer-by at the moment, to prevent its
+being carried into a small unwholesome chamber, where a poor girl
+was dying.  But, he strove against it unsuccessfully, and she
+expired while the crowd were pressing round her bed.
+
+Among the people who drop into St. Peter's at their leisure, to
+kneel on the pavement, and say a quiet prayer, there are certain
+schools and seminaries, priestly and otherwise, that come in,
+twenty or thirty strong.  These boys always kneel down in single
+file, one behind the other, with a tall grim master in a black
+gown, bringing up the rear:  like a pack of cards arranged to be
+tumbled down at a touch, with a disproportionately large Knave of
+clubs at the end.  When they have had a minute or so at the chief
+altar, they scramble up, and filing off to the chapel of the
+Madonna, or the sacrament, flop down again in the same order; so
+that if anybody did stumble against the master, a general and
+sudden overthrow of the whole line must inevitably ensue.
+
+The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible.  The same
+monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going on; the same
+dark building, darker from the brightness of the street without;
+the same lamps dimly burning; the selfsame people kneeling here and
+there; turned towards you, from one altar or other, the same
+priest's back, with the same large cross embroidered on it; however
+different in size, in shape, in wealth, in architecture, this
+church is from that, it is the same thing still.  There are the
+same dirty beggars stopping in their muttered prayers to beg; the
+same miserable cripples exhibiting their deformity at the doors;
+the same blind men, rattling little pots like kitchen pepper-
+castors:  their depositories for alms; the same preposterous crowns
+of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins
+in crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a
+head-dress bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent
+miles of landscape; the same favourite shrine or figure, smothered
+with little silver hearts and crosses, and the like:  the staple
+trade and show of all the jewellers; the same odd mixture of
+respect and indecorum, faith and phlegm:  kneeling on the stones,
+and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers to beg a
+little, or to pursue some other worldly matter:  and then kneeling
+down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the point where
+it was interrupted.  In one church, a kneeling lady got up from her
+prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card, as a teacher of Music;
+and in another, a sedate gentleman with a very thick walking-staff,
+arose from his devotions to belabour his dog, who was growling at
+another dog:  and whose yelps and howls resounded through the
+church, as his master quietly relapsed into his former train of
+meditation--keeping his eye upon the dog, at the same time,
+nevertheless.
+
+Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contributions of
+the Faithful, in some form or other.  Sometimes, it is a money-box,
+set up between the worshipper, and the wooden life-size figure of
+the Redeemer; sometimes, it is a little chest for the maintenance
+of the Virgin; sometimes, an appeal on behalf of a popular Bambino;
+sometimes, a bag at the end of a long stick, thrust among the
+people here and there, and vigilantly jingled by an active
+Sacristan; but there it always is, and, very often, in many shapes
+in the same church, and doing pretty well in all.  Nor, is it
+wanting in the open air--the streets and roads--for, often as you
+are walking along, thinking about anything rather than a tin
+canister, that object pounces out upon you from a little house by
+the wayside; and on its top is painted, 'For the Souls in
+Purgatory;' an appeal which the bearer repeats a great many times,
+as he rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles the cracked bell
+which his sanguine disposition makes an organ of.
+
+And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar sanctity,
+bear the inscription, 'Every Mass performed at this altar frees a
+soul from Purgatory.'  I have never been able to find out the
+charge for one of these services, but they should needs be
+expensive.  There are several Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of
+which, confers indulgences for varying terms.  That in the centre
+of the Coliseum, is worth a hundred days; and people may be seen
+kissing it from morning to night.  It is curious that some of these
+crosses seem to acquire an arbitrary popularity:  this very one
+among them.  In another part of the Coliseum there is a cross upon
+a marble slab, with the inscription, 'Who kisses this cross shall
+be entitled to Two hundred and forty days' indulgence.'  But I saw
+no one person kiss it, though, day after day, I sat in the arena,
+and saw scores upon scores of peasants pass it, on their way to
+kiss the other.
+
+To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches, would
+be the wildest occupation in the world.  But St. Stefano Rotondo, a
+damp, mildewed vault of an old church in the outskirts of Rome,
+will always struggle uppermost in my mind, by reason of the hideous
+paintings with which its walls are covered.  These represent the
+martyrdoms of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of
+horror and butchery no man could imagine in his sleep, though he
+were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.  Grey-bearded men being
+boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts,
+worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up
+small with hatchets:  women having their breasts torn with iron
+pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws
+broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the
+stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire:  these are among the
+mildest subjects.  So insisted on, and laboured at, besides, that
+every sufferer gives you the same occasion for wonder as poor old
+Duncan awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his having so
+much blood in him.
+
+There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what is
+said to have been--and very possibly may have been--the dungeon of
+St. Peter.  This chamber is now fitted up as an oratory, dedicated
+to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate place, in
+my recollection, too.  It is very small and low-roofed; and the
+dread and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as
+if they had come up in a dark mist through the floor.  Hanging on
+the walls, among the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at
+once strangely in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the
+place--rusty daggers, knives, pistols, clubs, divers instruments of
+violence and murder, brought here, fresh from use, and hung up to
+propitiate offended Heaven:  as if the blood upon them would drain
+off in consecrated air, and have no voice to cry with.  It is all
+so silent and so close, and tomb-like; and the dungeons below are
+so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and naked; that this little
+dark spot becomes a dream within a dream:  and in the vision of
+great churches which come rolling past me like a sea, it is a small
+wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and does not flow on
+with the rest.
+
+It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are
+entered from some Roman churches, and undermine the city.  Many
+churches have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which,
+in the ancient time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples,
+and what not:  but I do not speak of them.  Beneath the church of
+St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range
+of caverns, hewn out of the rock, and said to have another outlet
+underneath the Coliseum--tremendous darknesses of vast extent,
+half-buried in the earth and unexplorable, where the dull torches,
+flashed by the attendants, glimmer down long ranges of distant
+vaults branching to the right and left, like streets in a city of
+the dead; and show the cold damp stealing down the walls, drip-
+drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that lie here and
+there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the sun.  Some
+accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined for the
+amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators; some,
+both.  But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that in the
+upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
+Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the
+wild beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the
+night and solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon
+and life of the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these,
+their dreaded neighbours, bounding in!
+
+Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of
+San Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs
+of Rome--quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places
+of the Christians.  These ghastly passages have been explored for
+twenty miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in
+circumference.
+
+A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only
+guide, down into this profound and dreadful place.  The narrow ways
+and openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy
+air, soon blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track
+by which we had come:  and I could not help thinking 'Good Heaven,
+if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or
+if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!'  On we
+wandered, among martyrs' graves:  passing great subterranean
+vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with
+heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge
+there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which
+lives between it and the sun.  Graves, graves, graves; Graves of
+men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
+persecutors, 'We are Christians!  We are Christians!' that they
+might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of
+martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little
+niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs' blood; Graves of some
+who lived down here, for years together, ministering to the rest,
+and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude altars,
+that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy
+graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprised,
+were hemmed in and walled up:  buried before Death, and killed by
+slow starvation.
+
+'The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid
+churches,' said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped to
+rest in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding us
+on every side.  'They are here!  Among the Martyrs' Graves!'  He
+was a gentle, earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I
+thought how Christian men have dealt with one another; how,
+perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted down and
+tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed
+each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this
+Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it, and
+how these great and constant hearts would have been shaken--how
+they would have quailed and drooped--if a foreknowledge of the
+deeds that professing Christians would commit in the Great Name for
+which they died, could have rent them with its own unutterable
+anguish, on the cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful
+fire.
+
+Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain
+apart, and keep their separate identity.  I have a fainter
+recollection, sometimes of the relics; of the fragments of the
+pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the portion of the
+table that was spread for the Last Supper; of the well at which the
+woman of Samaria gave water to Our Saviour; of two columns from the
+house of Pontius Pilate; of the stone to which the Sacred hands
+were bound, when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of
+Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of
+his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as
+an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as
+they flit before me.  The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated
+buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of
+battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and
+forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian
+churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and
+ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells,
+and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ:  of Madonne,
+with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle
+like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously
+attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold:
+their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with
+chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round the
+pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and
+preaching fiercely:  the sun just streaming down through some high
+window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church,
+to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of
+the roof.  Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps,
+where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and
+strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels,
+of an old Italian street.
+
+
+On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was beheaded
+here.  Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a Bavarian
+countess, travelling as a pilgrim to Rome--alone and on foot, of
+course--and performing, it is said, that act of piety for the
+fourth time.  He saw her change a piece of gold at Viterbo, where
+he lived; followed her; bore her company on her journey for some
+forty miles or more, on the treacherous pretext of protecting her;
+attacked her, in the fulfilment of his unrelenting purpose, on the
+Campagna, within a very short distance of Rome, near to what is
+called (but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat her
+to death with her own pilgrim's staff.  He was newly married, and
+gave some of her apparel to his wife:  saying that he had bought it
+at a fair.  She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess passing
+through their town, recognised some trifle as having belonged to
+her.  Her husband then told her what he had done.  She, in
+confession, told a priest; and the man was taken, within four days
+after the commission of the murder.
+
+There are no fixed times for the administration of justice, or its
+execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had been in prison
+ever since.  On the Friday, as he was dining with the other
+prisoners, they came and told him he was to be beheaded next
+morning, and took him away.  It is very unusual to execute in Lent;
+but his crime being a very bad one, it was deemed advisable to make
+an example of him at that time, when great numbers of pilgrims were
+coming towards Rome, from all parts, for the Holy Week.  I heard of
+this on the Friday evening, and saw the bills up at the churches,
+calling on the people to pray for the criminal's soul.  So, I
+determined to go, and see him executed.
+
+The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o'clock, Roman
+time:  or a quarter before nine in the forenoon.  I had two friends
+with me; and as we did not know but that the crowd might be very
+great, we were on the spot by half-past seven.  The place of
+execution was near the church of San Giovanni decollato (a doubtful
+compliment to Saint John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back
+streets without any footway, of which a great part of Rome is
+composed--a street of rotten houses, which do not seem to belong to
+anybody, and do not seem to have ever been inhabited, and certainly
+were never built on any plan, or for any particular purpose, and
+have no window-sashes, and are a little like deserted breweries,
+and might be warehouses but for having nothing in them.  Opposite
+to one of these, a white house, the scaffold was built.  An untidy,
+unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking thing of course:  some seven feet
+high, perhaps:  with a tall, gallows-shaped frame rising above it,
+in which was the knife, charged with a ponderous mass of iron, all
+ready to descend, and glittering brightly in the morning sun,
+whenever it looked out, now and then, from behind a cloud.
+
+There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at
+a considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope's
+dragoons.  Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms,
+standing at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were
+walking up and down in twos and threes, chatting together, and
+smoking cigars.
+
+At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would be a
+dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of vegetable
+refuse, but for such things being thrown anywhere and everywhere in
+Rome, and favouring no particular sort of locality.  We got into a
+kind of wash-house, belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and
+standing there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled
+against the wall, looked, through a large grated window, at the
+scaffold, and straight down the street beyond it until, in
+consequence of its turning off abruptly to the left, our
+perspective was brought to a sudden termination, and had a
+corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.
+
+Nine o'clock struck, and ten o'clock struck, and nothing happened.
+All the bells of all the churches rang as usual.  A little
+parliament of dogs assembled in the open space, and chased each
+other, in and out among the soldiers.  Fierce-looking Romans of the
+lowest class, in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked,
+came and went, and talked together.  Women and children fluttered,
+on the skirts of the scanty crowd.  One large muddy spot was left
+quite bare, like a bald place on a man's head.  A cigar-merchant,
+with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one hand, went up and
+down, crying his wares.  A pastry-merchant divided his attention
+between the scaffold and his customers.  Boys tried to climb up
+walls, and tumbled down again.  Priests and monks elbowed a passage
+for themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of
+the knife:  then went away.  Artists, in inconceivable hats of the
+middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed
+picturesque scowls about them from their stations in the throng.
+One gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I presume) went up and
+down in a pair of Hessian-boots, with a red beard hanging down on
+his breast, and his long and bright red hair, plaited into two
+tails, one on either side of his head, which fell over his
+shoulders in front of him, very nearly to his waist, and were
+carefully entwined and braided!
+
+Eleven o'clock struck and still nothing happened.  A rumour got
+about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess; in
+which case, the priests would keep him until the Ave Maria
+(sunset); for it is their merciful custom never finally to turn the
+crucifix away from a man at that pass, as one refusing to be
+shriven, and consequently a sinner abandoned of the Saviour, until
+then.  People began to drop off.  The officers shrugged their
+shoulders and looked doubtful.  The dragoons, who came riding up
+below our window, every now and then, to order an unlucky hackney-
+coach or cart away, as soon as it had comfortably established
+itself, and was covered with exulting people (but never before),
+became imperious, and quick-tempered.  The bald place hadn't a
+straggling hair upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning the
+perspective, took a world of snuff.
+
+Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets.  'Attention!' was among
+the foot-soldiers instantly.  They were marched up to the scaffold
+and formed round it.  The dragoons galloped to their nearer
+stations too.  The guillotine became the centre of a wood of
+bristling bayonets and shining sabres.  The people closed round
+nearer, on the flank of the soldiery.  A long straggling stream of
+men and boys, who had accompanied the procession from the prison,
+came pouring into the open space.  The bald spot was scarcely
+distinguishable from the rest.  The cigar and pastry-merchants
+resigned all thoughts of business, for the moment, and abandoning
+themselves wholly to pleasure, got good situations in the crowd.
+The perspective ended, now, in a troop of dragoons.  And the
+corpulent officer, sword in hand, looked hard at a church close to
+him, which he could see, but we, the crowd, could not.
+
+After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the
+scaffold from this church; and above their heads, coming on slowly
+and gloomily, the effigy of Christ upon the cross, canopied with
+black.  This was carried round the foot of the scaffold, to the
+front, and turned towards the criminal, that he might see it to the
+last.  It was hardly in its place, when he appeared on the
+platform, bare-footed; his hands bound; and with the collar and
+neck of his shirt cut away, almost to the shoulder.  A young man--
+six-and-twenty--vigorously made, and well-shaped.  Face pale; small
+dark moustache; and dark brown hair.
+
+He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife
+brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had
+occasioned the delay.
+
+He immediately kneeled down, below the knife.  His neck fitting
+into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down,
+by another plank above; exactly like the pillory.  Immediately
+below him was a leathern bag.  And into it his head rolled
+instantly.
+
+The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it
+round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew
+that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
+
+When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was
+set upon a pole in front--a little patch of black and white, for
+the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on.  The eyes
+were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern
+bag, and looked to the crucifix.  Every tinge and hue of life had
+left it in that instant.  It was dull, cold, livid, wax.  The body
+also.
+
+There was a great deal of blood.  When we left the window, and went
+close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who
+were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the
+body into a shell, picked his way as through mire.  A strange
+appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck.  The head was
+taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly
+escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body
+looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
+
+Nobody cared, or was at all affected.  There was no manifestation
+of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow.  My empty pockets
+were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the
+scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin.  It was an
+ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but
+butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.
+Yes!  Such a sight has one meaning and one warning.  Let me not
+forget it.  The speculators in the lottery, station themselves at
+favourable points for counting the gouts of blood that spirt out,
+here or there; and buy that number.  It is pretty sure to have a
+run upon it.
+
+The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the
+scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed.  The
+executioner:  an outlaw ex officio (what a satire on the
+Punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St.
+Angelo but to do his work:  retreated to his lair, and the show was
+over.
+
+
+At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the Vatican,
+of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous galleries, and
+staircases, and suites upon suites of immense chambers, ranks
+highest and stands foremost.  Many most noble statues, and
+wonderful pictures, are there; nor is it heresy to say that there
+is a considerable amount of rubbish there, too.  When any old piece
+of sculpture dug out of the ground, finds a place in a gallery
+because it is old, and without any reference to its intrinsic
+merits:  and finds admirers by the hundred, because it is there,
+and for no other reason on earth:  there will be no lack of
+objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one who
+employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of
+Cant for less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste
+for the mere trouble of putting them on.
+
+I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural
+perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-door, in Italy
+or elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I were travelling in
+the East.  I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of
+face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their
+nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle.  I cannot
+dismiss from my certain knowledge, such commonplace facts as the
+ordinary proportion of men's arms, and legs, and heads; and when I
+meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and
+recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot honestly
+admire them, and think it best to say so; in spite of high critical
+advice that we should sometimes feign an admiration, though we have
+it not.
+
+Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young
+Waterman representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and Perkins's
+Drayman depicted as an Evangelist, I see nothing to commend or
+admire in the performance, however great its reputed Painter.
+Neither am I partial to libellous Angels, who play on fiddles and
+bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in
+liquor.  Nor to those Monsieur Tonsons of galleries, Saint Francis
+and Saint Sebastian; both of whom I submit should have very
+uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their
+compound multiplication by Italian Painters.
+
+It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined
+raptures in which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the
+true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works.  I
+cannot imagine, for example, how the resolute champion of
+undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing beauty of Titian's
+great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin at Venice; or how the
+man who is truly affected by the sublimity of that exquisite
+production, or who is truly sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto's
+great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can
+discern in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel,
+any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the
+stupendous subject.  He who will contemplate Raphael's masterpiece,
+the Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that
+same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael,
+representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of
+a great fire by Leo the Fourth--and who will say that he admires
+them both, as works of extraordinary genius--must, as I think, be
+wanting in his powers of perception in one of the two instances,
+and, probably, in the high and lofty one.
+
+It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether,
+sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and
+whether it is quite well or agreeable that we should know
+beforehand, where this figure will be turning round, and where that
+figure will be lying down, and where there will be drapery in
+folds, and so forth.  When I observe heads inferior to the subject,
+in pictures of merit, in Italian galleries, I do not attach that
+reproach to the Painter, for I have a suspicion that these great
+men, who were, of necessity, very much in the hands of monks and
+priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too often.  I
+frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below the
+story and the painter:  and I invariably observe that those heads
+are of the Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the
+Convent inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that,
+in such cases, the lameness was not with the painter, but with the
+vanity and ignorance of certain of his employers, who would be
+apostles--on canvas, at all events.
+
+The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova's statues; the wonderful
+gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both
+in the Capitol and the Vatican; and the strength and fire of many
+others; are, in their different ways, beyond all reach of words.
+They are especially impressive and delightful, after the works of
+Bernini and his disciples, in which the churches of Rome, from St.
+Peter's downward, abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most
+detestable class of productions in the wide world.  I would
+infinitely rather (as mere works of art) look upon the three
+deities of the Past, the Present, and the Future, in the Chinese
+Collection, than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose every
+fold of drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein, or
+artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is like a
+nest of lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other
+extravagance to shame.  Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there
+can be no place in the world, where such intolerable abortions,
+begotten of the sculptor's chisel, are to be found in such
+profusion, as in Rome.
+
+There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican;
+and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are arranged, are
+painted to represent a starlight sky in the Desert.  It may seem an
+odd idea, but it is very effective.  The grim, half-human monsters
+from the temples, look more grim and monstrous underneath the deep
+dark blue; it sheds a strange uncertain gloomy air on everything--a
+mystery adapted to the objects; and you leave them, as you find
+them, shrouded in a solemn night.
+
+In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advantage.
+There are seldom so many in one place that the attention need
+become distracted, or the eye confused.  You see them very
+leisurely; and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of people.  There
+are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke;
+heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects
+by Correggio, and Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and
+Spagnoletto--many of which it would be difficult, indeed, to praise
+too highly, or to praise enough; such is their tenderness and
+grace; their noble elevation, purity, and beauty.
+
+The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a
+picture almost impossible to be forgotten.  Through the
+transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a something
+shining out, that haunts me.  I see it now, as I see this paper, or
+my pen.  The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair
+falling down below the linen folds.  She has turned suddenly
+towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes--although they
+are very tender and gentle--as if the wildness of a momentary
+terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that
+instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,
+and a desolate earthly helplessness remained.  Some stories say
+that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other
+stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on
+her way to the scaffold.  I am willing to believe that, as you see
+her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from
+the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which
+he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the
+concourse.  The guilty palace of the Cenci:  blighting a whole
+quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains:  had
+that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black,
+blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and
+growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries.  The History
+is written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl's face, by
+Nature's own hand.  And oh! how in that one touch she puts to
+flight (instead of making kin) the puny world that claim to be
+related to her, in right of poor conventional forgeries!
+
+I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at
+whose base Caesar fell.  A stern, tremendous figure!  I imagined
+one of greater finish:  of the last refinement:  full of delicate
+touches:  losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose
+blood was ebbing before it, and settling into some such rigid
+majesty as this, as Death came creeping over the upturned face.
+
+The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would
+be full of interest were it only for the changing views they
+afford, of the wild Campagna.  But, every inch of ground, in every
+direction, is rich in associations, and in natural beauties.  There
+is Albano, with its lovely lake and wooded shore, and with its
+wine, that certainly has not improved since the days of Horace, and
+in these times hardly justifies his panegyric.  There is squalid
+Tivoli, with the river Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging
+down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of it.  With its
+picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor
+waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern
+yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots
+on, low down under beetling rocks.  There, too, is the Villa
+d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and
+cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state.  Then, there is
+Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where
+Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his favourite house (some
+fragments of it may yet be seen there), and where Cato was born.
+We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a grey, dull day, when a shrill
+March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old
+city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as
+the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
+
+One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen
+miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the
+ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown.  We started at
+half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out
+upon the open Campagna.  For twelve miles we went climbing on, over
+an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.
+Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of
+columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble;
+mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a
+spacious city from; lay strewn about us.  Sometimes, loose walls,
+built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our
+path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
+obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves,
+rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to
+advance; but it was always ruin.  Now, we tracked a piece of the
+old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy
+covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin.  In
+the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course
+along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us,
+stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on
+miles of ruin.  The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the
+awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen,
+clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their
+sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin.  The aspect of the desolate
+Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of
+an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men
+have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have
+left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished;
+where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their
+Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust!
+Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from the distance,
+on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost feel (as I had
+felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never
+rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world.
+
+To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
+fitting close to such a day.  The narrow streets, devoid of
+footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of
+dunghill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped
+dimensions, and their filth, and darkness, with the broad square
+before some haughty church:  in the centre of which, a
+hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the
+Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps
+an ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supports a
+Christian saint:  Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan
+to St. Peter.  Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from
+the spoliation of the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like
+mountains:  while here and there, are broken arches and rent walls,
+through which it gushes freely, as the life comes pouring from a
+wound.  The little town of miserable houses, walled, and shut in by
+barred gates, is the quarter where the Jews are locked up nightly,
+when the clock strikes eight--a miserable place, densely populated,
+and reeking with bad odours, but where the people are industrious
+and money-getting.  In the day-time, as you make your way along the
+narrow streets, you see them all at work:  upon the pavement,
+oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops:  furbishing old
+clothes, and driving bargains.
+
+Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the moon
+once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and
+rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear.  In the
+narrow little throat of street, beyond, a booth, dressed out with
+flaring lamps, and boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky
+Romans round its smoky coppers of hot broth, and cauliflower stew;
+its trays of fried fish, and its flasks of wine.  As you rattle
+round the sharply-twisting corner, a lumbering sound is heard.  The
+coachman stops abruptly, and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by,
+preceded by a man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a
+priest:  the latter chaunting as he goes.  It is the Dead Cart,
+with the bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the Sacred
+Field outside the walls, where they will be thrown into the pit
+that will be covered with a stone to-night, and sealed up for a
+year.
+
+But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns ancient
+temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums:  it is strange to
+see, how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended
+into some modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose--
+a wall, a dwelling-place, a granary, a stable--some use for which
+it never was designed, and associated with which it cannot
+otherwise than lamely assort.  It is stranger still, to see how
+many ruins of the old mythology:  how many fragments of obsolete
+legend and observance:  have been incorporated into the worship of
+Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false
+faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.
+
+From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a squat
+and stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius) makes an
+opaque triangle in the moonlight.  But, to an English traveller, it
+serves to mark the grave of Shelley too, whose ashes lie beneath a
+little garden near it.  Nearer still, almost within its shadow, lie
+the bones of Keats, 'whose name is writ in water,' that shines
+brightly in the landscape of a calm Italian night.
+
+The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attractions to all
+visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sunday, I would
+counsel those who go to Rome for its own interest, to avoid it at
+that time.  The ceremonies, in general, are of the most tedious and
+wearisome kind; the heat and crowd at every one of them, painfully
+oppressive; the noise, hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting.
+We abandoned the pursuit of these shows, very early in the
+proceedings, and betook ourselves to the Ruins again.  But, we
+plunged into the crowd for a share of the best of the sights; and
+what we saw, I will describe to you.
+
+At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little, for by
+the time we reached it (though we were early) the besieging crowd
+had filled it to the door, and overflowed into the adjoining hall,
+where they were struggling, and squeezing, and mutually
+expostulating, and making great rushes every time a lady was
+brought out faint, as if at least fifty people could be
+accommodated in her vacant standing-room.  Hanging in the doorway
+of the chapel, was a heavy curtain, and this curtain, some twenty
+people nearest to it, in their anxiety to hear the chaunting of the
+Miserere, were continually plucking at, in opposition to each
+other, that it might not fall down and stifle the sound of the
+voices.  The consequence was, that it occasioned the most
+extraordinary confusion, and seemed to wind itself about the
+unwary, like a Serpent.  Now, a lady was wrapped up in it, and
+couldn't be unwound.  Now, the voice of a stifling gentleman was
+heard inside it, beseeching to be let out.  Now, two muffled arms,
+no man could say of which sex, struggled in it as in a sack.  Now,
+it was carried by a rush, bodily overhead into the chapel, like an
+awning.  Now, it came out the other way, and blinded one of the
+Pope's Swiss Guard, who had arrived, that moment, to set things to
+rights.
+
+Being seated at a little distance, among two or three of the Pope's
+gentlemen, who were very weary and counting the minutes--as perhaps
+his Holiness was too--we had better opportunities of observing this
+eccentric entertainment, than of hearing the Miserere.  Sometimes,
+there was a swell of mournful voices that sounded very pathetic and
+sad, and died away, into a low strain again; but that was all we
+heard.
+
+At another time, there was the Exhibition of Relics in St. Peter's,
+which took place at between six and seven o'clock in the evening,
+and was striking from the cathedral being dark and gloomy, and
+having a great many people in it.  The place into which the relics
+were brought, one by one, by a party of three priests, was a high
+balcony near the chief altar.  This was the only lighted part of
+the church.  There are always a hundred and twelve lamps burning
+near the altar, and there were two tall tapers, besides, near the
+black statue of St. Peter; but these were nothing in such an
+immense edifice.  The gloom, and the general upturning of faces to
+the balcony, and the prostration of true believers on the pavement,
+as shining objects, like pictures or looking-glasses, were brought
+out and shown, had something effective in it, despite the very
+preposterous manner in which they were held up for the general
+edification, and the great elevation at which they were displayed;
+which one would think rather calculated to diminish the comfort
+derivable from a full conviction of their being genuine.
+
+On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament from
+the Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina, another
+chapel in the Vatican;--a ceremony emblematical of the entombment
+of the Saviour before His Resurrection.  We waited in a great
+gallery with a great crowd of people (three-fourths of them
+English) for an hour or so, while they were chaunting the Miserere,
+in the Sistine chapel again.  Both chapels opened out of the
+gallery; and the general attention was concentrated on the
+occasional opening and shutting of the door of the one for which
+the Pope was ultimately bound.  None of these openings disclosed
+anything more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting a great
+quantity of candles; but at each and every opening, there was a
+terrific rush made at this ladder and this man, something like (I
+should think) a charge of the heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.
+The man was never brought down, however, nor the ladder; for it
+performed the strangest antics in the world among the crowd--where
+it was carried by the man, when the candles were all lighted; and
+finally it was stuck up against the gallery wall, in a very
+disorderly manner, just before the opening of the other chapel, and
+the commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach of his
+Holiness.  At this crisis, the soldiers of the guard, who had been
+poking the crowd into all sorts of shapes, formed down the gallery:
+and the procession came up, between the two lines they made.
+
+There were a few choristers, and then a great many priests, walking
+two and two, and carrying--the good-looking priests at least--their
+lighted tapers, so as to throw the light with a good effect upon
+their faces:  for the room was darkened.  Those who were not
+handsome, or who had not long beards, carried THEIR tapers anyhow,
+and abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation.  Meanwhile,
+the chaunting was very monotonous and dreary.  The procession
+passed on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went
+on, and came on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking
+under a white satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in
+both hands; cardinals and canons clustered round him, making a
+brilliant show.  The soldiers of the guard knelt down as he passed;
+all the bystanders bowed; and so he passed on into the chapel:  the
+white satin canopy being removed from over him at the door, and a
+white satin parasol hoisted over his poor old head, in place of it.
+A few more couples brought up the rear, and passed into the chapel
+also.  Then, the chapel door was shut; and it was all over; and
+everybody hurried off headlong, as for life or death, to see
+something else, and say it wasn't worth the trouble.
+
+I think the most popular and most crowded sight (excepting those of
+Easter Sunday and Monday, which are open to all classes of people)
+was the Pope washing the feet of Thirteen men, representing the
+twelve apostles, and Judas Iscariot.  The place in which this pious
+office is performed, is one of the chapels of St. Peter's, which is
+gaily decorated for the occasion; the thirteen sitting, 'all of a
+row,' on a very high bench, and looking particularly uncomfortable,
+with the eyes of Heaven knows how many English, French, Americans,
+Swiss, Germans, Russians, Swedes, Norwegians, and other foreigners,
+nailed to their faces all the time.  They are robed in white; and
+on their heads they wear a stiff white cap, like a large English
+porter-pot, without a handle.  Each carries in his hand, a nosegay,
+of the size of a fine cauliflower; and two of them, on this
+occasion, wore spectacles; which, remembering the characters they
+sustained, I thought a droll appendage to the costume.  There was a
+great eye to character.  St. John was represented by a good-looking
+young man.  St. Peter, by a grave-looking old gentleman, with a
+flowing brown beard; and Judas Iscariot by such an enormous
+hypocrite (I could not make out, though, whether the expression of
+his face was real or assumed) that if he had acted the part to the
+death and had gone away and hanged himself, he would have left
+nothing to be desired.
+
+As the two large boxes, appropriated to ladies at this sight, were
+full to the throat, and getting near was hopeless, we posted off,
+along with a great crowd, to be in time at the Table, where the
+Pope, in person, waits on these Thirteen; and after a prodigious
+struggle at the Vatican staircase, and several personal conflicts
+with the Swiss guard, the whole crowd swept into the room.  It was
+a long gallery hung with drapery of white and red, with another
+great box for ladies (who are obliged to dress in black at these
+ceremonies, and to wear black veils), a royal box for the King of
+Naples and his party; and the table itself, which, set out like a
+ball supper, and ornamented with golden figures of the real
+apostles, was arranged on an elevated platform on one side of the
+gallery.  The counterfeit apostles' knives and forks were laid out
+on that side of the table which was nearest to the wall, so that
+they might be stared at again, without let or hindrance.
+
+The body of the room was full of male strangers; the crowd immense;
+the heat very great; and the pressure sometimes frightful.  It was
+at its height, when the stream came pouring in, from the feet-
+washing; and then there were such shrieks and outcries, that a
+party of Piedmontese dragoons went to the rescue of the Swiss
+guard, and helped them to calm the tumult.
+
+The ladies were particularly ferocious, in their struggles for
+places.  One lady of my acquaintance was seized round the waist, in
+the ladies' box, by a strong matron, and hoisted out of her place;
+and there was another lady (in a back row in the same box) who
+improved her position by sticking a large pin into the ladies
+before her.
+
+The gentlemen about me were remarkably anxious to see what was on
+the table; and one Englishman seemed to have embarked the whole
+energy of his nature in the determination to discover whether there
+was any mustard.  'By Jupiter there's vinegar!' I heard him say to
+his friend, after he had stood on tiptoe an immense time, and had
+been crushed and beaten on all sides.  'And there's oil!  I saw
+them distinctly, in cruets!  Can any gentleman, in front there, see
+mustard on the table?  Sir, will you oblige me!  DO you see a
+Mustard-Pot?'
+
+The apostles and Judas appearing on the platform, after much
+expectation, were marshalled, in line, in front of the table, with
+Peter at the top; and a good long stare was taken at them by the
+company, while twelve of them took a long smell at their nosegays,
+and Judas--moving his lips very obtrusively--engaged in inward
+prayer.  Then, the Pope, clad in a scarlet robe, and wearing on his
+head a skull-cap of white satin, appeared in the midst of a crowd
+of Cardinals and other dignitaries, and took in his hand a little
+golden ewer, from which he poured a little water over one of
+Peter's hands, while one attendant held a golden basin; a second, a
+fine cloth; a third, Peter's nosegay, which was taken from him
+during the operation.  This his Holiness performed, with
+considerable expedition, on every man in the line (Judas, I
+observed, to be particularly overcome by his condescension); and
+then the whole Thirteen sat down to dinner.  Grace said by the
+Pope.  Peter in the chair.
+
+There was white wine, and red wine:  and the dinner looked very
+good.  The courses appeared in portions, one for each apostle:  and
+these being presented to the Pope, by Cardinals upon their knees,
+were by him handed to the Thirteen.  The manner in which Judas grew
+more white-livered over his victuals, and languished, with his head
+on one side, as if he had no appetite, defies all description.
+Peter was a good, sound, old man, and went in, as the saying is,
+'to win;' eating everything that was given him (he got the best:
+being first in the row) and saying nothing to anybody.  The dishes
+appeared to be chiefly composed of fish and vegetables.  The Pope
+helped the Thirteen to wine also; and, during the whole dinner,
+somebody read something aloud, out of a large book--the Bible, I
+presume--which nobody could hear, and to which nobody paid the
+least attention.  The Cardinals, and other attendants, smiled to
+each other, from time to time, as if the thing were a great farce;
+and if they thought so, there is little doubt they were perfectly
+right.  His Holiness did what he had to do, as a sensible man gets
+through a troublesome ceremony, and seemed very glad when it was
+all over.
+
+The Pilgrims' Suppers:  where lords and ladies waited on the
+Pilgrims, in token of humility, and dried their feet when they had
+been well washed by deputy:  were very attractive.  But, of all the
+many spectacles of dangerous reliance on outward observances, in
+themselves mere empty forms, none struck me half so much as the
+Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase, which I saw several times, but to
+the greatest advantage, or disadvantage, on Good Friday.
+
+This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to
+have belonged to Pontius Pilate's house and to be the identical
+stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-
+seat.  Pilgrims ascend it, only on their knees.  It is steep; and,
+at the summit, is a chapel, reported to be full of relics; into
+which they peep through some iron bars, and then come down again,
+by one of two side staircases, which are not sacred, and may be
+walked on.
+
+On Good Friday, there were, on a moderate computation, a hundred
+people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees, at one
+time; while others, who were going up, or had come down--and a few
+who had done both, and were going up again for the second time--
+stood loitering in the porch below, where an old gentleman in a
+sort of watch-box, rattled a tin canister, with a slit in the top,
+incessantly, to remind them that he took the money.  The majority
+were country-people, male and female.  There were four or five
+Jesuit priests, however, and some half-dozen well-dressed women.  A
+whole school of boys, twenty at least, were about half-way up--
+evidently enjoying it very much.  They were all wedged together,
+pretty closely; but the rest of the company gave the boys as wide a
+berth as possible, in consequence of their betraying some
+recklessness in the management of their boots.
+
+I never, in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so
+unpleasant, as this sight--ridiculous in the absurd incidents
+inseparable from it; and unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning
+degradation.  There are two steps to begin with, and then a rather
+broad landing.  The more rigid climbers went along this landing on
+their knees, as well as up the stairs; and the figures they cut, in
+their shuffling progress over the level surface, no description can
+paint.  Then, to see them watch their opportunity from the porch,
+and cut in where there was a place next the wall!  And to see one
+man with an umbrella (brought on purpose, for it was a fine day)
+hoisting himself, unlawfully, from stair to stair!  And to observe
+a demure lady of fifty-five or so, looking back, every now and
+then, to assure herself that her legs were properly disposed!
+
+There were such odd differences in the speed of different people,
+too.  Some got on as if they were doing a match against time;
+others stopped to say a prayer on every step.  This man touched
+every stair with his forehead, and kissed it; that man scratched
+his head all the way.  The boys got on brilliantly, and were up and
+down again before the old lady had accomplished her half-dozen
+stairs.  But most of the penitents came down, very sprightly and
+fresh, as having done a real good substantial deed which it would
+take a good deal of sin to counterbalance; and the old gentleman in
+the watch-box was down upon them with his canister while they were
+in this humour, I promise you.
+
+As if such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll
+enough, there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a
+crucifix, resting on a sort of great iron saucer:  so rickety and
+unsteady, that whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure,
+with more than usual devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer,
+with more than common readiness (for it served in this respect as a
+second or supplementary canister), it gave a great leap and rattle,
+and nearly shook the attendant lamp out:  horribly frightening the
+people further down, and throwing the guilty party into unspeakable
+embarrassment.
+
+On Easter Sunday, as well as on the preceding Thursday, the Pope
+bestows his benediction on the people, from the balcony in front of
+St. Peter's.  This Easter Sunday was a day so bright and blue:  so
+cloudless, balmy, wonderfully bright:  that all the previous bad
+weather vanished from the recollection in a moment.  I had seen the
+Thursday's Benediction dropping damply on some hundreds of
+umbrellas, but there was not a sparkle then, in all the hundred
+fountains of Rome--such fountains as they are!--and on this Sunday
+morning they were running diamonds.  The miles of miserable streets
+through which we drove (compelled to a certain course by the Pope's
+dragoons:  the Roman police on such occasions) were so full of
+colour, that nothing in them was capable of wearing a faded aspect.
+The common people came out in their gayest dresses; the richer
+people in their smartest vehicles; Cardinals rattled to the church
+of the Poor Fishermen in their state carriages; shabby magnificence
+flaunted its thread-bare liveries and tarnished cocked hats, in the
+sun; and every coach in Rome was put in requisition for the Great
+Piazza of St. Peter's.
+
+One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at least!  Yet
+there was ample room.  How many carriages were there, I don't know;
+yet there was room for them too, and to spare.  The great steps of
+the church were densely crowded.  There were many of the Contadini,
+from Albano (who delight in red), in that part of the square, and
+the mingling of bright colours in the crowd was beautiful.  Below
+the steps the troops were ranged.  In the magnificent proportions
+of the place they looked like a bed of flowers.  Sulky Romans,
+lively peasants from the neighbouring country, groups of pilgrims
+from distant parts of Italy, sight-seeing foreigners of all
+nations, made a murmur in the clear air, like so many insects; and
+high above them all, plashing and bubbling, and making rainbow
+colours in the light, the two delicious fountains welled and
+tumbled bountifully.
+
+A kind of bright carpet was hung over the front of the balcony; and
+the sides of the great window were bedecked with crimson drapery.
+An awning was stretched, too, over the top, to screen the old man
+from the hot rays of the sun.  As noon approached, all eyes were
+turned up to this window.  In due time, the chair was seen
+approaching to the front, with the gigantic fans of peacock's
+feathers, close behind.  The doll within it (for the balcony is
+very high) then rose up, and stretched out its tiny arms, while all
+the male spectators in the square uncovered, and some, but not by
+any means the greater part, kneeled down.  The guns upon the
+ramparts of the Castle of St. Angelo proclaimed, next moment, that
+the benediction was given; drums beat; trumpets sounded; arms
+clashed; and the great mass below, suddenly breaking into smaller
+heaps, and scattering here and there in rills, was stirred like
+parti-coloured sand.
+
+What a bright noon it was, as we rode away!  The Tiber was no
+longer yellow, but blue.  There was a blush on the old bridges,
+that made them fresh and hale again.  The Pantheon, with its
+majestic front, all seamed and furrowed like an old face, had
+summer light upon its battered walls.  Every squalid and desolate
+hut in the Eternal City (bear witness every grim old palace, to the
+filth and misery of the plebeian neighbour that elbows it, as
+certain as Time has laid its grip on its patrician head!) was fresh
+and new with some ray of the sun.  The very prison in the crowded
+street, a whirl of carriages and people, had some stray sense of
+the day, dropping through its chinks and crevices:  and dismal
+prisoners who could not wind their faces round the barricading of
+the blocked-up windows, stretched out their hands, and clinging to
+the rusty bars, turned THEM towards the overflowing street:  as if
+it were a cheerful fire, and could be shared in, that way.
+
+But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the full moon,
+what a sight it was to see the Great Square full once more, and the
+whole church, from the cross to the ground, lighted with
+innumerable lanterns, tracing out the architecture, and winking and
+shining all round the colonnade of the piazza!  And what a sense of
+exultation, joy, delight, it was, when the great bell struck half-
+past seven--on the instant--to behold one bright red mass of fire,
+soar gallantly from the top of the cupola to the extremest summit
+of the cross, and the moment it leaped into its place, become the
+signal of a bursting out of countless lights, as great, and red,
+and blazing as itself, from every part of the gigantic church; so
+that every cornice, capital, and smallest ornament of stone,
+expressed itself in fire:  and the black, solid groundwork of the
+enormous dome seemed to grow transparent as an egg-shell!
+
+A train of gunpowder, an electric chain--nothing could be fired,
+more suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumination; and when
+we had got away, and gone upon a distant height, and looked towards
+it two hours afterwards, there it still stood, shining and
+glittering in the calm night like a jewel!  Not a line of its
+proportions wanting; not an angle blunted; not an atom of its
+radiance lost.
+
+The next night--Easter Monday--there was a great display of
+fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo.  We hired a room in an
+opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time,
+through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and
+all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which
+the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the
+rapid Tiber below.  There are statues on this bridge (execrable
+works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were
+placed:  glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less
+strangely on the stone counterfeits above them.
+
+The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
+twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant
+sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour,
+size, and speed:  while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones
+or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time.  The concluding burst--
+the Girandola--was like the blowing up into the air of the whole
+massive castle, without smoke or dust.
+
+In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed;
+the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the
+river; and half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle
+in their hands:  moving here and there, in search of anything worth
+having, that might have been dropped in the press:  had the whole
+scene to themselves.
+
+By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
+firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum.  I had seen
+it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without
+going back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past
+all telling.  The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal
+Arches of Old Emperors; those enormous masses of ruins which were
+once their palaces; the grass-grown mounds that mark the graves of
+ruined temples; the stones of the Via Sacra, smooth with the tread
+of feet in ancient Rome; even these were dimmed, in their
+transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody holidays,
+erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
+Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of
+weed, and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every
+gap and broken arch--the shadow of its awful self, immovable!
+
+As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our way
+to Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little wooden
+cross had been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim Countess
+was murdered.  So, we piled some loose stones about it, as the
+beginning of a mound to her memory, and wondered if we should ever
+rest there again, and look back at Rome.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--A RAPID DIORAMA
+
+
+
+We are bound for Naples!  And we cross the threshold of the Eternal
+City at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the
+two last objects that attract the notice of a departing visitor,
+and the two first objects that attract the notice of an arriving
+one, are a proud church and a decaying ruin--good emblems of Rome.
+
+Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright
+blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of
+ruin being plainer to the eye:  and the sunshine through the arches
+of the broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining
+through them in the melancholy distance.  When we have traversed
+it, and look back from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies
+below us like a stagnant lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing
+round the walls of Rome, and separating it from all the world!  How
+often have the Legions, in triumphant march, gone glittering across
+that purple waste, so silent and unpeopled now!  How often has the
+train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant
+city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of
+their conqueror!  What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in
+the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble!  What
+glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence
+and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is
+now heard but the wind, and where the solitary lizards gambol
+unmolested in the sun!
+
+The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy
+peasant reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-
+skin, is ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country
+where there are trees.  The next day brings us on the Pontine
+Marshes, wearily flat and lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood,
+and swamped with water, but with a fine road made across them,
+shaded by a long, long avenue.  Here and there, we pass a solitary
+guard-house; here and there a hovel, deserted, and walled up.  Some
+herdsmen loiter on the banks of the stream beside the road, and
+sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed by a man, comes rippling idly
+along it.  A horseman passes occasionally, carrying a long gun
+cross-wise on the saddle before him, and attended by fierce dogs;
+but there is nothing else astir save the wind and the shadows,
+until we come in sight of Terracina.
+
+How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn
+so famous in robber stories!  How picturesque the great crags and
+points of rock overhanging to-morrow's narrow road, where galley-
+slaves are working in the quarries above, and the sentinels who
+guard them lounge on the sea-shore!  All night there is the murmur
+of the sea beneath the stars; and, in the morning, just at
+daybreak, the prospect suddenly becoming expanded, as if by a
+miracle, reveals--in the far distance, across the sea there!--
+Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius spouting fire!  Within a
+quarter of an hour, the whole is gone as if it were a vision in the
+clouds, and there is nothing but the sea and sky.
+
+The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours' travelling; and
+the hungriest of soldiers and custom-house officers with difficulty
+appeased; we enter, by a gateless portal, into the first Neapolitan
+town--Fondi.  Take note of Fondi, in the name of all that is
+wretched and beggarly.
+
+A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the centre of the
+miserable streets, fed by obscene rivulets that trickle from the
+abject houses.  There is not a door, a window, or a shutter; not a
+roof, a wall, a post, or a pillar, in all Fondi, but is decayed,
+and crazy, and rotting away.  The wretched history of the town,
+with all its sieges and pillages by Barbarossa and the rest, might
+have been acted last year.  How the gaunt dogs that sneak about the
+miserable streets, come to be alive, and undevoured by the people,
+is one of the enigmas of the world.
+
+A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are!  All beggars; but
+that's nothing.  Look at them as they gather round.  Some, are too
+indolent to come down-stairs, or are too wisely mistrustful of the
+stairs, perhaps, to venture:  so stretch out their lean hands from
+upper windows, and howl; others, come flocking about us, fighting
+and jostling one another, and demanding, incessantly, charity for
+the love of God, charity for the love of the Blessed Virgin,
+charity for the love of all the Saints.  A group of miserable
+children, almost naked, screaming forth the same petition, discover
+that they can see themselves reflected in the varnish of the
+carriage, and begin to dance and make grimaces, that they may have
+the pleasure of seeing their antics repeated in this mirror.  A
+crippled idiot, in the act of striking one of them who drowns his
+clamorous demand for charity, observes his angry counterpart in the
+panel, stops short, and thrusting out his tongue, begins to wag his
+head and chatter.  The shrill cry raised at this, awakens half-a-
+dozen wild creatures wrapped in frowsy brown cloaks, who are lying
+on the church-steps with pots and pans for sale.  These, scrambling
+up, approach, and beg defiantly.  'I am hungry.  Give me something.
+Listen to me, Signor.  I am hungry!'  Then, a ghastly old woman,
+fearful of being too late, comes hobbling down the street,
+stretching out one hand, and scratching herself all the way with
+the other, and screaming, long before she can be heard, 'Charity,
+charity!  I'll go and pray for you directly, beautiful lady, if
+you'll give me charity!'  Lastly, the members of a brotherhood for
+burying the dead:  hideously masked, and attired in shabby black
+robes, white at the skirts, with the splashes of many muddy
+winters:  escorted by a dirty priest, and a congenial cross-bearer:
+come hurrying past.  Surrounded by this motley concourse, we move
+out of Fondi:  bad bright eyes glaring at us, out of the darkness
+of every crazy tenement, like glistening fragments of its filth and
+putrefaction.
+
+A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong
+eminence, traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old
+town of Itri, like a device in pastry, built up, almost
+perpendicularly, on a hill, and approached by long steep flights of
+steps; beautiful Mola di Gaeta, whose wines, like those of Albano,
+have degenerated since the days of Horace, or his taste for wine
+was bad:  which is not likely of one who enjoyed it so much, and
+extolled it so well; another night upon the road at St. Agatha; a
+rest next day at Capua, which is picturesque, but hardly so
+seductive to a traveller now, as the soldiers of Praetorian Rome
+were wont to find the ancient city of that name; a flat road among
+vines festooned and looped from tree to tree; and Mount Vesuvius
+close at hand at last!--its cone and summit whitened with snow; and
+its smoke hanging over it, in the heavy atmosphere of the day, like
+a dense cloud.  So we go, rattling down hill, into Naples.
+
+A funeral is coming up the street, towards us.  The body, on an
+open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth
+of crimson and gold.  The mourners, in white gowns and masks.  If
+there be death abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples
+would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages.
+Some of these, the common Vetturino vehicles, are drawn by three
+horses abreast, decked with smart trappings and great abundance of
+brazen ornament, and always going very fast.  Not that their loads
+are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside,
+four in front, four or five more hanging on behind, and two or
+three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie
+half-suffocated with mud and dust.  Exhibitors of Punch, buffo
+singers with guitars, reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a
+row of cheap exhibitions with clowns and showmen, drums, and
+trumpets, painted cloths representing the wonders within, and
+admiring crowds assembled without, assist the whirl and bustle.
+Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways, and kennels; the
+gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing up and down in carriages on the
+Chiaji, or walking in the Public Gardens; and quiet letter-writers,
+perched behind their little desks and inkstands under the Portico
+of the Great Theatre of San Carlo, in the public street, are
+waiting for clients.
+
+Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written to a
+friend.  He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting under the
+corner arch, and makes his bargain.  He has obtained permission of
+the sentinel who guards him:  who stands near, leaning against the
+wall and cracking nuts.  The galley-slave dictates in the ear of
+the letter-writer, what he desires to say; and as he can't read
+writing, looks intently in his face, to read there whether he sets
+down faithfully what he is told.  After a time, the galley-slave
+becomes discursive--incoherent.  The secretary pauses and rubs his
+chin.  The galley-slave is voluble and energetic.  The secretary,
+at length, catches the idea, and with the air of a man who knows
+how to word it, sets it down; stopping, now and then, to glance
+back at his text admiringly.  The galley-slave is silent.  The
+soldier stoically cracks his nuts.  Is there anything more to say?
+inquires the letter-writer.  No more.  Then listen, friend of mine.
+He reads it through.  The galley-slave is quite enchanted.  It is
+folded, and addressed, and given to him, and he pays the fee.  The
+secretary falls back indolently in his chair, and takes a book.
+The galley-slave gathers up an empty sack.  The sentinel throws
+away a handful of nut-shells, shoulders his musket, and away they
+go together.
+
+Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right
+hands, when you look at them?  Everything is done in pantomime in
+Naples, and that is the conventional sign for hunger.  A man who is
+quarrelling with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand
+on the back of his left, and shakes the two thumbs--expressive of a
+donkey's ears--whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation.  Two
+people bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary
+waistcoat pocket when he is told the price, and walks away without
+a word:  having thoroughly conveyed to the seller that he considers
+it too dear.  Two people in carriages, meeting, one touches his
+lips, twice or thrice, holding up the five fingers of his right
+hand, and gives a horizontal cut in the air with the palm.  The
+other nods briskly, and goes his way.  He has been invited to a
+friendly dinner at half-past five o'clock, and will certainly come.
+
+All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist,
+with the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative--the only
+negative beggars will ever understand.  But, in Naples, those five
+fingers are a copious language.
+
+All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and
+macaroni-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 picturesque, 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 Tiberius--Ischia,
+Procida, and the thousand distant beauties 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 amphitheatre, and go by the
+Grotto of Posilipo to the Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae:  or
+take the other way, towards Vesuvius and Sorrento, it is one
+succession of delights.  In the last-named direction, where, over
+doors and archways, there are countless little images of San
+Gennaro, with his Canute's hand stretched out, to check the fury of
+the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by a railroad on
+the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco, built
+upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of
+Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses,
+granaries, and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare, with its
+ruined castle, now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon
+a heap of rocks.  Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may
+ride on, by an unbroken succession of enchanting bays, and
+beautiful scenery, sloping from the highest summit of Saint Angelo,
+the highest neighbouring mountain, down to the water's edge--among
+vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards,
+heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills--and by the bases of
+snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-
+haired women at the doors--and pass delicious summer villas--to
+Sorrento, where the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty
+surrounding him.  Returning, we may climb the heights above Castel-
+a-Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp
+water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses in
+distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down to
+dice.  The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset:
+with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain, with
+its smoke and flame, upon the other:  is a sublime conclusion to
+the glory of the day.
+
+That church by the Porta Capuana--near the old fisher-market in the
+dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello
+began--is memorable for having been the scene of one of his
+earliest proclamations to the people, and is particularly
+remarkable for nothing else, unless it be its waxen and bejewelled
+Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands; or the enormous number
+of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins there, like a
+battery of castanets.  The cathedral with the beautiful door, and
+the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented
+the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San
+Gennaro or Januarius:  which is preserved in two phials in a silver
+tabernacle, and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the
+great admiration of the people.  At the same moment, the stone
+(distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes
+faintly red.  It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly
+red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
+
+The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these
+ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem
+waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious
+body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at
+funerals.  Two of these old spectres totter away, with lighted
+tapers, to show the caverns of death--as unconcerned as if they
+were immortal.  They were used as burying-places for three hundred
+years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones,
+said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a
+plague.  In the rest there is nothing but dust.  They consist,
+chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
+rock.  At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected
+glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above.  It looks as
+ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the
+dark vaults:  as if it, too, were dead and buried.
+
+The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the
+city and Vesuvius.  The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and
+sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and
+prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends.  The graceful new
+cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has
+already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy
+colonnades.  It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some
+of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general
+brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated
+from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the
+scene.
+
+If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its
+dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
+impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and
+Pompeii!
+
+Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look
+up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and
+Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to
+the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful
+distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in
+the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and
+the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun.  Then, ramble
+on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human
+habitation and every-day pursuits; the chafing of the bucket-rope
+in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-
+wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels
+on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae in private
+cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to
+this hour--all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of
+the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in
+its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the
+bottom of the sea.
+
+After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption,
+workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone, new ornaments for
+temples and other buildings that had suffered.  Here lies their
+work, outside the city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.
+
+In the cellar of Diomede's house, where certain skeletons were
+found huddled together, close to the door, the impression of their
+bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped
+and fixed there, after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones.
+So, in the theatre of Herculaneum, a comic mask, floating on the
+stream when it was hot and liquid, stamped its mimic features in it
+as it hardened into stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the
+fantastic look it turned upon the audiences in that same theatre
+two thousand years ago.
+
+Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out
+of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the temples of
+a religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many
+fresh traces of remote antiquity:  as if the course of Time had
+been stopped after this desolation, and there had been no nights
+and days, months, years, and centuries, since:  nothing is more
+impressive and terrible than the many evidences of the searching
+nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their irresistible power, and
+the impossibility of escaping them.  In the wine-cellars, they
+forced their way into the earthen vessels:  displacing the wine and
+choking them, to the brim, with dust.  In the tombs, they forced
+the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin
+even into them.  The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the
+skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail.  In Herculaneum,
+where the flood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled
+in, like a sea.  Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at its
+height--and that is what is called 'the lava' here.
+
+Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we
+now stand, looking down, when they came on some of the stone
+benches of the theatre--those steps (for such they seem) at the
+bottom of the excavation--and found the buried city of Herculaneum.
+Presently going down, with lighted torches, we are perplexed by
+great walls of monstrous thickness, rising up between the benches,
+shutting out the stage, obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd
+places, confusing the whole plan, and making it a disordered dream.
+We cannot, at first, believe, or picture to ourselves, that THIS
+came rolling in, and drowned the city; and that all that is not
+here, has been cut away, by the axe, like solid stone.  But this
+perceived and understood, the horror and oppression of its presence
+are indescribable.
+
+Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of both
+cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh
+and plain, as if they had been executed yesterday.  Here are
+subjects of still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses,
+and the like; familiar classical stories, or mythological fables,
+always forcibly and plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling,
+sporting, working at trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading
+their productions to their friends; inscriptions chalked upon the
+walls; political squibs, advertisements, rough drawings by
+schoolboys; everything to people and restore the ancient cities, in
+the fancy of their wondering visitor.  Furniture, too, you see, of
+every kind--lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking,
+and cooking; workmen's tools, surgical instruments, tickets for the
+theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of keys found
+clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards and warriors;
+little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic tones.
+
+The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the interest
+of Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination.  The
+looking, from either ruined city, into the neighbouring grounds
+overgrown with beautiful vines and luxuriant trees; and remembering
+that house upon house, temple on temple, building after building,
+and street after street, are still lying underneath the roots of
+all the quiet cultivation, waiting to be turned up to the light of
+day; is something so wonderful, so full of mystery, so captivating
+to the imagination, that one would think it would be paramount, and
+yield to nothing else.  To nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain
+is the genius of the scene.  From every indication of the ruin it
+has worked, we look, again, with an absorbing interest to where its
+smoke is rising up into the sky.  It is beyond us, as we thread the
+ruined streets:  above us, as we stand upon the ruined walls, we
+follow it through every vista of broken columns, as we wander
+through the empty court-yards of the houses; and through the
+garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine.  Turning away to
+Paestum yonder, to see the awful structures built, the least aged
+of them, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and standing
+yet, erect in lonely majesty, upon the wild, malaria-blighted
+plain--we watch Vesuvius as it disappears from the prospect, and
+watch for it again, on our return, with the same thrill of
+interest:  as the doom and destiny of all this beautiful country,
+biding its terrible time.
+
+It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when we
+return from Paestum, but very cold in the shade:  insomuch, that
+although we may lunch, pleasantly, at noon, in the open air, by the
+gate of Pompeii, the neighbouring rivulet supplies thick ice for
+our wine.  But, the sun is shining brightly; there is not a cloud
+or speck of vapour in the whole blue sky, looking down upon the bay
+of Naples; and the moon will be at the full to-night.  No matter
+that the snow and ice lie thick upon the summit of Vesuvius, or
+that we have been on foot all day at Pompeii, or that croakers
+maintain that strangers should not be on the mountain by night, in
+such an unusual season.  Let us take advantage of the fine weather;
+make the best of our way to Resina, the little village at the foot
+of the mountain; prepare ourselves, as well as we can, on so short
+a notice, at the guide's house; ascend at once, and have sunset
+half-way up, moonlight at the top, and midnight to come down in!
+
+At four o'clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible uproar in the
+little stable-yard of Signior Salvatore, the recognised head-guide,
+with the gold band round his cap; and thirty under-guides who are
+all scuffling and screaming at once, are preparing half-a-dozen
+saddled ponies, three litters, and some stout staves, for the
+journey.  Every one of the thirty, quarrels with the other twenty-
+nine, and frightens the six ponies; and as much of the village as
+can possibly squeeze itself into the little stable-yard,
+participates in the tumult, and gets trodden on by the cattle.
+
+After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than would suffice
+for the storming of Naples, the procession starts.  The head-guide,
+who is liberally paid for all the attendants, rides a little in
+advance of the party; the other thirty guides proceed on foot.
+Eight go forward with the litters that are to be used by-and-by;
+and the remaining two-and-twenty beg.
+
+We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights of
+stairs, for some time.  At length, we leave these, and the
+vineyards on either side of them, and emerge upon a bleak bare
+region where the lava lies confusedly, in enormous rusty masses; as
+if the earth had been ploughed up by burning thunderbolts.  And
+now, we halt to see the sun set.  The change that falls upon the
+dreary region, and on the whole mountain, as its red light fades,
+and the night comes on--and the unutterable solemnity and
+dreariness that reign around, who that has witnessed it, can ever
+forget!
+
+It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the broken
+ground, we arrive at the foot of the cone:  which is extremely
+steep, and seems to rise, almost perpendicularly, from the spot
+where we dismount.  The only light is reflected from the snow,
+deep, hard, and white, with which the cone is covered.  It is now
+intensely cold, and the air is piercing.  The thirty-one have
+brought no torches, knowing that the moon will rise before we reach
+the top.  Two of the litters are devoted to the two ladies; the
+third, to a rather heavy gentleman from Naples, whose hospitality
+and good-nature have attached him to the expedition, and determined
+him to assist in doing the honours of the mountain.  The rather
+heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by
+half-a-dozen.  We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so
+the whole party begin to labour upward over the snow,--as if they
+were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake.
+
+We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks oddly about
+him when one of the company--not an Italian, though an habitue of
+the mountain for many years:  whom we will call, for our present
+purpose, Mr. Pickle of Portici--suggests that, as it is freezing
+hard, and the usual footing of ashes is covered by the snow and
+ice, it will surely be difficult to descend.  But the sight of the
+litters above, tilting up and down, and jerking from this side to
+that, as the bearers continually slip and tumble, diverts our
+attention; more especially as the whole length of the rather heavy
+gentleman is, at that moment, presented to us alarmingly
+foreshortened, with his head downwards.
+
+The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flagging
+spirits of the bearers.  Stimulating each other with their usual
+watchword, 'Courage, friend!  It is to eat macaroni!' they press
+on, gallantly, for the summit.
+
+From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of light,
+and pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while we have
+been ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the whole white
+mountain-side, and the broad sea down below, and tiny Naples in the
+distance, and every village in the country round.  The whole
+prospect is in this lovely state, when we come upon the platform on
+the mountain-top--the region of Fire--an exhausted crater formed of
+great masses of gigantic cinders, like blocks of stone from some
+tremendous waterfall, burnt up; from every chink and crevice of
+which, hot, sulphurous smoke is pouring out:  while, from another
+conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising abruptly from this
+platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming forth:
+reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and
+spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the
+air like feathers, and fall down like lead.  What words can paint
+the gloom and grandeur of this scene!
+
+The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from the
+sulphur:  the fear of falling down through the crevices in the
+yawning ground; the stopping, every now and then, for somebody who
+is missing in the dark (for the dense smoke now obscures the moon);
+the intolerable noise of the thirty; and the hoarse roaring of the
+mountain; make it a scene of such confusion, at the same time, that
+we reel again.  But, dragging the ladies through it, and across
+another exhausted crater to the foot of the present Volcano, we
+approach close to it on the windy side, and then sit down among the
+hot ashes at its foot, and look up in silence; faintly estimating
+the action that is going on within, from its being full a hundred
+feet higher, at this minute, than it was six weeks ago.
+
+There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an
+irresistible desire to get nearer to it.  We cannot rest long,
+without starting off, two of us, on our hands and knees,
+accompanied by the head-guide, to climb to the brim of the flaming
+crater, and try to look in.  Meanwhile, the thirty yell, as with
+one voice, that it is a dangerous proceeding, and call to us to
+come back; frightening the rest of the party out of their wits.
+
+What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin
+crust of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and
+plunge us in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if
+there be any); and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces,
+and the shower of red-hot ashes that is raining down, and the
+choking smoke and sulphur; we may well feel giddy and irrational,
+like drunken men.  But, we contrive to climb up to the brim, and
+look down, for a moment, into the Hell of boiling fire below.
+Then, we all three come rolling down; blackened, and singed, and
+scorched, and hot, and giddy:  and each with his dress alight in
+half-a-dozen places.
+
+You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of descending,
+is, by sliding down the ashes:  which, forming a gradually-
+increasing ledge below the feet, prevent too rapid a descent.  But,
+when we have crossed the two exhausted craters on our way back and
+are come to this precipitous place, there is (as Mr. Pickle has
+foretold) no vestige of ashes to be seen; the whole being a smooth
+sheet of ice.
+
+In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously join
+hands, and make a chain of men; of whom the foremost beat, as well
+as they can, a rough track with their sticks, down which we prepare
+to follow.  The way being fearfully steep, and none of the party:
+even of the thirty:  being able to keep their feet for six paces
+together, the ladies are taken out of their litters, and placed,
+each between two careful persons; while others of the thirty hold
+by their skirts, to prevent their falling forward--a necessary
+precaution, tending to the immediate and hopeless dilapidation of
+their apparel.  The rather heavy gentleman is abjured to leave his
+litter too, and be escorted in a similar manner; but he resolves to
+be brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that his
+fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and that he
+is safer so, than trusting to his own legs.
+
+In this order, we begin the descent:  sometimes on foot, sometimes
+shuffling on the ice:  always proceeding much more quietly and
+slowly, than on our upward way:  and constantly alarmed by the
+falling among us of somebody from behind, who endangers the footing
+of the whole party, and clings pertinaciously to anybody's ankles.
+It is impossible for the litter to be in advance, too, as the track
+has to be made; and its appearance behind us, overhead--with some
+one or other of the bearers always down, and the rather heavy
+gentleman with his legs always in the air--is very threatening and
+frightful.  We have gone on thus, a very little way, painfully and
+anxiously, but quite merrily, and regarding it as a great success--
+and have all fallen several times, and have all been stopped,
+somehow or other, as we were sliding away--when Mr. Pickle of
+Portici, in the act of remarking on these uncommon circumstances as
+quite beyond his experience, stumbles, falls, disengages himself,
+with quick presence of mind, from those about him, plunges away
+head foremost, and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of
+the cone!
+
+Sickening as it is to look, and be so powerless to help him, I see
+him there, in the moonlight--I have had such a dream often--
+skimming over the white ice, like a cannon-ball.  Almost at the
+same moment, there is a cry from behind; and a man who has carried
+a light basket of spare cloaks on his head, comes rolling past, at
+the same frightful speed, closely followed by a boy.  At this
+climax of the chapter of accidents, the remaining eight-and-twenty
+vociferate to that degree, that a pack of wolves would be music to
+them!
+
+Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of Portici
+when we reach the place where we dismounted, and where the horses
+are waiting; but, thank God, sound in limb!  And never are we
+likely to be more glad to see a man alive and on his feet, than to
+see him now--making light of it too, though sorely bruised and in
+great pain.  The boy is brought into the Hermitage on the Mountain,
+while we are at supper, with his head tied up; and the man is heard
+of, some hours afterwards.  He too is bruised and stunned, but has
+broken no bones; the snow having, fortunately, covered all the
+larger blocks of rock and stone, and rendered them harmless.
+
+After a cheerful meal, and a good rest before a blazing fire, we
+again take horse, and continue our descent to Salvatore's house--
+very slowly, by reason of our bruised friend being hardly able to
+keep the saddle, or endure the pain of motion.  Though it is so
+late at night, or early in the morning, all the people of the
+village are waiting about the little stable-yard when we arrive,
+and looking up the road by which we are expected.  Our appearance
+is hailed with a great clamour of tongues, and a general sensation
+for which in our modesty we are somewhat at a loss to account,
+until, turning into the yard, we find that one of a party of French
+gentlemen who were on the mountain at the same time is lying on
+some straw in the stable, with a broken limb:  looking like Death,
+and suffering great torture; and that we were confidently supposed
+to have encountered some worse accident.
+
+So 'well returned, and Heaven be praised!' as the cheerful
+Vetturino, who has borne us company all the way from Pisa, says,
+with all his heart!  And away with his ready horses, into sleeping
+Naples!
+
+It wakes again to Policinelli and pickpockets, buffo singers and
+beggars, rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and universal
+degradation; airing its Harlequin suit in the sunshine, next day
+and every day; singing, starving, dancing, gaming, on the sea-
+shore; and leaving all labour to the burning mountain, which is
+ever at its work.
+
+Our English dilettanti would be very pathetic on the subject of the
+national taste, if they could hear an Italian opera half as badly
+sung in England as we may hear the Foscari performed, to-night, in
+the splendid theatre of San Carlo.  But, for astonishing truth and
+spirit in seizing and embodying the real life about it, the shabby
+little San Carlino Theatre--the rickety house one story high, with
+a staring picture outside:  down among the drums and trumpets, and
+the tumblers, and the lady conjurer--is without a rival anywhere.
+
+There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples, at
+which we may take a glance before we go--the Lotteries.
+
+They prevail in most parts of Italy, but are particularly obvious,
+in their effects and influences, here.  They are drawn every
+Saturday.  They bring an immense revenue to the Government; and
+diffuse a taste for gambling among the poorest of the poor, which
+is very comfortable to the coffers of the State, and very ruinous
+to themselves.  The lowest stake is one grain; less than a
+farthing.  One hundred numbers--from one to a hundred, inclusive--
+are put into a box.  Five are drawn.  Those are the prizes.  I buy
+three numbers.  If one of them come up, I win a small prize.  If
+two, some hundreds of times my stake.  If three, three thousand
+five hundred times my stake.  I stake (or play as they call it)
+what I can upon my numbers, and buy what numbers I please.  The
+amount I play, I pay at the lottery office, where I purchase the
+ticket; and it is stated on the ticket itself.
+
+Every lottery office keeps a printed book, an Universal Lottery
+Diviner, where every possible accident and circumstance is provided
+for, and has a number against it.  For instance, let us take two
+carlini--about sevenpence.  On our way to the lottery office, we
+run against a black man.  When we get there, we say gravely, 'The
+Diviner.'  It is handed over the counter, as a serious matter of
+business.  We look at black man.  Such a number.  'Give us that.'
+We look at running against a person in the street.  'Give us that.
+' We look at the name of the street itself.  'Give us that.'  Now,
+we have our three numbers.
+
+If the roof of the theatre of San Carlo were to fall in, so many
+people would play upon the numbers attached to such an accident in
+the Diviner, that the Government would soon close those numbers,
+and decline to run the risk of losing any more upon them.  This
+often happens.  Not long ago, when there was a fire in the King's
+Palace, there was such a desperate run on fire, and king, and
+palace, that further stakes on the numbers attached to those words
+in the Golden Book were forbidden.  Every accident or event, is
+supposed, by the ignorant populace, to be a revelation to the
+beholder, or party concerned, in connection with the lottery.
+Certain people who have a talent for dreaming fortunately, are much
+sought after; and there are some priests who are constantly
+favoured with visions of the lucky numbers.
+
+I heard of a horse running away with a man, and dashing him down,
+dead, at the corner of a street.  Pursuing the horse with
+incredible speed, was another man, who ran so fast, that he came
+up, immediately after the accident.  He threw himself upon his
+knees beside the unfortunate rider, and clasped his hand with an
+expression of the wildest grief.  'If you have life,' he said,
+'speak one word to me!  If you have one gasp of breath left,
+mention your age for Heaven's sake, that I may play that number in
+the lottery.'
+
+It is four o'clock in the afternoon, and we may go to see our
+lottery drawn.  The ceremony takes place every Saturday, in the
+Tribunale, or Court of Justice--this singular, earthy-smelling
+room, or gallery, as mouldy as an old cellar, and as damp as a
+dungeon.  At the upper end is a platform, with a large horse-shoe
+table upon it; and a President and Council sitting round--all
+judges of the Law.  The man on the little stool behind the
+President, is the Capo Lazzarone, a kind of tribune of the people,
+appointed on their behalf to see that all is fairly conducted:
+attended by a few personal friends.  A ragged, swarthy fellow he
+is:  with long matted hair hanging down all over his face:  and
+covered, from head to foot, with most unquestionably genuine dirt.
+All the body of the room is filled with the commonest of the
+Neapolitan people:  and between them and the platform, guarding the
+steps leading to the latter, is a small body of soldiers.
+
+There is some delay in the arrival of the necessary number of
+judges; during which, the box, in which the numbers are being
+placed, is a source of the deepest interest.  When the box is full,
+the boy who is to draw the numbers out of it becomes the prominent
+feature of the proceedings.  He is already dressed for his part, in
+a tight brown Holland coat, with only one (the left) sleeve to it,
+which leaves his right arm bared to the shoulder, ready for
+plunging down into the mysterious chest.
+
+During the hush and whisper that pervade the room, all eyes are
+turned on this young minister of fortune.  People begin to inquire
+his age, with a view to the next lottery; and the number of his
+brothers and sisters; and the age of his father and mother; and
+whether he has any moles or pimples upon him; and where, and how
+many; when the arrival of the last judge but one (a little old man,
+universally dreaded as possessing the Evil Eye) makes a slight
+diversion, and would occasion a greater one, but that he is
+immediately deposed, as a source of interest, by the officiating
+priest, who advances gravely to his place, followed by a very dirty
+little boy, carrying his sacred vestments, and a pot of Holy Water.
+
+Here is the last judge come at last, and now he takes his place at
+the horse-shoe table.
+
+There is a murmur of irrepressible agitation.  In the midst of it,
+the priest puts his head into the sacred vestments, and pulls the
+same over his shoulders.  Then he says a silent prayer; and dipping
+a brush into the pot of Holy Water, sprinkles it over the box--and
+over the boy, and gives them a double-barrelled blessing, which the
+box and the boy are both hoisted on the table to receive.  The boy
+remaining on the table, the box is now carried round the front of
+the platform, by an attendant, who holds it up and shakes it
+lustily all the time; seeming to say, like the conjurer, 'There is
+no deception, ladies and gentlemen; keep your eyes upon me, if you
+please!'
+
+At last, the box is set before the boy; and the boy, first holding
+up his naked arm and open hand, dives down into the hole (it is
+made like a ballot-box) and pulls out a number, which is rolled up,
+round something hard, like a bonbon.  This he hands to the judge
+next him, who unrolls a little bit, and hands it to the President,
+next to whom he sits.  The President unrolls it, very slowly.  The
+Capo Lazzarone leans over his shoulder.  The President holds it up,
+unrolled, to the Capo Lazzarone.  The Capo Lazzarone, looking at it
+eagerly, cries out, in a shrill, loud voice, 'Sessantadue!' (sixty-
+two), expressing the two upon his fingers, as he calls it out.
+Alas! the Capo Lazzarone himself has not staked on sixty-two.  His
+face is very long, and his eyes roll wildly.
+
+As it happens to be a favourite number, however, it is pretty well
+received, which is not always the case.  They are all drawn with
+the same ceremony, omitting the blessing.  One blessing is enough
+for the whole multiplication-table.  The only new incident in the
+proceedings, is the gradually deepening intensity of the change in
+the Cape Lazzarone, who has, evidently, speculated to the very
+utmost extent of his means; and who, when he sees the last number,
+and finds that it is not one of his, clasps his hands, and raises
+his eyes to the ceiling before proclaiming it, as though
+remonstrating, in a secret agony, with his patron saint, for having
+committed so gross a breach of confidence.  I hope the Capo
+Lazzarone may not desert him for some other member of the Calendar,
+but he seems to threaten it.
+
+Where the winners may be, nobody knows.  They certainly are not
+present; the general disappointment filling one with pity for the
+poor people.  They look:  when we stand aside, observing them, in
+their passage through the court-yard down below:  as miserable as
+the prisoners in the gaol (it forms a part of the building), who
+are peeping down upon them, from between their bars; or, as the
+fragments of human heads which are still dangling in chains
+outside, in memory of the good old times, when their owners were
+strung up there, for the popular edification.
+
+Away from Naples in a glorious sunrise, by the road to Capua, and
+then on a three days' journey along by-roads, that we may see, on
+the way, the monastery of Monte Cassino, which is perched on the
+steep and lofty hill above the little town of San Germano, and is
+lost on a misty morning in the clouds.
+
+So much the better, for the deep sounding of its bell, which, as we
+go winding up, on mules, towards the convent, is heard mysteriously
+in the still air, while nothing is seen but the grey mist, moving
+solemnly and slowly, like a funeral procession.  Behold, at length
+the shadowy pile of building close before us:  its grey walls and
+towers dimly seen, though so near and so vast:  and the raw vapour
+rolling through its cloisters heavily.
+
+There are two black shadows walking to and fro in the quadrangle,
+near the statues of the Patron Saint and his sister; and hopping on
+behind them, in and out of the old arches, is a raven, croaking in
+answer to the bell, and uttering, at intervals, the purest Tuscan.
+How like a Jesuit he looks!  There never was a sly and stealthy
+fellow so at home as is this raven, standing now at the refectory
+door, with his head on one side, and pretending to glance another
+way, while he is scrutinizing the visitors keenly, and listening
+with fixed attention.  What a dull-headed monk the porter becomes
+in comparison!
+
+'He speaks like us!' says the porter:  'quite as plainly.'  Quite
+as plainly, Porter.  Nothing could be more expressive than his
+reception of the peasants who are entering the gate with baskets
+and burdens.  There is a roll in his eye, and a chuckle in his
+throat, which should qualify him to be chosen Superior of an Order
+of Ravens.  He knows all about it.  'It's all right,' he says.  'We
+know what we know.  Come along, good people.  Glad to see you!'
+How was this extraordinary structure ever built in such a
+situation, where the labour of conveying the stone, and iron, and
+marble, so great a height, must have been prodigious?  'Caw!' says
+the raven, welcoming the peasants.  How, being despoiled by
+plunder, fire and earthquake, has it risen from its ruins, and been
+again made what we now see it, with its church so sumptuous and
+magnificent?  'Caw!' says the raven, welcoming the peasants.  These
+people have a miserable appearance, and (as usual) are densely
+ignorant, and all beg, while the monks are chaunting in the chapel.
+'Caw!' says the raven, 'Cuckoo!'
+
+So we leave him, chuckling and rolling his eye at the convent gate,
+and wind slowly down again through the cloud.  At last emerging
+from it, we come in sight of the village far below, and the flat
+green country intersected by rivulets; which is pleasant and fresh
+to see after the obscurity and haze of the convent--no disrespect
+to the raven, or the holy friars.
+
+Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most shattered
+and tattered of villages, where there is not a whole window among
+all the houses, or a whole garment among all the peasants, or the
+least appearance of anything to eat, in any of the wretched
+hucksters' shops.  The women wear a bright red bodice laced before
+and behind, a white skirt, and the Neapolitan head-dress of square
+folds of linen, primitively meant to carry loads on.  The men and
+children wear anything they can get.  The soldiers are as dirty and
+rapacious as the dogs.  The inns are such hobgoblin places, that
+they are infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best
+hotels in Paris.  Here is one near Valmontone (that is Valmontone
+the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which is approached
+by a quagmire almost knee-deep.  There is a wild colonnade below,
+and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a great long
+kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form, where a
+party of travellers, with two priests among them, are crowding
+round the fire while their supper is cooking.  Above stairs, is a
+rough brick gallery to sit in, with very little windows with very
+small patches of knotty glass in them, and all the doors that open
+from it (a dozen or two) off their hinges, and a bare board on
+tressels for a table, at which thirty people might dine easily, and
+a fireplace large enough in itself for a breakfast-parlour, where,
+as the faggots blaze and crackle, they illuminate the ugliest and
+grimmest of faces, drawn in charcoal on the whitewashed chimney-
+sides by previous travellers.  There is a flaring country lamp on
+the table; and, hovering about it, scratching her thick black hair
+continually, a yellow dwarf of a woman, who stands on tiptoe to
+arrange the hatchet knives, and takes a flying leap to look into
+the water-jug.  The beds in the adjoining rooms are of the
+liveliest kind.  There is not a solitary scrap of looking-glass in
+the house, and the washing apparatus is identical with the cooking
+utensils.  But the yellow dwarf sets on the table a good flask of
+excellent wine, holding a quart at least; and produces, among half-
+a-dozen other dishes, two-thirds of a roasted kid, smoking hot.
+She is as good-humoured, too, as dirty, which is saying a great
+deal.  So here's long life to her, in the flask of wine, and
+prosperity to the establishment.
+
+Rome gained and left behind, and with it the Pilgrims who are now
+repairing to their own homes again--each with his scallop shell and
+staff, and soliciting alms for the love of God--we come, by a fair
+country, to the Falls of Terni, where the whole Velino river
+dashes, headlong, from a rocky height, amidst shining spray and
+rainbows.  Perugia, strongly fortified by art and nature, on a
+lofty eminence, rising abruptly from the plain where purple
+mountains mingle with the distant sky, is glowing, on its market-
+day, with radiant colours.  They set off its sombre but rich Gothic
+buildings admirably.  The pavement of its market-place is strewn
+with country goods.  All along the steep hill leading from the
+town, under the town wall, there is a noisy fair of calves, lambs,
+pigs, horses, mules, and oxen.  Fowls, geese, and turkeys, flutter
+vigorously among their very hoofs; and buyers, sellers, and
+spectators, clustering everywhere, block up the road as we come
+shouting down upon them.
+
+Suddenly, there is a ringing sound among our horses.  The driver
+stops them.  Sinking in his saddle, and casting up his eyes to
+Heaven, he delivers this apostrophe, 'Oh Jove Omnipotent! here is a
+horse has lost his shoe!'
+
+Notwithstanding the tremendous nature of this accident, and the
+utterly forlorn look and gesture (impossible in any one but an
+Italian Vetturino) with which it is announced, it is not long in
+being repaired by a mortal Farrier, by whose assistance we reach
+Castiglione the same night, and Arezzo next day.  Mass is, of
+course, performing in its fine cathedral, where the sun shines in
+among the clustered pillars, through rich stained-glass windows:
+half revealing, half concealing the kneeling figures on the
+pavement, and striking out paths of spotted light in the long
+aisles.
+
+But, how much beauty of another kind is here, when, on a fair clear
+morning, we look, from the summit of a hill, on Florence!  See
+where it lies before us in a sun-lighted valley, bright with the
+winding Arno, and shut in by swelling hills; its domes, and towers,
+and palaces, rising from the rich country in a glittering heap, and
+shining in the sun like gold!
+
+Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful
+Florence; and the strong old piles of building make such heaps of
+shadow, on the ground and in the river, that there is another and a
+different city of rich forms and fancies, always lying at our feet.
+Prodigious palaces, constructed for defence, with small distrustful
+windows heavily barred, and walls of great thickness formed of huge
+masses of rough stone, frown, in their old sulky state, on every
+street.  In the midst of the city--in the Piazza of the Grand Duke,
+adorned with beautiful statues and the Fountain of Neptune--rises
+the Palazzo Vecchio, with its enormous overhanging battlements, and
+the Great Tower that watches over the whole town.  In its court-
+yard--worthy of the Castle of Otranto in its ponderous gloom--is a
+massive staircase that the heaviest waggon and the stoutest team of
+horses might be driven up.  Within it, is a Great Saloon, faded and
+tarnished in its stately decorations, and mouldering by grains, but
+recording yet, in pictures on its walls, the triumphs of the Medici
+and the wars of the old Florentine people.  The prison is hard by,
+in an adjacent court-yard of the building--a foul and dismal place,
+where some men are shut up close, in small cells like ovens; and
+where others look through bars and beg; where some are playing
+draughts, and some are talking to their friends, who smoke, the
+while, to purify the air; and some are buying wine and fruit of
+women-vendors; and all are squalid, dirty, and vile to look at.
+'They are merry enough, Signore,' says the jailer.  'They are all
+blood-stained here,' he adds, indicating, with his hand, three-
+fourths of the whole building.  Before the hour is out, an old man,
+eighty years of age, quarrelling over a bargain with a young girl
+of seventeen, stabs her dead, in the market-place full of bright
+flowers; and is brought in prisoner, to swell the number.
+
+Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte Vecchio--
+that bridge which is covered with the shops of Jewellers and
+Goldsmiths--is a most enchanting feature in the scene.  The space
+of one house, in the centre, being left open, the view beyond is
+shown as in a frame; and that precious glimpse of sky, and water,
+and rich buildings, shining so quietly among the huddled roofs and
+gables on the bridge, is exquisite.  Above it, the Gallery of the
+Grand Duke crosses the river.  It was built to connect the two
+Great Palaces by a secret passage; and it takes its jealous course
+among the streets and houses, with true despotism:  going where it
+lists, and spurning every obstacle away, before it.
+
+The Grand Duke has a worthier secret passage through the streets,
+in his black robe and hood, as a member of the Compagnia della
+Misericordia, which brotherhood includes all ranks of men.  If an
+accident take place, their office is, to raise the sufferer, and
+bear him tenderly to the Hospital.  If a fire break out, it is one
+of their functions to repair to the spot, and render their
+assistance and protection.  It is, also, among their commonest
+offices, to attend and console the sick; and they neither receive
+money, nor eat, nor drink, in any house they visit for this
+purpose.  Those who are on duty for the time, are all called
+together, on a moment's notice, by the tolling of the great bell of
+the Tower; and it is said that the Grand Duke has been seen, at
+this sound, to rise from his seat at table, and quietly withdraw to
+attend the summons.
+
+In this other large Piazza, where an irregular kind of market is
+held, and stores of old iron and other small merchandise are set
+out on stalls, or scattered on the pavement, are grouped together,
+the Cathedral with its great Dome, the beautiful Italian Gothic
+Tower the Campanile, and the Baptistery with its wrought bronze
+doors.  And here, a small untrodden square in the pavement, is 'the
+Stone of DANTE,' where (so runs the story) he was used to bring his
+stool, and sit in contemplation.  I wonder was he ever, in his
+bitter exile, withheld from cursing the very stones in the streets
+of Florence the ungrateful, by any kind remembrance of this old
+musing-place, and its association with gentle thoughts of little
+Beatrice!
+
+The chapel of the Medici, the Good and Bad Angels, of Florence; the
+church of Santa Croce where Michael Angelo lies buried, and where
+every stone in the cloisters is eloquent on great men's deaths;
+innumerable churches, often masses of unfinished heavy brickwork
+externally, but solemn and serene within; arrest our lingering
+steps, in strolling through the city.
+
+In keeping with the tombs among the cloisters, is the Museum of
+Natural History, famous through the world for its preparations in
+wax; beginning with models of leaves, seeds, plants, inferior
+animals; and gradually ascending, through separate organs of the
+human frame, up to the whole structure of that wonderful creation,
+exquisitely presented, as in recent death.  Few admonitions of our
+frail mortality can be more solemn and more sad, or strike so home
+upon the heart, as the counterfeits of Youth and Beauty that are
+lying there, upon their beds, in their last sleep.
+
+Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the convent
+at Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, BOCCACCIO'S house, old villas and
+retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glowing in a landscape
+of surpassing beauty steeped in the richest light; are spread
+before us.  Returning from so much brightness, how solemn and how
+grand the streets again, with their great, dark, mournful palaces,
+and many legends:  not of siege, and war, and might, and Iron Hand
+alone, but of the triumphant growth of peaceful Arts and Sciences.
+
+What light is shed upon the world, at this day, from amidst these
+rugged Palaces of Florence!  Here, open to all comers, in their
+beautiful and calm retreats, the ancient Sculptors are immortal,
+side by side with Michael Angelo, Canova, Titian, Rembrandt,
+Raphael, Poets, Historians, Philosophers--those illustrious men of
+history, beside whom its crowned heads and harnessed warriors show
+so poor and small, and are so soon forgotten.  Here, the
+imperishable part of noble minds survives, placid and equal, when
+strongholds of assault and defence are overthrown; when the tyranny
+of the many, or the few, or both, is but a tale; when Pride and
+Power are so much cloistered dust.  The fire within the stern
+streets, and among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled by rays
+from Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flickering of war
+is extinguished and the household fires of generations have
+decayed; as thousands upon thousands of faces, rigid with the
+strife and passion of the hour, have faded out of the old Squares
+and public haunts, while the nameless Florentine Lady, preserved
+from oblivion by a Painter's hand, yet lives on, in enduring grace
+and youth.
+
+Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining
+Dome is seen no more, go travelling through cheerful Tuscany, with
+a bright remembrance of it; for Italy will be the fairer for the
+recollection.  The summer-time being come:  and Genoa, and Milan,
+and the Lake of Como lying far behind us:  and we resting at Faido,
+a Swiss village, near the awful rocks and mountains, the
+everlasting snows and roaring cataracts, of the Great Saint
+Gothard:  hearing the Italian tongue for the last time on this
+journey:  let us part from Italy, with all its miseries and wrongs,
+affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and
+artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our
+tenderness towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient,
+and sweet-tempered.  Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule,
+have been at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit;
+miserable jealousies, fomented by petty Princes to whom union was
+destruction, and division strength, have been a canker at their
+root of nationality, and have barbarized their language; but the
+good that was in them ever, is in them yet, and a noble people may
+be, one day, raised up from these ashes.  Let us entertain that
+hope!  And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully, because,
+in every fragment of her fallen Temples, and every stone of her
+deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson
+that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the world
+is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing, and
+more hopeful, as it rolls!
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  This was written in 1846.
+
+{2}  A far more liberal and just recognition of the public has
+arisen in Westminster Abbey since this was written.
+
+
+
+
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+<title>Pictures from Italy</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Pictures from Italy
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+Release Date: September, 1996  [EBook #650]
+[This file was first posted on September 17, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1913 Chapman &amp; Hall, Ltd. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PICTURES FROM ITALY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE READER&rsquo;S PASSPORT<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+If the readers of this volume will be so kind as to take their credentials
+for the different places which are the subject of its author&rsquo;s
+reminiscences, from the Author himself, perhaps they may visit them,
+in fancy, the more agreeably, and with a better understanding of what
+they are to expect.<br>
+<br>
+Many books have been written upon Italy, affording many means of studying
+the history of that interesting country, and the innumerable associations
+entwined about it.&nbsp; I make but little reference to that stock of
+information; not at all regarding it as a necessary consequence of my
+having had recourse to the storehouse for my own benefit, that I should
+reproduce its easily accessible contents before the eyes of my readers.<br>
+<br>
+Neither will there be found, in these pages, any grave examination into
+the government or misgovernment of any portion of the country.&nbsp;
+No visitor of that beautiful land can fail to have a strong conviction
+on the subject; but as I chose when residing there, a Foreigner, to
+abstain from the discussion of any such questions with any order of
+Italians, so I would rather not enter on the inquiry now.&nbsp; During
+my twelve months&rsquo; occupation of a house at Genoa, I never found
+that authorities constitutionally jealous were distrustful of me; and
+I should be sorry to give them occasion to regret their free courtesy,
+either to myself or any of my countrymen.<br>
+<br>
+There is, probably, not a famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but
+could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to
+dissertations on it.&nbsp; I do not, therefore, though an earnest admirer
+of Painting and Sculpture, expatiate at any length on famous Pictures
+and Statues.<br>
+<br>
+This Book is a series of faint reflections - mere shadows in the water
+- of places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted in
+a greater or less degree, on which mine had dwelt for years, and which
+have some interest for all.&nbsp; The greater part of the descriptions
+were written on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private
+letters.&nbsp; I do not mention the circumstance as an excuse for any
+defects they may present, for it would be none; but as a guarantee to
+the Reader that they were at least penned in the fulness of the subject,
+and with the liveliest impressions of novelty and freshness.<br>
+<br>
+If they have ever a fanciful and idle air, perhaps the reader will suppose
+them written in the shade of a Sunny Day, in the midst of the objects
+of which they treat, and will like them none the worse for having such
+influences of the country upon them.<br>
+<br>
+I hope I am not likely to be misunderstood by Professors of the Roman
+Catholic faith, on account of anything contained in these pages.&nbsp;
+I have done my best, in one of my former productions, to do justice
+to them; and I trust, in this, they will do justice to me.&nbsp; When
+I mention any exhibition that impressed me as absurd or disagreeable,
+I do not seek to connect it, or recognise it as necessarily connected
+with, any essentials of their creed.&nbsp; When I treat of the ceremonies
+of the Holy Week, I merely treat of their effect, and do not challenge
+the good and learned Dr. Wiseman&rsquo;s interpretation of their meaning.&nbsp;
+When I hint a dislike of nunneries for young girls who abjure the world
+before they have ever proved or known it; or doubt the <i>ex officio</i>
+sanctity of all Priests and Friars; I do no more than many conscientious
+Catholics both abroad and at home.<br>
+<br>
+I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and would fain
+hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to mar the
+shadows.&nbsp; I could never desire to be on better terms with all my
+friends than now, when distant mountains rise, once more, in my path.&nbsp;
+For I need not hesitate to avow, that, bent on correcting a brief mistake
+I made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between myself
+and my readers, and departing for a moment from my old pursuits, I am
+about to resume them, joyfully, in Switzerland; where during another
+year of absence, I can at once work out the themes I have now in my
+mind, without interruption: and while I keep my English audience within
+speaking distance, extend my knowledge of a noble country, inexpressibly
+attractive to me. <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a><br>
+<br>
+This book is made as accessible as possible, because it would be a great
+pleasure to me if I could hope, through its means, to compare impressions
+with some among the multitudes who will hereafter visit the scenes described
+with interest and delight.<br>
+<br>
+And I have only now, in passport wise, to sketch my reader&rsquo;s portrait,
+which I hope may be thus supposititiously traced for either sex:<br>
+<br>
+<font face="Courier New,Courier,Mono">Complexion&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Fair.<br>
+Eyes&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Very cheerful.<br>
+Nose&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Not supercilious.<br>
+Mouth&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Smiling.<br>
+Visage&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  Beaming.<br>
+General Expression&nbsp;  Extremely agreeable.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</font>CHAPTER I - GOING THROUGH FRANCE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of eighteen
+hundred and forty-four, it was, my good friend, when - don&rsquo;t be
+alarmed; not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making
+their way over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first
+chapter of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained - but when an English
+travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady
+halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square, London, was observed
+(by a very small French soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue
+from the gate of the H&ocirc;tel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.<br>
+<br>
+I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this
+carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday morning,
+of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for all the
+little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men postilions;
+which is the invariable rule.&nbsp; But, they had some sort of reason
+for what they did, I have no doubt; and their reason for being there
+at all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair Genoa
+for a year; and that the head of the family purposed, in that space
+of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him.<br>
+<br>
+And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the
+population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and not
+the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat beside me in the person
+of a French Courier - best of servants and most beaming of men!&nbsp;
+Truth to say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in
+the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all.<br>
+<br>
+There was, of course, very little in the aspect of Paris - as we rattled
+near the dismal Morgue and over the Pont Neuf - to reproach us for our
+Sunday travelling.&nbsp; The wine-shops (every second house) were driving
+a roaring trade; awnings were spreading, and chairs and tables arranging,
+outside the caf&eacute;s, preparatory to the eating of ices, and drinking
+of cool liquids, later in the day; shoe-blacks were busy on the bridges;
+shops were open; carts and waggons clattered to and fro; the narrow,
+up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River, were so many dense perspectives
+of crowd and bustle, parti-coloured nightcaps, tobacco-pipes, blouses,
+large boots, and shaggy heads of hair; nothing at that hour denoted
+a day of rest, unless it were the appearance, here and there, of a family
+pleasure-party, crammed into a bulky old lumbering cab; or of some contemplative
+holiday-maker in the freest and easiest dishabille, leaning out of a
+low garret window, watching the drying of his newly polished shoes on
+the little parapet outside (if a gentleman), or the airing of her stockings
+in the sun (if a lady), with calm anticipation.<br>
+<br>
+Once clear of the never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement which surrounds
+Paris, the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet
+and monotonous enough.&nbsp; To Sens.&nbsp; To Avallon.&nbsp; To Chalons.&nbsp;
+A sketch of one day&rsquo;s proceedings is a sketch of all three; and
+here it is.<br>
+<br>
+We have four horses, and one postilion, who has a very long whip, and
+drives his team, something like the Courier of Saint Petersburgh in
+the circle at Astley&rsquo;s or Franconi&rsquo;s: only he sits his own
+horse instead of standing on him.&nbsp; The immense jack-boots worn
+by these postilions, are sometimes a century or two old; and are so
+ludicrously disproportionate to the wearer&rsquo;s foot, that the spur,
+which is put where his own heel comes, is generally halfway up the leg
+of the boots.&nbsp; The man often comes out of the stable-yard, with
+his whip in his hand and his shoes on, and brings out, in both hands,
+one boot at a time, which he plants on the ground by the side of his
+horse, with great gravity, until everything is ready.&nbsp; When it
+is - and oh Heaven! the noise they make about it! - he gets into the
+boots, shoes and all, or is hoisted into them by a couple of friends;
+adjusts the rope harness, embossed by the labours of innumerable pigeons
+in the stables; makes all the horses kick and plunge; cracks his whip
+like a madman; shouts &lsquo;En route - Hi!&rsquo; and away we go.&nbsp;
+He is sure to have a contest with his horse before we have gone very
+far; and then he calls him a Thief, and a Brigand, and a Pig, and what
+not; and beats him about the head as if he were made of wood.<br>
+<br>
+There is little more than one variety in the appearance of the country,
+for the first two days.&nbsp; From a dreary plain, to an interminable
+avenue, and from an interminable avenue to a dreary plain again.&nbsp;
+Plenty of vines there are in the open fields, but of a short low kind,
+and not trained in festoons, but about straight sticks.&nbsp; Beggars
+innumerable there are, everywhere; but an extraordinarily scanty population,
+and fewer children than I ever encountered.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe
+we saw a hundred children between Paris and Chalons.&nbsp; Queer old
+towns, draw-bridged and walled: with odd little towers at the angles,
+like grotesque faces, as if the wall had put a mask on, and were staring
+down into the moat; other strange little towers, in gardens and fields,
+and down lanes, and in farm-yards: all alone, and always round, with
+a peaked roof, and never used for any purpose at all; ruinous buildings
+of all sorts; sometimes an h&ocirc;tel de ville, sometimes a guard-house,
+sometimes a dwelling-house, sometimes a ch&acirc;teau with a rank garden,
+prolific in dandelion, and watched over by extinguisher-topped turrets,
+and blink-eyed little casements; are the standard objects, repeated
+over and over again.&nbsp; Sometimes we pass a village inn, with a crumbling
+wall belonging to it, and a perfect town of out-houses; and painted
+over the gateway, &lsquo;Stabling for Sixty Horses;&rsquo; as indeed
+there might be stabling for sixty score, were there any horses to be
+stabled there, or anybody resting there, or anything stirring about
+the place but a dangling bush, indicative of the wine inside: which
+flutters idly in the wind, in lazy keeping with everything else, and
+certainly is never in a green old age, though always so old as to be
+dropping to pieces.&nbsp; And all day long, strange little narrow waggons,
+in strings of six or eight, bringing cheese from Switzerland, and frequently
+in charge, the whole line, of one man, or even boy - and he very often
+asleep in the foremost cart - come jingling past: the horses drowsily
+ringing the bells upon their harness, and looking as if they thought
+(no doubt they do) their great blue woolly furniture, of immense weight
+and thickness, with a pair of grotesque horns growing out of the collar,
+very much too warm for the Midsummer weather.<br>
+<br>
+Then, there is the Diligence, twice or thrice a-day; with the dusty
+outsides in blue frocks, like butchers; and the insides in white nightcaps;
+and its cabriolet head on the roof, nodding and shaking, like an idiot&rsquo;s
+head; and its Young-France passengers staring out of window, with beards
+down to their waists, and blue spectacles awfully shading their warlike
+eyes, and very big sticks clenched in their National grasp.&nbsp; Also
+the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at
+a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time.&nbsp; Steady
+old Cur&eacute;s come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle,
+rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in;
+and bony women dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes
+while they feed, or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more
+laborious kind, or representing real shepherdesses with their flocks
+- to obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and its followers, in
+any country, it is only necessary to take any pastoral poem, or picture,
+and imagine to yourself whatever is most exquisitely and widely unlike
+the descriptions therein contained.<br>
+<br>
+You have been travelling along, stupidly enough, as you generally do
+in the last stage of the day; and the ninety-six bells upon the horses
+- twenty-four apiece - have been ringing sleepily in your ears for half
+an hour or so; and it has become a very jog-trot, monotonous, tiresome
+sort of business; and you have been thinking deeply about the dinner
+you will have at the next stage; when, down at the end of the long avenue
+of trees through which you are travelling, the first indication of a
+town appears, in the shape of some straggling cottages: and the carriage
+begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement.&nbsp; As
+if the equipage were a great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking
+cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and splutter,
+as if the very devil were in it.&nbsp; Crack, crack, crack, crack.&nbsp;
+Crack-crack-crack.&nbsp; Crick-crack.&nbsp; Crick-crack.&nbsp; Helo!&nbsp;
+Hola!&nbsp; Vite!&nbsp; Voleur!&nbsp; Brigand!&nbsp; Hi hi hi!&nbsp;
+En r-r-r-r-r-route!&nbsp; Whip, wheels, driver, stones, beggars, children,
+crack, crack, crack; helo! hola! charit&eacute; pour l&rsquo;amour de
+Dieu! crick-crack-crick-crack; crick, crick, crick; bump, jolt, crack,
+bump, crick-crack; round the corner, up the narrow street, down the
+paved hill on the other side; in the gutter; bump, bump; jolt, jog,
+crick, crick, crick; crack, crack, crack; into the shop-windows on the
+left-hand side of the street, preliminary to a sweeping turn into the
+wooden archway on the right; rumble, rumble, rumble; clatter, clatter,
+clatter; crick, crick, crick; and here we are in the yard of the H&ocirc;tel
+de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted;
+but sometimes making a false start unexpectedly, with nothing coming
+of it - like a firework to the last!<br>
+<br>
+The landlady of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is here; and
+the landlord of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is here; and
+the femme de chambre of the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is
+here; and a gentleman in a glazed cap, with a red beard like a bosom
+friend, who is staying at the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or,
+is here; and Monsieur le Cur&eacute; is walking up and down in a corner
+of the yard by himself, with a shovel hat upon his head, and a black
+gown on his back, and a book in one hand, and an umbrella in the other;
+and everybody, except Monsieur le Cur&eacute;, is open-mouthed and open-eyed,
+for the opening of the carriage-door.&nbsp; The landlord of the H&ocirc;tel
+de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or, dotes to that extent upon the Courier, that
+he can hardly wait for his coming down from the box, but embraces his
+very legs and boot-heels as he descends.&nbsp; &lsquo;My Courier!&nbsp;
+My brave Courier!&nbsp; My friend!&nbsp; My brother!&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+landlady loves him, the femme de chambre blesses him, the gar&ccedil;on
+worships him.&nbsp; The Courier asks if his letter has been received?&nbsp;
+It has, it has.&nbsp; Are the rooms prepared?&nbsp; They are, they are.&nbsp;
+The best rooms for my noble Courier.&nbsp; The rooms of state for my
+gallant Courier; the whole house is at the service of my best of friends!&nbsp;
+He keeps his hand upon the carriage-door, and asks some other question
+to enhance the expectation.&nbsp; He carries a green leathern purse
+outside his coat, suspended by a belt.&nbsp; The idlers look at it;
+one touches it.&nbsp; It is full of five-franc pieces.&nbsp; Murmurs
+of admiration are heard among the boys.&nbsp; The landlord falls upon
+the Courier&rsquo;s neck, and folds him to his breast.&nbsp; He is so
+much fatter than he was, he says!&nbsp; He looks so rosy and so well!<br>
+<br>
+The door is opened.&nbsp; Breathless expectation.&nbsp; The lady of
+the family gets out.&nbsp; Ah sweet lady!&nbsp; Beautiful lady!&nbsp;
+The sister of the lady of the family gets out.&nbsp; Great Heaven, Ma&rsquo;amselle
+is charming!&nbsp; First little boy gets out.&nbsp; Ah, what a beautiful
+little boy!&nbsp; First little girl gets out.&nbsp; Oh, but this is
+an enchanting child!&nbsp; Second little girl gets out.&nbsp; The landlady,
+yielding to the finest impulse of our common nature, catches her up
+in her arms!&nbsp; Second little boy gets out.&nbsp; Oh, the sweet boy!&nbsp;
+Oh, the tender little family!&nbsp; The baby is handed out.&nbsp; Angelic
+baby!&nbsp; The baby has topped everything.&nbsp; All the rapture is
+expended on the baby!&nbsp; Then the two nurses tumble out; and the
+enthusiasm swelling into madness, the whole family are swept up-stairs
+as on a cloud; while the idlers press about the carriage, and look into
+it, and walk round it, and touch it.&nbsp; For it is something to touch
+a carriage that has held so many people.&nbsp; It is a legacy to leave
+one&rsquo;s children.<br>
+<br>
+The rooms are on the first floor, except the nursery for the night,
+which is a great rambling chamber, with four or five beds in it: through
+a dark passage, up two steps, down four, past a pump, across a balcony,
+and next door to the stable.&nbsp; The other sleeping apartments are
+large and lofty; each with two small bedsteads, tastefully hung, like
+the windows, with red and white drapery.&nbsp; The sitting-room is famous.&nbsp;
+Dinner is already laid in it for three; and the napkins are folded in
+cocked-hat fashion.&nbsp; The floors are of red tile.&nbsp; There are
+no carpets, and not much furniture to speak of; but there is abundance
+of looking-glass, and there are large vases under glass shades, filled
+with artificial flowers; and there are plenty of clocks.&nbsp; The whole
+party are in motion.&nbsp; The brave Courier, in particular, is everywhere:
+looking after the beds, having wine poured down his throat by his dear
+brother the landlord, and picking up green cucumbers - always cucumbers;
+Heaven knows where he gets them - with which he walks about, one in
+each hand, like truncheons.<br>
+<br>
+Dinner is announced.&nbsp; There is very thin soup; there are very large
+loaves - one apiece; a fish; four dishes afterwards; some poultry afterwards;
+a dessert afterwards; and no lack of wine.&nbsp; There is not much in
+the dishes; but they are very good, and always ready instantly.&nbsp;
+When it is nearly dark, the brave Courier, having eaten the two cucumbers,
+sliced up in the contents of a pretty large decanter of oil, and another
+of vinegar, emerges from his retreat below, and proposes a visit to
+the Cathedral, whose massive tower frowns down upon the court-yard of
+the inn.&nbsp; Off we go; and very solemn and grand it is, in the dim
+light: so dim at last, that the polite, old, lanthorn-jawed Sacristan
+has a feeble little bit of candle in his hand, to grope among the tombs
+with - and looks among the grim columns, very like a lost ghost who
+is searching for his own.<br>
+<br>
+Underneath the balcony, when we return, the inferior servants of the
+inn are supping in the open air, at a great table; the dish, a stew
+of meat and vegetables, smoking hot, and served in the iron cauldron
+it was boiled in.&nbsp; They have a pitcher of thin wine, and are very
+merry; merrier than the gentleman with the red beard, who is playing
+billiards in the light room on the left of the yard, where shadows,
+with cues in their hands, and cigars in their mouths, cross and recross
+the window, constantly.&nbsp; Still the thin Cur&eacute; walks up and
+down alone, with his book and umbrella.&nbsp; And there he walks, and
+there the billiard-balls rattle, long after we are fast asleep.<br>
+<br>
+We are astir at six next morning.&nbsp; It is a delightful day, shaming
+yesterday&rsquo;s mud upon the carriage, if anything could shame a carriage,
+in a land where carriages are never cleaned.&nbsp; Everybody is brisk;
+and as we finish breakfast, the horses come jingling into the yard from
+the Post-house.&nbsp; Everything taken out of the carriage is put back
+again.&nbsp; The brave Courier announces that all is ready, after walking
+into every room, and looking all round it, to be certain that nothing
+is left behind.&nbsp; Everybody gets in.&nbsp; Everybody connected with
+the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu d&rsquo;Or is again enchanted.&nbsp;
+The brave Courier runs into the house for a parcel containing cold fowl,
+sliced ham, bread, and biscuits, for lunch; hands it into the coach;
+and runs back again.<br>
+<br>
+What has he got in his hand now?&nbsp; More cucumbers?&nbsp; No.&nbsp;
+A long strip of paper.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s the bill.<br>
+<br>
+The brave Courier has two belts on, this morning: one supporting the
+purse: another, a mighty good sort of leathern bottle, filled to the
+throat with the best light Bordeaux wine in the house.&nbsp; He never
+pays the bill till this bottle is full.&nbsp; Then he disputes it.<br>
+<br>
+He disputes it now, violently.&nbsp; He is still the landlord&rsquo;s
+brother, but by another father or mother.&nbsp; He is not so nearly
+related to him as he was last night.&nbsp; The landlord scratches his
+head.&nbsp; The brave Courier points to certain figures in the bill,
+and intimates that if they remain there, the H&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu
+d&rsquo;Or is thenceforth and for ever an h&ocirc;tel de l&rsquo;Ecu
+de cuivre.&nbsp; The landlord goes into a little counting-house.&nbsp;
+The brave Courier follows, forces the bill and a pen into his hand,
+and talks more rapidly than ever.&nbsp; The landlord takes the pen.&nbsp;
+The Courier smiles.&nbsp; The landlord makes an alteration.&nbsp; The
+Courier cuts a joke.&nbsp; The landlord is affectionate, but not weakly
+so.&nbsp; He bears it like a man.&nbsp; He shakes hands with his brave
+brother, but he don&rsquo;t hug him.&nbsp; Still, he loves his brother;
+for he knows that he will be returning that way, one of these fine days,
+with another family, and he foresees that his heart will yearn towards
+him again.&nbsp; The brave Courier traverses all round the carriage
+once, looks at the drag, inspects the wheels, jumps up, gives the word,
+and away we go!<br>
+<br>
+It is market morning.&nbsp; The market is held in the little square
+outside in front of the cathedral.&nbsp; It is crowded with men and
+women, in blue, in red, in green, in white; with canvassed stalls; and
+fluttering merchandise.&nbsp; The country people are grouped about,
+with their clean baskets before them.&nbsp; Here, the lace-sellers;
+there, the butter and egg-sellers; there, the fruit-sellers; there,
+the shoe-makers.&nbsp; The whole place looks as if it were the stage
+of some great theatre, and the curtain had just run up, for a picturesque
+ballet.&nbsp; And there is the cathedral to boot: scene-like: all grim,
+and swarthy, and mouldering, and cold: just splashing the pavement in
+one place with faint purple drops, as the morning sun, entering by a
+little window on the eastern side, struggles through some stained glass
+panes, on the western.<br>
+<br>
+In five minutes we have passed the iron cross, with a little ragged
+kneeling-place of turf before it, in the outskirts of the town; and
+are again upon the road.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - LYONS, THE RHONE, AND THE GOBLIN OF AVIGNON<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Chalons is a fair resting-place, in right of its good inn on the bank
+of the river, and the little steamboats, gay with green and red paint,
+that come and go upon it: which make up a pleasant and refreshing scene,
+after the dusty roads.&nbsp; But, unless you would like to dwell on
+an enormous plain, with jagged rows of irregular poplars on it, that
+look in the distance like so many combs with broken teeth: and unless
+you would like to pass your life without the possibility of going up-hill,
+or going up anything but stairs: you would hardly approve of Chalons
+as a place of residence.<br>
+<br>
+You would probably like it better, however, than Lyons: which you may
+reach, if you will, in one of the before-mentioned steamboats, in eight
+hours.<br>
+<br>
+What a city Lyons is!&nbsp; Talk about people feeling, at certain unlucky
+times, as if they had tumbled from the clouds!&nbsp; Here is a whole
+town that is tumbled, anyhow, out of the sky; having been first caught
+up, like other stones that tumble down from that region, out of fens
+and barren places, dismal to behold!&nbsp; The two great streets through
+which the two great rivers dash, and all the little streets whose name
+is Legion, were scorching, blistering, and sweltering.&nbsp; The houses,
+high and vast, dirty to excess, rotten as old cheeses, and as thickly
+peopled.&nbsp; All up the hills that hem the city in, these houses swarm;
+and the mites inside were lolling out of the windows, and drying their
+ragged clothes on poles, and crawling in and out at the doors, and coming
+out to pant and gasp upon the pavement, and creeping in and out among
+huge piles and bales of fusty, musty, stifling goods; and living, or
+rather not dying till their time should come, in an exhausted receiver.&nbsp;
+Every manufacturing town, melted into one, would hardly convey an impression
+of Lyons as it presented itself to me: for all the undrained, unscavengered
+qualities of a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native
+miseries of a manufacturing one; and it bears such fruit as I would
+go some miles out of my way to avoid encountering again.<br>
+<br>
+In the cool of the evening: or rather in the faded heat of the day:
+we went to see the Cathedral, where divers old women, and a few dogs,
+were engaged in contemplation.&nbsp; There was no difference, in point
+of cleanliness, between its stone pavement and that of the streets;
+and there was a wax saint, in a little box like a berth aboard ship,
+with a glass front to it, whom Madame Tussaud would have nothing to
+say to, on any terms, and which even Westminster Abbey might be ashamed
+of.&nbsp; If you would know all about the architecture of this church,
+or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it
+not written in Mr. Murray&rsquo;s Guide-Book, and may you not read it
+there, with thanks to him, as I did!<br>
+<br>
+For this reason, I should abstain from mentioning the curious clock
+in Lyons Cathedral, if it were not for a small mistake I made, in connection
+with that piece of mechanism.&nbsp; The keeper of the church was very
+anxious it should be shown; partly for the honour of the establishment
+and the town; and partly, perhaps, because of his deriving a percentage
+from the additional consideration.&nbsp; However that may be, it was
+set in motion, and thereupon a host of little doors flew open, and innumerable
+little figures staggered out of them, and jerked themselves back again,
+with that special unsteadiness of purpose, and hitching in the gait,
+which usually attaches to figures that are moved by clock-work.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile, the Sacristan stood explaining these wonders, and pointing
+them out, severally, with a wand.&nbsp; There was a centre puppet of
+the Virgin Mary; and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which
+another and a very ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges
+I ever saw accomplished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her,
+and banging his little door violently after him.&nbsp; Taking this to
+be emblematic of the victory over Sin and Death, and not at all unwilling
+to show that I perfectly understood the subject, in anticipation of
+the showman, I rashly said, &lsquo;Aha!&nbsp; The Evil Spirit.&nbsp;
+To be sure.&nbsp; He is very soon disposed of.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Pardon,
+Monsieur,&rsquo; said the Sacristan, with a polite motion of his hand
+towards the little door, as if introducing somebody - &lsquo;The Angel
+Gabriel!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Soon after daybreak next morning, we were steaming down the Arrowy Rhone,
+at the rate of twenty miles an hour, in a very dirty vessel full of
+merchandise, and with only three or four other passengers for our companions:
+among whom, the most remarkable was a silly, old, meek-faced, garlic-eating,
+immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red ribbon hanging
+at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there to remind himself of
+something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in his pocket-handkerchief.<br>
+<br>
+For the last two days, we had seen great sullen hills, the first indications
+of the Alps, lowering in the distance.&nbsp; Now, we were rushing on
+beside them: sometimes close beside them: sometimes with an intervening
+slope, covered with vineyards.&nbsp; Villages and small towns hanging
+in mid-air, with great woods of olives seen through the light open towers
+of their churches, and clouds moving slowly on, upon the steep acclivity
+behind them; ruined castles perched on every eminence; and scattered
+houses in the clefts and gullies of the hills; made it very beautiful.&nbsp;
+The great height of these, too, making the buildings look so tiny, that
+they had all the charm of elegant models; their excessive whiteness,
+as contrasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy
+green of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of
+the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture.&nbsp;
+There were ferries out of number, too; bridges; the famous Pont d&rsquo;Esprit,
+with I don&rsquo;t know how many arches; towns where memorable wines
+are made; Vallence, where Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing
+at every winding turn, new beauties into view.<br>
+<br>
+There lay before us, that same afternoon, the broken bridge of Avignon,
+and all the city baking in the sun; yet with an under-done-pie-crust,
+battlemented wall, that never will be brown, though it bake for centuries.<br>
+<br>
+The grapes were hanging in clusters in the streets, and the brilliant
+Oleander was in full bloom everywhere.&nbsp; The streets are old and
+very narrow, but tolerably clean, and shaded by awnings stretched from
+house to house.&nbsp; Bright stuffs and handkerchiefs, curiosities,
+ancient frames of carved wood, old chairs, ghostly tables, saints, virgins,
+angels, and staring daubs of portraits, being exposed for sale beneath,
+it was very quaint and lively.&nbsp; All this was much set off, too,
+by the glimpses one caught, through a rusty gate standing ajar, of quiet
+sleepy court-yards, having stately old houses within, as silent as tombs.&nbsp;
+It was all very like one of the descriptions in the Arabian Nights.&nbsp;
+The three one-eyed Calenders might have knocked at any one of those
+doors till the street rang again, and the porter who persisted in asking
+questions - the man who had the delicious purchases put into his basket
+in the morning - might have opened it quite naturally.<br>
+<br>
+After breakfast next morning, we sallied forth to see the lions.&nbsp;
+Such a delicious breeze was blowing in, from the north, as made the
+walk delightful: though the pavement-stones, and stones of the walls
+and houses, were far too hot to have a hand laid on them comfortably.<br>
+<br>
+We went, first of all, up a rocky height, to the cathedral: where Mass
+was performing to an auditory very like that of Lyons, namely, several
+old women, a baby, and a very self-possessed dog, who had marked out
+for himself a little course or platform for exercise, beginning at the
+altar-rails and ending at the door, up and down which constitutional
+walk he trotted, during the service, as methodically and calmly, as
+any old gentleman out of doors.<br>
+<br>
+It is a bare old church, and the paintings in the roof are sadly defaced
+by time and damp weather; but the sun was shining in, splendidly, through
+the red curtains of the windows, and glittering on the altar furniture;
+and it looked as bright and cheerful as need be.<br>
+<br>
+Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was being executed
+in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to observe more
+closely than I might otherwise have done, a great number of votive offerings
+with which the walls of the different chapels were profusely hung.&nbsp;
+I will not say decorated, for they were very roughly and comically got
+up; most likely by poor sign-painters, who eke out their living in that
+way.&nbsp; They were all little pictures: each representing some sickness
+or calamity from which the person placing it there, had escaped, through
+the interposition of his or her patron saint, or of the Madonna; and
+I may refer to them as good specimens of the class generally.&nbsp;
+They are abundant in Italy.<br>
+<br>
+In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective,
+they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but they were oil-paintings,
+and the artist, like the painter of the Primrose family, had not been
+sparing of his colours.&nbsp; In one, a lady was having a toe amputated
+- an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon
+a couch, to superintend.&nbsp; In another, a lady was lying in bed,
+tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a
+tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and
+the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber.&nbsp;
+One would never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint,
+beyond the inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter
+had not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in
+one corner, with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like
+boot-trees.&nbsp; Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan, promised
+to restore the patient.&nbsp; In another case, a lady was in the very
+act of being run over, immediately outside the city walls, by a sort
+of piano-forte van.&nbsp; But the Madonna was there again.&nbsp; Whether
+the supernatural appearance had startled the horse (a bay griffin),
+or whether it was invisible to him, I don&rsquo;t know; but he was galloping
+away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or compunction.&nbsp;
+On every picture &lsquo;Ex voto&rsquo; was painted in yellow capitals
+in the sky.<br>
+<br>
+Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are evidently
+among the many compromises made between the false religion and the true,
+when the true was in its infancy, I could wish that all the other compromises
+were as harmless.&nbsp; Gratitude and Devotion are Christian qualities;
+and a grateful, humble, Christian spirit may dictate the observance.<br>
+<br>
+Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which
+one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while
+gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their
+own old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings.&nbsp; But
+we neither went there, to see state rooms, nor soldiers&rsquo; quarters,
+nor a common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners&rsquo;
+box outside, whilst the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron
+bars, high up, and watched us eagerly.&nbsp; We went to see the ruins
+of the dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.<br>
+<br>
+A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes, -
+proof that the world hadn&rsquo;t conjured down the devil within her,
+though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in, - came
+out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large
+keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we should go.&nbsp;
+How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer (<i>concierge
+du palais a</i> <i>apostolique</i>), and had been, for I don&rsquo;t
+know how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to princes;
+and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how she had resided
+in the palace from an infant, - had been born there, if I recollect
+right, - I needn&rsquo;t relate.&nbsp; But such a fierce, little, rapid,
+sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld.&nbsp; She was alight
+and flaming, all the time.&nbsp; Her action was violent in the extreme.&nbsp;
+She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose.&nbsp; She
+stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes,
+hammered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now whispered
+as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she were
+on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger,
+when approaching the remains of some new horror - looking back and walking
+stealthily, and making horrible grimaces - that might alone have qualified
+her to walk up and down a sick man&rsquo;s counterpane, to the exclusion
+of all other figures, through a whole fever.<br>
+<br>
+Passing through the court-yard, among groups of idle soldiers, we turned
+off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our admission, and
+locked again behind us: and entered a narrow court, rendered narrower
+by fallen stones and heaps of rubbish; part of it choking up the mouth
+of a ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is said
+to have done so) with another castle on the opposite bank of the river.&nbsp;
+Close to this court-yard is a dungeon - we stood within it, in another
+minute - in the dismal tower <i>des oubliettes</i>, where Rienzi was
+imprisoned, fastened by an iron chain to the very wall that stands there
+now, but shut out from the sky which now looks down into it.&nbsp; A
+few steps brought us to the Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition
+were confined for forty-eight hours after their capture, without food
+or drink, that their constancy might be shaken, even before they were
+confronted with their gloomy judges.&nbsp; The day has not got in there
+yet.&nbsp; They are still small cells, shut in by four unyielding, close,
+hard walls; still profoundly dark; still massively doored and fastened,
+as of old.<br>
+<br>
+Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a vaulted
+chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of the Holy Office.&nbsp;
+The place where the tribunal sat, was plain.&nbsp; The platform might
+have been removed but yesterday.&nbsp; Conceive the parable of the Good
+Samaritan having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition
+chambers!&nbsp; But it was, and may be traced there yet.<br>
+<br>
+High up in the jealous wall, are niches where the faltering replies
+of the accused were heard and noted down.&nbsp; Many of them had been
+brought out of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully; along
+the same stone passage.&nbsp; We had trodden in their very footsteps.<br>
+<br>
+I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when
+Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but
+the handle of a key, upon her lip.&nbsp; She invites me, with a jerk,
+to follow her.&nbsp; I do so.&nbsp; She leads me out into a room adjoining
+- a rugged room, with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the
+top, to the bright day.&nbsp; I ask her what it is.&nbsp; She folds
+her arms, leers hideously, and stares.&nbsp; I ask again.&nbsp; She
+glances round, to see that all the little company are there; sits down
+upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend,
+&lsquo;La Salle de la Question!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Chamber of Torture!&nbsp; And the roof was made of that shape to
+stifle the victim&rsquo;s cries!&nbsp; Oh Goblin, Goblin, let us think
+of this awhile, in silence.&nbsp; Peace, Goblin!&nbsp; Sit with your
+short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for
+only five minutes, and then flame out again.<br>
+<br>
+Minutes!&nbsp; Seconds are not marked upon the Palace clock, when, with
+her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber,
+describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows.&nbsp; Thus
+it ran round! cries Goblin.&nbsp; Mash, mash, mash!&nbsp; An endless
+routine of heavy hammers.&nbsp; Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer&rsquo;s
+limbs.&nbsp; See the stone trough! says Goblin.&nbsp; For the water
+torture!&nbsp; Gurgle, swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer&rsquo;s
+honour!&nbsp; Suck the bloody rag, deep down into your unbelieving body,
+Heretic, at every breath you draw!&nbsp; And when the executioner plucks
+it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God&rsquo;s own Image,
+know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the
+Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal: who
+never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness,
+any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed hand
+out, but to give relief and ease!<br>
+<br>
+See! cries Goblin.&nbsp; There the furnace was.&nbsp; There they made
+the irons red-hot.&nbsp; Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which
+the tortured persons hung poised: dangling with their whole weight from
+the roof.&nbsp; &lsquo;But;&rsquo; and Goblin whispers this; &lsquo;Monsieur
+has heard of this tower?&nbsp; Yes?&nbsp; Let Monsieur look down, then!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur;
+for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall.&nbsp; Monsieur
+looks in.&nbsp; Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep,
+dark, lofty tower: very dismal, very dark, very cold.&nbsp; The Executioner
+of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also,
+flung those who were past all further torturing, down here.&nbsp; &lsquo;But
+look! does Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?&rsquo;&nbsp; A
+glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin&rsquo;s keen eye, shows Monsieur
+- and would without the aid of the directing key - where they are.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;What are they?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Blood!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty
+persons: men and women (&lsquo;and priests,&rsquo; says Goblin, &lsquo;priests&rsquo;):
+were murdered, and hurled, the dying and the dead, into this dreadful
+pit, where a quantity of quick-lime was tumbled down upon their bodies.&nbsp;
+Those ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one
+stone of the strong building in which the deed was done, remains upon
+another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see
+as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.<br>
+<br>
+Was it a portion of the great scheme of Retribution, that the cruel
+deed should be committed in this place!&nbsp; That a part of the atrocities
+and monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores of years, at
+work, to change men&rsquo;s nature, should in its last service, tempt
+them with the ready means of gratifying their furious and beastly rage!&nbsp;
+Should enable them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy,
+no worse than a great, solemn, legal establishment, in the height of
+its power!&nbsp; No worse!&nbsp; Much better.&nbsp; They used the Tower
+of the Forgotten, in the name of Liberty - their liberty; an earth-born
+creature, nursed in the black mud of the Bastile moats and dungeons,
+and necessarily betraying many evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up
+- but the Inquisition used it in the name of Heaven.<br>
+<br>
+Goblin&rsquo;s finger is lifted; and she steals out again, into the
+Chapel of the Holy Office.&nbsp; She stops at a certain part of the
+flooring.&nbsp; Her great effect is at hand.&nbsp; She waits for the
+rest.&nbsp; She darts at the brave Courier, who is explaining something;
+hits him a sounding rap on the hat with the largest key; and bids him
+be silent.&nbsp; She assembles us all, round a little trap-door in the
+floor, as round a grave.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Voil&agrave;!&rsquo; she darts down at the ring, and flings the
+door open with a crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light
+weight.&nbsp; &lsquo;Voil&agrave; les oubliettes!&nbsp; Voil&agrave;
+les oubliettes!&nbsp; Subterranean! Frightful!&nbsp; Black!&nbsp; Terrible!&nbsp;
+Deadly!&nbsp; Les oubliettes de l&rsquo;Inquisition!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+My blood ran cold, as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where
+these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside:
+of wives, friends, children, brothers: starved to death, and made the
+stones ring with their unavailing groans.&nbsp; But, the thrill I felt
+on seeing the accursed wall below, decayed and broken through, and the
+sun shining in through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory
+and triumph.&nbsp; I felt exalted with the proud delight of living in
+these degenerate times, to see it.&nbsp; As if I were the hero of some
+high achievement!&nbsp; The light in the doleful vaults was typical
+of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in God&rsquo;s
+name, but which is not yet at its noon!&nbsp; It cannot look more lovely
+to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a traveller who sees
+it, calmly and majestically, treading down the darkness of that Infernal
+Well.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - AVIGNON TO GENOA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Goblin, having shown <i>les oubliettes</i>, felt that her great <i>coup</i>
+was struck.&nbsp; She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon
+it with her arms a-kimbo, sniffing prodigiously.<br>
+<br>
+When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the
+outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building.&nbsp;
+Her cabaret, a dark, low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the
+thick wall - in the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney;
+its little counter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it;
+its household implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a
+sober-looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it, with Goblin,)
+knitting at the door - looked exactly like a picture by OSTADE.<br>
+<br>
+I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and
+yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the
+light, down in the vaults, had given me the assurance.&nbsp; The immense
+thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the
+massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions,
+frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder.&nbsp;
+The recollection of its opposite old uses: an impregnable fortress,
+a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court
+of the Inquisition: at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting,
+religion, and blood: gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful
+interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities.&nbsp; I could
+think of little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the
+dungeons.&nbsp; The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy
+soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk, and common oaths,
+and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some
+reduction of its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in
+its cells, and the sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty - that
+was its desolation and defeat!&nbsp; If I had seen it in a blaze from
+ditch to rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the
+light in all the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sunbeams
+in its secret council-chamber, and its prisons.<br>
+<br>
+Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the little
+history I mentioned just now, a short anecdote, quite appropriate to
+itself, connected with its adventures.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre
+de Lude, the Pope&rsquo;s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished
+ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man,
+and horribly mutilated him.&nbsp; For several years the legate kept
+<i>his</i> revenge within his own breast, but he was not the less resolved
+upon its gratification at last.&nbsp; He even made, in the fulness of
+time, advances towards a complete reconciliation; and when their apparent
+sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace,
+certain families, whole families, whom he sought to exterminate.&nbsp;
+The utmost gaiety animated the repast; but the measures of the legate
+were well taken.&nbsp; When the dessert was on the board, a Swiss presented
+himself, with the announcement that a strange ambassador solicited an
+extraordinary audience.&nbsp; The legate, excusing himself, for the
+moment, to his guests, retired, followed by his officers.&nbsp; Within
+a few minutes afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced to ashes:
+the whole of that wing of the building having been blown into the air
+with a terrible explosion!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just
+now), we left Avignon that afternoon.&nbsp; The heat being very great,
+the roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every
+little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake,
+who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their
+playing bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road.&nbsp;
+The harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were
+treading out the corn in the fields.&nbsp; We came, at dusk, upon a
+wild and hilly country, once famous for brigands; and travelled slowly
+up a steep ascent.&nbsp; So we went on, until eleven at night, when
+we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.<br>
+<br>
+The hotel, with all the blinds and shutters closed to keep the light
+and heat out, was comfortable and airy next morning, and the town was
+very clean; but so hot, and so intensely light, that when I walked out
+at noon it was like coming suddenly from the darkened room into crisp
+blue fire.&nbsp; The air was so very clear, that distant hills and rocky
+points appeared within an hour&rsquo;s walk; while the town immediately
+at hand - with a kind of blue wind between me and it - seemed to be
+white hot, and to be throwing off a fiery air from the surface.<br>
+<br>
+We left this town towards evening, and took the road to Marseilles.&nbsp;
+A dusty road it was; the houses shut up close; and the vines powdered
+white.&nbsp; At nearly all the cottage doors, women were peeling and
+slicing onions into earthen bowls for supper.&nbsp; So they had been
+doing last night all the way from Avignon.&nbsp; We passed one or two
+shady dark ch&acirc;teaux, surrounded by trees, and embellished with
+cool basins of water: which were the more refreshing to behold, from
+the great scarcity of such residences on the road we had travelled.&nbsp;
+As we approached Marseilles, the road began to be covered with holiday
+people.&nbsp; Outside the public-houses were parties smoking, drinking,
+playing draughts and cards, and (once) dancing.&nbsp; But dust, dust,
+dust, everywhere.&nbsp; We went on, through a long, straggling, dirty
+suburb, thronged with people; having on our left a dreary slope of land,
+on which the country-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always staring
+white, are jumbled and heaped without the slightest order: backs, fronts,
+sides, and gables towards all points of the compass; until, at last,
+we entered the town.<br>
+<br>
+I was there, twice or thrice afterwards, in fair weather and foul; and
+I am afraid there is no doubt that it is a dirty and disagreeable place.&nbsp;
+But the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean,
+with its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful.&nbsp; These heights
+are a desirable retreat, for less picturesque reasons - as an escape
+from a compound of vile smells perpetually arising from a great harbour
+full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable ships
+with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot weather, is dreadful in the
+last degree.<br>
+<br>
+There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with red
+shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange
+colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards, and no beards;
+in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses.&nbsp;
+There were the townspeople sitting in clusters on the pavement, or airing
+themselves on the tops of their houses, or walking up and down the closest
+and least airy of Boulevards; and there were crowds of fierce-looking
+people of the lower sort, blocking up the way, constantly.&nbsp; In
+the very heart of all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse;
+a low, contracted, miserable building, looking straight upon the street,
+without the smallest screen or court-yard; where chattering mad-men
+and mad-women were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces
+below, while the sun, darting fiercely aslant into their little cells,
+seemed to dry up their brains, and worry them, as if they were baited
+by a pack of dogs.<br>
+<br>
+We were pretty well accommodated at the H&ocirc;tel du Paradis, situated
+in a narrow street of very high houses, with a hairdresser&rsquo;s shop
+opposite, exhibiting in one of its windows two full-length waxen ladies,
+twirling round and round: which so enchanted the hairdresser himself,
+that he and his family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on
+the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by,
+with lazy dignity.&nbsp; The family had retired to rest when we went
+to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers)
+was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and
+evidently couldn&rsquo;t bear to have the shutters put up.<br>
+<br>
+Next day we went down to the harbour, where the sailors of all nations
+were discharging and taking in cargoes of all kinds: fruits, wines,
+oils, silks, stuffs, velvets, and every manner of merchandise.&nbsp;
+Taking one of a great number of lively little boats with gay-striped
+awnings, we rowed away, under the sterns of great ships, under tow-ropes
+and cables, against and among other boats, and very much too near the
+sides of vessels that were faint with oranges, to the <i>Marie Antoinette</i>,
+a handsome steamer bound for Genoa, lying near the mouth of the harbour.&nbsp;
+By-and-by, the carriage, that unwieldy &lsquo;trifle from the Pantechnicon,&rsquo;
+on a flat barge, bumping against everything, and giving occasion for
+a prodigious quantity of oaths and grimaces, came stupidly alongside;
+and by five o&rsquo;clock we were steaming out in the open sea.&nbsp;
+The vessel was beautifully clean; the meals were served under an awning
+on deck; the night was calm and clear; the quiet beauty of the sea and
+sky unspeakable.<br>
+<br>
+We were off Nice, early next morning, and coasted along, within a few
+miles of the Cornice road (of which more in its place) nearly all day.&nbsp;
+We could see Genoa before three; and watching it as it gradually developed
+its splendid amphitheatre, terrace rising above terrace, garden above
+garden, palace above palace, height upon height, was ample occupation
+for us, till we ran into the stately harbour.&nbsp; Having been duly
+astonished, here, by the sight of a few Cappucini monks, who were watching
+the fair-weighing of some wood upon the wharf, we drove off to Albaro,
+two miles distant, where we had engaged a house.<br>
+<br>
+The way lay through the main streets, but not through the Strada Nuova,
+or the Strada Balbi, which are the famous streets of palaces.&nbsp;
+I never in my life was so dismayed!&nbsp; The wonderful novelty of everything,
+the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the
+cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses,
+one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close
+than any in St. Giles&rsquo;s or old Paris; in and out of which, not
+vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans,
+were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any
+dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one
+had ever seen before; and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay;
+perfectly confounded me.&nbsp; I fell into a dismal reverie.&nbsp; I
+am conscious of a feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins&rsquo;
+shrines at the street corners - of great numbers of friars, monks, and
+soldiers - of vast red curtains, waving in the doorways of the churches
+- of always going up hill, and yet seeing every other street and passage
+going higher up - of fruit-stalls, with fresh lemons and oranges hanging
+in garlands made of vine-leaves - of a guard-house, and a drawbridge
+- and some gateways - and vendors of iced water, sitting with little
+trays upon the margin of the kennel - and this is all the consciousness
+I had, until I was set down in a rank, dull, weedy court-yard, attached
+to a kind of pink jail; and was told I lived there.<br>
+<br>
+I little thought, that day, that I should ever come to have an attachment
+for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the
+city with affection as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet!&nbsp;
+But these are my first impressions honestly set down; and how they changed,
+I will set down too.&nbsp; At present, let us breathe after this long-winded
+journey.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - GENOA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The first impressions of such a place as ALBARO, the suburb of Genoa,
+where I am now, as my American friends would say, &lsquo;located,&rsquo;
+can hardly fail, I should imagine, to be mournful and disappointing.&nbsp;
+It requires a little time and use to overcome the feeling of depression
+consequent, at first, on so much ruin and neglect.&nbsp; Novelty, pleasant
+to most people, is particularly delightful, I think, to me.&nbsp; I
+am not easily dispirited when I have the means of pursuing my own fancies
+and occupations; and I believe I have some natural aptitude for accommodating
+myself to circumstances.&nbsp; But, as yet, I stroll about here, in
+all the holes and corners of the neighbourhood, in a perpetual state
+of forlorn surprise; and returning to my villa: the Villa Bagnerello
+(it sounds romantic, but Signor Bagnerello is a butcher hard by): have
+sufficient occupation in pondering over my new experiences, and comparing
+them, very much to my own amusement, with my expectations, until I wander
+out again.<br>
+<br>
+The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name for
+the mansion: is in one of the most splendid situations imaginable.&nbsp;
+The noble bay of Genoa, with the deep blue Mediterranean, lies stretched
+out near at hand; monstrous old desolate houses and palaces are dotted
+all about; lofty hills, with their tops often hidden in the clouds,
+and with strong forts perched high up on their craggy sides, are close
+upon the left; and in front, stretching from the walls of the house,
+down to a ruined chapel which stands upon the bold and picturesque rocks
+on the sea-shore, are green vineyards, where you may wander all day
+long in partial shade, through interminable vistas of grapes, trained
+on a rough trellis-work across the narrow paths.<br>
+<br>
+This sequestered spot is approached by lanes so very narrow, that when
+we arrived at the Custom-house, we found the people here had <i>taken
+the measure</i> of the narrowest among them, and were waiting to apply
+it to the carriage; which ceremony was gravely performed in the street,
+while we all stood by in breathless suspense.&nbsp; It was found to
+be a very tight fit, but just a possibility, and no more - as I am reminded
+every day, by the sight of various large holes which it punched in the
+walls on either side as it came along.&nbsp; We are more fortunate,
+I am told, than an old lady, who took a house in these parts not long
+ago, and who stuck fast in <i>her</i> carriage in a lane; and as it
+was impossible to open one of the doors, she was obliged to submit to
+the indignity of being hauled through one of the little front windows,
+like a harlequin.<br>
+<br>
+When you have got through these narrow lanes, you come to an archway,
+imperfectly stopped up by a rusty old gate - my gate.&nbsp; The rusty
+old gate has a bell to correspond, which you ring as long as you like,
+and which nobody answers, as it has no connection whatever with the
+house.&nbsp; But there is a rusty old knocker, too - very loose, so
+that it slides round when you touch it - and if you learn the trick
+of it, and knock long enough, somebody comes.&nbsp; The brave Courier
+comes, and gives you admittance.&nbsp; You walk into a seedy little
+garden, all wild and weedy, from which the vineyard opens; cross it,
+enter a square hall like a cellar, walk up a cracked marble staircase,
+and pass into a most enormous room with a vaulted roof and whitewashed
+walls: not unlike a great Methodist chapel.&nbsp; This is the <i>sala</i>.&nbsp;
+It has five windows and five doors, and is decorated with pictures which
+would gladden the heart of one of those picture-cleaners in London who
+hang up, as a sign, a picture divided, like death and the lady, at the
+top of the old ballad: which always leaves you in a state of uncertainty
+whether the ingenious professor has cleaned one half, or dirtied the
+other.&nbsp; The furniture of this <i>sala</i> is a sort of red brocade.&nbsp;
+All the chairs are immovable, and the sofa weighs several tons.<br>
+<br>
+On the same floor, and opening out of this same chamber, are dining-room,
+drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a multiplicity of doors
+and windows.&nbsp; Up-stairs are divers other gaunt chambers, and a
+kitchen; and down-stairs is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of
+strange contrivances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical
+laboratory.&nbsp; There are also some half-dozen small sitting-rooms,
+where the servants in this hot July, may escape from the heat of the
+fire, and where the brave Courier plays all sorts of musical instruments
+of his own manufacture, all the evening long.&nbsp; A mighty old, wandering,
+ghostly, echoing, grim, bare house it is, as ever I beheld or thought
+of.<br>
+<br>
+There is a little vine-covered terrace, opening from the drawing-room;
+and under this terrace, and forming one side of the little garden, is
+what used to be the stable.&nbsp; It is now a cow-house, and has three
+cows in it, so that we get new milk by the bucketful.&nbsp; There is
+no pasturage near, and they never go out, but are constantly lying down,
+and surfeiting themselves with vine-leaves - perfect Italian cows enjoying
+the <i>dolce far&rsquo; niente</i> all day long.&nbsp; They are presided
+over, and slept with, by an old man named Antonio, and his son; two
+burnt-sienna natives with naked legs and feet, who wear, each, a shirt,
+a pair of trousers, and a red sash, with a relic, or some sacred charm
+like the bonbon off a twelfth-cake, hanging round the neck.&nbsp; The
+old man is very anxious to convert me to the Catholic faith, and exhorts
+me frequently.&nbsp; We sit upon a stone by the door, sometimes in the
+evening, like Robinson Crusoe and Friday reversed; and he generally
+relates, towards my conversion, an abridgment of the History of Saint
+Peter - chiefly, I believe, from the unspeakable delight he has in his
+imitation of the cock.<br>
+<br>
+The view, as I have said, is charming; but in the day you must keep
+the lattice-blinds close shut, or the sun would drive you mad; and when
+the sun goes down you must shut up all the windows, or the mosquitoes
+would tempt you to commit suicide.&nbsp; So at this time of the year,
+you don&rsquo;t see much of the prospect within doors.&nbsp; As for
+the flies, you don&rsquo;t mind them.&nbsp; Nor the fleas, whose size
+is prodigious, and whose name is Legion, and who populate the coach-house
+to that extent that I daily expect to see the carriage going off bodily,
+drawn by myriads of industrious fleas in harness.&nbsp; The rats are
+kept away, quite comfortably, by scores of lean cats, who roam about
+the garden for that purpose.&nbsp; The lizards, of course, nobody cares
+for; they play in the sun, and don&rsquo;t bite.&nbsp; The little scorpions
+are merely curious.&nbsp; The beetles are rather late, and have not
+appeared yet.&nbsp; The frogs are company.&nbsp; There is a preserve
+of them in the grounds of the next villa; and after nightfall, one would
+think that scores upon scores of women in pattens were going up and
+down a wet stone pavement without a moment&rsquo;s cessation.&nbsp;
+That is exactly the noise they make.<br>
+<br>
+The ruined chapel, on the picturesque and beautiful sea-shore, was dedicated,
+once upon a time, to Saint John the Baptist.&nbsp; I believe there is
+a legend that Saint John&rsquo;s bones were received there, with various
+solemnities, when they were first brought to Genoa; for Genoa possesses
+them to this day.&nbsp; When there is any uncommon tempest at sea, they
+are brought out and exhibited to the raging weather, which they never
+fail to calm.&nbsp; In consequence of this connection of Saint John
+with the city, great numbers of the common people are christened Giovanni
+Baptista, which latter name is pronounced in the Genoese patois &lsquo;Batcheetcha,&rsquo;
+like a sneeze.&nbsp; To hear everybody calling everybody else Batcheetcha,
+on a Sunday, or festa-day, when there are crowds in the streets, is
+not a little singular and amusing to a stranger.<br>
+<br>
+The narrow lanes have great villas opening into them, whose walls (outside
+walls, I mean) are profusely painted with all sorts of subjects, grim
+and holy.&nbsp; But time and the sea-air have nearly obliterated them;
+and they look like the entrance to Vauxhall Gardens on a sunny day.&nbsp;
+The court-yards of these houses are overgrown with grass and weeds;
+all sorts of hideous patches cover the bases of the statues, as if they
+were afflicted with a cutaneous disorder; the outer gates are rusty;
+and the iron bars outside the lower windows are all tumbling down.&nbsp;
+Firewood is kept in halls where costly treasures might be heaped up,
+mountains high; waterfalls are dry and choked; fountains, too dull to
+play, and too lazy to work, have just enough recollection of their identity,
+in their sleep, to make the neighbourhood damp; and the sirocco wind
+is often blowing over all these things for days together, like a gigantic
+oven out for a holiday.<br>
+<br>
+Not long ago, there was a festa-day, in honour of the <i>Virgin&rsquo;s
+mother</i>, when the young men of the neighbourhood, having worn green
+wreaths of the vine in some procession or other, bathed in them, by
+scores.&nbsp; It looked very odd and pretty.&nbsp; Though I am bound
+to confess (not knowing of the festa at that time), that I thought,
+and was quite satisfied, they wore them as horses do - to keep the flies
+off.<br>
+<br>
+Soon afterwards, there was another festa-day, in honour of St. Nazaro.&nbsp;
+One of the Albaro young men brought two large bouquets soon after breakfast,
+and coming up-stairs into the great <i>sala</i>, presented them himself.&nbsp;
+This was a polite way of begging for a contribution towards the expenses
+of some music in the Saint&rsquo;s honour, so we gave him whatever it
+may have been, and his messenger departed: well satisfied.&nbsp; At
+six o&rsquo;clock in the evening we went to the church - close at hand
+- a very gaudy place, hung all over with festoons and bright draperies,
+and filled, from the altar to the main door, with women, all seated.&nbsp;
+They wear no bonnets here, simply a long white veil - the &lsquo;mezzero;&rsquo;
+and it was the most gauzy, ethereal-looking audience I ever saw.&nbsp;
+The young women are not generally pretty, but they walk remarkably well,
+and in their personal carriage and the management of their veils, display
+much innate grace and elegance.&nbsp; There were some men present: not
+very many: and a few of these were kneeling about the aisles, while
+everybody else tumbled over them.&nbsp; Innumerable tapers were burning
+in the church; the bits of silver and tin about the saints (especially
+in the Virgin&rsquo;s necklace) sparkled brilliantly; the priests were
+seated about the chief altar; the organ played away, lustily, and a
+full band did the like; while a conductor, in a little gallery opposite
+to the band, hammered away on the desk before him, with a scroll; and
+a tenor, without any voice, sang.&nbsp; The band played one way, the
+organ played another, the singer went a third, and the unfortunate conductor
+banged and banged, and flourished his scroll on some principle of his
+own: apparently well satisfied with the whole performance.&nbsp; I never
+did hear such a discordant din.&nbsp; The heat was intense all the time.<br>
+<br>
+The men, in red caps, and with loose coats hanging on their shoulders
+(they never put them on), were playing bowls, and buying sweetmeats,
+immediately outside the church.&nbsp; When half-a-dozen of them finished
+a game, they came into the aisle, crossed themselves with the holy water,
+knelt on one knee for an instant, and walked off again to play another
+game at bowls.&nbsp; They are remarkably expert at this diversion, and
+will play in the stony lanes and streets, and on the most uneven and
+disastrous ground for such a purpose, with as much nicety as on a billiard-table.&nbsp;
+But the most favourite game is the national one of Mora, which they
+pursue with surprising ardour, and at which they will stake everything
+they possess.&nbsp; It is a destructive kind of gambling, requiring
+no accessories but the ten fingers, which are always - I intend no pun
+- at hand.&nbsp; Two men play together.&nbsp; One calls a number - say
+the extreme one, ten.&nbsp; He marks what portion of it he pleases by
+throwing out three, or four, or five fingers; and his adversary has,
+in the same instant, at hazard, and without seeing his hand, to throw
+out as many fingers, as will make the exact balance.&nbsp; Their eyes
+and hands become so used to this, and act with such astonishing rapidity,
+that an uninitiated bystander would find it very difficult, if not impossible,
+to follow the progress of the game.&nbsp; The initiated, however, of
+whom there is always an eager group looking on, devour it with the most
+intense avidity; and as they are always ready to champion one side or
+the other in case of a dispute, and are frequently divided in their
+partisanship, it is often a very noisy proceeding.&nbsp; It is never
+the quietest game in the world; for the numbers are always called in
+a loud sharp voice, and follow as close upon each other as they can
+be counted.&nbsp; On a holiday evening, standing at a window, or walking
+in a garden, or passing through the streets, or sauntering in any quiet
+place about the town, you will hear this game in progress in a score
+of wine-shops at once; and looking over any vineyard walk, or turning
+almost any corner, will come upon a knot of players in full cry.&nbsp;
+It is observable that most men have a propensity to throw out some particular
+number oftener than another; and the vigilance with which two sharp-eyed
+players will mutually endeavour to detect this weakness, and adapt their
+game to it, is very curious and entertaining.&nbsp; The effect is greatly
+heightened by the universal suddenness and vehemence of gesture; two
+men playing for half a farthing with an intensity as all-absorbing as
+if the stake were life.<br>
+<br>
+Hard by here is a large Palazzo, formerly belonging to some member of
+the Brignole family, but just now hired by a school of Jesuits for their
+summer quarters.&nbsp; I walked into its dismantled precincts the other
+evening about sunset, and couldn&rsquo;t help pacing up and down for
+a little time, drowsily taking in the aspect of the place: which is
+repeated hereabouts in all directions.<br>
+<br>
+I loitered to and fro, under a colonnade, forming two sides of a weedy,
+grass-grown court-yard, whereof the house formed a third side, and a
+low terrace-walk, overlooking the garden and the neighbouring hills,
+the fourth.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t believe there was an uncracked stone
+in the whole pavement.&nbsp; In the centre was a melancholy statue,
+so piebald in its decay, that it looked exactly as if it had been covered
+with sticking-plaster, and afterwards powdered.&nbsp; The stables, coach-houses,
+offices, were all empty, all ruinous, all utterly deserted.<br>
+<br>
+Doors had lost their hinges, and were holding on by their latches; windows
+were broken, painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about in
+clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out-buildings,
+that I couldn&rsquo;t help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them
+with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back
+again.&nbsp; One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry
+green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came
+prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment,
+that I might be the hero come to marry the lady, and set all to-rights;
+but discovering his mistake, he suddenly gave a grim snarl, and walked
+away with such a tremendous tail, that he couldn&rsquo;t get into the
+little hole where he lived, but was obliged to wait outside, until his
+indignation and his tail had gone down together.<br>
+<br>
+In a sort of summer-house, or whatever it may be, in this colonnade,
+some Englishmen had been living, like grubs in a nut; but the Jesuits
+had given them notice to go, and they had gone, and <i>that</i> was
+shut up too.&nbsp; The house: a wandering, echoing, thundering barrack
+of a place, with the lower windows barred up, as usual, was wide open
+at the door: and I have no doubt I might have gone in, and gone to bed,
+and gone dead, and nobody a bit the wiser.&nbsp; Only one suite of rooms
+on an upper floor was tenanted; and from one of these, the voice of
+a young-lady vocalist, practising bravura lustily, came flaunting out
+upon the silent evening.<br>
+<br>
+I went down into the garden, intended to be prim and quaint, with avenues,
+and terraces, and orange-trees, and statues, and water in stone basins;
+and everything was green, gaunt, weedy, straggling, under grown or over
+grown, mildewy, damp, redolent of all sorts of slabby, clammy, creeping,
+and uncomfortable life.&nbsp; There was nothing bright in the whole
+scene but a firefly - one solitary firefly - showing against the dark
+bushes like the last little speck of the departed Glory of the house;
+and even it went flitting up and down at sudden angles, and leaving
+a place with a jerk, and describing an irregular circle, and returning
+to the same place with a twitch that startled one: as if it were looking
+for the rest of the Glory, and wondering (Heaven knows it might!) what
+had become of it.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In the course of two months, the flitting shapes and shadows of my dismal
+entering reverie gradually resolved themselves into familiar forms and
+substances; and I already began to think that when the time should come,
+a year hence, for closing the long holiday and turning back to England,
+I might part from Genoa with anything but a glad heart.<br>
+<br>
+It is a place that &lsquo;grows upon you&rsquo; every day.&nbsp; There
+seems to be always something to find out in it.&nbsp; There are the
+most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in.&nbsp; You can
+lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times
+a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and
+surprising difficulties.&nbsp; It abounds in the strangest contrasts;
+things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and
+offensive, break upon the view at every turn.<br>
+<br>
+They who would know how beautiful the country immediately surrounding
+Genoa is, should climb (in clear weather) to the top of Monte Faccio,
+or, at least, ride round the city walls: a feat more easily performed.&nbsp;
+No prospect can be more diversified and lovely than the changing views
+of the harbour, and the valleys of the two rivers, the Polcevera and
+the Bizagno, from the heights along which the strongly fortified walls
+are carried, like the great wall of China in little.&nbsp; In not the
+least picturesque part of this ride, there is a fair specimen of a real
+Genoese tavern, where the visitor may derive good entertainment from
+real Genoese dishes, such as Tagliarini; Ravioli; German sausages, strong
+of garlic, sliced and eaten with fresh green figs; cocks&rsquo; combs
+and sheep-kidneys, chopped up with mutton chops and liver; small pieces
+of some unknown part of a calf, twisted into small shreds, fried, and
+served up in a great dish like white-bait; and other curiosities of
+that kind.&nbsp; They often get wine at these suburban Trattorie, from
+France and Spain and Portugal, which is brought over by small captains
+in little trading-vessels.&nbsp; They buy it at so much a bottle, without
+asking what it is, or caring to remember if anybody tells them, and
+usually divide it into two heaps; of which they label one Champagne,
+and the other Madeira.&nbsp; The various opposite flavours, qualities,
+countries, ages, and vintages that are comprised under these two general
+heads is quite extraordinary.&nbsp; The most limited range is probably
+from cool Gruel up to old Marsala, and down again to apple Tea.<br>
+<br>
+The great majority of the streets are as narrow as any thoroughfare
+can well be, where people (even Italian people) are supposed to live
+and walk about; being mere lanes, with here and there a kind of well,
+or breathing-place.&nbsp; The houses are immensely high, painted in
+all sorts of colours, and are in every stage and state of damage, dirt,
+and lack of repair.&nbsp; They are commonly let off in floors, or flats,
+like the houses in the old town of Edinburgh, or many houses in Paris.&nbsp;
+There are few street doors; the entrance halls are, for the most part,
+looked upon as public property; and any moderately enterprising scavenger
+might make a fine fortune by now and then clearing them out.&nbsp; As
+it is impossible for coaches to penetrate into these streets, there
+are sedan chairs, gilded and otherwise, for hire in divers places.&nbsp;
+A great many private chairs are also kept among the nobility and gentry;
+and at night these are trotted to and fro in all directions, preceded
+by bearers of great lanthorns, made of linen stretched upon a frame.&nbsp;
+The sedans and lanthorns are the legitimate successors of the long strings
+of patient and much-abused mules, that go jingling their little bells
+through these confined streets all day long.&nbsp; They follow them,
+as regularly as the stars the sun.<br>
+<br>
+When shall I forget the Streets of Palaces: the Strada Nuova and the
+Strada Balbi! or how the former looked one summer day, when I first
+saw it underneath the brightest and most intensely blue of summer skies:
+which its narrow perspective of immense mansions, reduced to a tapering
+and most precious strip of brightness, looking down upon the heavy shade
+below!&nbsp; A brightness not too common, even in July and August, to
+be well esteemed: for, if the Truth must out, there were not eight blue
+skies in as many midsummer weeks, saving, sometimes, early in the morning;
+when, looking out to sea, the water and the firmament were one world
+of deep and brilliant blue.&nbsp; At other times, there were clouds
+and haze enough to make an Englishman grumble in his own climate.<br>
+<br>
+The endless details of these rich Palaces: the walls of some of them,
+within, alive with masterpieces by Vandyke!&nbsp; The great, heavy,
+stone balconies, one above another, and tier over tier: with here and
+there, one larger than the rest, towering high up - a huge marble platform;
+the doorless vestibules, massively barred lower windows, immense public
+staircases, thick marble pillars, strong dungeon-like arches, and dreary,
+dreaming, echoing vaulted chambers: among which the eye wanders again,
+and again, and again, as every palace is succeeded by another - the
+terrace gardens between house and house, with green arches of the vine,
+and groves of orange-trees, and blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty,
+thirty, forty feet above the street - the painted halls, mouldering,
+and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out
+in beautiful colours and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry
+- the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths,
+and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches,
+and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by
+contrast with some fresh little Cupids, who on a more recently decorated
+portion of the front, are stretching out what seems to be the semblance
+of a blanket, but is, indeed, a sun-dial - the steep, steep, up-hill
+streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with
+marble terraces looking down into close by-ways - the magnificent and
+innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately
+edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome
+stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of
+dirty people - make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively,
+and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so
+shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is
+a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and
+look about him.&nbsp; A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency
+of a dream, and all the pain and all the pleasure of an extravagant
+reality!<br>
+<br>
+The different uses to which some of these Palaces are applied, all at
+once, is characteristic.&nbsp; For instance, the English Banker (my
+excellent and hospitable friend) has his office in a good-sized Palazzo
+in the Strada Nuova.&nbsp; In the hall (every inch of which is elaborately
+painted, but which is as dirty as a police-station in London), a hook-nosed
+Saracen&rsquo;s Head with an immense quantity of black hair (there is
+a man attached to it) sells walking-sticks.&nbsp; On the other side
+of the doorway, a lady with a showy handkerchief for head-dress (wife
+to the Saracen&rsquo;s Head, I believe) sells articles of her own knitting;
+and sometimes flowers.&nbsp; A little further in, two or three blind
+men occasionally beg.&nbsp; Sometimes, they are visited by a man without
+legs, on a little go-cart, but who has such a fresh-coloured, lively
+face, and such a respectable, well-conditioned body, that he looks as
+if he had sunk into the ground up to his middle, or had come, but partially,
+up a flight of cellar-steps to speak to somebody.&nbsp; A little further
+in, a few men, perhaps, lie asleep in the middle of the day; or they
+may be chairmen waiting for their absent freight.&nbsp; If so, they
+have brought their chairs in with them, and there <i>they</i> stand
+also.&nbsp; On the left of the hall is a little room: a hatter&rsquo;s
+shop.&nbsp; On the first floor, is the English bank.&nbsp; On the first
+floor also, is a whole house, and a good large residence too.&nbsp;
+Heaven knows what there may be above that; but when you are there, you
+have only just begun to go up-stairs.&nbsp; And yet, coming down-stairs
+again, thinking of this; and passing out at a great crazy door in the
+back of the hall, instead of turning the other way, to get into the
+street again; it bangs behind you, making the dismallest and most lonesome
+echoes, and you stand in a yard (the yard of the same house) which seems
+to have been unvisited by human foot, for a hundred years.&nbsp; Not
+a sound disturbs its repose.&nbsp; Not a head, thrust out of any of
+the grim, dark, jealous windows, within sight, makes the weeds in the
+cracked pavement faint of heart, by suggesting the possibility of there
+being hands to grub them up.&nbsp; Opposite to you, is a giant figure
+carved in stone, reclining, with an urn, upon a lofty piece of artificial
+rockwork; and out of the urn, dangles the fag end of a leaden pipe,
+which, once upon a time, poured a small torrent down the rocks.&nbsp;
+But the eye-sockets of the giant are not drier than this channel is
+now.&nbsp; He seems to have given his urn, which is nearly upside down,
+a final tilt; and after crying, like a sepulchral child, &lsquo;All
+gone!&rsquo; to have lapsed into a stony silence.<br>
+<br>
+In the streets of shops, the houses are much smaller, but of great size
+notwithstanding, and extremely high.&nbsp; They are very dirty: quite
+undrained, if my nose be at all reliable: and emit a peculiar fragrance,
+like the smell of very bad cheese, kept in very hot blankets.&nbsp;
+Notwithstanding the height of the houses, there would seem to have been
+a lack of room in the City, for new houses are thrust in everywhere.&nbsp;
+Wherever it has been possible to cram a tumble-down tenement into a
+crack or corner, in it has gone.&nbsp; If there be a nook or angle in
+the wall of a church, or a crevice in any other dead wall, of any sort,
+there you are sure to find some kind of habitation: looking as if it
+had grown there, like a fungus.&nbsp; Against the Government House,
+against the old Senate House, round about any large building, little
+shops stick so close, like parasite vermin to the great carcase.&nbsp;
+And for all this, look where you may: up steps, down steps, anywhere,
+everywhere: there are irregular houses, receding, starting forward,
+tumbling down, leaning against their neighbours, crippling themselves
+or their friends by some means or other, until one, more irregular than
+the rest, chokes up the way, and you can&rsquo;t see any further.<br>
+<br>
+One of the rottenest-looking parts of the town, I think, is down by
+the landing-wharf: though it may be, that its being associated with
+a great deal of rottenness on the evening of our arrival, has stamped
+it deeper in my mind.&nbsp; Here, again, the houses are very high, and
+are of an infinite variety of deformed shapes, and have (as most of
+the houses have) something hanging out of a great many windows, and
+wafting its frowsy fragrance on the breeze.&nbsp; Sometimes, it is a
+curtain; sometimes, it is a carpet; sometimes, it is a bed; sometimes,
+a whole line-full of clothes; but there is almost always something.&nbsp;
+Before the basement of these houses, is an arcade over the pavement:
+very massive, dark, and low, like an old crypt.&nbsp; The stone, or
+plaster, of which it is made, has turned quite black; and against every
+one of these black piles, all sorts of filth and garbage seem to accumulate
+spontaneously.&nbsp; Beneath some of the arches, the sellers of macaroni
+and polenta establish their stalls, which are by no means inviting.&nbsp;
+The offal of a fish-market, near at hand - that is to say, of a back
+lane, where people sit upon the ground and on various old bulk-heads
+and sheds, and sell fish when they have any to dispose of - and of a
+vegetable market, constructed on the same principle - are contributed
+to the decoration of this quarter; and as all the mercantile business
+is transacted here, and it is crowded all day, it has a very decided
+flavour about it.&nbsp; The Porto Franco, or Free Port (where goods
+brought in from foreign countries pay no duty until they are sold and
+taken out, as in a bonded warehouse in England), is down here also;
+and two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to search
+you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and Ladies.&nbsp; For, Sanctity
+as well as Beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of smuggling,
+and in the same way: that is to say, by concealing the smuggled property
+beneath the loose folds of its dress.&nbsp; So Sanctity and Beauty may,
+by no means, enter.<br>
+<br>
+The streets of Genoa would be all the better for the importation of
+a few Priests of prepossessing appearance.&nbsp; Every fourth or fifth
+man in the streets is a Priest or a Monk; and there is pretty sure to
+be at least one itinerant ecclesiastic inside or outside every hackney
+carriage on the neighbouring roads.&nbsp; I have no knowledge, elsewhere,
+of more repulsive countenances than are to be found among these gentry.&nbsp;
+If Nature&rsquo;s handwriting be at all legible, greater varieties of
+sloth, deceit, and intellectual torpor, could hardly be observed among
+any class of men in the world.<br>
+<br>
+MR. PEPYS once heard a clergyman assert in his sermon, in illustration
+of his respect for the Priestly office, that if he could meet a Priest
+and angel together, he would salute the Priest first.&nbsp; I am rather
+of the opinion of PETRARCH, who, when his pupil BOCCACCIO wrote to him
+in great tribulation, that he had been visited and admonished for his
+writings by a Carthusian Friar who claimed to be a messenger immediately
+commissioned by Heaven for that purpose, replied, that for his own part,
+he would take the liberty of testing the reality of the commission by
+personal observation of the Messenger&rsquo;s face, eyes, forehead,
+behaviour, and discourse.&nbsp; I cannot but believe myself, from similar
+observation, that many unaccredited celestial messengers may be seen
+skulking through the streets of Genoa, or droning away their lives in
+other Italian towns.<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps the Cappucc&iacute;ni, though not a learned body, are, as an
+order, the best friends of the people.&nbsp; They seem to mingle with
+them more immediately, as their counsellors and comforters; and to go
+among them more, when they are sick; and to pry less than some other
+orders, into the secrets of families, for the purpose of establishing
+a baleful ascendency over their weaker members; and to be influenced
+by a less fierce desire to make converts, and once made, to let them
+go to ruin, soul and body.&nbsp; They may be seen, in their coarse dress,
+in all parts of the town at all times, and begging in the markets early
+in the morning.&nbsp; The Jesuits too, muster strong in the streets,
+and go slinking noiselessly about, in pairs, like black cats.<br>
+<br>
+In some of the narrow passages, distinct trades congregate.&nbsp; There
+is a street of jewellers, and there is a row of booksellers; but even
+down in places where nobody ever can, or ever could, penetrate in a
+carriage, there are mighty old palaces shut in among the gloomiest and
+closest walls, and almost shut out from the sun.&nbsp; Very few of the
+tradesmen have any idea of setting forth their goods, or disposing them
+for show.&nbsp; If you, a stranger, want to buy anything, you usually
+look round the shop till you see it; then clutch it, if it be within
+reach, and inquire how much.&nbsp; Everything is sold at the most unlikely
+place.&nbsp; If you want coffee, you go to a sweetmeat shop; and if
+you want meat, you will probably find it behind an old checked curtain,
+down half-a-dozen steps, in some sequestered nook as hard to find as
+if the commodity were poison, and Genoa&rsquo;s law were death to any
+that uttered it.<br>
+<br>
+Most of the apothecaries&rsquo; shops are great lounging-places.&nbsp;
+Here, grave men with sticks, sit down in the shade for hours together,
+passing a meagre Genoa paper from hand to hand, and talking, drowsily
+and sparingly, about the News.&nbsp; Two or three of these are poor
+physicians, ready to proclaim themselves on an emergency, and tear off
+with any messenger who may arrive.&nbsp; You may know them by the way
+in which they stretch their necks to listen, when you enter; and by
+the sigh with which they fall back again into their dull corners, on
+finding that you only want medicine.&nbsp; Few people lounge in the
+barbers&rsquo; shops; though they are very numerous, as hardly any man
+shaves himself.&nbsp; But the apothecary&rsquo;s has its group of loungers,
+who sit back among the bottles, with their hands folded over the tops
+of their sticks.&nbsp; So still and quiet, that either you don&rsquo;t
+see them in the darkened shop, or mistake them - as I did one ghostly
+man in bottle-green, one day, with a hat like a stopper - for Horse
+Medicine.<br>
+<br>
+On a summer evening the Genoese are as fond of putting themselves, as
+their ancestors were of putting houses, in every available inch of space
+in and about the town.&nbsp; In all the lanes and alleys, and up every
+little ascent, and on every dwarf wall, and on every flight of steps,
+they cluster like bees.&nbsp; Meanwhile (and especially on festa-days)
+the bells of the churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known
+form of sound, but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle,
+dingle: with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which is
+maddening.&nbsp; This performance is usually achieved by a boy up in
+the steeple, who takes hold of the clapper, or a little rope attached
+to it, and tries to dingle louder than every other boy similarly employed.&nbsp;
+The noise is supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits;
+but looking up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young
+Christians thus engaged, one might very naturally mistake them for the
+Enemy.<br>
+<br>
+Festa-days, early in the autumn, are very numerous.&nbsp; All the shops
+were shut up, twice within a week, for these holidays; and one night,
+all the houses in the neighbourhood of a particular church were illuminated,
+while the church itself was lighted, outside, with torches; and a grove
+of blazing links was erected, in an open space outside one of the city
+gates.&nbsp; This part of the ceremony is prettier and more singular
+a little way in the country, where you can trace the illuminated cottages
+all the way up a steep hill-side; and where you pass festoons of tapers,
+wasting away in the starlight night, before some lonely little house
+upon the road.<br>
+<br>
+On these days, they always dress the church of the saint in whose honour
+the festa is holden, very gaily.&nbsp; Gold-embroidered festoons of
+different colours, hang from the arches; the altar furniture is set
+forth; and sometimes, even the lofty pillars are swathed from top to
+bottom in tight-fitting draperies.&nbsp; The cathedral is dedicated
+to St. Lorenzo.&nbsp; On St. Lorenzo&rsquo;s day, we went into it, just
+as the sun was setting.&nbsp; Although these decorations are usually
+in very indifferent taste, the effect, just then, was very superb indeed.&nbsp;
+For the whole building was dressed in red; and the sinking sun, streaming
+in, through a great red curtain in the chief doorway, made all the gorgeousness
+its own.&nbsp; When the sun went down, and it gradually grew quite dark
+inside, except for a few twinkling tapers on the principal altar, and
+some small dangling silver lamps, it was very mysterious and effective.&nbsp;
+But, sitting in any of the churches towards evening, is like a mild
+dose of opium.<br>
+<br>
+With the money collected at a festa, they usually pay for the dressing
+of the church, and for the hiring of the band, and for the tapers.&nbsp;
+If there be any left (which seldom happens, I believe), the souls in
+Purgatory get the benefit of it.&nbsp; They are also supposed to have
+the benefit of the exertions of certain small boys, who shake money-boxes
+before some mysterious little buildings like rural turnpikes, which
+(usually shut up close) fly open on Red-letter days, and disclose an
+image and some flowers inside.<br>
+<br>
+Just without the city gate, on the Albara road, is a small house, with
+an altar in it, and a stationary money-box: also for the benefit of
+the souls in Purgatory.&nbsp; Still further to stimulate the charitable,
+there is a monstrous painting on the plaster, on either side of the
+grated door, representing a select party of souls, frying.&nbsp; One
+of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as
+if he had been taken out of a hairdresser&rsquo;s window and cast into
+the furnace.&nbsp; There he is: a most grotesque and hideously comic
+old soul: for ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic
+fire, for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions)
+of the poor Genoese.<br>
+<br>
+They are not a very joyous people, and are seldom seen to dance on their
+holidays: the staple places of entertainment among the women, being
+the churches and the public walks.&nbsp; They are very good-tempered,
+obliging, and industrious.&nbsp; Industry has not made them clean, for
+their habitations are extremely filthy, and their usual occupation on
+a fine Sunday morning, is to sit at their doors, hunting in each other&rsquo;s
+heads.&nbsp; But their dwellings are so close and confined that if those
+parts of the city had been beaten down by Massena in the time of the
+terrible Blockade, it would have at least occasioned one public benefit
+among many misfortunes.<br>
+<br>
+The Peasant Women, with naked feet and legs, are so constantly washing
+clothes, in the public tanks, and in every stream and ditch, that one
+cannot help wondering, in the midst of all this dirt, who wears them
+when they are clean.&nbsp; The custom is to lay the wet linen which
+is being operated upon, on a smooth stone, and hammer away at it, with
+a flat wooden mallet.&nbsp; This they do, as furiously as if they were
+revenging themselves on dress in general for being connected with the
+Fall of Mankind.<br>
+<br>
+It is not unusual to see, lying on the edge of the tank at these times,
+or on another flat stone, an unfortunate baby, tightly swathed up, arms
+and legs and all, in an enormous quantity of wrapper, so that it is
+unable to move a toe or finger.&nbsp; This custom (which we often see
+represented in old pictures) is universal among the common people.&nbsp;
+A child is left anywhere without the possibility of crawling away, or
+is accidentally knocked off a shelf, or tumbled out of bed, or is hung
+up to a hook now and then, and left dangling like a doll at an English
+rag-shop, without the least inconvenience to anybody.<br>
+<br>
+I was sitting, one Sunday, soon after my arrival, in the little country
+church of San Martino, a couple of miles from the city, while a baptism
+took place.&nbsp; I saw the priest, and an attendant with a large taper,
+and a man, and a woman, and some others; but I had no more idea, until
+the ceremony was all over, that it was a baptism, or that the curious
+little stiff instrument, that was passed from one to another, in the
+course of the ceremony, by the handle - like a short poker - was a child,
+than I had that it was my own christening.&nbsp; I borrowed the child
+afterwards, for a minute or two (it was lying across the font then),
+and found it very red in the face but perfectly quiet, and not to be
+bent on any terms.&nbsp; The number of cripples in the streets, soon
+ceased to surprise me.<br>
+<br>
+There are plenty of Saints&rsquo; and Virgin&rsquo;s Shrines, of course;
+generally at the corners of streets.&nbsp; The favourite memento to
+the Faithful, about Genoa, is a painting, representing a peasant on
+his knees, with a spade and some other agricultural implements beside
+him; and the Madonna, with the Infant Saviour in her arms, appearing
+to him in a cloud.&nbsp; This is the legend of the Madonna della Guardia:
+a chapel on a mountain within a few miles, which is in high repute.&nbsp;
+It seems that this peasant lived all alone by himself, tilling some
+land atop of the mountain, where, being a devout man, he daily said
+his prayers to the Virgin in the open air; for his hut was a very poor
+one.&nbsp; Upon a certain day, the Virgin appeared to him, as in the
+picture, and said, &lsquo;Why do you pray in the open air, and without
+a priest?&rsquo;&nbsp; The peasant explained because there was neither
+priest nor church at hand - a very uncommon complaint indeed in Italy.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I should wish, then,&rsquo; said the Celestial Visitor, &lsquo;to
+have a chapel built here, in which the prayers of the Faithful may be
+offered up.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;But, Santissima Madonna,&rsquo; said
+the peasant, &lsquo;I am a poor man; and chapels cannot be built without
+money.&nbsp; They must be supported, too, Santissima; for to have a
+chapel and not support it liberally, is a wickedness - a deadly sin.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+This sentiment gave great satisfaction to the visitor.&nbsp; &lsquo;Go!&rsquo;
+said she.&nbsp; &lsquo;There is such a village in the valley on the
+left, and such another village in the valley on the right, and such
+another village elsewhere, that will gladly contribute to the building
+of a chapel.&nbsp; Go to them!&nbsp; Relate what you have seen; and
+do not doubt that sufficient money will be forthcoming to erect my chapel,
+or that it will, afterwards, be handsomely maintained.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+All of which (miraculously) turned out to be quite true.&nbsp; And in
+proof of this prediction and revelation, there is the chapel of the
+Madonna della Guardia, rich and flourishing at this day.<br>
+<br>
+The splendour and variety of the Genoese churches, can hardly be exaggerated.&nbsp;
+The church of the Annunciata especially: built, like many of the others,
+at the cost of one noble family, and now in slow progress of repair:
+from the outer door to the utmost height of the high cupola, is so elaborately
+painted and set in gold, that it looks (as SIMOND describes it, in his
+charming book on Italy) like a great enamelled snuff-box.&nbsp; Most
+of the richer churches contain some beautiful pictures, or other embellishments
+of great price, almost universally set, side by side, with sprawling
+effigies of maudlin monks, and the veriest trash and tinsel ever seen.<br>
+<br>
+It may be a consequence of the frequent direction of the popular mind,
+and pocket, to the souls in Purgatory, but there is very little tenderness
+for the <i>bodies</i> of the dead here.&nbsp; For the very poor, there
+are, immediately outside one angle of the walls, and behind a jutting
+point of the fortification, near the sea, certain common pits - one
+for every day in the year - which all remain closed up, until the turn
+of each comes for its daily reception of dead bodies.&nbsp; Among the
+troops in the town, there are usually some Swiss: more or less.&nbsp;
+When any of these die, they are buried out of a fund maintained by such
+of their countrymen as are resident in Genoa.&nbsp; Their providing
+coffins for these men is matter of great astonishment to the authorities.<br>
+<br>
+Certainly, the effect of this promiscuous and indecent splashing down
+of dead people in so many wells, is bad.&nbsp; It surrounds Death with
+revolting associations, that insensibly become connected with those
+whom Death is approaching.&nbsp; Indifference and avoidance are the
+natural result; and all the softening influences of the great sorrow
+are harshly disturbed.<br>
+<br>
+There is a ceremony when an old Cavali&eacute;re or the like, expires,
+of erecting a pile of benches in the cathedral, to represent his bier;
+covering them over with a pall of black velvet; putting his hat and
+sword on the top; making a little square of seats about the whole; and
+sending out formal invitations to his friends and acquaintances to come
+and sit there, and hear Mass: which is performed at the principal Altar,
+decorated with an infinity of candles for that purpose.<br>
+<br>
+When the better kind of people die, or are at the point of death, their
+nearest relations generally walk off: retiring into the country for
+a little change, and leaving the body to be disposed of, without any
+superintendence from them.&nbsp; The procession is usually formed, and
+the coffin borne, and the funeral conducted, by a body of persons called
+a Confrat&eacute;rnita, who, as a kind of voluntary penance, undertake
+to perform these offices, in regular rotation, for the dead; but who,
+mingling something of pride with their humility, are dressed in a loose
+garment covering their whole person, and wear a hood concealing the
+face; with breathing-holes and apertures for the eyes.&nbsp; The effect
+of this costume is very ghastly: especially in the case of a certain
+Blue Confrat&eacute;rnita belonging to Genoa, who, to say the least
+of them, are very ugly customers, and who look - suddenly encountered
+in their pious ministration in the streets - as if they were Ghoules
+or Demons, bearing off the body for themselves.<br>
+<br>
+Although such a custom may be liable to the abuse attendant on many
+Italian customs, of being recognised as a means of establishing a current
+account with Heaven, on which to draw, too easily, for future bad actions,
+or as an expiation for past misdeeds, it must be admitted to be a good
+one, and a practical one, and one involving unquestionably good works.&nbsp;
+A voluntary service like this, is surely better than the imposed penance
+(not at all an infrequent one) of giving so many licks to such and such
+a stone in the pavement of the cathedral; or than a vow to the Madonna
+to wear nothing but blue for a year or two.&nbsp; This is supposed to
+give great delight above; blue being (as is well known) the Madonna&rsquo;s
+favourite colour.&nbsp; Women who have devoted themselves to this act
+of Faith, are very commonly seen walking in the streets.<br>
+<br>
+There are three theatres in the city, besides an old one now rarely
+opened.&nbsp; The most important - the Carlo Felice: the opera-house
+of Genoa - is a very splendid, commodious, and beautiful theatre.&nbsp;
+A company of comedians were acting there, when we arrived: and soon
+after their departure, a second-rate opera company came.&nbsp; The great
+season is not until the carnival time - in the spring.&nbsp; Nothing
+impressed me, so much, in my visits here (which were pretty numerous)
+as the uncommonly hard and cruel character of the audience, who resent
+the slightest defect, take nothing good-humouredly, seem to be always
+lying in wait for an opportunity to hiss, and spare the actresses as
+little as the actors.<br>
+<br>
+But, as there is nothing else of a public nature at which they are allowed
+to express the least disapprobation, perhaps they are resolved to make
+the most of this opportunity.<br>
+<br>
+There are a great number of Piedmontese officers too, who are allowed
+the privilege of kicking their heels in the pit, for next to nothing:
+gratuitous, or cheap accommodation for these gentlemen being insisted
+on, by the Governor, in all public or semi-public entertainments.&nbsp;
+They are lofty critics in consequence, and infinitely more exacting
+than if they made the unhappy manager&rsquo;s fortune.<br>
+<br>
+The TEATRO DIURNO, or Day Theatre, is a covered stage in the open air,
+where the performances take place by daylight, in the cool of the afternoon;
+commencing at four or five o&rsquo;clock, and lasting, some three hours.&nbsp;
+It is curious, sitting among the audience, to have a fine view of the
+neighbouring hills and houses, and to see the neighbours at their windows
+looking on, and to hear the bells of the churches and convents ringing
+at most complete cross-purposes with the scene.&nbsp; Beyond this, and
+the novelty of seeing a play in the fresh pleasant air, with the darkening
+evening closing in, there is nothing very exciting or characteristic
+in the performances.&nbsp; The actors are indifferent; and though they
+sometimes represent one of Goldoni&rsquo;s comedies, the staple of the
+Drama is French.&nbsp; Anything like nationality is dangerous to despotic
+governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.<br>
+<br>
+The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti - a famous company from Milan
+- is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld in
+my life.&nbsp; I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous.&nbsp;
+They <i>look</i> between four and five feet high, but are really much
+smaller; for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat
+on the stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an
+actor.&nbsp; They usually play a comedy, and a ballet.&nbsp; The comic
+man in the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel.&nbsp;
+There never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began.&nbsp;
+Great pains are taken with him.&nbsp; He has extra joints in his legs:
+and a practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that
+is absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated audience,
+mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do everything
+else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a man.&nbsp; His
+spirits are prodigious.&nbsp; He continually shakes his legs, and winks
+his eye.&nbsp; And there is a heavy father with grey hair, who sits
+down on the regular conventional stage-bank, and blesses his daughter
+in the regular conventional way, who is tremendous.&nbsp; No one would
+suppose it possible that anything short of a real man could be so tedious.&nbsp;
+It is the triumph of art.<br>
+<br>
+In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very hour
+of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to soothe her.&nbsp;
+They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the regular place, O.
+P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of musicians enters; one creature
+playing a drum, and knocking himself off his legs at every blow.&nbsp;
+These failing to delight her, dancers appear.&nbsp; Four first; then
+two; <i>the</i> two; the flesh-coloured two.&nbsp; The way in which
+they dance; the height to which they spring; the impossible and inhuman
+extent to which they pirouette; the revelation of their preposterous
+legs; the coming down with a pause, on the very tips of their toes,
+when the music requires it; the gentleman&rsquo;s retiring up, when
+it is the lady&rsquo;s turn; and the lady&rsquo;s retiring up, when
+it is the gentleman&rsquo;s turn; the final passion of a pas-de-deux;
+and the going off with a bound! - I shall never see a real ballet, with
+a composed countenance again.<br>
+<br>
+I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called &lsquo;St.
+Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.&rsquo;&nbsp; It began by the disclosure
+of Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at
+St. Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure announcement:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Sir Yew ud se on Low?&rsquo; (the <i>ow</i>, as in cow).<br>
+<br>
+Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a perfect
+mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a monstrously disproportionate
+face, and a great clump for the lower-jaw, to express his tyrannical
+and obdurate nature.&nbsp; He began his system of persecution, by calling
+his prisoner &lsquo;General Buonaparte;&rsquo; to which the latter replied,
+with the deepest tragedy, &lsquo;Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not thus.&nbsp;
+Repeat that phrase and leave me!&nbsp; I am Napoleon, Emperor of France!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Sir Yew ud se on, nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an
+ordinance of the British Government, regulating the state he should
+preserve, and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his attendants
+to four or five persons.&nbsp; &lsquo;Four or five for <i>me</i>!&rsquo;
+said Napoleon.&nbsp; &lsquo;Me!&nbsp; One hundred thousand men were
+lately at my sole command; and this English officer talks of four or
+five for <i>me</i>!&rsquo;&nbsp; Throughout the piece, Napoleon (who
+talked very like the real Napoleon, and was, for ever, having small
+soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on &lsquo;these English officers,&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;these English soldiers;&rsquo; to the great satisfaction
+of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to have Low bullied; and
+who, whenever Low said &lsquo;General Buonaparte&rsquo; (which he always
+did: always receiving the same correction), quite execrated him.&nbsp;
+It would be hard to say why; for Italians have little cause to sympathise
+with Napoleon, Heaven knows.<br>
+<br>
+There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised as
+an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being discovered,
+but not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to steal his freedom,
+was immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged.&nbsp; In two very long
+speeches, which Low made memorable, by winding up with &lsquo;Yas!&rsquo;
+- to show that he was English - which brought down thunders of applause.&nbsp;
+Napoleon was so affected by this catastrophe, that he fainted away on
+the spot, and was carried out by two other puppets.&nbsp; Judging from
+what followed, it would appear that he never recovered the shock; for
+the next act showed him, in a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson
+and white), where a lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two
+little children, who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent
+end; the last word on his lips being &lsquo;Vatterlo.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It was unspeakably ludicrous.&nbsp; Buonaparte&rsquo;s boots were so
+wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their
+own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and dangling
+in the air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of all human knowledge,
+when he was in full speech - mischances which were not rendered the
+less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted in his face.&nbsp; To
+put an end to one conference with Low, he had to go to a table, and
+read a book: when it was the finest spectacle I ever beheld, to see
+his body bending over the volume, like a boot-jack, and his sentimental
+eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.&nbsp; He was prodigiously good,
+in bed, with an immense collar to his shirt, and his little hands outside
+the coverlet.&nbsp; So was Dr. Antommarchi, represented by a puppet
+with long lank hair, like Mawworm&rsquo;s, who, in consequence of some
+derangement of his wires, hovered about the couch like a vulture, and
+gave medical opinions in the air.&nbsp; He was almost as good as Low,
+though the latter was great at all times - a decided brute and villain,
+beyond all possibility of mistake.&nbsp; Low was especially fine at
+the last, when, hearing the doctor and the valet say, &lsquo;The Emperor
+is dead!&rsquo; he pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not
+the watch) by exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, &lsquo;Ha!
+ha!&nbsp; Eleven minutes to six!&nbsp; The General dead! and the spy
+hanged!&rsquo;&nbsp; This brought the curtain down, triumphantly.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence
+than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither we removed
+as soon as our three months&rsquo; tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro
+had ceased and determined.<br>
+<br>
+It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the
+town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with statues,
+vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of orange-trees and
+lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias.&nbsp; All its apartments
+are beautiful in their proportions and decorations; but the great hall,
+some fifty feet in height, with three large windows at the end, overlooking
+the whole town of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords
+one of the most fascinating and delightful prospects in the world.&nbsp;
+Any house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within,
+it would be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious
+than the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.&nbsp;
+It is more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave
+and sober lodging.<br>
+<br>
+How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the wild
+fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh colouring
+as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor, or even the
+great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade;
+or how there are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use
+and rarely visit, and scarcely know the way through; or how there is
+a view of a perfectly different character on each of the four sides
+of the building; matters little.&nbsp; But that prospect from the hall
+is like a vision to me.&nbsp; I go back to it, in fancy, as I have done
+in calm reality a hundred times a day; and stand there, looking out,
+with the sweet scents from the garden rising up about me, in a perfect
+dream of happiness.<br>
+<br>
+There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many churches,
+monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny sky; and down
+below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary convent parapet, fashioned
+like a gallery, with an iron across at the end, where sometimes early
+in the morning, I have seen a little group of dark-veiled nuns gliding
+sorrowfully to and fro, and stopping now and then to peep down upon
+the waking world in which they have no part.&nbsp; Old Monte Faccio,
+brightest of hills in good weather, but sulkiest when storms are coming
+on, is here, upon the left.&nbsp; The Fort within the walls (the good
+King built it to command the town, and beat the houses of the Genoese
+about their ears, in case they should be discontented) commands that
+height upon the right.&nbsp; The broad sea lies beyond, in front there;
+and that line of coast, beginning by the light-house, and tapering away,
+a mere speck in the rosy distance, is the beautiful coast road that
+leads to Nice.&nbsp; The garden near at hand, among the roofs and houses:
+all red with roses and fresh with little fountains: is the Acqua Sola
+- a public promenade, where the military band plays gaily, and the white
+veils cluster thick, and the Genoese nobility ride round, and round,
+and round, in state-clothes and coaches at least, if not in absolute
+wisdom.&nbsp; Within a stone&rsquo;s-throw, as it seems, the audience
+of the Day Theatre sit: their faces turned this way.&nbsp; But as the
+stage is hidden, it is very odd, without a knowledge of the cause, to
+see their faces changed so suddenly from earnestness to laughter; and
+odder still, to hear the rounds upon rounds of applause, rattling in
+the evening air, to which the curtain falls.&nbsp; But, being Sunday
+night, they act their best and most attractive play.&nbsp; And now,
+the sun is going down, in such magnificent array of red, and green,
+and golden light, as neither pen nor pencil could depict; and to the
+ringing of the vesper bells, darkness sets in at once, without a twilight.&nbsp;
+Then, lights begin to shine in Genoa, and on the country road; and the
+revolving lanthorn out at sea there, flashing, for an instant, on this
+palace front and portico, illuminates it as if there were a bright moon
+bursting from behind a cloud; then, merges it in deep obscurity.&nbsp;
+And this, so far as I know, is the only reason why the Genoese avoid
+it after dark, and think it haunted.<br>
+<br>
+My memory will haunt it, many nights, in time to come; but nothing worse,
+I will engage.&nbsp; The same Ghost will occasionally sail away, as
+I did one pleasant autumn evening, into the bright prospect, and sniff
+the morning air at Marseilles.<br>
+<br>
+The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside
+his shop-door there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with the
+natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were languishing,
+stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to blind corners of
+the establishment, where it was impossible for admirers to penetrate.<br>
+<br>
+The steamer had come from Genoa in a delicious run of eighteen hours,
+and we were going to run back again by the Cornice road from Nice: not
+being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the beautiful towns
+that rise in picturesque white clusters from among the olive woods,
+and rocks, and hills, upon the margin of the Sea.<br>
+<br>
+The Boat which started for Nice that night, at eight o&rsquo;clock,
+was very small, and so crowded with goods that there was scarcely room
+to move; neither was there anything to cat on board, except bread; nor
+to drink, except coffee.&nbsp; But being due at Nice at about eight
+or so in the morning, this was of no consequence; so when we began to
+wink at the bright stars, in involuntary acknowledgment of their winking
+at us, we turned into our berths, in a crowded, but cool little cabin,
+and slept soundly till morning.<br>
+<br>
+The Boat, being as dull and dogged a little boat as ever was built,
+it was within an hour of noon when we turned into Nice Harbour, where
+we very little expected anything but breakfast.&nbsp; But we were laden
+with wool.&nbsp; Wool must not remain in the Custom-house at Marseilles
+more than twelve months at a stretch, without paying duty.&nbsp; It
+is the custom to make fictitious removals of unsold wool to evade this
+law; to take it somewhere when the twelve months are nearly out; bring
+it straight back again; and warehouse it, as a new cargo, for nearly
+twelve months longer.&nbsp; This wool of ours, had come originally from
+some place in the East.&nbsp; It was recognised as Eastern produce,
+the moment we entered the harbour.&nbsp; Accordingly, the gay little
+Sunday boats, full of holiday people, which had come off to greet us,
+were warned away by the authorities; we were declared in quarantine;
+and a great flag was solemnly run up to the mast-head on the wharf,
+to make it known to all the town.<br>
+<br>
+It was a very hot day indeed.&nbsp; We were unshaved, unwashed, undressed,
+unfed, and could hardly enjoy the absurdity of lying blistering in a
+lazy harbour, with the town looking on from a respectful distance, all
+manner of whiskered men in cocked hats discussing our fate at a remote
+guard-house, with gestures (we looked very hard at them through telescopes)
+expressive of a week&rsquo;s detention at least: and nothing whatever
+the matter all the time.&nbsp; But even in this crisis the brave Courier
+achieved a triumph.&nbsp; He telegraphed somebody (<i>I</i> saw nobody)
+either naturally connected with the hotel, or put <i>en rapport</i>
+with the establishment for that occasion only.&nbsp; The telegraph was
+answered, and in half an hour or less, there came a loud shout from
+the guard-house.&nbsp; The captain was wanted.&nbsp; Everybody helped
+the captain into his boat.&nbsp; Everybody got his luggage, and said
+we were going.&nbsp; The captain rowed away, and disappeared behind
+a little jutting corner of the Galley-slaves&rsquo; Prison: and presently
+came back with something, very sulkily.&nbsp; The brave Courier met
+him at the side, and received the something as its rightful owner.&nbsp;
+It was a wicker basket, folded in a linen cloth; and in it were two
+great bottles of wine, a roast fowl, some salt fish chopped with garlic,
+a great loaf of bread, a dozen or so of peaches, and a few other trifles.&nbsp;
+When we had selected our own breakfast, the brave Courier invited a
+chosen party to partake of these refreshments, and assured them that
+they need not be deterred by motives of delicacy, as he would order
+a second basket to be furnished at their expense.&nbsp; Which he did
+- no one knew how - and by-and-by, the captain being again summoned,
+again sulkily returned with another something; over which my popular
+attendant presided as before: carving with a clasp-knife, his own personal
+property, something smaller than a Roman sword.<br>
+<br>
+The whole party on board were made merry by these unexpected supplies;
+but none more so than a loquacious little Frenchman, who got drunk in
+five minutes, and a sturdy Cappucc&iacute;no Friar, who had taken everybody&rsquo;s
+fancy mightily, and was one of the best friars in the world, I verily
+believe.<br>
+<br>
+He had a free, open countenance; and a rich brown, flowing beard; and
+was a remarkably handsome man, of about fifty.&nbsp; He had come up
+to us, early in the morning, and inquired whether we were sure to be
+at Nice by eleven; saying that he particularly wanted to know, because
+if we reached it by that time he would have to perform Mass, and must
+deal with the consecrated wafer, fasting; whereas, if there were no
+chance of his being in time, he would immediately breakfast.&nbsp; He
+made this communication, under the idea that the brave Courier was the
+captain; and indeed he looked much more like it than anybody else on
+board.&nbsp; Being assured that we should arrive in good time, he fasted,
+and talked, fasting, to everybody, with the most charming good humour;
+answering jokes at the expense of friars, with other jokes at the expense
+of laymen, and saying that, friar as he was, he would engage to take
+up the two strongest men on board, one after the other, with his teeth,
+and carry them along the deck.&nbsp; Nobody gave him the opportunity,
+but I dare say he could have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure
+of a man, even in the Cappucc&iacute;no dress, which is the ugliest
+and most ungainly that can well be.<br>
+<br>
+All this had given great delight to the loquacious Frenchman, who gradually
+patronised the Friar very much, and seemed to commiserate him as one
+who might have been born a Frenchman himself, but for an unfortunate
+destiny.&nbsp; Although his patronage was such as a mouse might bestow
+upon a lion, he had a vast opinion of its condescension; and in the
+warmth of that sentiment, occasionally rose on tiptoe, to slap the Friar
+on the back.<br>
+<br>
+When the baskets arrived: it being then too late for Mass: the Friar
+went to work bravely: eating prodigiously of the cold meat and bread,
+drinking deep draughts of the wine, smoking cigars, taking snuff, sustaining
+an uninterrupted conversation with all hands, and occasionally running
+to the boat&rsquo;s side and hailing somebody on shore with the intelligence
+that we <i>must</i> be got out of this quarantine somehow or other,
+as he had to take part in a great religious procession in the afternoon.&nbsp;
+After this, he would come back, laughing lustily from pure good humour:
+while the Frenchman wrinkled his small face into ten thousand creases,
+and said how droll it was, and what a brave boy was that Friar!&nbsp;
+At length the heat of the sun without, and the wine within, made the
+Frenchman sleepy.&nbsp; So, in the noontide of his patronage of his
+gigantic prot&eacute;g&eacute;, he lay down among the wool, and began
+to snore.<br>
+<br>
+It was four o&rsquo;clock before we were released; and the Frenchman,
+dirty and woolly, and snuffy, was still sleeping when the Friar went
+ashore.&nbsp; As soon as we were free, we all hurried away, to wash
+and dress, that we might make a decent appearance at the procession;
+and I saw no more of the Frenchman until we took up our station in the
+main street to see it pass, when he squeezed himself into a front place,
+elaborately renovated; threw back his little coat, to show a broad-barred
+velvet waistcoat, sprinkled all over with stars; then adjusted himself
+and his cane so as utterly to bewilder and transfix the Friar, when
+he should appear.<br>
+<br>
+The procession was a very long one, and included an immense number of
+people divided into small parties; each party chanting nasally, on its
+own account, without reference to any other, and producing a most dismal
+result.&nbsp; There were angels, crosses, Virgins carried on flat boards
+surrounded by Cupids, crowns, saints, missals, infantry, tapers, monks,
+nuns, relics, dignitaries of the church in green hats, walking under
+crimson parasols: and, here and there, a species of sacred street-lamp
+hoisted on a pole.&nbsp; We looked out anxiously for the Cappucc&iacute;ni,
+and presently their brown robes and corded girdles were seen coming
+on, in a body.<br>
+<br>
+I observed the little Frenchman chuckle over the idea that when the
+Friar saw him in the broad-barred waistcoat, he would mentally exclaim,
+&lsquo;Is that my Patron!&nbsp; <i>That</i> distinguished man!&rsquo;
+and would be covered with confusion.&nbsp; Ah! never was the Frenchman
+so deceived.&nbsp; As our friend the Cappucc&iacute;no advanced, with
+folded arms, he looked straight into the visage of the little Frenchman,
+with a bland, serene, composed abstraction, not to be described.&nbsp;
+There was not the faintest trace of recognition or amusement on his
+features; not the smallest consciousness of bread and meat, wine, snuff,
+or cigars.&nbsp; &lsquo;C&rsquo;est lui-m&ecirc;me,&rsquo; I heard the
+little Frenchman say, in some doubt.&nbsp; Oh yes, it was himself.&nbsp;
+It was not his brother or his nephew, very like him.&nbsp; It was he.&nbsp;
+He walked in great state: being one of the Superiors of the Order: and
+looked his part to admiration.&nbsp; There never was anything so perfect
+of its kind as the contemplative way in which he allowed his placid
+gaze to rest on us, his late companions, as if he had never seen us
+in his life and didn&rsquo;t see us then.&nbsp; The Frenchman, quite
+humbled, took off his hat at last, but the Friar still passed on, with
+the same imperturbable serenity; and the broad-barred waistcoat, fading
+into the crowd, was seen no more.<br>
+<br>
+The procession wound up with a discharge of musketry that shook all
+the windows in the town.&nbsp; Next afternoon we started for Genoa,
+by the famed Cornice road.<br>
+<br>
+The half-French, half-Italian Vettur&iacute;no, who undertook, with
+his little rattling carriage and pair, to convey us thither in three
+days, was a careless, good-looking fellow, whose light-heartedness and
+singing propensities knew no bounds as long as we went on smoothly.&nbsp;
+So long, he had a word and a smile, and a flick of his whip, for all
+the peasant girls, and odds and ends of the Sonnambula for all the echoes.&nbsp;
+So long, he went jingling through every little village, with bells on
+his horses and rings in his ears: a very meteor of gallantry and cheerfulness.&nbsp;
+But, it was highly characteristic to see him under a slight reverse
+of circumstances, when, in one part of the journey, we came to a narrow
+place where a waggon had broken down and stopped up the road.&nbsp;
+His hands were twined in his hair immediately, as if a combination of
+all the direst accidents in life had suddenly fallen on his devoted
+head.&nbsp; He swore in French, prayed in Italian, and went up and down,
+beating his feet on the ground in a very ecstasy of despair.&nbsp; There
+were various carters and mule-drivers assembled round the broken waggon,
+and at last some man of an original turn of mind, proposed that a general
+and joint effort should be made to get things to-rights again, and clear
+the way - an idea which I verily believe would never have presented
+itself to our friend, though we had remained there until now.&nbsp;
+It was done at no great cost of labour; but at every pause in the doing,
+his hands were wound in his hair again, as if there were no ray of hope
+to lighten his misery.&nbsp; The moment he was on his box once more,
+and clattering briskly down hill, he returned to the Sonnambula and
+the peasant girls, as if it were not in the power of misfortune to depress
+him.<br>
+<br>
+Much of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful
+road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable.&nbsp;
+The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid;
+and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into
+a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so
+intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen
+straggling about in dim doorways with their spindles, or crooning together
+in by-corners, they are like a population of Witches - except that they
+certainly are not to be suspected of brooms or any other instrument
+of cleanliness.&nbsp; Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold
+wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental,
+as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads
+and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails.<br>
+<br>
+These towns, as they are seen in the approach, however: nestling, with
+their clustering roofs and towers, among trees on steep hill-sides,
+or built upon the brink of noble bays: are charming.&nbsp; The vegetation
+is, everywhere, luxuriant and beautiful, and the Palm-tree makes a novel
+feature in the novel scenery.&nbsp; In one town, San Remo - a most extraordinary
+place, built on gloomy open arches, so that one might ramble underneath
+the whole town - there are pretty terrace gardens; in other towns, there
+is the clang of shipwrights&rsquo; hammers, and the building of small
+vessels on the beach.&nbsp; In some of the broad bays, the fleets of
+Europe might ride at anchor.&nbsp; In every case, each little group
+of houses presents, in the distance, some enchanting confusion of picturesque
+and fanciful shapes.<br>
+<br>
+The road itself - now high above the glittering sea, which breaks against
+the foot of the precipice: now turning inland to sweep the shore of
+a bay: now crossing the stony bed of a mountain stream: now low down
+on the beach: now winding among riven rocks of many forms and colours:
+now chequered by a solitary ruined tower, one of a chain of towers built,
+in old time, to protect the coast from the invasions of the Barbary
+Corsairs - presents new beauties every moment.&nbsp; When its own striking
+scenery is passed, and it trails on through a long line of suburb, lying
+on the flat sea-shore, to Genoa, then, the changing glimpses of that
+noble city and its harbour, awaken a new source of interest; freshened
+by every huge, unwieldy, half-inhabited old house in its outskirts:
+and coming to its climax when the city gate is reached, and all Genoa
+with its beautiful harbour, and neighbouring hills, bursts proudly on
+the view.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - TO PARMA, MODENA, AND BOLOGNA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I strolled away from Genoa on the 6th of November, bound for a good
+many places (England among them), but first for Piacenza; for which
+town I started in the <i>coup&eacute;</i> of a machine something like
+a travelling caravan, in company with the brave Courier, and a lady
+with a large dog, who howled dolefully, at intervals, all night.&nbsp;
+It was very wet, and very cold; very dark, and very dismal; we travelled
+at the rate of barely four miles an hour, and stopped nowhere for refreshment.&nbsp;
+At ten o&rsquo;clock next morning, we changed coaches at Alessandria,
+where we were packed up in another coach (the body whereof would have
+been small for a fly), in company with a very old priest; a young Jesuit,
+his companion - who carried their breviaries and other books, and who,
+in the exertion of getting into the coach, had made a gash of pink leg
+between his black stocking and his black knee-shorts, that reminded
+one of Hamlet in Ophelia&rsquo;s closet, only it was visible on both
+legs - a provincial Avvoc&aacute;to; and a gentleman with a red nose
+that had an uncommon and singular sheen upon it, which I never observed
+in the human subject before.&nbsp; In this way we travelled on, until
+four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon; the roads being still very heavy,
+and the coach very slow.&nbsp; To mend the matter, the old priest was
+troubled with cramps in his legs, so that he had to give a terrible
+yell every ten minutes or so, and be hoisted out by the united efforts
+of the company; the coach always stopping for him, with great gravity.&nbsp;
+This disorder, and the roads, formed the main subject of conversation.&nbsp;
+Finding, in the afternoon, that the <i>coup&eacute;</i> had discharged
+two people, and had only one passenger inside - a monstrous ugly Tuscan,
+with a great purple moustache, of which no man could see the ends when
+he had his hat on - I took advantage of its better accommodation, and
+in company with this gentleman (who was very conversational and good-humoured)
+travelled on, until nearly eleven o&rsquo;clock at night, when the driver
+reported that he couldn&rsquo;t think of going any farther, and we accordingly
+made a halt at a place called Stradella.<br>
+<br>
+The inn was a series of strange galleries surrounding a yard where our
+coach, and a waggon or two, and a lot of fowls, and firewood, were all
+heaped up together, higgledy-piggledy; so that you didn&rsquo;t know,
+and couldn&rsquo;t have taken your oath, which was a fowl and which
+was a cart.&nbsp; We followed a sleepy man with a flaring torch, into
+a great, cold room, where there were two immensely broad beds, on what
+looked like two immensely broad deal dining-tables; another deal table
+of similar dimensions in the middle of the bare floor; four windows;
+and two chairs.&nbsp; Somebody said it was my room; and I walked up
+and down it, for half an hour or so, staring at the Tuscan, the old
+priest, the young priest, and the Avvoc&aacute;to (Red-Nose lived in
+the town, and had gone home), who sat upon their beds, and stared at
+me in return.<br>
+<br>
+The rather dreary whimsicality of this stage of the proceedings, is
+interrupted by an announcement from the Brave (he had been cooking)
+that supper is ready; and to the priest&rsquo;s chamber (the next room
+and the counterpart of mine) we all adjourn.&nbsp; The first dish is
+a cabbage, boiled with a great quantity of rice in a tureen full of
+water, and flavoured with cheese.&nbsp; It is so hot, and we are so
+cold, that it appears almost jolly.&nbsp; The second dish is some little
+bits of pork, fried with pigs&rsquo; kidneys.&nbsp; The third, two red
+fowls.&nbsp; The fourth, two little red turkeys.&nbsp; The fifth, a
+huge stew of garlic and truffles, and I don&rsquo;t know what else;
+and this concludes the entertainment.<br>
+<br>
+Before I can sit down in my own chamber, and think it of the dampest,
+the door opens, and the Brave comes moving in, in the middle of such
+a quantity of fuel that he looks like Birnam Wood taking a winter walk.&nbsp;
+He kindles this heap in a twinkling, and produces a jorum of hot brandy
+and water; for that bottle of his keeps company with the seasons, and
+now holds nothing but the purest <i>eau de vie</i>.&nbsp; When he has
+accomplished this feat, he retires for the night; and I hear him, for
+an hour afterwards, and indeed until I fall asleep, making jokes in
+some outhouse (apparently under the pillow), where he is smoking cigars
+with a party of confidential friends.&nbsp; He never was in the house
+in his life before; but he knows everybody everywhere, before he has
+been anywhere five minutes; and is certain to have attracted to himself,
+in the meantime, the enthusiastic devotion of the whole establishment.<br>
+<br>
+This is at twelve o&rsquo;clock at night.&nbsp; At four o&rsquo;clock
+next morning, he is up again, fresher than a full-blown rose; making
+blazing fires without the least authority from the landlord; producing
+mugs of scalding coffee when nobody else can get anything but cold water;
+and going out into the dark streets, and roaring for fresh milk, on
+the chance of somebody with a cow getting up to supply it.&nbsp; While
+the horses are &lsquo;coming,&rsquo; I stumble out into the town too.&nbsp;
+It seems to be all one little Piazza, with a cold damp wind blowing
+in and out of the arches, alternately, in a sort of pattern.&nbsp; But
+it is profoundly dark, and raining heavily; and I shouldn&rsquo;t know
+it to-morrow, if I were taken there to try.&nbsp; Which Heaven forbid.<br>
+<br>
+The horses arrive in about an hour.&nbsp; In the interval, the driver
+swears; sometimes Christian oaths, sometimes Pagan oaths.&nbsp; Sometimes,
+when it is a long, compound oath, he begins with Christianity and merges
+into Paganism.&nbsp; Various messengers are despatched; not so much
+after the horses, as after each other; for the first messenger never
+comes back, and all the rest imitate him.&nbsp; At length the horses
+appear, surrounded by all the messengers; some kicking them, and some
+dragging them, and all shouting abuse to them.&nbsp; Then, the old priest,
+the young priest, the Avvoc&aacute;to, the Tuscan, and all of us, take
+our places; and sleepy voices proceeding from the doors of extraordinary
+hutches in divers parts of the yard, cry out &lsquo;Addio corri&egrave;re
+mio!&nbsp; Buon&rsquo; vi&aacute;ggio, corri&egrave;re!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Salutations which the courier, with his face one monstrous grin, returns
+in like manner as we go jolting and wallowing away, through the mud.<br>
+<br>
+At Piacenza, which was four or five hours&rsquo; journey from the inn
+at Stradella, we broke up our little company before the hotel door,
+with divers manifestations of friendly feeling on all sides.&nbsp; The
+old priest was taken with the cramp again, before he had got half-way
+down the street; and the young priest laid the bundle of books on a
+door-step, while he dutifully rubbed the old gentleman&rsquo;s legs.&nbsp;
+The client of the Avvoc&aacute;to was waiting for him at the yard-gate,
+and kissed him on each cheek, with such a resounding smack, that I am
+afraid he had either a very bad case, or a scantily-furnished purse.&nbsp;
+The Tuscan, with a cigar in his mouth, went loitering off, carrying
+his hat in his hand that he might the better trail up the ends of his
+dishevelled moustache.&nbsp; And the brave Courier, as he and I strolled
+away to look about us, began immediately to entertain me with the private
+histories and family affairs of the whole party.<br>
+<br>
+A brown, decayed, old town, Piacenza is.&nbsp; A deserted, solitary,
+grass-grown place, with ruined ramparts; half filled-up trenches, which
+afford a frowsy pasturage to the lean kine that wander about them; and
+streets of stern houses, moodily frowning at the other houses over the
+way.&nbsp; The sleepiest and shabbiest of soldiery go wandering about,
+with the double curse of laziness and poverty, uncouthly wrinkling their
+misfitting regimentals; the dirtiest of children play with their impromptu
+toys (pigs and mud) in the feeblest of gutters; and the gauntest of
+dogs trot in and out of the dullest of archways, in perpetual search
+of something to eat, which they never seem to find.&nbsp; A mysterious
+and solemn Palace, guarded by two colossal statues, twin Genii of the
+place, stands gravely in the midst of the idle town; and the king with
+the marble legs, who flourished in the time of the thousand and one
+Nights, might live contentedly inside of it, and never have the energy,
+in his upper half of flesh and blood, to want to come out.<br>
+<br>
+What a strange, half-sorrowful and half-delicious doze it is, to ramble
+through these places gone to sleep and basking in the sun!&nbsp; Each,
+in its turn, appears to be, of all the mouldy, dreary, God-forgotten
+towns in the wide world, the chief.&nbsp; Sitting on this hillock where
+a bastion used to be, and where a noisy fortress was, in the time of
+the old Roman station here, I became aware that I have never known till
+now, what it is to be lazy.&nbsp; A dormouse must surely be in very
+much the same condition before he retires under the wool in his cage;
+or a tortoise before he buries himself.<br>
+<br>
+I feel that I am getting rusty.&nbsp; That any attempt to think, would
+be accompanied with a creaking noise.&nbsp; That there is nothing, anywhere,
+to be done, or needing to be done.&nbsp; That there is no more human
+progress, motion, effort, or advancement, of any kind beyond this.&nbsp;
+That the whole scheme stopped here centuries ago, and laid down to rest
+until the Day of Judgment.<br>
+<br>
+Never while the brave Courier lives!&nbsp; Behold him jingling out of
+Piacenza, and staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise ever
+seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were peeping
+over a garden wall; while the postilion, concentrated essence of all
+the shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his animated conversation,
+to touch his hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby
+than himself, enshrined in a plaster Punch&rsquo;s show outside the
+town.<br>
+<br>
+In Genoa, and thereabouts, they train the vines on trellis-work, supported
+on square clumsy pillars, which, in themselves, are anything but picturesque.&nbsp;
+But, here, they twine them around trees, and let them trail among the
+hedges; and the vineyards are full of trees, regularly planted for this
+purpose, each with its own vine twining and clustering about it.&nbsp;
+Their leaves are now of the brightest gold and deepest red; and never
+was anything so enchantingly graceful and full of beauty.&nbsp; Through
+miles of these delightful forms and colours, the road winds its way.&nbsp;
+The wild festoons, the elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of
+all shapes; the fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them prisoners
+in sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite shapes upon the
+ground; how rich and beautiful they are!&nbsp; And every now and then,
+a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and garlanded together:
+as if they had taken hold of one another, and were coming dancing down
+the field!<br>
+<br>
+Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and consequently
+is not so characteristic as many places of less note.&nbsp; Always excepting
+the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral, Baptistery, and Campanile -
+ancient buildings, of a sombre brown, embellished with innumerable grotesque
+monsters and dreamy-looking creatures carved in marble and red stone
+- are clustered in a noble and magnificent repose.&nbsp; Their silent
+presence was only invaded, when I saw them, by the twittering of the
+many birds that were flying in and out of the crevices in the stones
+and little nooks in the architecture, where they had made their nests.&nbsp;
+They were busy, rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands,
+into the sunny air of Heaven.&nbsp; Not so the worshippers within, who
+were listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
+kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed down,
+in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa and everywhere
+else.<br>
+<br>
+The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is covered,
+have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing influence.&nbsp;
+It is miserable to see great works of art - something of the Souls of
+Painters - perishing and fading away, like human forms.&nbsp; This cathedral
+is odorous with the rotting of Correggio&rsquo;s frescoes in the Cupola.&nbsp;
+Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at one time.&nbsp; Connoisseurs
+fall into raptures with them now; but such a labyrinth of arms and legs:
+such heaps of foreshortened limbs, entangled and involved and jumbled
+together: no operative surgeon, gone mad, could imagine in his wildest
+delirium.<br>
+<br>
+There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the roof supported
+by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to be at least
+one beggar in ambush: to say nothing of the tombs and secluded altars.&nbsp;
+From every one of these lurking-places, such crowds of phantom-looking
+men and women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs, or chattering
+jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity,
+came hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral
+above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower church,
+they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or exhibited a more
+confounding display of arms and legs.<br>
+<br>
+There is Petrarch&rsquo;s Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery,
+with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery containing
+some very remarkable pictures, whereof a few were being copied by hairy-faced
+artists, with little velvet caps more off their heads than on.&nbsp;
+There is the Farnese Palace, too; and in it one of the dreariest spectacles
+of decay that ever was seen - a grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering
+away.<br>
+<br>
+It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower seats
+arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy chambers;
+rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their proud state.&nbsp;
+Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre, enhanced in the spectator&rsquo;s
+fancy by its gay intention and design, none but worms can be familiar
+with.&nbsp; A hundred and ten years have passed, since any play was
+acted here.&nbsp; The sky shines in through the gashes in the roof;
+the boxes are dropping down, wasting away, and only tenanted by rats;
+damp and mildew smear the faded colours, and make spectral maps upon
+the panels; lean rags are dangling down where there were gay festoons
+on the Proscenium; the stage has rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery
+is thrown across it, or it would sink beneath the tread, and bury the
+visitor in the gloomy depth beneath.&nbsp; The desolation and decay
+impress themselves on all the senses.&nbsp; The air has a mouldering
+smell, and an earthy taste; any stray outer sounds that straggle in
+with some lost sunbeam, are muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot,
+and the rot have changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch,
+as time will seam and roughen a smooth hand.&nbsp; If ever Ghosts act
+plays, they act them on this ghostly stage.<br>
+<br>
+It was most delicious weather, when we came into Modena, where the darkness
+of the sombre colonnades over the footways skirting the main street
+on either side, was made refreshing and agreeable by the bright sky,
+so wonderfully blue.&nbsp; I passed from all the glory of the day, into
+a dim cathedral, where High Mass was performing, feeble tapers were
+burning, people were kneeling in all directions before all manner of
+shrines, and officiating priests were crooning the usual chant, in the
+usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone.<br>
+<br>
+Thinking how strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this same
+Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the
+same torpid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly
+scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was
+blown.&nbsp; Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian
+company from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls of the church,
+and flouting, with their horses&rsquo; heels, the griffins, lions, tigers,
+and other monsters in stone and marble, decorating its exterior.&nbsp;
+First, there came a stately nobleman with a great deal of hair, and
+no hat, bearing an enormous banner, on which was inscribed, MAZEPPA!&nbsp;
+TO-NIGHT!&nbsp; Then, a Mexican chief, with a great pear-shaped club
+on his shoulder, like Hercules.&nbsp; Then, six or eight Roman chariots:
+each with a beautiful lady in extremely short petticoats, and unnaturally
+pink tights, erect within: shedding beaming looks upon the crowd, in
+which there was a latent expression of discomposure and anxiety, for
+which I couldn&rsquo;t account, until, as the open back of each chariot
+presented itself, I saw the immense difficulty with which the pink legs
+maintained their perpendicular, over the uneven pavement of the town:
+which gave me quite a new idea of the ancient Romans and Britons.&nbsp;
+The procession was brought to a close, by some dozen indomitable warriors
+of different nations, riding two and two, and haughtily surveying the
+tame population of Modena: among whom, however, they occasionally condescended
+to scatter largesse in the form of a few handbills.&nbsp; After caracolling
+among the lions and tigers, and proclaiming that evening&rsquo;s entertainments
+with blast of trumpet, it then filed off, by the other end of the square,
+and left a new and greatly increased dulness behind.<br>
+<br>
+When the procession had so entirely passed away, that the shrill trumpet
+was mild in the distance, and the tail of the last horse was hopelessly
+round the corner, the people who had come out of the church to stare
+at it, went back again.&nbsp; But one old lady, kneeling on the pavement
+within, near the door, had seen it all, and had been immensely interested,
+without getting up; and this old lady&rsquo;s eye, at that juncture,
+I happened to catch: to our mutual confusion.&nbsp; She cut our embarrassment
+very short, however, by crossing herself devoutly, and going down, at
+full length, on her face, before a figure in a fancy petticoat and a
+gilt crown; which was so like one of the procession-figures, that perhaps
+at this hour she may think the whole appearance a celestial vision.&nbsp;
+Anyhow, I must certainly have forgiven her her interest in the Circus,
+though I had been her Father Confessor.<br>
+<br>
+There was a little fiery-eyed old man with a crooked shoulder, in the
+cathedral, who took it very ill that I made no effort to see the bucket
+(kept in an old tower) which the people of Modena took away from the
+people of Bologna in the fourteenth century, and about which there was
+war made and a mock-heroic poem by TASSONE, too.&nbsp; Being quite content,
+however, to look at the outside of the tower, and feast, in imagination,
+on the bucket within; and preferring to loiter in the shade of the tall
+Campanile, and about the cathedral; I have no personal knowledge of
+this bucket, even at the present time.<br>
+<br>
+Indeed, we were at Bologna, before the little old man (or the Guide-Book)
+would have considered that we had half done justice to the wonders of
+Modena.&nbsp; But it is such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind,
+and still go on, encountering newer scenes - and, moreover, I have such
+a perverse disposition in respect of sights that are cut, and dried,
+and dictated - that I fear I sin against similar authorities in every
+place I visit.<br>
+<br>
+Be this as it may, in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I found myself
+walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs and colonnades,
+in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted by a little Cicerone
+of that town, who was excessively anxious for the honour of the place,
+and most solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments: whereas
+he was never tired of extolling the good ones.&nbsp; Seeing this little
+man (a good-humoured little man he was, who seemed to have nothing in
+his face but shining teeth and eyes) looking wistfully at a certain
+plot of grass, I asked him who was buried there.&nbsp; &lsquo;The poor
+people, Signore,&rsquo; he said, with a shrug and a smile, and stopping
+to look back at me - for he always went on a little before, and took
+off his hat to introduce every new monument.&nbsp; &lsquo;Only the poor,
+Signore!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very cheerful.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very lively.&nbsp;
+How green it is, how cool!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s like a meadow!&nbsp; There
+are five,&rsquo; - holding up all the fingers of his right hand to express
+the number, which an Italian peasant will always do, if it be within
+the compass of his ten fingers, - &lsquo;there are five of my little
+children buried there, Signore; just there; a little to the right.&nbsp;
+Well!&nbsp; Thanks to God!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s very cheerful.&nbsp; How
+green it is, how cool it is!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s quite a meadow!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He looked me very hard in the face, and seeing I was sorry for him,
+took a pinch of snuff (every Cicerone takes snuff), and made a little
+bow; partly in deprecation of his having alluded to such a subject,
+and partly in memory of the children and of his favourite saint.&nbsp;
+It was as unaffected and as perfectly natural a little bow, as ever
+man made.&nbsp; Immediately afterwards, he took his hat off altogether,
+and begged to introduce me to the next monument; and his eyes and his
+teeth shone brighter than before.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VI - THROUGH BOLOGNA AND FERRARA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There was such a very smart official in attendance at the Cemetery where
+the little Cicerone had buried his children, that when the little Cicerone
+suggested to me, in a whisper, that there would be no offence in presenting
+this officer, in return for some slight extra service, with a couple
+of pauls (about tenpence, English money), I looked incredulously at
+his cocked hat, wash-leather gloves, well-made uniform, and dazzling
+buttons, and rebuked the little Cicerone with a grave shake of the head.&nbsp;
+For, in splendour of appearance, he was at least equal to the Deputy
+Usher of the Black Rod; and the idea of his carrying, as Jeremy Diddler
+would say, &lsquo;such a thing as tenpence&rsquo; away with him, seemed
+monstrous.&nbsp; He took it in excellent part, however, when I made
+bold to give it him, and pulled off his cocked hat with a flourish that
+would have been a bargain at double the money.<br>
+<br>
+It seemed to be his duty to describe the monuments to the people - at
+all events he was doing so; and when I compared him, like Gulliver in
+Brobdingnag, &lsquo;with the Institutions of my own beloved country,
+I could not refrain from tears of pride and exultation.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He had no pace at all; no more than a tortoise.&nbsp; He loitered as
+the people loitered, that they might gratify their curiosity; and positively
+allowed them, now and then, to read the inscriptions on the tombs.&nbsp;
+He was neither shabby, nor insolent, nor churlish, nor ignorant.&nbsp;
+He spoke his own language with perfect propriety, and seemed to consider
+himself, in his way, a kind of teacher of the people, and to entertain
+a just respect both for himself and them.&nbsp; They would no more have
+such a man for a Verger in Westminster Abbey, than they would let the
+people in (as they do at Bologna) to see the monuments for nothing.
+<a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a><br>
+<br>
+Again, an ancient sombre town, under the brilliant sky; with heavy arcades
+over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and more cheerful
+archways in the newer portions of the town.&nbsp; Again, brown piles
+of sacred buildings, with more birds flying in and out of chinks in
+the stones; and more snarling monsters for the bases of the pillars.&nbsp;
+Again, rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells,
+priests in bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses,
+images, and artificial flowers.<br>
+<br>
+There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom
+upon it, that would leave it, a distinct and separate impression in
+the mind, among a crowd of cities, though it were not still further
+marked in the traveller&rsquo;s remembrance by the two brick leaning
+towers (sufficiently unsightly in themselves, it must be acknowledged),
+inclining cross-wise as if they were bowing stiffly to each other -
+a most extraordinary termination to the perspective of some of the narrow
+streets.&nbsp; The colleges, and churches too, and palaces: and above
+all the academy of Fine Arts, where there are a host of interesting
+pictures, especially by GUIDO, DOMENICHINO, and LUDOVICO CARACCI: give
+it a place of its own in the memory.&nbsp; Even though these were not,
+and there were nothing else to remember it by, the great Meridian on
+the pavement of the church of San Petronio, where the sunbeams mark
+the time among the kneeling people, would give it a fanciful and pleasant
+interest.<br>
+<br>
+Bologna being very full of tourists, detained there by an inundation
+which rendered the road to Florence impassable, I was quartered up at
+the top of an hotel, in an out-of-the-way room which I never could find:
+containing a bed, big enough for a boarding-school, which I couldn&rsquo;t
+fall asleep in.&nbsp; The chief among the waiters who visited this lonely
+retreat, where there was no other company but the swallows in the broad
+eaves over the window, was a man of one idea in connection with the
+English; and the subject of this harmless monomania, was Lord Byron.&nbsp;
+I made the discovery by accidentally remarking to him, at breakfast,
+that the matting with which the floor was covered, was very comfortable
+at that season, when he immediately replied that Milor Beeron had been
+much attached to that kind of matting.&nbsp; Observing, at the same
+moment, that I took no milk, he exclaimed with enthusiasm, that Milor
+Beeron had never touched it.&nbsp; At first, I took it for granted,
+in my innocence, that he had been one of the Beeron servants; but no,
+he said, no, he was in the habit of speaking about my Lord, to English
+gentlemen; that was all.&nbsp; He knew all about him, he said.&nbsp;
+In proof of it, he connected him with every possible topic, from the
+Monte Pulciano wine at dinner (which was grown on an estate he had owned),
+to the big bed itself, which was the very model of his.&nbsp; When I
+left the inn, he coupled with his final bow in the yard, a parting assurance
+that the road by which I was going, had been Milor Beeron&rsquo;s favourite
+ride; and before the horse&rsquo;s feet had well begun to clatter on
+the pavement, he ran briskly up-stairs again, I dare say to tell some
+other Englishman in some other solitary room that the guest who had
+just departed was Lord Beeron&rsquo;s living image.<br>
+<br>
+I had entered Bologna by night - almost midnight - and all along the
+road thither, after our entrance into the Papal territory: which is
+not, in any part, supremely well governed, Saint Peter&rsquo;s keys
+being rather rusty now; the driver had so worried about the danger of
+robbers in travelling after dark, and had so infected the brave Courier,
+and the two had been so constantly stopping and getting up and down
+to look after a portmanteau which was tied on behind, that I should
+have felt almost obliged to any one who would have had the goodness
+to take it away.&nbsp; Hence it was stipulated, that, whenever we left
+Bologna, we should start so as not to arrive at Ferrara later than eight
+at night; and a delightful afternoon and evening journey it was, albeit
+through a flat district which gradually became more marshy from the
+overflow of brooks and rivers in the recent heavy rains.<br>
+<br>
+At sunset, when I was walking on alone, while the horses rested, I arrived
+upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental operations
+of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and
+which I see distinctly now.&nbsp; There was not much in it.&nbsp; In
+the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred
+by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees.&nbsp; In the foreground
+was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little
+bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now down into the water; in
+the distance, a deep bell; the shade of approaching night on everything.&nbsp;
+If I had been murdered there, in some former life, I could not have
+seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic
+chilling of the blood; and the mere remembrance of it acquired in that
+minute, is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly
+think I could forget it.<br>
+<br>
+More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than any
+city of the solemn brotherhood!&nbsp; The grass so grows up in the silent
+streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while the sun
+shines.&nbsp; But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in grim
+Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass through the
+places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be grass indeed, and
+growing in the squares.<br>
+<br>
+I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives next
+door to the Hotel, or opposite: making the visitor feel as if the beating
+hammers were his own heart, palpitating with a deadly energy!&nbsp;
+I wonder why jealous corridors surround the bedroom on all sides, and
+fill it with unnecessary doors that can&rsquo;t be shut, and will not
+open, and abut on pitchy darkness!&nbsp; I wonder why it is not enough
+that these distrustful genii stand agape at one&rsquo;s dreams all night,
+but there must also be round open portholes, high in the wall, suggestive,
+when a mouse or rat is heard behind the wainscot, of a somebody scraping
+the wall with his toes, in his endeavours to reach one of these portholes
+and look in!&nbsp; I wonder why the faggots are so constructed, as to
+know of no effect but an agony of heat when they are lighted and replenished,
+and an agony of cold and suffocation at all other times!&nbsp; I wonder,
+above all, why it is the great feature of domestic architecture in Italian
+inns, that all the fire goes up the chimney, except the smoke!<br>
+<br>
+The answer matters little.&nbsp; Coppersmiths, doors, portholes, smoke,
+and faggots, are welcome to me.&nbsp; Give me the smiling face of the
+attendant, man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to
+please and to be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air -
+so many jewels set in dirt - and I am theirs again to-morrow!<br>
+<br>
+ARIOSTO&rsquo;S house, TASSO&rsquo;S prison, a rare old Gothic cathedral,
+and more churches of course, are the sights of Ferrara.&nbsp; But the
+long silent streets, and the dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in
+lieu of banners, and where rank weeds are slowly creeping up the long-untrodden
+stairs, are the best sights of all.<br>
+<br>
+The aspect of this dreary town, half an hour before sunrise one fine
+morning, when I left it, was as picturesque as it seemed unreal and
+spectral.&nbsp; It was no matter that the people were not yet out of
+bed; for if they had all been up and busy, they would have made but
+little difference in that desert of a place.&nbsp; It was best to see
+it, without a single figure in the picture; a city of the dead, without
+one solitary survivor.&nbsp; Pestilence might have ravaged streets,
+squares, and market-places; and sack and siege have ruined the old houses,
+battered down their doors and windows, and made breaches in their roofs.&nbsp;
+In one part, a great tower rose into the air; the only landmark in the
+melancholy view.&nbsp; In another, a prodigious castle, with a moat
+about it, stood aloof: a sullen city in itself.&nbsp; In the black dungeons
+of this castle, Parisina and her lover were beheaded in the dead of
+night.&nbsp; The red light, beginning to shine when I looked back upon
+it, stained its walls without, as they have, many a time, been stained
+within, in old days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle
+and the city might have been avoided by all human creatures, from the
+moment when the axe went down upon the last of the two lovers: and might
+have never vibrated to another sound<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Beyond the blow that to the block<br>
+Pierced through with forced and sullen shock.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Coming to the Po, which was greatly swollen, and running fiercely, we
+crossed it by a floating bridge of boats, and so came into the Austrian
+territory, and resumed our journey: through a country of which, for
+some miles, a great part was under water.&nbsp; The brave Courier and
+the soldiery had first quarrelled, for half an hour or more, over our
+eternal passport.&nbsp; But this was a daily relaxation with the Brave,
+who was always stricken deaf when shabby functionaries in uniform came,
+as they constantly did come, plunging out of wooden boxes to look at
+it - or in other words to beg - and who, stone deaf to my entreaties
+that the man might have a trifle given him, and we resume our journey
+in peace, was wont to sit reviling the functionary in broken English:
+while the unfortunate man&rsquo;s face was a portrait of mental agony
+framed in the coach window, from his perfect ignorance of what was being
+said to his disparagement.<br>
+<br>
+There was a postilion, in the course of this day&rsquo;s journey, as
+wild and savagely good-looking a vagabond as you would desire to see.&nbsp;
+He was a tall, stout-made, dark-complexioned fellow, with a profusion
+of shaggy black hair hanging all over his face, and great black whiskers
+stretching down his throat.&nbsp; His dress was a torn suit of rifle
+green, garnished here and there with red; a steeple-crowned hat, innocent
+of nap, with a broken and bedraggled feather stuck in the band; and
+a flaming red neckerchief hanging on his shoulders.&nbsp; He was not
+in the saddle, but reposed, quite at his ease, on a sort of low foot-board
+in front of the postchaise, down amongst the horses&rsquo; tails - convenient
+for having his brains kicked out, at any moment.&nbsp; To this Brigand,
+the brave Courier, when we were at a reasonable trot, happened to suggest
+the practicability of going faster.&nbsp; He received the proposal with
+a perfect yell of derision; brandished his whip about his head (such
+a whip! it was more like a home-made bow); flung up his heels, much
+higher than the horses; and disappeared, in a paroxysm, somewhere in
+the neighbourhood of the axle-tree.&nbsp; I fully expected to see him
+lying in the road, a hundred yards behind, but up came the steeple-crowned
+hat again, next minute, and he was seen reposing, as on a sofa, entertaining
+himself with the idea, and crying, &lsquo;Ha, ha! what next!&nbsp; Oh
+the devil!&nbsp; Faster too!&nbsp; Shoo - hoo - o - o!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+(This last ejaculation, an inexpressibly defiant hoot.)&nbsp; Being
+anxious to reach our immediate destination that night, I ventured, by-and-by,
+to repeat the experiment on my own account.&nbsp; It produced exactly
+the same effect.&nbsp; Round flew the whip with the same scornful flourish,
+up came the heels, down went the steeple-crowned hat, and presently
+he reappeared, reposing as before and saying to himself, &lsquo;Ha ha!
+what next!&nbsp; Faster too!&nbsp; Oh the devil!&nbsp; Shoo - hoo -
+o - o!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VII - AN ITALIAN DREAM<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I had been travelling, for some days; resting very little in the night,
+and never in the day.&nbsp; The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties
+that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a
+crowd of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind,
+as I travelled on, by a solitary road.&nbsp; At intervals, some one
+among them would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro,
+and enable me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness.&nbsp;
+After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern;
+and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and
+some not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately
+seen, lingering behind it, and coming through it.&nbsp; This was no
+sooner visible than, in its turn, it melted into something else.<br>
+<br>
+At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged churches
+of Modena.&nbsp; As I recognised the curious pillars with grim monsters
+for their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by themselves in the
+quiet square at Padua, where there were the staid old University, and
+the figures, demurely gowned, grouped here and there in the open space
+about it.&nbsp; Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant
+city, admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens,
+and orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before.&nbsp; In their
+stead arose, immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate
+of all these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the
+monstrous moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a
+wild romance, came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the
+solitary, grass-grown, withered town.&nbsp; In short, I had that incoherent
+but delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have,
+and are indolently willing to encourage.&nbsp; Every shake of the coach
+in which I sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection
+out of its place, and to jerk some other new recollection into it; and
+in this state I fell asleep.<br>
+<br>
+I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of the
+coach.&nbsp; It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside.&nbsp;
+There lay here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of
+the same mournful colour.&nbsp; When I had taken my seat in this, the
+boat was paddled, by two men, towards a great light, lying in the distance
+on the sea.<br>
+<br>
+Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind.&nbsp; It ruffled the
+water, and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before the
+stars.&nbsp; I could not but think how strange it was, to be floating
+away at that hour: leaving the land behind, and going on, towards this
+light upon the sea.&nbsp; It soon began to burn brighter; and from being
+one light became a cluster of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the
+water, as the boat approached towards them by a dreamy kind of track,
+marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.<br>
+<br>
+We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I heard
+it rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at hand.&nbsp;
+Looking out attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a something black
+and massive - like a shore, but lying close and flat upon the water,
+like a raft - which we were gliding past.&nbsp; The chief of the two
+rowers said it was a burial-place.<br>
+<br>
+Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there, in
+the lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should recede
+in our path, when it was quickly shut out from my view.&nbsp; Before
+I knew by what, or how, I found that we were gliding up a street - a
+phantom street; the houses rising on both sides, from the water, and
+the black boat gliding on beneath their windows.&nbsp; Lights were shining
+from some of these casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream
+with their reflected rays, but all was profoundly silent.<br>
+<br>
+So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our course
+through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water.&nbsp;
+Some of the corners where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow,
+that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them; but
+the rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on
+without a pause.&nbsp; Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like
+our own, echoed the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we
+did ours) would come flitting past us like a dark shadow.&nbsp; Other
+boats, of the same sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted
+pillars, near to dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the
+water.&nbsp; Some of these were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep;
+towards one, I saw some figures coming down a gloomy archway from the
+interior of a palace: gaily dressed, and attended by torch-bearers.&nbsp;
+It was but a glimpse I had of them; for a bridge, so low and close upon
+the boat that it seemed ready to fall down and crush us: one of the
+many bridges that perplexed the Dream: blotted them out, instantly.&nbsp;
+On we went, floating towards the heart of this strange place - with
+water all about us where never water was elsewhere - clusters of houses,
+churches, heaps of stately buildings growing out of it - and, everywhere,
+the same extraordinary silence.&nbsp; Presently, we shot across a broad
+and open stream; and passing, as I thought, before a spacious paved
+quay, where the bright lamps with which it was illuminated showed long
+rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous construction and great strength,
+but as light to the eye as garlands of hoarfrost or gossamer - and where,
+for the first time, I saw people walking - arrived at a flight of steps
+leading from the water to a large mansion, where, having passed through
+corridors and galleries innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to
+the black boats stealing up and down below the window on the rippling
+water, till I fell asleep.<br>
+<br>
+The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its freshness,
+motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its clear blue sky
+and rustling air; no waking words can tell.&nbsp; But, from my window,
+I looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on
+groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on
+wide quays, strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on
+great ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on islands, crowned
+with gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses glittered
+in the light, atop of wondrous churches, springing from the sea!&nbsp;
+Going down upon the margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door,
+and filling all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing
+beauty, and such grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in
+comparison with its absorbing loveliness.<br>
+<br>
+It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest, in
+the deep ocean.&nbsp; On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic
+and magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the earth,
+in the high prime and fulness of their youth.&nbsp; Cloisters and galleries:
+so light, they might have been the work of fairy hands: so strong that
+centuries had battered them in vain: wound round and round this palace,
+and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies
+of the East.&nbsp; At no great distance from its porch, a lofty tower,
+standing by itself, and rearing its proud head, alone, into the sky,
+looked out upon the Adriatic Sea.&nbsp; Near to the margin of the stream,
+were two ill-omened pillars of red granite; one having on its top, a
+figure with a sword and shield; the other, a winged lion.&nbsp; Not
+far from these again, a second tower: richest of the rich in all its
+decorations: even here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great
+orb, gleaming with gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on
+it, and a mimic sun revolving in its course around them: while above,
+two bronze giants hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell.&nbsp;
+An oblong square of lofty houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by
+a light and beautiful arcade, formed part of this enchanted scene; and,
+here and there, gay masts for flags rose, tapering, from the pavement
+of the unsubstantial ground.<br>
+<br>
+I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many
+arches: traversing its whole extent.&nbsp; A grand and dreamy structure,
+of immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes;
+dim with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones
+and metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
+saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
+woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened
+distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal, fantastic,
+solemn, inconceivable throughout.&nbsp; I thought I entered the old
+palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old
+rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures,
+from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious
+on canvas, fought and conquered as of old.&nbsp; I thought I wandered
+through its halls of state and triumph - bare and empty now! - and musing
+on its pride and might, extinct: for that was past; all past: heard
+a voice say, &lsquo;Some tokens of its ancient rule and some consoling
+reasons for its downfall, may be traced here, yet!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms, communicating
+with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a lofty bridge crossing
+a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs.<br>
+<br>
+But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions&rsquo;
+mouths - now toothless - where, in the distempered horror of my sleep,
+I thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had
+been dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark.&nbsp; So,
+when I saw the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination,
+and the door by which they passed out, when they were condemned - a
+door that never closed upon a man with life and hope before him - my
+heart appeared to die within me.<br>
+<br>
+It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, I descended from
+the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful,
+horrible stone cells.&nbsp; They were quite dark.&nbsp; Each had a loop-hole
+in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was
+placed - I dreamed - to light the prisoner within, for half an hour.&nbsp;
+The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and
+cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults.&nbsp; I saw them.&nbsp; For
+their labour with a rusty nail&rsquo;s point, had outlived their agony
+and them, through many generations.<br>
+<br>
+One cell, I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty
+hours; being marked for dead before he entered it.&nbsp; Hard by, another,
+and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came - a monk
+brown-robed, and hooded - ghastly in the day, and free bright air, but
+in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope&rsquo;s extinguisher, and
+Murder&rsquo;s herald.&nbsp; I had my foot upon the spot, where, at
+the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck
+my hand upon the guilty door - low-browed and stealthy - through which
+the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned
+where it was death to cast a net.<br>
+<br>
+Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking the
+rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime within: stuffing
+dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as if the very stones
+and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a smooth road for the removal
+of the bodies of the secret victims of the State - a road so ready that
+it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel officer -
+flowed the same water that filled this Dream of mine, and made it seem
+one, even at the time.<br>
+<br>
+Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the Giant&rsquo;s
+- I had some imaginary recollection of an old man abdicating, coming,
+more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he heard the bell, proclaiming
+his successor - I glided off, in one of the dark boats, until we came
+to an old arsenal guarded by four marble lions.&nbsp; To make my Dream
+more monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon
+its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown language;
+so that their purport was a mystery to all men.<br>
+<br>
+There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships,
+and little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no more,
+as I have said.&nbsp; Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found drifting
+on the sea; a strange flag hoisted in its honourable stations, and strangers
+standing at its helm.&nbsp; A splendid barge in which its ancient chief
+had gone forth, pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay
+here, I thought, no more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model,
+made from recollection like the city&rsquo;s greatness; and it told
+of what had been (so are the strong and weak confounded in the dust)
+almost as eloquently as the massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to
+overshadow stately ships that had no other shadow now, upon the water
+or the earth.<br>
+<br>
+An armoury was there yet.&nbsp; Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury.&nbsp;
+With a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull air
+of its cage.&nbsp; Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were hoarded
+there; crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears; swords,
+daggers, maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes.&nbsp; Plates of wrought
+steel and iron, to make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales;
+and one spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to
+do its office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned darts.<br>
+<br>
+One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly
+contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men&rsquo;s bones,
+and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths.&nbsp;
+Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close
+up tight and smooth upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened
+on to each, was a small knob or anvil, where the directing devil could
+repose his elbow at his ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to
+the lamentations and confessions of the wretch within.&nbsp; There was
+that grim resemblance in them to the human shape - they were such moulds
+of sweating faces, pained and cramped - that it was difficult to think
+them empty; and terrible distortions lingering within them, seemed to
+follow me, when, taking to my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden
+or public walk in the sea, where there were grass and trees.&nbsp; But
+I forgot them when I stood upon its farthest brink - I stood there,
+in my dream - and looked, along the ripple, to the setting sun; before
+me, in the sky and on the deep, a crimson flush; and behind me the whole
+city resolving into streaks of red and purple, on the water.<br>
+<br>
+In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of
+time, and had but little understanding of its flight.&nbsp; But there
+were days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the
+rays of lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat,
+I thought: plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings
+of the tide, as my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.<br>
+<br>
+Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I wandered
+on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through labyrinths of rich
+altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments where the furniture, half
+awful, half grotesque, was mouldering away.&nbsp; Pictures were there,
+replete with such enduring beauty and expression: with such passion,
+truth and power: that they seemed so many young and fresh realities
+among a host of spectres.&nbsp; I thought these, often intermingled
+with the old days of the city: with its beauties, tyrants, captains,
+patriots, merchants, counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and
+bricks, and public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the
+walls.&nbsp; Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water
+lapped and oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again,
+and went on in my dream.<br>
+<br>
+Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane and
+chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon the water,
+where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap.&nbsp;
+Past open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through
+which some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual
+shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves.&nbsp; Past quays
+and terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and repassing,
+and where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and
+on flights of steps.&nbsp; Past bridges, where there were idlers too;
+loitering and looking over.&nbsp; Below stone balconies, erected at
+a giddy height, before the loftiest windows of the loftiest houses.&nbsp;
+Past plots of garden, theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of architecture
+- Gothic - Saracenic - fanciful with all the fancies of all times and
+countries.&nbsp; Past buildings that were high, and low, and black,
+and white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.&nbsp;
+Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at
+last into a Grand Canal!&nbsp; There, in the errant fancy of my dream,
+I saw old Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with
+shops and humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for
+Desdemona&rsquo;s, leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower.&nbsp;
+And, in the dream, I thought that Shakespeare&rsquo;s spirit was abroad
+upon the water somewhere: stealing through the city.<br>
+<br>
+At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin,
+in a gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that
+the great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light, and
+that its whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting
+themselves in splendid coffee-houses opening from it - which were never
+shut, I thought, but open all night long.&nbsp; When the bronze giants
+struck the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation
+of the city were all centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the
+silent quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping
+boatmen wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the
+stones.<br>
+<br>
+But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking
+at their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town: crept
+the water always.&nbsp; Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and round
+it, in its many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the time, I
+thought, when people should look down into its depths for any stone
+of the old city that had claimed to be its mistress.<br>
+<br>
+Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona.&nbsp;
+I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this strange Dream upon
+the water: half-wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be VENICE.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VIII - BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE
+SIMPLON INTO SWITZERLAND<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I had been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me
+out of conceit with Romeo and Juliet.&nbsp; But, I was no sooner come
+into the old market-place, than the misgiving vanished.&nbsp; It is
+so fanciful, quaint, and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary
+and rich variety of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing
+better at the core of even this romantic town: scene of one of the most
+romantic and beautiful of stories.<br>
+<br>
+It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the
+House of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little
+inn.&nbsp; Noisy vettur&iacute;ni and muddy market-carts were disputing
+possession of the yard, which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of
+splashed and bespattered geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously
+panting in a doorway, who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg,
+the moment he put it over the wall, if he had existed and been at large
+in those times.&nbsp; The orchard fell into other hands, and was parted
+off many years ago; but there used to be one attached to the house -
+or at all events there may have, been, - and the hat (Capp&ecirc;llo)
+the ancient cognizance of the family, may still be seen, carved in stone,
+over the gateway of the yard.&nbsp; The geese, the market-carts, their
+drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the way of the story, it must
+be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter to have found the house
+empty, and to have been able to walk through the disused rooms.&nbsp;
+But the hat was unspeakably comfortable; and the place where the garden
+used to be, hardly less so.&nbsp; Besides, the house is a distrustful,
+jealous-looking house as one would desire to see, though of a very moderate
+size.&nbsp; So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable mansion
+of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my acknowledgments
+to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the Padrona of the Hotel,
+who was lounging on the threshold looking at the geese; and who at least
+resembled the Capulets in the one particular of being very great indeed
+in the &lsquo;Family&rsquo; way.<br>
+<br>
+From Juliet&rsquo;s home, to Juliet&rsquo;s tomb, is a transition as
+natural to the visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest
+Juliet that ever has taught the torches to burn bright in any time.&nbsp;
+So, I went off, with a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging
+to an old, old convent, I suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered
+gate, by a bright-eyed woman who was washing clothes, went down some
+walks where fresh plants and young flowers were prettily growing among
+fragments of old wall, and ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown a little
+tank, or water-trough, which the bright-eyed woman - drying her arms
+upon her &lsquo;kerchief, called &lsquo;La tomba di Giulietta la sfortun&aacute;ta.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+With the best disposition in the world to believe, I could do no more
+than believe that the bright-eyed woman believed; so I gave her that
+much credit, and her customary fee in ready money.&nbsp; It was a pleasure,
+rather than a disappointment, that Juliet&rsquo;s resting-place was
+forgotten.&nbsp; However consolatory it may have been to Yorick&rsquo;s
+Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and, twenty times
+a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet to lie out
+of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as come to
+graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.<br>
+<br>
+Pleasant Verona!&nbsp; With its beautiful old palaces, and charming
+country in the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded
+galleries.&nbsp; With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street,
+and casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred
+years ago.&nbsp; With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich
+architecture, and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues
+and Capulets once resounded,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And made Verona&rsquo;s ancient citizens<br>
+Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,<br>
+To wield old partizans.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving
+cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful!&nbsp; Pleasant
+Verona!<br>
+<br>
+In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Br&aacute; - a spirit of old time
+among the familiar realities of the passing hour - is the great Roman
+Amphitheatre.&nbsp; So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that
+every row of seats is there, unbroken.&nbsp; Over certain of the arches,
+the old Roman numerals may yet be seen; and there are corridors, and
+staircases, and subterranean passages for beasts, and winding ways,
+above ground and below, as when the fierce thousands hurried in and
+out, intent upon the bloody shows of the arena.&nbsp; Nestling in some
+of the shadows and hollow places of the walls, now, are smiths with
+their forges, and a few small dealers of one kind or other; and there
+are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the parapet.&nbsp; But
+little else is greatly changed.<br>
+<br>
+When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone
+up to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama
+closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed
+to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw,
+with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being
+represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats.&nbsp; The comparison
+is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but
+it was irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless.<br>
+<br>
+An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before - the same troop,
+I dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at Modena -
+and had scooped out a little ring at one end of the area; where their
+performances had taken place, and where the marks of their horses&rsquo;
+feet were still fresh.&nbsp; I could not but picture to myself, a handful
+of spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone seats,
+and a spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with
+the grim walls looking on.&nbsp; Above all, I thought how strangely
+those Roman mutes would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling
+English, where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach:
+dressed in a blue-tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches,
+and a white hat: comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with
+an English lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a
+red spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up
+parasol.<br>
+<br>
+I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and could
+have walked there until now, I think.&nbsp; In one place, there was
+a very pretty modern theatre, where they had just performed the opera
+(always popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet.&nbsp; In another there
+was a collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains,
+presided over by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic
+himself; for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he
+had unlocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he
+described the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them: he was so very
+old.&nbsp; In another place, there was a gallery of pictures: so abominably
+bad, that it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away.&nbsp;
+But anywhere: in the churches, among the palaces, in the streets, on
+the bridge, or down beside the river: it was always pleasant Verona,
+and in my remembrance always will be.<br>
+<br>
+I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night - of course,
+no Englishman had ever read it there, before - and set out for Mantua
+next day at sunrise, repeating to myself (in the <i>coup&eacute;</i>
+of an omnibus, and next to the conductor, who was reading the Mysteries
+of Paris),<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is no world without Verona&rsquo;s walls<br>
+But purgatory, torture, hell itself.<br>
+Hence-banished is banished from the world,<br>
+And world&rsquo;s exile is death -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty miles
+after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy and boldness.<br>
+<br>
+Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I wonder!&nbsp; Did
+it wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing
+streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees!&nbsp; Those
+purple mountains lay on the horizon, then, for certain; and the dresses
+of these peasant girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an
+English &lsquo;life-preserver&rsquo; through their hair behind, can
+hardly be much changed.&nbsp; The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning,
+and so exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger, even to an exiled
+lover&rsquo;s breast; and Mantua itself must have broken on him in the
+prospect, with its towers, and walls, and water, pretty much as on a
+commonplace and matrimonial omnibus.&nbsp; He made the same sharp twists
+and turns, perhaps, over two rumbling drawbridges; passed through the
+like long, covered, wooden bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind,
+approached the rusty gate of stagnant Mantua.<br>
+<br>
+If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place of
+residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a
+perfect fitness of things.&nbsp; It may have been more stirring then,
+perhaps.&nbsp; If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his time,
+and knew what Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-four.&nbsp;
+He fasted much, and that assisted him in his foreknowledge.<br>
+<br>
+I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room arranging
+plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest little tap at
+the door, which opened on an outer gallery surrounding a court-yard;
+and an intensely shabby little man looked in, to inquire if the gentleman
+would have a Cicerone to show the town.&nbsp; His face was so very wistful
+and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there was so much poverty
+expressed in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in the thread-bare
+worsted glove with which he held it - not expressed the less, because
+these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped on - that
+I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him.&nbsp; I engaged
+him on the instant, and he stepped in directly.<br>
+<br>
+While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood, beaming
+by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing my hat with his arm.&nbsp;
+If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was francs, there could
+not have shot over the twilight of his shabbiness such a gleam of sun,
+as lighted up the whole man, now that he was hired.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well!&rsquo; said I, when I was ready, &lsquo;shall we go out
+now?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If the gentleman pleases.&nbsp; It is a beautiful day.&nbsp;
+A little fresh, but charming; altogether charming.&nbsp; The gentleman
+will allow me to open the door.&nbsp; This is the Inn Yard.&nbsp; The
+court-yard of the Golden Lion!&nbsp; The gentleman will please to mind
+his footing on the stairs.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+We were now in the street.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;This is the street of the Golden Lion.&nbsp; This, the outside
+of the Golden Lion.&nbsp; The interesting window up there, on the first
+Piano, where the pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman&rsquo;s
+chamber!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there were
+much to see in Mantua.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well!&nbsp; Truly, no.&nbsp; Not much!&nbsp; So, so,&rsquo; he
+said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Many churches?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No.&nbsp; Nearly all suppressed by the French.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Monasteries or convents?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No.&nbsp; The French again!&nbsp; Nearly all suppressed by Napoleon.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Much business?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Very little business.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Many strangers?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ah Heaven!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I thought he would have fainted.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Then, when we have seen the two large churches yonder, what shall
+we do next?&rsquo; said I.<br>
+<br>
+He looked up the street, and down the street, and rubbed his chin timidly;
+and then said, glancing in my face as if a light had broken on his mind,
+yet with a humble appeal to my forbearance that was perfectly irresistible:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;We can take a little turn about the town, Signore!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+(Si pu&ograve; far &lsquo;un p&iacute;ccolo g&iacute;ro della citta).<br>
+<br>
+It was impossible to be anything but delighted with the proposal, so
+we set off together in great good-humour.&nbsp; In the relief of his
+mind, he opened his heart, and gave up as much of Mantua as a Cicerone
+could.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;One must eat,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;but, bah! it was a dull
+place, without doubt!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He made as much as possible of the Basilica of Santa Andrea - a noble
+church - and of an inclosed portion of the pavement, about which tapers
+were burning, and a few people kneeling, and under which is said to
+be preserved the Sangreal of the old Romances.&nbsp; This church disposed
+of, and another after it (the cathedral of San Pietro), we went to the
+Museum, which was shut up.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was all the same,&rsquo;
+he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Bah!&nbsp; There was not much inside!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Then, we went to see the Piazza del Diavolo, built by the Devil (for
+no particular purpose) in a single night; then, the Piazza Virgiliana;
+then, the statue of Virgil - <i>our</i> Poet, my little friend said,
+plucking up a spirit, for the moment, and putting his hat a little on
+one side.&nbsp; Then, we went to a dismal sort of farm-yard, by which
+a picture-gallery was approached.&nbsp; The moment the gate of this
+retreat was opened, some five hundred geese came waddling round us,
+stretching out their necks, and clamouring in the most hideous manner,
+as if they were ejaculating, &lsquo;Oh! here&rsquo;s somebody come to
+see the Pictures!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t go up!&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t go up!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+While we went up, they waited very quietly about the door in a crowd,
+cackling to one another occasionally, in a subdued tone; but the instant
+we appeared again, their necks came out like telescopes, and setting
+up a great noise, which meant, I have no doubt, &lsquo;What, you would
+go, would you!&nbsp; What do you think of it!&nbsp; How do you like
+it!&rsquo; they attended us to the outer gate, and cast us forth, derisively,
+into Mantua.<br>
+<br>
+The geese who saved the Capitol, were, as compared to these, Pork to
+the learned Pig.&nbsp; What a gallery it was!&nbsp; I would take their
+opinion on a question of art, in preference to the discourses of Sir
+Joshua Reynolds.<br>
+<br>
+Now that we were standing in the street, after being thus ignominiouly
+escorted thither, my little friend was plainly reduced to the &lsquo;p&iacute;ccolo
+g&iacute;ro,&rsquo; or little circuit of the town, he had formerly proposed.&nbsp;
+But my suggestion that we should visit the Palazzo T&egrave; (of which
+I had heard a great deal, as a strange wild place) imparted new life
+to him, and away we went.<br>
+<br>
+The secret of the length of Midas&rsquo;s ears, would have been more
+extensively known, if that servant of his, who whispered it to the reeds,
+had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and rushes enough to have
+published it to all the world.&nbsp; The Palazzo T&egrave; stands in
+a swamp, among this sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular
+a place as I ever saw.<br>
+<br>
+Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary.&nbsp; Not for its
+dampness, though it is very damp.&nbsp; Nor for its desolate condition,
+though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be.&nbsp; But chiefly
+for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior has been decorated
+(among other subjects of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano.&nbsp;
+There is a leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are
+dozens of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another
+room, so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how
+any man can have imagined such creatures.&nbsp; In the chamber in which
+they abound, these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks,
+and every kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering
+under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the
+ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath; vainly
+striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple down upon
+their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every kind of mad
+and demoniacal destruction.&nbsp; The figures are immensely large, and
+exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the colouring is harsh
+and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like (I should imagine)
+a violent rush of blood to the head of the spectator, than any real
+picture set before him by the hand of an artist.&nbsp; This apoplectic
+performance was shown by a sickly-looking woman, whose appearance was
+referable, I dare say, to the bad air of the marshes; but it was difficult
+to help feeling as if she were too much haunted by the Giants, and they
+were frightening her to death, all alone in that exhausted cistern of
+a Palace, among the reeds and rushes, with the mists hovering about
+outside, and stalking round and round it continually.<br>
+<br>
+Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some suppressed
+church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at all: all as crazy
+and dismantled as they could be, short of tumbling down bodily.&nbsp;
+The marshy town was so intensely dull and flat, that the dirt upon it
+seemed not to have come there in the ordinary course, but to have settled
+and mantled on its surface as on standing water.&nbsp; And yet there
+were some business-dealings going on, and some profits realising; for
+there were arcades full of Jews, where those extraordinary people were
+sitting outside their shops, contemplating their stores of stuffs, and
+woollens, and bright handkerchiefs, and trinkets: and looking, in all
+respects, as wary and business-like, as their brethren in Houndsditch,
+London.<br>
+<br>
+Having selected a Vettur&iacute;no from among the neighbouring Christians,
+who agreed to carry us to Milan in two days and a half, and to start,
+next morning, as soon as the gates were opened, I returned to the Golden
+Lion, and dined luxuriously in my own room, in a narrow passage between
+two bedsteads: confronted by a smoky fire, and backed up by a chest
+of drawers.&nbsp; At six o&rsquo;clock next morning, we were jingling
+in the dark through the wet cold mist that enshrouded the town; and,
+before noon, the driver (a native of Mantua, and sixty years of age
+or thereabouts) began <i>to ask the</i> <i>way</i> to Milan.<br>
+<br>
+It lay through Bozzolo; formerly a little republic, and now one of the
+most deserted and poverty-stricken of towns: where the landlord of the
+miserable inn (God bless him! it was his weekly custom) was distributing
+infinitesimal coins among a clamorous herd of women and children, whose
+rags were fluttering in the wind and rain outside his door, where they
+were gathered to receive his charity.&nbsp; It lay through mist, and
+mud, and rain, and vines trained low upon the ground, all that day and
+the next; the first sleeping-place being Cremona, memorable for its
+dark brick churches, and immensely high tower, the Torrazzo - to say
+nothing of its violins, of which it certainly produces none in these
+degenerate days; and the second, Lodi.&nbsp; Then we went on, through
+more mud, mist, and rain, and marshy ground: and through such a fog,
+as Englishmen, strong in the faith of their own grievances, are apt
+to believe is nowhere to be found but in their own country, until we
+entered the paved streets of Milan.<br>
+<br>
+The fog was so dense here, that the spire of the far-famed Cathedral
+might as well have been at Bombay, for anything that could be seen of
+it at that time.&nbsp; But as we halted to refresh, for a few days then,
+and returned to Milan again next summer, I had ample opportunities of
+seeing the glorious structure in all its majesty and beauty.<br>
+<br>
+All Christian homage to the saint who lies within it!&nbsp; There are
+many good and true saints in the calendar, but San Carlo Borromeo has
+- if I may quote Mrs. Primrose on such a subject - &lsquo;my warm heart.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+A charitable doctor to the sick, a munificent friend to the poor, and
+this, not in any spirit of blind bigotry, but as the bold opponent of
+enormous abuses in the Romish church, I honour his memory.&nbsp; I honour
+it none the less, because he was nearly slain by a priest, suborned,
+by priests, to murder him at the altar: in acknowledgment of his endeavours
+to reform a false and hypocritical brotherhood of monks.&nbsp; Heaven
+shield all imitators of San Carlo Borromeo as it shielded him!&nbsp;
+A reforming Pope would need a little shielding, even now.<br>
+<br>
+The subterranean chapel in which the body of San Carlo Borromeo is preserved,
+presents as striking and as ghastly a contrast, perhaps, as any place
+can show.&nbsp; The tapers which are lighted down there, flash and gleam
+on alti-rilievi in gold and silver, delicately wrought by skilful hands,
+and representing the principal events in the life of the saint.&nbsp;
+Jewels, and precious metals, shine and sparkle on every side.&nbsp;
+A windlass slowly removes the front of the altar; and, within it, in
+a gorgeous shrine of gold and silver, is seen, through alabaster, the
+shrivelled mummy of a man: the pontifical robes with which it is adorned,
+radiant with diamonds, emeralds, rubies: every costly and magnificent
+gem.&nbsp; The shrunken heap of poor earth in the midst of this great
+glitter, is more pitiful than if it lay upon a dung-hill.&nbsp; There
+is not a ray of imprisoned light in all the flash and fire of jewels,
+but seems to mock the dusty holes where eyes were, once.&nbsp; Every
+thread of silk in the rich vestments seems only a provision from the
+worms that spin, for the behoof of worms that propagate in sepulchres.<br>
+<br>
+In the old refectory of the dilapidated Convent of Santa Maria delle
+Grazie, is the work of art, perhaps, better known than any other in
+the world: the Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci - with a door cut through
+it by the intelligent Dominican friars, to facilitate their operations
+at dinner-time.<br>
+<br>
+I am not mechanically acquainted with the art of painting, and have
+no other means of judging of a picture than as I see it resembling and
+refining upon nature, and presenting graceful combinations of forms
+and colours.&nbsp; I am, therefore, no authority whatever, in reference
+to the &lsquo;touch&rsquo; of this or that master; though I know very
+well (as anybody may, who chooses to think about the matter) that few
+very great masters can possibly have painted, in the compass of their
+lives, one-half of the pictures that bear their names, and that are
+recognised by many aspirants to a reputation for taste, as undoubted
+originals.&nbsp; But this, by the way.&nbsp; Of the Last Supper, I would
+simply observe, that in its beautiful composition and arrangement, there
+it is, at Milan, a wonderful picture; and that, in its original colouring,
+or in its original expression of any single face or feature, there it
+is not.&nbsp; Apart from the damage it has sustained from damp, decay,
+or neglect, it has been (as Barry shows) so retouched upon, and repainted,
+and that so clumsily, that many of the heads are, now, positive deformities,
+with patches of paint and plaster sticking upon them like wens, and
+utterly distorting the expression.&nbsp; Where the original artist set
+that impress of his genius on a face, which, almost in a line or touch,
+separated him from meaner painters and made him what he was, succeeding
+bunglers, filling up, or painting across seams and cracks, have been
+quite unable to imitate his hand; and putting in some scowls, or frowns,
+or wrinkles, of their own, have blotched and spoiled the work.&nbsp;
+This is so well established as an historical fact, that I should not
+repeat it, at the risk of being tedious, but for having observed an
+English gentleman before the picture, who was at great pains to fall
+into what I may describe as mild convulsions, at certain minute details
+of expression which are not left in it.&nbsp; Whereas, it would be comfortable
+and rational for travellers and critics to arrive at a general understanding
+that it cannot fail to have been a work of extraordinary merit, once:
+when, with so few of its original beauties remaining, the grandeur of
+the general design is yet sufficient to sustain it, as a piece replete
+with interest and dignity.<br>
+<br>
+We achieved the other sights of Milan, in due course, and a fine city
+it is, though not so unmistakably Italian as to possess the characteristic
+qualities of many towns far less important in themselves.&nbsp; The
+Corso, where the Milanese gentry ride up and down in carriages, and
+rather than not do which, they would half starve themselves at home,
+is a most noble public promenade, shaded by long avenues of trees.&nbsp;
+In the splendid theatre of La Scala, there was a ballet of action performed
+after the opera, under the title of Prometheus: in the beginning of
+which, some hundred or two of men and women represented our mortal race
+before the refinements of the arts and sciences, and loves and graces,
+came on earth to soften them.&nbsp; I never saw anything more effective.&nbsp;
+Generally speaking, the pantomimic action of the Italians is more remarkable
+for its sudden and impetuous character than for its delicate expression,
+but, in this case, the drooping monotony: the weary, miserable, listless,
+moping life: the sordid passions and desires of human creatures, destitute
+of those elevating influences to which we owe so much, and to whose
+promoters we render so little: were expressed in a manner really powerful
+and affecting.&nbsp; I should have thought it almost impossible to present
+such an idea so strongly on the stage, without the aid of speech.<br>
+<br>
+Milan soon lay behind us, at five o&rsquo;clock in the morning; and
+before the golden statue on the summit of the cathedral spire was lost
+in the blue sky, the Alps, stupendously confused in lofty peaks and
+ridges, clouds and snow, were towering in our path.<br>
+<br>
+Still, we continued to advance toward them until nightfall; and, all
+day long, the mountain tops presented strangely shifting shapes, as
+the road displayed them in different points of view.&nbsp; The beautiful
+day was just declining, when we came upon the Lago Maggiore, with its
+lovely islands.&nbsp; For however fanciful and fantastic the Isola Bella
+may be, and is, it still is beautiful.&nbsp; Anything springing out
+of that blue water, with that scenery around it, must be.<br>
+<br>
+It was ten o&rsquo;clock at night when we got to Domo d&rsquo;Ossola,
+at the foot of the Pass of the Simplon.&nbsp; But as the moon was shining
+brightly, and there was not a cloud in the starlit sky, it was no time
+for going to bed, or going anywhere but on.&nbsp; So, we got a little
+carriage, after some delay, and began the ascent.<br>
+<br>
+It was late in November; and the snow lying four or five feet thick
+in the beaten road on the summit (in other parts the new drift was already
+deep), the air was piercing cold.&nbsp; But, the serenity of the night,
+and the grandeur of the road, with its impenetrable shadows, and deep
+glooms, and its sudden turns into the shining of the moon and its incessant
+roar of falling water, rendered the journey more and more sublime at
+every step.<br>
+<br>
+Soon leaving the calm Italian villages below us, sleeping in the moonlight,
+the road began to wind among dark trees, and after a time emerged upon
+a barer region, very steep and toilsome, where the moon shone bright
+and high.&nbsp; By degrees, the roar of water grew louder; and the stupendous
+track, after crossing the torrent by a bridge, struck in between two
+massive perpendicular walls of rock that quite shut out the moonlight,
+and only left a few stars shining in the narrow strip of sky above.&nbsp;
+Then, even this was lost, in the thick darkness of a cavern in the rock,
+through which the way was pierced; the terrible cataract thundering
+and roaring close below it, and its foam and spray hanging, in a mist,
+about the entrance.&nbsp; Emerging from this cave, and coming again
+into the moonlight, and across a dizzy bridge, it crept and twisted
+upward, through the Gorge of Gondo, savage and grand beyond description,
+with smooth-fronted precipices, rising up on either hand, and almost
+meeting overhead.&nbsp; Thus we went, climbing on our rugged way, higher
+and higher all night, without a moment&rsquo;s weariness: lost in the
+contemplation of the black rocks, the tremendous heights and depths,
+the fields of smooth snow lying, in the clefts and hollows, and the
+fierce torrents thundering headlong down the deep abyss.<br>
+<br>
+Towards daybreak, we came among the snow, where a keen wind was blowing
+fiercely.&nbsp; Having, with some trouble, awakened the inmates of a
+wooden house in this solitude: round which the wind was howling dismally,
+catching up the snow in wreaths and hurling it away: we got some breakfast
+in a room built of rough timbers, but well warmed by a stove, and well
+contrived (as it had need to be) for keeping out the bitter storms.&nbsp;
+A sledge being then made ready, and four horses harnessed to it, we
+went, ploughing, through the snow.&nbsp; Still upward, but now in the
+cold light of morning, and with the great white desert on which we travelled,
+plain and clear.<br>
+<br>
+We were well upon the summit of the mountain: and had before us the
+rude cross of wood, denoting its greatest altitude above the sea: when
+the light of the rising sun, struck, all at once, upon the waste of
+snow, and turned it a deep red.&nbsp; The lonely grandeur of the scene
+was then at its height.<br>
+<br>
+As we went sledging on, there came out of the Hospice founded by Napoleon,
+a group of Peasant travellers, with staves and knapsacks, who had rested
+there last night: attended by a Monk or two, their hospitable entertainers,
+trudging slowly forward with them, for company&rsquo;s sake.&nbsp; It
+was pleasant to give them good morning, and pretty, looking back a long
+way after them, to see them looking back at us, and hesitating presently,
+when one of our horses stumbled and fell, whether or no they should
+return and help us.&nbsp; But he was soon up again, with the assistance
+of a rough waggoner whose team had stuck fast there too; and when we
+had helped him out of his difficulty, in return, we left him slowly
+ploughing towards them, and went slowly and swiftly forward, on the
+brink of a steep precipice, among the mountain pines.<br>
+<br>
+Taking to our wheels again, soon afterwards, we began rapidly to descend;
+passing under everlasting glaciers, by means of arched galleries, hung
+with clusters of dripping icicles; under and over foaming waterfalls;
+near places of refuge, and galleries of shelter against sudden danger;
+through caverns over whose arched roofs the avalanches slide, in spring,
+and bury themselves in the unknown gulf beneath.&nbsp; Down, over lofty
+bridges, and through horrible ravines: a little shifting speck in the
+vast desolation of ice and snow, and monstrous granite rocks; down through
+the deep Gorge of the Saltine, and deafened by the torrent plunging
+madly down, among the riven blocks of rock, into the level country,
+far below.&nbsp; Gradually down, by zig-zag roads, lying between an
+upward and a downward precipice, into warmer weather, calmer air, and
+softer scenery, until there lay before us, glittering like gold or silver
+in the thaw and sunshine, the metal-covered, red, green, yellow, domes
+and church-spires of a Swiss town.<br>
+<br>
+The business of these recollections being with Italy, and my business,
+consequently, being to scamper back thither as fast as possible, I will
+not recall (though I am sorely tempted) how the Swiss villages, clustered
+at the feet of Giant mountains, looked like playthings; or how confusedly
+the houses were heaped and piled together; or how there were very narrow
+streets to shut the howling winds out in the winter-time; and broken
+bridges, which the impetuous torrents, suddenly released in spring,
+had swept away.&nbsp; Or how there were peasant women here, with great
+round fur caps: looking, when they peeped out of casements and only
+their heads were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to the Lord
+Mayor of London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the smooth lake
+of Geneva, was beautiful to see; or how the statue of Saint Peter in
+the street at Fribourg, grasps the largest key that ever was beheld;
+or how Fribourg is illustrious for its two suspension bridges, and its
+grand cathedral organ.<br>
+<br>
+Or how, between that town and B&acirc;le, the road meandered among thriving
+villages of wooden cottages, with overhanging thatched roofs, and low
+protruding windows, glazed with small round panes of glass like crown-pieces;
+or how, in every little Swiss homestead, with its cart or waggon carefully
+stowed away beside the house, its little garden, stock of poultry, and
+groups of red-cheeked children, there was an air of comfort, very new
+and very pleasant after Italy; or how the dresses of the women changed
+again, and there were no more sword-bearers to be seen; and fair white
+stomachers, and great black, fan-shaped, gauzy-looking caps, prevailed
+instead.<br>
+<br>
+Or how the country by the Jura mountains, sprinkled with snow, and lighted
+by the moon, and musical with falling water, was delightful; or how,
+below the windows of the great hotel of the Three Kings at B&acirc;le,
+the swollen Rhine ran fast and green; or how, at Strasbourg, it was
+quite as fast but not as green: and was said to be foggy lower down:
+and, at that late time of the year, was a far less certain means of
+progress, than the highway road to Paris.<br>
+<br>
+Or how Strasbourg itself, in its magnificent old Gothic Cathedral, and
+its ancient houses with their peaked roofs and gables, made a little
+gallery of quaint and interesting views; or how a crowd was gathered
+inside the cathedral at noon, to see the famous mechanical clock in
+motion, striking twelve.&nbsp; How, when it struck twelve, a whole army
+of puppets went through many ingenious evolutions; and, among them,
+a huge puppet-cock, perched on the top, crowed twelve times, loud and
+clear.&nbsp; Or how it was wonderful to see this cock at great pains
+to clap its wings, and strain its throat; but obviously having no connection
+whatever with its own voice; which was deep within the clock, a long
+way down.<br>
+<br>
+Or how the road to Paris, was one sea of mud, and thence to the coast,
+a little better for a hard frost.&nbsp; Or how the cliffs of Dover were
+a pleasant sight, and England was so wonderfully neat - though dark,
+and lacking colour on a winter&rsquo;s day, it must be conceded.<br>
+<br>
+Or how, a few days afterwards, it was cool, re-crossing the channel,
+with ice upon the decks, and snow lying pretty deep in France.&nbsp;
+Or how the Malle Poste scrambled through the snow, headlong, drawn in
+the hilly parts by any number of stout horses at a canter; or how there
+were, outside the Post-office Yard in Paris, before daybreak, extraordinary
+adventurers in heaps of rags, groping in the snowy streets with little
+rakes, in search of odds and ends.<br>
+<br>
+Or how, between Paris and Marseilles, the snow being then exceeding
+deep, a thaw came on, and the mail waded rather than rolled for the
+next three hundred miles or so; breaking springs on Sunday nights, and
+putting out its two passengers to warm and refresh themselves pending
+the repairs, in miserable billiard-rooms, where hairy company, collected
+about stoves, were playing cards; the cards being very like themselves
+- extremely limp and dirty.<br>
+<br>
+Or how there was detention at Marseilles from stress of weather; and
+steamers were advertised to go, which did not go; or how the good Steam-packet
+Charlemagne at length put out, and met such weather that now she threatened
+to run into Toulon, and now into Nice, but, the wind moderating, did
+neither, but ran on into Genoa harbour instead, where the familiar Bells
+rang sweetly in my ear.&nbsp; Or how there was a travelling party on
+board, of whom one member was very ill in the cabin next to mine, and
+being ill was cross, and therefore declined to give up the Dictionary,
+which he kept under his pillow; thereby obliging his companions to come
+down to him, constantly, to ask what was the Italian for a lump of sugar
+- a glass of brandy and water - what&rsquo;s o&rsquo;clock? and so forth:
+which he always insisted on looking out, with his own sea-sick eyes,
+declining to entrust the book to any man alive.<br>
+<br>
+Like GRUMIO, I might have told you, in detail, all this and something
+more - but to as little purpose - were I not deterred by the remembrance
+that my business is with Italy.&nbsp; Therefore, like GRUMIO&rsquo;S
+story, &lsquo;it shall die in oblivion.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IX - TO ROME BY PISA AND SIENA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is nothing in Italy, more beautiful to me, than the coast-road
+between Genoa and Spezzia.&nbsp; On one side: sometimes far below, sometimes
+nearly on a level with the road, and often skirted by broken rocks of
+many shapes: there is the free blue sea, with here and there a picturesque
+felucca gliding slowly on; on the other side are lofty hills, ravines
+besprinkled with white cottages, patches of dark olive woods, country
+churches with their light open towers, and country houses gaily painted.&nbsp;
+On every bank and knoll by the wayside, the wild cactus and aloe flourish
+in exuberant profusion; and the gardens of the bright villages along
+the road, are seen, all blushing in the summer-time with clusters of
+the Belladonna, and are fragrant in the autumn and winter with golden
+oranges and lemons.<br>
+<br>
+Some of the villages are inhabited, almost exclusively, by fishermen;
+and it is pleasant to see their great boats hauled up on the beach,
+making little patches of shade, where they lie asleep, or where the
+women and children sit romping and looking out to sea, while they mend
+their nets upon the shore.&nbsp; There is one town, Camoglia, with its
+little harbour on the sea, hundreds of feet below the road; where families
+of mariners live, who, time out of mind, have owned coasting-vessels
+in that place, and have traded to Spain and elsewhere.&nbsp; Seen from
+the road above, it is like a tiny model on the margin of the dimpled
+water, shining in the sun.&nbsp; Descended into, by the winding mule-tracks,
+it is a perfect miniature of a primitive seafaring town; the saltest,
+roughest, most piratical little place that ever was seen.&nbsp; Great
+rusty iron rings and mooring-chains, capstans, and fragments of old
+masts and spars, choke up the way; hardy rough-weather boats, and seamen&rsquo;s
+clothing, flutter in the little harbour or are drawn out on the sunny
+stones to dry; on the parapet of the rude pier, a few amphibious-looking
+fellows lie asleep, with their legs dangling over the wall, as though
+earth or water were all one to them, and if they slipped in, they would
+float away, dozing comfortably among the fishes; the church is bright
+with trophies of the sea, and votive offerings, in commemoration of
+escape from storm and shipwreck.&nbsp; The dwellings not immediately
+abutting on the harbour are approached by blind low archways, and by
+crooked steps, as if in darkness and in difficulty of access they should
+be like holds of ships, or inconvenient cabins under water; and everywhere,
+there is a smell of fish, and sea-weed, and old rope.<br>
+<br>
+The coast-road whence Camoglia is descried so far below, is famous,
+in the warm season, especially in some parts near Genoa, for fire-flies.&nbsp;
+Walking there on a dark night, I have seen it made one sparkling firmament
+by these beautiful insects: so that the distant stars were pale against
+the flash and glitter that spangled every olive wood and hill-side,
+and pervaded the whole air.<br>
+<br>
+It was not in such a season, however, that we traversed this road on
+our way to Rome.&nbsp; The middle of January was only just past, and
+it was very gloomy and dark weather; very wet besides.&nbsp; In crossing
+the fine pass of Bracco, we encountered such a storm of mist and rain,
+that we travelled in a cloud the whole way.&nbsp; There might have been
+no Mediterranean in the world, for anything that we saw of it there,
+except when a sudden gust of wind, clearing the mist before it, for
+a moment, showed the agitated sea at a great depth below, lashing the
+distant rocks, and spouting up its foam furiously.&nbsp; The rain was
+incessant; every brook and torrent was greatly swollen; and such a deafening
+leaping, and roaring, and thundering of water, I never heard the like
+of in my life.<br>
+<br>
+Hence, when we came to Spezzia, we found that the Magra, an unbridged
+river on the high-road to Pisa, was too high to be safely crossed in
+the Ferry Boat, and were fain to wait until the afternoon of next day,
+when it had, in some degree, subsided.&nbsp; Spezzia, however, is a
+good place to tarry at; by reason, firstly, of its beautiful bay; secondly,
+of its ghostly Inn; thirdly, of the head-dress of the women, who wear,
+on one side of their head, a small doll&rsquo;s straw hat, stuck on
+to the hair; which is certainly the oddest and most roguish head-gear
+that ever was invented.<br>
+<br>
+The Magra safely crossed in the Ferry Boat - the passage is not by any
+means agreeable, when the current is swollen and strong - we arrived
+at Carrara, within a few hours.&nbsp; In good time next morning, we
+got some ponies, and went out to see the marble quarries.<br>
+<br>
+They are four or five great glens, running up into a range of lofty
+hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by being abruptly
+strangled by Nature.&nbsp; The quarries, &lsquo;or caves,&rsquo; as
+they call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills, on
+either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for marble:
+which may turn out good or bad: may make a man&rsquo;s fortune very
+quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working what is worth nothing.&nbsp;
+Some of these caves were opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as
+they left them to this hour.&nbsp; Many others are being worked at this
+moment; others are to be begun to-morrow, next week, next month; others
+are unbought, unthought of; and marble enough for more ages than have
+passed since the place was resorted to, lies hidden everywhere: patiently
+awaiting its time of discovery.<br>
+<br>
+As you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having left your
+pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down) you hear,
+every now and then, echoing among the hills, in a low tone, more silent
+than the previous silence, a melancholy warning bugle, - a signal to
+the miners to withdraw.&nbsp; Then, there is a thundering, and echoing
+from hill to hill, and perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of
+rock into the air; and on you toil again until some other bugle sounds,
+in a new direction, and you stop directly, lest you should come within
+the range of the new explosion.<br>
+<br>
+There were numbers of men, working high up in these hills - on the sides
+- clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone and earth,
+to make way for the blocks of marble that had been discovered.&nbsp;
+As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the narrow valley,
+I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen)
+where the Roc left Sindbad the Sailor; and where the merchants from
+the heights above, flung down great pieces of meat for the diamonds
+to stick to.&nbsp; There were no eagles here, to darken the sun in their
+swoop, and pounce upon them; but it was as wild and fierce as if there
+had been hundreds.<br>
+<br>
+But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense
+the blocks! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its institutions,
+pave that road: repair it, watch it, keep it going!&nbsp; Conceive a
+channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of
+stone of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of this valley;
+and <i>that</i> being the road - because it was the road five hundred
+years ago!&nbsp; Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago,
+being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be, five hundred
+years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death five hundred
+years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in twelve months, by
+the suffering and agony of this cruel work!&nbsp; Two pair, four pair,
+ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size; down it
+must come, this way.&nbsp; In their struggling from stone to stone,
+with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the
+spot; and not they alone; for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling
+down in their energy, are crushed to death beneath the wheels.&nbsp;
+But it was good five hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and
+a railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world)
+would be flat blasphemy.<br>
+<br>
+When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair of
+oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming down,
+I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke, to keep
+it on the neck of the poor beasts - and who faced backwards: not before
+him - as the very Devil of true despotism.&nbsp; He had a great rod
+in his hand, with an iron point; and when they could plough and force
+their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to
+a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed
+it round and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in
+the madness of intense pain; repeated all these persuasions, with increased
+intensity of purpose, when they stopped again; got them on, once more;
+forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent; and when
+their writhing and smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging
+down the precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above
+his head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved something,
+and had no idea that they might shake him off, and blindly mash his
+brains upon the road, in the noontide of his triumph.<br>
+<br>
+Standing in one of the many studii of Carrara, that afternoon - for
+it is a great workshop, full of beautifully-finished copies in marble,
+of almost every figure, group, and bust, we know - it seemed, at first,
+so strange to me that those exquisite shapes, replete with grace, and
+thought, and delicate repose, should grow out of all this toil, and
+sweat, and torture!&nbsp; But I soon found a parallel to it, and an
+explanation of it, in every virtue that springs up in miserable ground,
+and every good thing that has its birth in sorrow and distress.&nbsp;
+And, looking out of the sculptor&rsquo;s great window, upon the marble
+mountains, all red and glowing in the decline of day, but stern and
+solemn to the last, I thought, my God! how many quarries of human hearts
+and souls, capable of far more beautiful results, are left shut up and
+mouldering away: while pleasure-travellers through life, avert their
+faces, as they pass, and shudder at the gloom and ruggedness that conceal
+them!<br>
+<br>
+The then reigning Duke of Modena, to whom this territory in part belonged,
+claimed the proud distinction of being the only sovereign in Europe
+who had not recognised Louis-Philippe as King of the French!&nbsp; He
+was not a wag, but quite in earnest.&nbsp; He was also much opposed
+to railroads; and if certain lines in contemplation by other potentates,
+on either side of him, had been executed, would have probably enjoyed
+the satisfaction of having an omnibus plying to and fro across his not
+very vast dominions, to forward travellers from one terminus to another.<br>
+<br>
+Carrara, shut in by great hills, is very picturesque and bold.&nbsp;
+Few tourists stay there; and the people are nearly all connected, in
+one way or other, with the working of marble.&nbsp; There are also villages
+among the caves, where the workmen live.&nbsp; It contains a beautiful
+little Theatre, newly built; and it is an interesting custom there,
+to form the chorus of labourers in the marble quarries, who are self-taught
+and sing by ear.&nbsp; I heard them in a comic opera, and in an act
+of &lsquo;Norma;&rsquo; and they acquitted themselves very well; unlike
+the common people of Italy generally, who (with some exceptions among
+the Neapolitans) sing vilely out of tune, and have very disagreeable
+singing voices.<br>
+<br>
+From the summit of a lofty hill beyond Carrara, the first view of the
+fertile plain in which the town of Pisa lies - with Leghorn, a purple
+spot in the flat distance - is enchanting.&nbsp; Nor is it only distance
+that lends enchantment to the view; for the fruitful country, and rich
+woods of olive-trees through which the road subsequently passes, render
+it delightful.<br>
+<br>
+The moon was shining when we approached Pisa, and for a long time we
+could see, behind the wall, the leaning Tower, all awry in the uncertain
+light; the shadowy original of the old pictures in school-books, setting
+forth &lsquo;The Wonders of the World.&rsquo;&nbsp; Like most things
+connected in their first associations with school-books and school-times,
+it was too small.&nbsp; I felt it keenly.&nbsp; It was nothing like
+so high above the wall as I had hoped.&nbsp; It was another of the many
+deceptions practised by Mr. Harris, Bookseller, at the corner of St.
+Paul&rsquo;s Churchyard, London.&nbsp; <i>His</i> Tower was a fiction,
+but this was a reality - and, by comparison, a short reality.&nbsp;
+Still, it looked very well, and very strange, and was quite as much
+out of the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be.&nbsp; The
+quiet air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the gate, with only two
+little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of people
+in them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the centre of the town;
+were excellent.&nbsp; So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr. Harris
+(remembering his good intentions), but forgave him before dinner, and
+went out, full of confidence, to see the Tower next morning.<br>
+<br>
+I might have known better; but, somehow, I had expected to see it, casting
+its long shadow on a public street where people came and went all day.&nbsp;
+It was a surprise to me to find it in a grave retired place, apart from
+the general resort, and carpeted with smooth green turf.&nbsp; But,
+the group of buildings, clustered on and about this verdant carpet:
+comprising the Tower, the Baptistery, the Cathedral, and the Church
+of the Campo Santo: is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful in
+the whole world; and from being clustered there, together, away from
+the ordinary transactions and details of the town, they have a singularly
+venerable and impressive character.&nbsp; It is the architectural essence
+of a rich old city, with all its common life and common habitations
+pressed out, and filtered away.<br>
+<br>
+SIMOND compares the Tower to the usual pictorial representations in
+children&rsquo;s books of the Tower of Babel.&nbsp; It is a happy simile,
+and conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured
+description.&nbsp; Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the
+structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance.&nbsp;
+In the course of the ascent to the top (which is by an easy staircase),
+the inclination is not very apparent; but, at the summit, it becomes
+so, and gives one the sensation of being in a ship that has heeled over,
+through the action of an ebb-tide.&nbsp; The effect <i>upon the low
+side</i>, so to speak - looking over from the gallery, and seeing the
+shaft recede to its base - is very startling; and I saw a nervous traveller
+hold on to the Tower involuntarily, after glancing down, as if he had
+some idea of propping it up.&nbsp; The view within, from the ground
+- looking up, as through a slanted tube - is also very curious.&nbsp;
+It certainly inclines as much as the most sanguine tourist could desire.&nbsp;
+The natural impulse of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, who were
+about to recline upon the grass below it, to rest, and contemplate the
+adjacent buildings, would probably be, not to take up their position
+under the leaning side; it is so very much aslant.<br>
+<br>
+The manifold beauties of the Cathedral and Baptistery need no recapitulation
+from me; though in this case, as in a hundred others, I find it difficult
+to separate my own delight in recalling them, from your weariness in
+having them recalled.&nbsp; There is a picture of St. Agnes, by Andrea
+del Sarto, in the former, and there are a variety of rich columns in
+the latter, that tempt me strongly.<br>
+<br>
+It is, I hope, no breach of my resolution not to be tempted into elaborate
+descriptions, to remember the Campo Santo; where grass-grown graves
+are dug in earth brought more than six hundred years ago, from the Holy
+Land; and where there are, surrounding them, such cloisters, with such
+playing lights and shadows falling through their delicate tracery on
+the stone pavement, as surely the dullest memory could never forget.&nbsp;
+On the walls of this solemn and lovely place, are ancient frescoes,
+very much obliterated and decayed, but very curious.&nbsp; As usually
+happens in almost any collection of paintings, of any sort, in Italy,
+where there are many heads, there is, in one of them, a striking accidental
+likeness of Napoleon.&nbsp; At one time, I used to please my fancy with
+the speculation whether these old painters, at their work, had a foreboding
+knowledge of the man who would one day arise to wreak such destruction
+upon art: whose soldiers would make targets of great pictures, and stable
+their horses among triumphs of architecture.&nbsp; But the same Corsican
+face is so plentiful in some parts of Italy at this day, that a more
+commonplace solution of the coincidence is unavoidable.<br>
+<br>
+If Pisa be the seventh wonder of the world in right of its Tower, it
+may claim to be, at least, the second or third in right of its beggars.&nbsp;
+They waylay the unhappy visitor at every turn, escort him to every door
+he enters at, and lie in wait for him, with strong reinforcements, at
+every door by which they know he must come out.&nbsp; The grating of
+the portal on its hinges is the signal for a general shout, and the
+moment he appears, he is hemmed in, and fallen on, by heaps of rags
+and personal distortions.&nbsp; The beggars seem to embody all the trade
+and enterprise of Pisa.&nbsp; Nothing else is stirring, but warm air.&nbsp;
+Going through the streets, the fronts of the sleepy houses look like
+backs.&nbsp; They are all so still and quiet, and unlike houses with
+people in them, that the greater part of the city has the appearance
+of a city at daybreak, or during a general siesta of the population.&nbsp;
+Or it is yet more like those backgrounds of houses in common prints,
+or old engravings, where windows and doors are squarely indicated, and
+one figure (a beggar of course) is seen walking off by itself into illimitable
+perspective.<br>
+<br>
+Not so Leghorn (made illustrious by SMOLLETT&rsquo;S grave), which is
+a thriving, business-like, matter-of-fact place, where idleness is shouldered
+out of the way by commerce.&nbsp; The regulations observed there, in
+reference to trade and merchants, are very liberal and free; and the
+town, of course, benefits by them.&nbsp; Leghorn had a bad name in connection
+with stabbers, and with some justice it must be allowed; for, not many
+years ago, there was an assassination club there, the members of which
+bore no ill-will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people (quite
+strangers to them) in the streets at night, for the pleasure and excitement
+of the recreation.&nbsp; I think the president of this amiable society
+was a shoemaker.&nbsp; He was taken, however, and the club was broken
+up.&nbsp; It would, probably, have disappeared in the natural course
+of events, before the railroad between Leghorn and Pisa, which is a
+good one, and has already begun to astonish Italy with a precedent of
+punctuality, order, plain dealing, and improvement - the most dangerous
+and heretical astonisher of all.&nbsp; There must have been a slight
+sensation, as of earthquake, surely, in the Vatican, when the first
+Italian railroad was thrown open.<br>
+<br>
+Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered Vettur&iacute;no, and
+his four horses, to take us on to Rome, we travelled through pleasant
+Tuscan villages and cheerful scenery all day.&nbsp; The roadside crosses
+in this part of Italy are numerous and curious.&nbsp; There is seldom
+a figure on the cross, though there is sometimes a face, but they are
+remarkable for being garnished with little models in wood, of every
+possible object that can be connected with the Saviour&rsquo;s death.&nbsp;
+The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his Master thrice, is usually
+perched on the tip-top; and an ornithological phenomenon he generally
+is.&nbsp; Under him, is the inscription.&nbsp; Then, hung on to the
+cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the sponge of vinegar and water
+at the end, the coat without seam for which the soldiers cast lots,
+the dice-box with which they threw for it, the hammer that drove in
+the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the ladder which was set
+against the cross, the crown of thorns, the instrument of flagellation,
+the lanthorn with which Mary went to the tomb (I suppose), and the sword
+with which Peter smote the servant of the high priest, - a perfect toy-shop
+of little objects, repeated at every four or five miles, all along the
+highway.<br>
+<br>
+On the evening of the second day from Pisa, we reached the beautiful
+old city of Siena.&nbsp; There was what they called a Carnival, in progress;
+but, as its secret lay in a score or two of melancholy people walking
+up and down the principal street in common toy-shop masks, and being
+more melancholy, if possible, than the same sort of people in England,
+I say no more of it.&nbsp; We went off, betimes next morning, to see
+the Cathedral, which is wonderfully picturesque inside and out, especially
+the latter - also the market-place, or great Piazza, which is a large
+square, with a great broken-nosed fountain in it: some quaint Gothic
+houses: and a high square brick tower; <i>outside</i> the top of which
+- a curious feature in such views in Italy - hangs an enormous bell.&nbsp;
+It is like a bit of Venice, without the water.&nbsp; There are some
+curious old Palazzi in the town, which is very ancient; and without
+having (for me) the interest of Verona, or Genoa, it is very dreamy
+and fantastic, and most interesting.<br>
+<br>
+We went on again, as soon as we had seen these things, and going over
+a rather bleak country (there had been nothing but vines until now:
+mere walking-sticks at that season of the year), stopped, as usual,
+between one and two hours in the middle of the day, to rest the horses;
+that being a part of every Vettur&iacute;no contract.&nbsp; We then
+went on again, through a region gradually becoming bleaker and wilder,
+until it became as bare and desolate as any Scottish moors.&nbsp; Soon
+after dark, we halted for the night, at the osteria of La Scala: a perfectly
+lone house, where the family were sitting round a great fire in the
+kitchen, raised on a stone platform three or four feet high, and big
+enough for the roasting of an ox.&nbsp; On the upper, and only other
+floor of this hotel, there was a great, wild, rambling s&aacute;la,
+with one very little window in a by-corner, and four black doors opening
+into four black bedrooms in various directions.&nbsp; To say nothing
+of another large black door, opening into another large black s&aacute;la,
+with the staircase coming abruptly through a kind of trap-door in the
+floor, and the rafters of the roof looming above: a suspicious little
+press skulking in one obscure corner: and all the knives in the house
+lying about in various directions.&nbsp; The fireplace was of the purest
+Italian architecture, so that it was perfectly impossible to see it
+for the smoke.&nbsp; The waitress was like a dramatic brigand&rsquo;s
+wife, and wore the same style of dress upon her head.&nbsp; The dogs
+barked like mad; the echoes returned the compliments bestowed upon them;
+there was not another house within twelve miles; and things had a dreary,
+and rather a cut-throat, appearance.<br>
+<br>
+They were not improved by rumours of robbers having come out, strong
+and boldly, within a few nights; and of their having stopped the mail
+very near that place.&nbsp; They were known to have waylaid some travellers
+not long before, on Mount Vesuvius itself, and were the talk at all
+the roadside inns.&nbsp; As they were no business of ours, however (for
+we had very little with us to lose), we made ourselves merry on the
+subject, and were very soon as comfortable as need be.&nbsp; We had
+the usual dinner in this solitary house; and a very good dinner it is,
+when you are used to it.&nbsp; There is something with a vegetable or
+some rice in it which is a sort of shorthand or arbitrary character
+for soup, and which tastes very well, when you have flavoured it with
+plenty of grated cheese, lots of salt, and abundance of pepper.&nbsp;
+There is the half fowl of which this soup has been made.&nbsp; There
+is a stewed pigeon, with the gizzards and livers of himself and other
+birds stuck all round him.&nbsp; There is a bit of roast beef, the size
+of a small French roll.&nbsp; There are a scrap of Parmesan cheese,
+and five little withered apples, all huddled together on a small plate,
+and crowding one upon the other, as if each were trying to save itself
+from the chance of being eaten.&nbsp; Then there is coffee; and then
+there is bed.&nbsp; You don&rsquo;t mind brick floors; you don&rsquo;t
+mind yawning doors, nor banging windows; you don&rsquo;t mind your own
+horses being stabled under the bed: and so close, that every time a
+horse coughs or sneezes, he wakes you.&nbsp; If you are good-humoured
+to the people about you, and speak pleasantly, and look cheerful, take
+my word for it you may be well entertained in the very worst Italian
+Inn, and always in the most obliging manner, and may go from one end
+of the country to the other (despite all stories to the contrary) without
+any great trial of your patience anywhere.&nbsp; Especially, when you
+get such wine in flasks, as the Orvieto, and the Monte Pulciano.<br>
+<br>
+It was a bad morning when we left this place; and we went, for twelve
+miles, over a country as barren, as stony, and as wild, as Cornwall
+in England, until we came to Radicofani, where there is a ghostly, goblin
+inn: once a hunting-seat, belonging to the Dukes of Tuscany.&nbsp; It
+is full of such rambling corridors, and gaunt rooms, that all the murdering
+and phantom tales that ever were written might have originated in that
+one house.&nbsp; There are some horrible old Palazzi in Genoa: one in
+particular, not unlike it, outside: but there is a winding, creaking,
+wormy, rustling, door-opening, foot-on-staircase-falling character about
+this Radicofani Hotel, such as I never saw, anywhere else.&nbsp; The
+town, such as it is, hangs on a hill-side above the house, and in front
+of it.&nbsp; The inhabitants are all beggars; and as soon as they see
+a carriage coming, they swoop down upon it, like so many birds of prey.<br>
+<br>
+When we got on the mountain pass, which lies beyond this place, the
+wind (as they had forewarned us at the inn) was so terrific, that we
+were obliged to take my other half out of the carriage, lest she should
+be blown over, carriage and all, and to hang to it, on the windy side
+(as well as we could for laughing), to prevent its going, Heaven knows
+where.&nbsp; For mere force of wind, this land-storm might have competed
+with an Atlantic gale, and had a reasonable chance of coming off victorious.&nbsp;
+The blast came sweeping down great gullies in a range of mountains on
+the right: so that we looked with positive awe at a great morass on
+the left, and saw that there was not a bush or twig to hold by.&nbsp;
+It seemed as if, once blown from our feet, we must be swept out to sea,
+or away into space.&nbsp; There was snow, and hail, and rain, and lightning,
+and thunder; and there were rolling mists, travelling with incredible
+velocity.&nbsp; It was dark, awful, and solitary to the last degree;
+there were mountains above mountains, veiled in angry clouds; and there
+was such a wrathful, rapid, violent, tumultuous hurry, everywhere, as
+rendered the scene unspeakably exciting and grand.<br>
+<br>
+It was a relief to get out of it, notwithstanding; and to cross even
+the dismal, dirty Papal Frontier.&nbsp; After passing through two little
+towns; in one of which, Acquapendente, there was also a &lsquo;Carnival&rsquo;
+in progress: consisting of one man dressed and masked as a woman, and
+one woman dressed and masked as a man, walking ankle-deep, through the
+muddy streets, in a very melancholy manner: we came, at dusk, within
+sight of the Lake of Bolsena, on whose bank there is a little town of
+the same name, much celebrated for malaria.&nbsp; With the exception
+of this poor place, there is not a cottage on the banks of the lake,
+or near it (for nobody dare sleep there); not a boat upon its waters;
+not a stick or stake to break the dismal monotony of seven-and-twenty
+watery miles.&nbsp; We were late in getting in, the roads being very
+bad from heavy rains; and, after dark, the dulness of the scene was
+quite intolerable.<br>
+<br>
+We entered on a very different, and a finer scene of desolation, next
+night, at sunset.&nbsp; We had passed through Montefiaschone (famous
+for its wine) and Viterbo (for its fountains): and after climbing up
+a long hill of eight or ten miles&rsquo; extent, came suddenly upon
+the margin of a solitary lake: in one part very beautiful, with a luxuriant
+wood; in another, very barren, and shut in by bleak volcanic hills.&nbsp;
+Where this lake flows, there stood, of old, a city.&nbsp; It was swallowed
+up one day; and in its stead, this water rose.&nbsp; There are ancient
+traditions (common to many parts of the world) of the ruined city having
+been seen below, when the water was clear; but however that may be,
+from this spot of earth it vanished.&nbsp; The ground came bubbling
+up above it; and the water too; and here they stand, like ghosts on
+whom the other world closed suddenly, and who have no means of getting
+back again.&nbsp; They seem to be waiting the course of ages, for the
+next earthquake in that place; when they will plunge below the ground,
+at its first yawning, and be seen no more.&nbsp; The unhappy city below,
+is not more lost and dreary, than these fire-charred hills and the stagnant
+water, above.&nbsp; The red sun looked strangely on them, as with the
+knowledge that they were made for caverns and darkness; and the melancholy
+water oozed and sucked the mud, and crept quietly among the marshy grass
+and reeds, as if the overthrow of all the ancient towers and housetops,
+and the death of all the ancient people born and bred there, were yet
+heavy on its conscience.<br>
+<br>
+A short ride from this lake, brought us to Ronciglione; a little town
+like a large pig-sty, where we passed the night.&nbsp; Next morning
+at seven o&rsquo;clock, we started for Rome.<br>
+<br>
+As soon as we were out of the pig-sty, we entered on the Campagna Romana;
+an undulating flat (as you know), where few people can live; and where,
+for miles and miles, there is nothing to relieve the terrible monotony
+and gloom.&nbsp; Of all kinds of country that could, by possibility,
+lie outside the gates of Rome, this is the aptest and fittest burial-ground
+for the Dead City.&nbsp; So sad, so quiet, so sullen; so secret in its
+covering up of great masses of ruin, and hiding them; so like the waste
+places into which the men possessed with devils used to go and howl,
+and rend themselves, in the old days of Jerusalem.&nbsp; We had to traverse
+thirty miles of this Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and
+on, seeing nothing but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking
+shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped to
+the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep.&nbsp; At the end
+of that distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some
+lunch, in a common malaria-shaken, despondent little public-house, whose
+every inch of wall and beam, inside, was (according to custom) painted
+and decorated in a way so miserable that every room looked like the
+wrong side of another room, and, with its wretched imitation of drapery,
+and lop-sided little daubs of lyres, seemed to have been plundered from
+behind the scenes of some travelling circus.<br>
+<br>
+When we were fairly going off again, we began, in a perfect fever, to
+strain our eyes for Rome; and when, after another mile or two, the Eternal
+City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like - I am half
+afraid to write the word - like LONDON!!!&nbsp; There it lay, under
+a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses,
+rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome.&nbsp; I swear,
+that keenly as I felt the seeming absurdity of the comparison, it was
+so like London, at that distance, that if you could have shown it me,
+in a glass, I should have taken it for nothing else.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER X - ROME<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We entered the Eternal City, at about four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon,
+on the thirtieth of January, by the Porta del Popolo, and came immediately
+- it was a dark, muddy day, and there had been heavy rain - on the skirts
+of the Carnival.&nbsp; We did not, then, know that we were only looking
+at the fag end of the masks, who were driving slowly round and round
+the Piazza until they could find a promising opportunity for falling
+into the stream of carriages, and getting, in good time, into the thick
+of the festivity; and coming among them so abruptly, all travel-stained
+and weary, was not coming very well prepared to enjoy the scene.<br>
+<br>
+We had crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Molle two or three miles before.&nbsp;
+It had looked as yellow as it ought to look, and hurrying on between
+its worn-away and miry banks, had a promising aspect of desolation and
+ruin.&nbsp; The masquerade dresses on the fringe of the Carnival, did
+great violence to this promise.&nbsp; There were no great ruins, no
+solemn tokens of antiquity, to be seen; - they all lie on the other
+side of the city.&nbsp; There seemed to be long streets of commonplace
+shops and houses, such as are to be found in any European town; there
+were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude
+of chattering strangers.&nbsp; It was no more <i>my</i> Rome: the Rome
+of anybody&rsquo;s fancy, man or boy; degraded and fallen and lying
+asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than the Place de la Concorde
+in Paris is.&nbsp; A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain, and muddy streets,
+I was prepared for, but not for this: and I confess to having gone to
+bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour, and with a very considerably
+quenched enthusiasm.<br>
+<br>
+Immediately on going out next day, we hurried off to St. Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+It looked immense in the distance, but distinctly and decidedly small,
+by comparison, on a near approach.&nbsp; The beauty of the Piazza, on
+which it stands, with its clusters of exquisite columns, and its gushing
+fountains - so fresh, so broad, and free, and beautiful - nothing can
+exaggerate.&nbsp; The first burst of the interior, in all its expansive
+majesty and glory: and, most of all, the looking up into the Dome: is
+a sensation never to be forgotten.&nbsp; But, there were preparations
+for a Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent
+frippery of red and yellow; the altar, and entrance to the subterranean
+chapel: which is before it: in the centre of the church: were like a
+goldsmith&rsquo;s shop, or one of the opening scenes in a very lavish
+pantomime.&nbsp; And though I had as high a sense of the beauty of the
+building (I hope) as it is possible to entertain, I felt no very strong
+emotion.&nbsp; I have been infinitely more affected in many English
+cathedrals when the organ has been playing, and in many English country
+churches when the congregation have been singing.&nbsp; I had a much
+greater sense of mystery and wonder, in the Cathedral of San Mark at
+Venice.<br>
+<br>
+When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour staring
+up into the dome: and would not have &lsquo;gone over&rsquo; the Cathedral
+then, for any money), we said to the coachman, &lsquo;Go to the Coliseum.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+In a quarter of an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.<br>
+<br>
+It is no fiction, but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive
+and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment - actually in passing
+in - they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it
+used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena,
+and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there, as no
+language can describe.&nbsp; Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its
+utter desolation, strike upon the stranger the next moment, like a softened
+sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome
+by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and
+afflictions.<br>
+<br>
+To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown
+with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in
+its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets,
+and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the
+birds who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see its
+Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in
+the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin,
+ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus,
+and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of
+the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome,
+wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people
+trod.&nbsp; It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn,
+grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable.&nbsp; Never, in its bloodiest
+prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over
+with the lustiest life, have moved one&rsquo;s heart, as it must move
+all who look upon it now, a ruin.&nbsp; GOD be thanked: a ruin!<br>
+<br>
+As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among graves:
+so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old mythology
+and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman
+people.&nbsp; The Italian face changes as the visitor approaches the
+city; its beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one countenance
+in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not
+be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow.<br>
+<br>
+Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine
+in its full and awful grandeur!&nbsp; We wandered out upon the Appian
+Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken walls,
+with here and there a desolate and uninhabited house: past the Circus
+of Romulus, where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges,
+competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old
+time: past the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclosure, hedge, or
+stake, wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where on that side
+of Rome, nothing is to be beheld but Ruin.&nbsp; Except where the distant
+Apennines bound the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one
+field of ruin.&nbsp; Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque
+and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs.&nbsp;
+A desert of decay, sombre and desolate beyond all expression; and with
+a history in every stone that strews the ground.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On Sunday, the Pope assisted in the performance of High Mass at St.
+Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The effect of the Cathedral on my mind, on that
+second visit, was exactly what it was at first, and what it remains
+after many visits.&nbsp; It is not religiously impressive or affecting.&nbsp;
+It is an immense edifice, with no one point for the mind to rest upon;
+and it tires itself with wandering round and round.&nbsp; The very purpose
+of the place, is not expressed in anything you see there, unless you
+examine its details - and all examination of details is incompatible
+with the place itself.&nbsp; It might be a Pantheon, or a Senate House,
+or a great architectural trophy, having no other object than an architectural
+triumph.&nbsp; There is a black statue of St. Peter, to be sure, under
+a red canopy; which is larger than life and which is constantly having
+its great toe kissed by good Catholics.&nbsp; You cannot help seeing
+that: it is so very prominent and popular.&nbsp; But it does not heighten
+the effect of the temple, as a work of art; and it is not expressive
+- to me at least - of its high purpose.<br>
+<br>
+A large space behind the altar, was fitted up with boxes, shaped like
+those at the Italian Opera in England, but in their decoration much
+more gaudy.&nbsp; In the centre of the kind of theatre thus railed off,
+was a canopied dais with the Pope&rsquo;s chair upon it.&nbsp; The pavement
+was covered with a carpet of the brightest green; and what with this
+green, and the intolerable reds and crimsons, and gold borders of the
+hangings, the whole concern looked like a stupendous Bonbon.&nbsp; On
+either side of the altar, was a large box for lady strangers.&nbsp;
+These were filled with ladies in black dresses and black veils.&nbsp;
+The gentlemen of the Pope&rsquo;s guard, in red coats, leather breeches,
+and jack-boots, guarded all this reserved space, with drawn swords that
+were very flashy in every sense; and from the altar all down the nave,
+a broad lane was kept clear by the Pope&rsquo;s Swiss guard, who wear
+a quaint striped surcoat, and striped tight legs, and carry halberds
+like those which are usually shouldered by those theatrical supernumeraries,
+who never <i>can</i> get off the stage fast enough, and who may be generally
+observed to linger in the enemy&rsquo;s camp after the open country,
+held by the opposite forces, has been split up the middle by a convulsion
+of Nature.<br>
+<br>
+I got upon the border of the green carpet, in company with a great many
+other gentlemen, attired in black (no other passport is necessary),
+and stood there at my ease, during the performance of Mass.&nbsp; The
+singers were in a crib of wirework (like a large meat-safe or bird-cage)
+in one corner; and sang most atrociously.&nbsp; All about the green
+carpet, there was a slowly moving crowd of people: talking to each other:
+staring at the Pope through eye-glasses; defrauding one another, in
+moments of partial curiosity, out of precarious seats on the bases of
+pillars: and grinning hideously at the ladies.&nbsp; Dotted here and
+there, were little knots of friars (Frances-c&aacute;ni, or Cappucc&iacute;ni,
+in their coarse brown dresses and peaked hoods) making a strange contrast
+to the gaudy ecclesiastics of higher degree, and having their humility
+gratified to the utmost, by being shouldered about, and elbowed right
+and left, on all sides.&nbsp; Some of these had muddy sandals and umbrellas,
+and stained garments: having trudged in from the country.&nbsp; The
+faces of the greater part were as coarse and heavy as their dress; their
+dogged, stupid, monotonous stare at all the glory and splendour, having
+something in it, half miserable, and half ridiculous.<br>
+<br>
+Upon the green carpet itself, and gathered round the altar, was a perfect
+army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold, purple, violet, white,
+and fine linen.&nbsp; Stragglers from these, went to and fro among the
+crowd, conversing two and two, or giving and receiving introductions,
+and exchanging salutations; other functionaries in black gowns, and
+other functionaries in court-dresses, were similarly engaged.&nbsp;
+In the midst of all these, and stealthy Jesuits creeping in and out,
+and the extreme restlessness of the Youth of England, who were perpetually
+wandering about, some few steady persons in black cassocks, who had
+knelt down with their faces to the wall, and were poring over their
+missals, became, unintentionally, a sort of humane man-traps, and with
+their own devout legs, tripped up other people&rsquo;s by the dozen.<br>
+<br>
+There was a great pile of candles lying down on the floor near me, which
+a very old man in a rusty black gown with an open-work tippet, like
+a summer ornament for a fireplace in tissue-paper, made himself very
+busy in dispensing to all the ecclesiastics: one a-piece.&nbsp; They
+loitered about with these for some time, under their arms like walking-sticks,
+or in their hands like truncheons.&nbsp; At a certain period of the
+ceremony, however, each carried his candle up to the Pope, laid it across
+his two knees to be blessed, took it back again, and filed off.&nbsp;
+This was done in a very attenuated procession, as you may suppose, and
+occupied a long time.&nbsp; Not because it takes long to bless a candle
+through and through, but because there were so many candles to be blessed.&nbsp;
+At last they were all blessed: and then they were all lighted; and then
+the Pope was taken up, chair and all, and carried round the church.<br>
+<br>
+I must say, that I never saw anything, out of November, so like the
+popular English commemoration of the fifth of that month.&nbsp; A bundle
+of matches and a lantern, would have made it perfect.&nbsp; Nor did
+the Pope, himself, at all mar the resemblance, though he has a pleasant
+and venerable face; for, as this part of the ceremony makes him giddy
+and sick, he shuts his eyes when it is performed: and having his eyes
+shut and a great mitre on his head, and his head itself wagging to and
+fro as they shook him in carrying, he looked as if his mask were going
+to tumble off.&nbsp; The two immense fans which are always borne, one
+on either side of him, accompanied him, of course, on this occasion.&nbsp;
+As they carried him along, he blessed the people with the mystic sign;
+and as he passed them, they kneeled down.&nbsp; When he had made the
+round of the church, he was brought back again, and if I am not mistaken,
+this performance was repeated, in the whole, three times.&nbsp; There
+was, certainly nothing solemn or effective in it; and certainly very
+much that was droll and tawdry.&nbsp; But this remark applies to the
+whole ceremony, except the raising of the Host, when every man in the
+guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the
+ground; which had a fine effect.<br>
+<br>
+The next time I saw the cathedral, was some two or three weeks afterwards,
+when I climbed up into the ball; and then, the hangings being taken
+down, and the carpet taken up, but all the framework left, the remnants
+of these decorations looked like an exploded cracker.<br>
+<br>
+The Friday and Saturday having been solemn Festa days, and Sunday being
+always a <i>dies non</i> in carnival proceedings, we had looked forward,
+with some impatience and curiosity, to the beginning of the new week:
+Monday and Tuesday being the two last and best days of the Carnival.<br>
+<br>
+On the Monday afternoon at one or two o&rsquo;clock, there began to
+be a great rattling of carriages into the court-yard of the hotel; a
+hurrying to and fro of all the servants in it; and, now and then, a
+swift shooting across some doorway or balcony, of a straggling stranger
+in a fancy dress: not yet sufficiently well used to the same, to wear
+it with confidence, and defy public opinion.&nbsp; All the carriages
+were open, and had the linings carefully covered with white cotton or
+calico, to prevent their proper decorations from being spoiled by the
+incessant pelting of sugar-plums; and people were packing and cramming
+into every vehicle as it waited for its occupants, enormous sacks and
+baskets full of these conf&eacute;tti, together with such heaps of flowers,
+tied up in little nosegays, that some carriages were not only brimful
+of flowers, but literally running over: scattering, at every shake and
+jerk of the springs, some of their abundance on the ground.&nbsp; Not
+to be behindhand in these essential particulars, we caused two very
+respectable sacks of sugar-plums (each about three feet high) and a
+large clothes-basket full of flowers to be conveyed into our hired barouche,
+with all speed.&nbsp; And from our place of observation, in one of the
+upper balconies of the hotel, we contemplated these arrangements with
+the liveliest satisfaction.&nbsp; The carriages now beginning to take
+up their company, and move away, we got into ours, and drove off too,
+armed with little wire masks for our faces; the sugar-plums, like Falstaff&rsquo;s
+adulterated sack, having lime in their composition.<br>
+<br>
+The Corso is a street a mile long; a street of shops, and palaces, and
+private houses, sometimes opening into a broad piazza.&nbsp; There are
+verandahs and balconies, of all shapes and sizes, to almost every house
+- not on one story alone, but often to one room or another on every
+story - put there in general with so little order or regularity, that
+if, year after year, and season after season, it had rained balconies,
+hailed balconies, snowed balconies, blown balconies, they could scarcely
+have come into existence in a more disorderly manner.<br>
+<br>
+This is the great fountain-head and focus of the Carnival.&nbsp; But
+all the streets in which the Carnival is held, being vigilantly kept
+by dragoons, it is necessary for carriages, in the first instance, to
+pass, in line, down another thoroughfare, and so come into the Corso
+at the end remote from the Pi&aacute;zza del Popolo; which is one of
+its terminations.&nbsp; Accordingly, we fell into the string of coaches,
+and, for some time, jogged on quietly enough; now crawling on at a very
+slow walk; now trotting half-a-dozen yards; now backing fifty; and now
+stopping altogether: as the pressure in front obliged us.&nbsp; If any
+impetuous carriage dashed out of the rank and clattered forward, with
+the wild idea of getting on faster, it was suddenly met, or overtaken,
+by a trooper on horseback, who, deaf as his own drawn sword to all remonstrances,
+immediately escorted it back to the very end of the row, and made it
+a dim speck in the remotest perspective.&nbsp; Occasionally, we interchanged
+a volley of conf&eacute;tti with the carriage next in front, or the
+carriage next behind; but as yet, this capturing of stray and errant
+coaches by the military, was the chief amusement.<br>
+<br>
+Presently, we came into a narrow street, where, besides one line of
+carriages going, there was another line of carriages returning.&nbsp;
+Here the sugar-plums and the nosegays began to fly about, pretty smartly;
+and I was fortunate enough to observe one gentleman attired as a Greek
+warrior, catch a light-whiskered brigand on the nose (he was in the
+very act of tossing up a bouquet to a young lady in a first-floor window)
+with a precision that was much applauded by the bystanders.&nbsp; As
+this victorious Greek was exchanging a facetious remark with a stout
+gentleman in a doorway - one-half black and one-half white, as if he
+had been peeled up the middle - who had offered him his congratulations
+on this achievement, he received an orange from a housetop, full on
+his left ear, and was much surprised, not to say discomfited.&nbsp;
+Especially, as he was standing up at the time; and in consequence of
+the carriage moving on suddenly, at the same moment, staggered ignominiously,
+and buried himself among his flowers.<br>
+<br>
+Some quarter of an hour of this sort of progress, brought us to the
+Corso; and anything so gay, so bright, and lively as the whole scene
+there, it would be difficult to imagine.&nbsp; From all the innumerable
+balconies: from the remotest and highest, no less than from the lowest
+and nearest: hangings of bright red, bright green, bright blue, white
+and gold, were fluttering in the brilliant sunlight.&nbsp; From windows,
+and from parapets, and tops of houses, streamers of the richest colours,
+and draperies of the gaudiest and most sparkling hues, were floating
+out upon the street.&nbsp; The buildings seemed to have been literally
+turned inside out, and to have all their gaiety towards the highway.&nbsp;
+Shop-fronts were taken down, and the windows filled with company, like
+boxes at a shining theatre; doors were carried off their hinges, and
+long tapestried groves, hung with garlands of flowers and evergreens,
+displayed within; builders&rsquo; scaffoldings were gorgeous temples,
+radiant in silver, gold, and crimson; and in every nook and corner,
+from the pavement to the chimney-tops, where women&rsquo;s eyes could
+glisten, there they danced, and laughed, and sparkled, like the light
+in water.&nbsp; Every sort of bewitching madness of dress was there.&nbsp;
+Little preposterous scarlet jackets; quaint old stomachers, more wicked
+than the smartest bodices; Polish pelisses, strained and tight as ripe
+gooseberries; tiny Greek caps, all awry, and clinging to the dark hair,
+Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy
+had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten
+by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts
+that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their sturdy
+arches, that morning.<br>
+<br>
+The carriages were now three abreast; in broader places four; often
+stationary for a long time together, always one close mass of variegated
+brightness; showing, the whole street-full, through the storm of flowers,
+like flowers of a larger growth themselves.&nbsp; In some, the horses
+were richly caparisoned in magnificent trappings; in others they were
+decked from head to tail, with flowing ribbons.&nbsp; Some were driven
+by coachmen with enormous double faces: one face leering at the horses:
+the other cocking its extraordinary eyes into the carriage: and both
+rattling again, under the hail of sugar-plums.&nbsp; Other drivers were
+attired as women, wearing long ringlets and no bonnets, and looking
+more ridiculous in any real difficulty with the horses (of which, in
+such a concourse, there were a great many) than tongue can tell, or
+pen describe.&nbsp; Instead of sitting <i>in</i> the carriages, upon
+the seats, the handsome Roman women, to see and to be seen the better,
+sit in the heads of the barouches, at this time of general licence,
+with their feet upon the cushions - and oh, the flowing skirts and dainty
+waists, the blessed shapes and laughing faces, the free, good-humoured,
+gallant figures that they make! There were great vans, too, full of
+handsome girls - thirty, or more together, perhaps - and the broadsides
+that were poured into, and poured out of, these fairy fire-shops, splashed
+the air with flowers and bon-bons for ten minutes at a time.&nbsp; Carriages,
+delayed long in one place, would begin a deliberate engagement with
+other carriages, or with people at the lower windows; and the spectators
+at some upper balcony or window, joining in the fray, and attacking
+both parties, would empty down great bags of conf&eacute;tti, that descended
+like a cloud, and in an instant made them white as millers.&nbsp; Still,
+carriages on carriages, dresses on dresses, colours on colours, crowds
+upon crowds, without end.&nbsp; Men and boys clinging to the wheels
+of coaches, and holding on behind, and following in their wake, and
+diving in among the horses&rsquo; feet to pick up scattered flowers
+to sell again; maskers on foot (the drollest generally) in fantastic
+exaggerations of court-dresses, surveying the throng through enormous
+eye-glasses, and always transported with an ecstasy of love, on the
+discovery of any particularly old lady at a window; long strings of
+Policinelli, laying about them with blown bladders at the ends of sticks;
+a waggon-full of madmen, screaming and tearing to the life; a coach-full
+of grave mamelukes, with their horse-tail standard set up in the midst;
+a party of gipsy-women engaged in terrific conflict with a shipful of
+sailors; a man-monkey on a pole, surrounded by strange animals with
+pigs&rsquo; faces, and lions&rsquo; tails, carried under their arms,
+or worn gracefully over their shoulders; carriages on carriages, dresses
+on dresses, colours on colours, crowds upon crowds, without end.&nbsp;
+Not many actual characters sustained, or represented, perhaps, considering
+the number dressed, but the main pleasure of the scene consisting in
+its perfect good temper; in its bright, and infinite, and flashing variety;
+and in its entire abandonment to the mad humour of the time - an abandonment
+so perfect, so contagious, so irresistible, that the steadiest foreigner
+fights up to his middle in flowers and sugar-plums, like the wildest
+Roman of them all, and thinks of nothing else till half-past four o&rsquo;clock,
+when he is suddenly reminded (to his great regret) that this is not
+the whole business of his existence, by hearing the trumpets sound,
+and seeing the dragoons begin to clear the street.<br>
+<br>
+How it ever <i>is</i> cleared for the race that takes place at five,
+or how the horses ever go through the race, without going over the people,
+is more than I can say.&nbsp; But the carriages get out into the by-streets,
+or up into the Pi&aacute;zza del Popolo, and some people sit in temporary
+galleries in the latter place, and tens of thousands line the Corso
+on both sides, when the horses are brought out into the Pi&aacute;zza
+- to the foot of that same column which, for centuries, looked down
+upon the games and chariot-races in the Circus Maximus.<br>
+<br>
+At a given signal they are started off.&nbsp; Down the live lane, the
+whole length of the Corso, they fly like the wind: riderless, as all
+the world knows: with shining ornaments upon their backs, and twisted
+in their plaited manes: and with heavy little balls stuck full of spikes,
+dangling at their sides, to goad them on.&nbsp; The jingling of these
+trappings, and the rattling of their hoofs upon the hard stones; the
+dash and fury of their speed along the echoing street; nay, the very
+cannon that are fired - these noises are nothing to the roaring of the
+multitude: their shouts: the clapping of their hands.&nbsp; But it is
+soon over - almost instantaneously.&nbsp; More cannon shake the town.&nbsp;
+The horses have plunged into the carpets put across the street to stop
+them; the goal is reached; the prizes are won (they are given, in part,
+by the poor Jews, as a compromise for not running foot-races themselves);
+and there is an end to that day&rsquo;s sport.<br>
+<br>
+But if the scene be bright, and gay, and crowded, on the last day but
+one, it attains, on the concluding day, to such a height of glittering
+colour, swarming life, and frolicsome uproar, that the bare recollection
+of it makes me giddy at this moment.&nbsp; The same diversions, greatly
+heightened and intensified in the ardour with which they are pursued,
+go on until the same hour.&nbsp; The race is repeated; the cannon are
+fired; the shouting and clapping of hands are renewed; the cannon are
+fired again; the race is over; and the prizes are won.&nbsp; But the
+carriages: ankle-deep with sugar-plums within, and so be-flowered and
+dusty without, as to be hardly recognisable for the same vehicles that
+they were, three hours ago: instead of scampering off in all directions,
+throng into the Corso, where they are soon wedged together in a scarcely
+moving mass.&nbsp; For the diversion of the Moccoletti, the last gay
+madness of the Carnival, is now at hand; and sellers of little tapers
+like what are called Christmas candles in England, are shouting lustily
+on every side, &lsquo;Moccoli, Moccoli!&nbsp; Ecco Moccoli!&rsquo; -
+a new item in the tumult; quite abolishing that other item of &lsquo;
+Ecco Fi&oacute;ri!&nbsp; Ecco Fior-r-r!&rsquo; which has been making
+itself audible over all the rest, at intervals, the whole day through.<br>
+<br>
+As the bright hangings and dresses are all fading into one dull, heavy,
+uniform colour in the decline of the day, lights begin flashing, here
+and there: in the windows, on the housetops, in the balconies, in the
+carriages, in the hands of the foot-passengers: little by little: gradually,
+gradually: more and more: until the whole long street is one great glare
+and blaze of fire.&nbsp; Then, everybody present has but one engrossing
+object; that is, to extinguish other people&rsquo;s candles, and to
+keep his own alight; and everybody: man, woman, or child, gentleman
+or lady, prince or peasant, native or foreigner: yells and screams,
+and roars incessantly, as a taunt to the subdued, &lsquo;Senza Moccolo,
+Senza Moccolo!&rsquo;&nbsp; (Without a light!&nbsp; Without a light!)
+until nothing is heard but a gigantic chorus of those two words, mingled
+with peals of laughter.<br>
+<br>
+The spectacle, at this time, is one of the most extraordinary that can
+be imagined.&nbsp; Carriages coming slowly by, with everybody standing
+on the seats or on the box, holding up their lights at arms&rsquo; length,
+for greater safety; some in paper shades; some with a bunch of undefended
+little tapers, kindled altogether; some with blazing torches; some with
+feeble little candles; men on foot, creeping along, among the wheels,
+watching their opportunity, to make a spring at some particular light,
+and dash it out; other people climbing up into carriages, to get hold
+of them by main force; others, chasing some unlucky wanderer, round
+and round his own coach, to blow out the light he has begged or stolen
+somewhere, before he can ascend to his own company, and enable them
+to light their extinguished tapers; others, with their hats off, at
+a carriage-door, humbly beseeching some kind-hearted lady to oblige
+them with a light for a cigar, and when she is in the fulness of doubt
+whether to comply or no, blowing out the candle she is guarding so tenderly
+with her little hand; other people at the windows, fishing for candles
+with lines and hooks, or letting down long willow-wands with handkerchiefs
+at the end, and flapping them out, dexterously, when the bearer is at
+the height of his triumph, others, biding their time in corners, with
+immense extinguishers like halberds, and suddenly coming down upon glorious
+torches; others, gathered round one coach, and sticking to it; others,
+raining oranges and nosegays at an obdurate little lantern, or regularly
+storming a pyramid of men, holding up one man among them, who carries
+one feeble little wick above his head, with which he defies them all!&nbsp;
+Senza Moccolo!&nbsp; Senza Moccolo!&nbsp; Beautiful women, standing
+up in coaches, pointing in derision at extinguished lights, and clapping
+their hands, as they pass on, crying, &lsquo;Senza Moccolo!&nbsp; Senza
+Moccolo!&rsquo;; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses,
+struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them as they
+climb up, some bending down, some leaning over, some shrinking back
+- delicate arms and bosoms - graceful figures - glowing lights, fluttering
+dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o! - when
+in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport,
+the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and the Carnival is over
+in an instant - put out like a taper, with a breath!<br>
+<br>
+There was a masquerade at the theatre at night, as dull and senseless
+as a London one, and only remarkable for the summary way in which the
+house was cleared at eleven o&rsquo;clock: which was done by a line
+of soldiers forming along the wall, at the back of the stage, and sweeping
+the whole company out before them, like a broad broom.&nbsp; The game
+of the Moccoletti (the word, in the singular, Moccoletto, is the diminutive
+of Moccolo, and means a little lamp or candlesnuff) is supposed by some
+to be a ceremony of burlesque mourning for the death of the Carnival:
+candles being indispensable to Catholic grief.&nbsp; But whether it
+be so, or be a remnant of the ancient Saturnalia, or an incorporation
+of both, or have its origin in anything else, I shall always remember
+it, and the frolic, as a brilliant and most captivating sight: no less
+remarkable for the unbroken good-humour of all concerned, down to the
+very lowest (and among those who scaled the carriages, were many of
+the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity.&nbsp; For,
+odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness
+and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any
+general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to
+prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish,
+simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the
+Ave Maria has rung it away, for a whole year.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Availing ourselves of a part of the quiet interval between the termination
+of the Carnival and the beginning of the Holy Week: when everybody had
+run away from the one, and few people had yet begun to run back again
+for the other: we went conscientiously to work, to see Rome.&nbsp; And,
+by dint of going out early every morning, and coming back late every
+evening, and labouring hard all day, I believe we made acquaintance
+with every post and pillar in the city, and the country round; and,
+in particular, explored so many churches, that I abandoned that part
+of the enterprise at last, before it was half finished, lest I should
+never, of my own accord, go to church again, as long as I lived.&nbsp;
+But, I managed, almost every day, at one time or other, to get back
+to the Coliseum, and out upon the open Campagna, beyond the Tomb of
+Cecilia Metella.<br>
+<br>
+We often encountered, in these expeditions, a company of English Tourists,
+with whom I had an ardent, but ungratified longing, to establish a speaking
+acquaintance.&nbsp; They were one Mr. Davis, and a small circle of friends.&nbsp;
+It was impossible not to know Mrs. Davis&rsquo;s name, from her being
+always in great request among her party, and her party being everywhere.&nbsp;
+During the Holy Week, they were in every part of every scene of every
+ceremony.&nbsp; For a fortnight or three weeks before it, they were
+in every tomb, and every church, and every ruin, and every Picture Gallery;
+and I hardly ever observed Mrs. Davis to be silent for a moment.&nbsp;
+Deep underground, high up in St. Peter&rsquo;s, out on the Campagna,
+and stifling in the Jews&rsquo; quarter, Mrs. Davis turned up, all the
+same.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t think she ever saw anything, or ever looked
+at anything; and she had always lost something out of a straw hand-basket,
+and was trying to find it, with all her might and main, among an immense
+quantity of English halfpence, which lay, like sands upon the sea-shore,
+at the bottom of it.&nbsp; There was a professional Cicerone always
+attached to the party (which had been brought over from London, fifteen
+or twenty strong, by contract), and if he so much as looked at Mrs.
+Davis, she invariably cut him short by saying, &lsquo;There, God bless
+the man, don&rsquo;t worrit me!&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t understand a word
+you say, and shouldn&rsquo;t if you was to talk till you was black in
+the face!&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Davis always had a snuff-coloured great-coat
+on, and carried a great green umbrella in his hand, and had a slow curiosity
+constantly devouring him, which prompted him to do extraordinary things,
+such as taking the covers off urns in tombs, and looking in at the ashes
+as if they were pickles - and tracing out inscriptions with the ferrule
+of his umbrella, and saying, with intense thoughtfulness, &lsquo;Here&rsquo;s
+a B you see, and there&rsquo;s a R, and this is the way we goes on in;
+is it!&rsquo;&nbsp; His antiquarian habits occasioned his being frequently
+in the rear of the rest; and one of the agonies of Mrs. Davis, and the
+party in general, was an ever-present fear that Davis would be lost.&nbsp;
+This caused them to scream for him, in the strangest places, and at
+the most improper seasons.&nbsp; And when he came, slowly emerging out
+of some sepulchre or other, like a peaceful Ghoule, saying &lsquo;Here
+I am!&rsquo; Mrs. Davis invariably replied, &lsquo;You&rsquo;ll be buried
+alive in a foreign country, Davis, and it&rsquo;s no use trying to prevent
+you!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their party, had, probably, been brought from
+London in about nine or ten days.&nbsp; Eighteen hundred years ago,
+the Roman legions under Claudius, protested against being led into Mr.
+and Mrs. Davis&rsquo;s country, urging that it lay beyond the limits
+of the world.<br>
+<br>
+Among what may be called the Cubs or minor Lions of Rome, there was
+one that amused me mightily.&nbsp; It is always to be found there; and
+its den is on the great flight of steps that lead from the Piazza di
+Sp&aacute;gna, to the church of Tr&iacute;nita del Monte.&nbsp; In plainer
+words, these steps are the great place of resort for the artists&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Models,&rsquo; and there they are constantly waiting to be hired.&nbsp;
+The first time I went up there, I could not conceive why the faces seemed
+familiar to me; why they appeared to have beset me, for years, in every
+possible variety of action and costume; and how it came to pass that
+they started up before me, in Rome, in the broad day, like so many saddled
+and bridled nightmares.&nbsp; I soon found that we had made acquaintance,
+and improved it, for several years, on the walls of various Exhibition
+Galleries.&nbsp; There is one old gentleman, with long white hair and
+an immense beard, who, to my knowledge, has gone half through the catalogue
+of the Royal Academy.&nbsp; This is the venerable, or patriarchal model.&nbsp;
+He carries a long staff; and every knot and twist in that staff I have
+seen, faithfully delineated, innumerable times.&nbsp; There is another
+man in a blue cloak, who always pretends to be asleep in the sun (when
+there is any), and who, I need not say, is always very wide awake, and
+very attentive to the disposition of his legs.&nbsp; This is the <i>dolce
+far&rsquo; niente</i> model.&nbsp; There is another man in a brown cloak,
+who leans against a wall, with his arms folded in his mantle, and looks
+out of the corners of his eyes: which are just visible beneath his broad
+slouched hat.&nbsp; This is the assassin model.&nbsp; There is another
+man, who constantly looks over his own shoulder, and is always going
+away, but never does.&nbsp; This is the haughty, or scornful model.&nbsp;
+As to Domestic Happiness, and Holy Families, they should come very cheap,
+for there are lumps of them, all up the steps; and the cream of the
+thing is, that they are all the falsest vagabonds in the world, especially
+made up for the purpose, and having no counterparts in Rome or any other
+part of the habitable globe.<br>
+<br>
+My recent mention of the Carnival, reminds me of its being said to be
+a mock mourning (in the ceremony with which it closes), for the gaieties
+and merry-makings before Lent; and this again reminds me of the real
+funerals and mourning processions of Rome, which, like those in most
+other parts of Italy, are rendered chiefly remarkable to a Foreigner,
+by the indifference with which the mere clay is universally regarded,
+after life has left it.&nbsp; And this is not from the survivors having
+had time to dissociate the memory of the dead from their well-remembered
+appearance and form on earth; for the interment follows too speedily
+after death, for that: almost always taking place within four-and-twenty
+hours, and, sometimes, within twelve.<br>
+<br>
+At Rome, there is the same arrangement of Pits in a great, bleak, open,
+dreary space, that I have already described as existing in Genoa.&nbsp;
+When I visited it, at noonday, I saw a solitary coffin of plain deal:
+uncovered by any shroud or pall, and so slightly made, that the hoof
+of any wandering mule would have crushed it in: carelessly tumbled down,
+all on one side, on the door of one of the pits - and there left, by
+itself, in the wind and sunshine.&nbsp; &lsquo;How does it come to be
+left here?&rsquo; I asked the man who showed me the place.&nbsp; &lsquo;It
+was brought here half an hour ago, Signore,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; I
+remembered to have met the procession, on its return: straggling away
+at a good round pace.&nbsp; &lsquo;When will it be put in the pit?&rsquo;
+I asked him.&nbsp; &lsquo;When the cart comes, and it is opened to-night,&rsquo;
+he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;How much does it cost to be brought here in this
+way, instead of coming in the cart?&rsquo; I asked him.&nbsp; &lsquo;Ten
+scudi,&rsquo; he said (about two pounds, two-and-sixpence, English).&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The other bodies, for whom nothing is paid, are taken to the
+church of the Santa Maria della Consol&aacute;zione,&rsquo; he continued,
+&lsquo;and brought here altogether, in the cart at night.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I stood, a moment, looking at the coffin, which had two initial letters
+scrawled upon the top; and turned away, with an expression in my face,
+I suppose, of not much liking its exposure in that manner: for he said,
+shrugging his shoulders with great vivacity, and giving a pleasant smile,
+&lsquo;But he&rsquo;s dead, Signore, he&rsquo;s dead.&nbsp; Why not?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Among the innumerable churches, there is one I must select for separate
+mention.&nbsp; It is the church of the Ara Coeli, supposed to be built
+on the site of the old Temple of Jupiter Feretrius; and approached,
+on one side, by a long steep flight of steps, which seem incomplete
+without some group of bearded soothsayers on the top.&nbsp; It is remarkable
+for the possession of a miraculous Bamb&iacute;no, or wooden doll, representing
+the Infant Saviour; and I first saw this miraculous Bamb&iacute;no,
+in legal phrase, in manner following, that is to say:<br>
+<br>
+We had strolled into the church one afternoon, and were looking down
+its long vista of gloomy pillars (for all these ancient churches built
+upon the ruins of old temples, are dark and sad), when the Brave came
+running in, with a grin upon his face that stretched it from ear to
+ear, and implored us to follow him, without a moment&rsquo;s delay,
+as they were going to show the Bamb&iacute;no to a select party.&nbsp;
+We accordingly hurried off to a sort of chapel, or sacristy, hard by
+the chief altar, but not in the church itself, where the select party,
+consisting of two or three Catholic gentlemen and ladies (not Italians),
+were already assembled: and where one hollow-cheeked young monk was
+lighting up divers candles, while another was putting on some clerical
+robes over his coarse brown habit.&nbsp; The candles were on a kind
+of altar, and above it were two delectable figures, such as you would
+see at any English fair, representing the Holy Virgin, and Saint Joseph,
+as I suppose, bending in devotion over a wooden box, or coffer; which
+was shut.<br>
+<br>
+The hollow-cheeked monk, number One, having finished lighting the candles,
+went down on his knees, in a corner, before this set-piece; and the
+monk number Two, having put on a pair of highly ornamented and gold-bespattered
+gloves, lifted down the coffer, with great reverence, and set it on
+the altar.&nbsp; Then, with many genuflexions, and muttering certain
+prayers, he opened it, and let down the front, and took off sundry coverings
+of satin and lace from the inside.&nbsp; The ladies had been on their
+knees from the commencement; and the gentlemen now dropped down devoutly,
+as he exposed to view a little wooden doll, in face very like General
+Tom Thumb, the American Dwarf: gorgeously dressed in satin and gold
+lace, and actually blazing with rich jewels.&nbsp; There was scarcely
+a spot upon its little breast, or neck, or stomach, but was sparkling
+with the costly offerings of the Faithful.&nbsp; Presently, he lifted
+it out of the box, and carrying it round among the kneelers, set its
+face against the forehead of every one, and tendered its clumsy foot
+to them to kiss - a ceremony which they all performed down to a dirty
+little ragamuffin of a boy who had walked in from the street.&nbsp;
+When this was done, he laid it in the box again: and the company, rising,
+drew near, and commended the jewels in whispers.&nbsp; In good time,
+he replaced the coverings, shut up the box, put it back in its place,
+locked up the whole concern (Holy Family and all) behind a pair of folding-doors;
+took off his priestly vestments; and received the customary &lsquo;small
+charge,&rsquo; while his companion, by means of an extinguisher fastened
+to the end of a long stick, put out the lights, one after another.&nbsp;
+The candles being all extinguished, and the money all collected, they
+retired, and so did the spectators.<br>
+<br>
+I met this same Bamb&iacute;no, in the street a short time afterwards,
+going, in great state, to the house of some sick person.&nbsp; It is
+taken to all parts of Rome for this purpose, constantly; but, I understand
+that it is not always as successful as could be wished; for, making
+its appearance at the bedside of weak and nervous people in extremity,
+accompanied by a numerous escort, it not unfrequently frightens them
+to death.&nbsp; It is most popular in cases of child-birth, where it
+has done such wonders, that if a lady be longer than usual in getting
+through her difficulties, a messenger is despatched, with all speed,
+to solicit the immediate attendance of the Bamb&iacute;no.&nbsp; It
+is a very valuable property, and much confided in - especially by the
+religious body to whom it belongs.<br>
+<br>
+I am happy to know that it is not considered immaculate, by some who
+are good Catholics, and who are behind the scenes, from what was told
+me by the near relation of a Priest, himself a Catholic, and a gentleman
+of learning and intelligence.&nbsp; This Priest made my informant promise
+that he would, on no account, allow the Bamb&iacute;no to be borne into
+the bedroom of a sick lady, in whom they were both interested.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;For,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;if they (the monks) trouble her with
+it, and intrude themselves into her room, it will certainly kill her.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+My informant accordingly looked out of the window when it came; and,
+with many thanks, declined to open the door.&nbsp; He endeavoured, in
+another case of which he had no other knowledge than such as he gained
+as a passer-by at the moment, to prevent its being carried into a small
+unwholesome chamber, where a poor girl was dying.&nbsp; But, he strove
+against it unsuccessfully, and she expired while the crowd were pressing
+round her bed.<br>
+<br>
+Among the people who drop into St. Peter&rsquo;s at their leisure, to
+kneel on the pavement, and say a quiet prayer, there are certain schools
+and seminaries, priestly and otherwise, that come in, twenty or thirty
+strong.&nbsp; These boys always kneel down in single file, one behind
+the other, with a tall grim master in a black gown, bringing up the
+rear: like a pack of cards arranged to be tumbled down at a touch, with
+a disproportionately large Knave of clubs at the end.&nbsp; When they
+have had a minute or so at the chief altar, they scramble up, and filing
+off to the chapel of the Madonna, or the sacrament, flop down again
+in the same order; so that if anybody did stumble against the master,
+a general and sudden overthrow of the whole line must inevitably ensue.<br>
+<br>
+The scene in all the churches is the strangest possible.&nbsp; The same
+monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting, always going on; the same dark
+building, darker from the brightness of the street without; the same
+lamps dimly burning; the selfsame people kneeling here and there; turned
+towards you, from one altar or other, the same priest&rsquo;s back,
+with the same large cross embroidered on it; however different in size,
+in shape, in wealth, in architecture, this church is from that, it is
+the same thing still.&nbsp; There are the same dirty beggars stopping
+in their muttered prayers to beg; the same miserable cripples exhibiting
+their deformity at the doors; the same blind men, rattling little pots
+like kitchen pepper-castors: their depositories for alms; the same preposterous
+crowns of silver stuck upon the painted heads of single saints and Virgins
+in crowded pictures, so that a little figure on a mountain has a head-dress
+bigger than the temple in the foreground, or adjacent miles of landscape;
+the same favourite shrine or figure, smothered with little silver hearts
+and crosses, and the like: the staple trade and show of all the jewellers;
+the same odd mixture of respect and indecorum, faith and phlegm: kneeling
+on the stones, and spitting on them, loudly; getting up from prayers
+to beg a little, or to pursue some other worldly matter: and then kneeling
+down again, to resume the contrite supplication at the point where it
+was interrupted.&nbsp; In one church, a kneeling lady got up from her
+prayer, for a moment, to offer us her card, as a teacher of Music; and
+in another, a sedate gentleman with a very thick walking-staff, arose
+from his devotions to belabour his dog, who was growling at another
+dog: and whose yelps and howls resounded through the church, as his
+master quietly relapsed into his former train of meditation - keeping
+his eye upon the dog, at the same time, nevertheless.<br>
+<br>
+Above all, there is always a receptacle for the contributions of the
+Faithful, in some form or other.&nbsp; Sometimes, it is a money-box,
+set up between the worshipper, and the wooden life-size figure of the
+Redeemer; sometimes, it is a little chest for the maintenance of the
+Virgin; sometimes, an appeal on behalf of a popular Bamb&iacute;no;
+sometimes, a bag at the end of a long stick, thrust among the people
+here and there, and vigilantly jingled by an active Sacristan; but there
+it always is, and, very often, in many shapes in the same church, and
+doing pretty well in all.&nbsp; Nor, is it wanting in the open air -
+the streets and roads - for, often as you are walking along, thinking
+about anything rather than a tin canister, that object pounces out upon
+you from a little house by the wayside; and on its top is painted, &lsquo;For
+the Souls in Purgatory;&rsquo; an appeal which the bearer repeats a
+great many times, as he rattles it before you, much as Punch rattles
+the cracked bell which his sanguine disposition makes an organ of.<br>
+<br>
+And this reminds me that some Roman altars of peculiar sanctity, bear
+the inscription, &lsquo;Every Mass performed at this altar frees a soul
+from Purgatory.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have never been able to find out the
+charge for one of these services, but they should needs be expensive.&nbsp;
+There are several Crosses in Rome too, the kissing of which, confers
+indulgences for varying terms.&nbsp; That in the centre of the Coliseum,
+is worth a hundred days; and people may be seen kissing it from morning
+to night.&nbsp; It is curious that some of these crosses seem to acquire
+an arbitrary popularity: this very one among them.&nbsp; In another
+part of the Coliseum there is a cross upon a marble slab, with the inscription,
+&lsquo;Who kisses this cross shall be entitled to Two hundred and forty
+days&rsquo; indulgence.&rsquo;&nbsp; But I saw no one person kiss it,
+though, day after day, I sat in the arena, and saw scores upon scores
+of peasants pass it, on their way to kiss the other.<br>
+<br>
+To single out details from the great dream of Roman Churches, would
+be the wildest occupation in the world.&nbsp; But St. Stefano Rotondo,
+a damp, mildewed vault of an old church in the outskirts of Rome, will
+always struggle uppermost in my mind, by reason of the hideous paintings
+with which its walls are covered.&nbsp; These represent the martyrdoms
+of saints and early Christians; and such a panorama of horror and butchery
+no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig
+raw, for supper.&nbsp; Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled,
+crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive,
+torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having
+their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their
+ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the
+rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire:
+these are among the mildest subjects.&nbsp; So insisted on, and laboured
+at, besides, that every sufferer gives you the same occasion for wonder
+as poor old Duncan awoke, in Lady Macbeth, when she marvelled at his
+having so much blood in him.<br>
+<br>
+There is an upper chamber in the Mamertine prisons, over what is said
+to have been - and very possibly may have been - the dungeon of St.
+Peter.&nbsp; This chamber is now fitted up as an oratory, dedicated
+to that saint; and it lives, as a distinct and separate place, in my
+recollection, too.&nbsp; It is very small and low-roofed; and the dread
+and gloom of the ponderous, obdurate old prison are on it, as if they
+had come up in a dark mist through the floor.&nbsp; Hanging on the walls,
+among the clustered votive offerings, are objects, at once strangely
+in keeping, and strangely at variance, with the place - rusty daggers,
+knives, pistols, clubs, divers instruments of violence and murder, brought
+here, fresh from use, and hung up to propitiate offended Heaven: as
+if the blood upon them would drain off in consecrated air, and have
+no voice to cry with.&nbsp; It is all so silent and so close, and tomb-like;
+and the dungeons below are so black and stealthy, and stagnant, and
+naked; that this little dark spot becomes a dream within a dream: and
+in the vision of great churches which come rolling past me like a sea,
+it is a small wave by itself, that melts into no other wave, and does
+not flow on with the rest.<br>
+<br>
+It is an awful thing to think of the enormous caverns that are entered
+from some Roman churches, and undermine the city.&nbsp; Many churches
+have crypts and subterranean chapels of great size, which, in the ancient
+time, were baths, and secret chambers of temples, and what not: but
+I do not speak of them.&nbsp; Beneath the church of St. Giovanni and
+St. Paolo, there are the jaws of a terrific range of caverns, hewn out
+of the rock, and said to have another outlet underneath the Coliseum
+- tremendous darknesses of vast extent, half-buried in the earth and
+unexplorable, where the dull torches, flashed by the attendants, glimmer
+down long ranges of distant vaults branching to the right and left,
+like streets in a city of the dead; and show the cold damp stealing
+down the walls, drip-drop, drip-drop, to join the pools of water that
+lie here and there, and never saw, or never will see, one ray of the
+sun.&nbsp; Some accounts make these the prisons of the wild beasts destined
+for the amphitheatre; some the prisons of the condemned gladiators;
+some, both.&nbsp; But the legend most appalling to the fancy is, that
+in the upper range (for there are two stories of these caves) the Early
+Christians destined to be eaten at the Coliseum Shows, heard the wild
+beasts, hungry for them, roaring down below; until, upon the night and
+solitude of their captivity, there burst the sudden noon and life of
+the vast theatre crowded to the parapet, and of these, their dreaded
+neighbours, bounding in!<br>
+<br>
+Below the church of San Sebastiano, two miles beyond the gate of San
+Sebastiano, on the Appian Way, is the entrance to the catacombs of Rome
+- quarries in the old time, but afterwards the hiding-places of the
+Christians.&nbsp; These ghastly passages have been explored for twenty
+miles; and form a chain of labyrinths, sixty miles in circumference.<br>
+<br>
+A gaunt Franciscan friar, with a wild bright eye, was our only guide,
+down into this profound and dreadful place.&nbsp; The narrow ways and
+openings hither and thither, coupled with the dead and heavy air, soon
+blotted out, in all of us, any recollection of the track by which we
+had come: and I could not help thinking &lsquo;Good Heaven, if, in a
+sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or if he should
+be seized with a fit, what would become of us!&rsquo;&nbsp; On we wandered,
+among martyrs&rsquo; graves: passing great subterranean vaulted roads,
+diverging in all directions, and choked up with heaps of stones, that
+thieves and murderers may not take refuge there, and form a population
+under Rome, even worse than that which lives between it and the sun.&nbsp;
+Graves, graves, graves; Graves of men, of women, of their little children,
+who ran crying to the persecutors, &lsquo;We are Christians!&nbsp; We
+are Christians!&rsquo; that they might be murdered with their parents;
+Graves with the palm of martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries,
+and little niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs&rsquo; blood;
+Graves of some who lived down here, for years together, ministering
+to the rest, and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude
+altars, that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy
+graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprised, were
+hemmed in and walled up: buried before Death, and killed by slow starvation.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid
+churches,&rsquo; said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped
+to rest in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding
+us on every side.&nbsp; &lsquo;They are here!&nbsp; Among the Martyrs&rsquo;
+Graves!&rsquo;&nbsp; He was a gentle, earnest man, and said it from
+his heart; but when I thought how Christian men have dealt with one
+another; how, perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted
+down and tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed
+each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this Dust
+had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it, and how these
+great and constant hearts would have been shaken - how they would have
+quailed and drooped - if a foreknowledge of the deeds that professing
+Christians would commit in the Great Name for which they died, could
+have rent them with its own unutterable anguish, on the cruel wheel,
+and bitter cross, and in the fearful fire.<br>
+<br>
+Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain
+apart, and keep their separate identity.&nbsp; I have a fainter recollection,
+sometimes of the relics; of the fragments of the pillar of the Temple
+that was rent in twain; of the portion of the table that was spread
+for the Last Supper; of the well at which the woman of Samaria gave
+water to Our Saviour; of two columns from the house of Pontius Pilate;
+of the stone to which the Sacred hands were bound, when the scourging
+was performed; of the grid-iron of Saint Lawrence, and the stone below
+it, marked with the frying of his fat and blood; these set a shadowy
+mark on some cathedrals, as an old story, or a fable might, and stop
+them for an instant, as they flit before me.&nbsp; The rest is a vast
+wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending
+one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from
+the ground, and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of
+Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and
+ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and
+sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ: of Madonne, with their
+breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern
+fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy
+satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their withered crust of
+skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets of crushed flowers;
+sometimes of people gathered round the pulpit, and a monk within it
+stretching out the crucifix, and preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming
+down through some high window on the sail-cloth stretched above him
+and across the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost
+among the echoes of the roof.&nbsp; Then my tired memory comes out upon
+a flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the
+light; and strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and
+hovels, of an old Italian street.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was beheaded here.&nbsp;
+Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a Bavarian countess, travelling
+as a pilgrim to Rome - alone and on foot, of course - and performing,
+it is said, that act of piety for the fourth time.&nbsp; He saw her
+change a piece of gold at Viterbo, where he lived; followed her; bore
+her company on her journey for some forty miles or more, on the treacherous
+pretext of protecting her; attacked her, in the fulfilment of his unrelenting
+purpose, on the Campagna, within a very short distance of Rome, near
+to what is called (but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and
+beat her to death with her own pilgrim&rsquo;s staff.&nbsp; He was newly
+married, and gave some of her apparel to his wife: saying that he had
+bought it at a fair.&nbsp; She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess
+passing through their town, recognised some trifle as having belonged
+to her.&nbsp; Her husband then told her what he had done.&nbsp; She,
+in confession, told a priest; and the man was taken, within four days
+after the commission of the murder.<br>
+<br>
+There are no fixed times for the administration of justice, or its execution,
+in this unaccountable country; and he had been in prison ever since.&nbsp;
+On the Friday, as he was dining with the other prisoners, they came
+and told him he was to be beheaded next morning, and took him away.&nbsp;
+It is very unusual to execute in Lent; but his crime being a very bad
+one, it was deemed advisable to make an example of him at that time,
+when great numbers of pilgrims were coming towards Rome, from all parts,
+for the Holy Week.&nbsp; I heard of this on the Friday evening, and
+saw the bills up at the churches, calling on the people to pray for
+the criminal&rsquo;s soul.&nbsp; So, I determined to go, and see him
+executed.<br>
+<br>
+The beheading was appointed for fourteen and a-half o&rsquo;clock, Roman
+time: or a quarter before nine in the forenoon.&nbsp; I had two friends
+with me; and as we did not know but that the crowd might be very great,
+we were on the spot by half-past seven.&nbsp; The place of execution
+was near the church of San Giovanni decoll&aacute;to (a doubtful compliment
+to Saint John the Baptist) in one of the impassable back streets without
+any footway, of which a great part of Rome is composed - a street of
+rotten houses, which do not seem to belong to anybody, and do not seem
+to have ever been inhabited, and certainly were never built on any plan,
+or for any particular purpose, and have no window-sashes, and are a
+little like deserted breweries, and might be warehouses but for having
+nothing in them.&nbsp; Opposite to one of these, a white house, the
+scaffold was built.&nbsp; An untidy, unpainted, uncouth, crazy-looking
+thing of course: some seven feet high, perhaps: with a tall, gallows-shaped
+frame rising above it, in which was the knife, charged with a ponderous
+mass of iron, all ready to descend, and glittering brightly in the morning
+sun, whenever it looked out, now and then, from behind a cloud.<br>
+<br>
+There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at a
+considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope&rsquo;s
+dragoons.&nbsp; Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms,
+standing at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were walking
+up and down in twos and threes, chatting together, and smoking cigars.<br>
+<br>
+At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would be a
+dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of vegetable refuse,
+but for such things being thrown anywhere and everywhere in Rome, and
+favouring no particular sort of locality.&nbsp; We got into a kind of
+wash-house, belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and standing
+there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled against the
+wall, looked, through a large grated window, at the scaffold, and straight
+down the street beyond it until, in consequence of its turning off abruptly
+to the left, our perspective was brought to a sudden termination, and
+had a corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.<br>
+<br>
+Nine o&rsquo;clock struck, and ten o&rsquo;clock struck, and nothing
+happened.&nbsp; All the bells of all the churches rang as usual.&nbsp;
+A little parliament of dogs assembled in the open space, and chased
+each other, in and out among the soldiers.&nbsp; Fierce-looking Romans
+of the lowest class, in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked,
+came and went, and talked together.&nbsp; Women and children fluttered,
+on the skirts of the scanty crowd.&nbsp; One large muddy spot was left
+quite bare, like a bald place on a man&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; A cigar-merchant,
+with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one hand, went up and down,
+crying his wares.&nbsp; A pastry-merchant divided his attention between
+the scaffold and his customers.&nbsp; Boys tried to climb up walls,
+and tumbled down again.&nbsp; Priests and monks elbowed a passage for
+themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of the
+knife: then went away.&nbsp; Artists, in inconceivable hats of the middle-ages,
+and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed picturesque scowls
+about them from their stations in the throng.&nbsp; One gentleman (connected
+with the fine arts, I presume) went up and down in a pair of Hessian-boots,
+with a red beard hanging down on his breast, and his long and bright
+red hair, plaited into two tails, one on either side of his head, which
+fell over his shoulders in front of him, very nearly to his waist, and
+were carefully entwined and braided!<br>
+<br>
+Eleven o&rsquo;clock struck and still nothing happened.&nbsp; A rumour
+got about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess; in
+which case, the priests would keep him until the Ave Maria (sunset);
+for it is their merciful custom never finally to turn the crucifix away
+from a man at that pass, as one refusing to be shriven, and consequently
+a sinner abandoned of the Saviour, until then.&nbsp; People began to
+drop off.&nbsp; The officers shrugged their shoulders and looked doubtful.&nbsp;
+The dragoons, who came riding up below our window, every now and then,
+to order an unlucky hackney-coach or cart away, as soon as it had comfortably
+established itself, and was covered with exulting people (but never
+before), became imperious, and quick-tempered.&nbsp; The bald place
+hadn&rsquo;t a straggling hair upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning
+the perspective, took a world of snuff.<br>
+<br>
+Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets.&nbsp; &lsquo;Attention!&rsquo;
+was among the foot-soldiers instantly.&nbsp; They were marched up to
+the scaffold and formed round it.&nbsp; The dragoons galloped to their
+nearer stations too.&nbsp; The guillotine became the centre of a wood
+of bristling bayonets and shining sabres.&nbsp; The people closed round
+nearer, on the flank of the soldiery.&nbsp; A long straggling stream
+of men and boys, who had accompanied the procession from the prison,
+came pouring into the open space.&nbsp; The bald spot was scarcely distinguishable
+from the rest.&nbsp; The cigar and pastry-merchants resigned all thoughts
+of business, for the moment, and abandoning themselves wholly to pleasure,
+got good situations in the crowd.&nbsp; The perspective ended, now,
+in a troop of dragoons.&nbsp; And the corpulent officer, sword in hand,
+looked hard at a church close to him, which he could see, but we, the
+crowd, could not.<br>
+<br>
+After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the scaffold
+from this church; and above their heads, coming on slowly and gloomily,
+the effigy of Christ upon the cross, canopied with black.&nbsp; This
+was carried round the foot of the scaffold, to the front, and turned
+towards the criminal, that he might see it to the last.&nbsp; It was
+hardly in its place, when he appeared on the platform, bare-footed;
+his hands bound; and with the collar and neck of his shirt cut away,
+almost to the shoulder.&nbsp; A young man - six-and-twenty - vigorously
+made, and well-shaped.&nbsp; Face pale; small dark moustache; and dark
+brown hair.<br>
+<br>
+He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife
+brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had occasioned
+the delay.<br>
+<br>
+He immediately kneeled down, below the knife.&nbsp; His neck fitting
+into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down,
+by another plank above; exactly like the pillory.&nbsp; Immediately
+below him was a leathern bag.&nbsp; And into it his head rolled instantly.<br>
+<br>
+The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round
+the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the
+knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.<br>
+<br>
+When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set
+upon a pole in front - a little patch of black and white, for the long
+street to stare at, and the flies to settle on.&nbsp; The eyes were
+turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and
+looked to the crucifix.&nbsp; Every tinge and hue of life had left it
+in that instant.&nbsp; It was dull, cold, livid, wax.&nbsp; The body
+also.<br>
+<br>
+There was a great deal of blood.&nbsp; When we left the window, and
+went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men
+who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the
+body into a shell, picked his way as through mire.&nbsp; A strange appearance
+was the apparent annihilation of the neck.&nbsp; The head was taken
+off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing
+the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were
+nothing left above the shoulder.<br>
+<br>
+Nobody cared, or was at all affected.&nbsp; There was no manifestation
+of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow.&nbsp; My empty pockets
+were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the scaffold,
+as the corpse was being put into its coffin.&nbsp; It was an ugly, filthy,
+careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery beyond the
+momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.&nbsp; Yes!&nbsp; Such
+a sight has one meaning and one warning.&nbsp; Let me not forget it.&nbsp;
+The speculators in the lottery, station themselves at favourable points
+for counting the gouts of blood that spirt out, here or there; and buy
+that number.&nbsp; It is pretty sure to have a run upon it.<br>
+<br>
+The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the scaffold
+taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed.&nbsp; The executioner:
+an outlaw <i>ex officio</i> (what a satire on the Punishment!) who dare
+not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St. Angelo but to do his work:
+retreated to his lair, and the show was over.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the Vatican,
+of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous galleries, and staircases,
+and suites upon suites of immense chambers, ranks highest and stands
+foremost.&nbsp; Many most noble statues, and wonderful pictures, are
+there; nor is it heresy to say that there is a considerable amount of
+rubbish there, too.&nbsp; When any old piece of sculpture dug out of
+the ground, finds a place in a gallery because it is old, and without
+any reference to its intrinsic merits: and finds admirers by the hundred,
+because it is there, and for no other reason on earth: there will be
+no lack of objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one
+who employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of
+Cant for less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste
+for the mere trouble of putting them on.<br>
+<br>
+I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural perception
+of what is natural and true, at a palace-door, in Italy or elsewhere,
+as I should leave my shoes if I were travelling in the East.&nbsp; I
+cannot forget that there are certain expressions of face, natural to
+certain passions, and as unchangeable in their nature as the gait of
+a lion, or the flight of an eagle.&nbsp; I cannot dismiss from my certain
+knowledge, such commonplace facts as the ordinary proportion of men&rsquo;s
+arms, and legs, and heads; and when I meet with performances that do
+violence to these experiences and recollections, no matter where they
+may be, I cannot honestly admire them, and think it best to say so;
+in spite of high critical advice that we should sometimes feign an admiration,
+though we have it not.<br>
+<br>
+Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young Waterman
+representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and Perkins&rsquo;s Drayman depicted
+as an Evangelist, I see nothing to commend or admire in the performance,
+however great its reputed Painter.&nbsp; Neither am I partial to libellous
+Angels, who play on fiddles and bassoons, for the edification of sprawling
+monks apparently in liquor.&nbsp; Nor to those Monsieur Tonsons of galleries,
+Saint Francis and Saint Sebastian; both of whom I submit should have
+very uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their compound
+multiplication by Italian Painters.<br>
+<br>
+It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined raptures
+in which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the true appreciation
+of the really great and transcendent works.&nbsp; I cannot imagine,
+for example, how the resolute champion of undeserving pictures can soar
+to the amazing beauty of Titian&rsquo;s great picture of the Assumption
+of the Virgin at Venice; or how the man who is truly affected by the
+sublimity of that exquisite production, or who is truly sensible of
+the beauty of Tintoretto&rsquo;s great picture of the Assembly of the
+Blessed in the same place, can discern in Michael Angelo&rsquo;s Last
+Judgment, in the Sistine chapel, any general idea, or one pervading
+thought, in harmony with the stupendous subject.&nbsp; He who will contemplate
+Raphael&rsquo;s masterpiece, the Transfiguration, and will go away into
+another chamber of that same Vatican, and contemplate another design
+of Raphael, representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping
+of a great fire by Leo the Fourth - and who will say that he admires
+them both, as works of extraordinary genius - must, as I think, be wanting
+in his powers of perception in one of the two instances, and, probably,
+in the high and lofty one.<br>
+<br>
+It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether, sometimes,
+the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and whether it is quite
+well or agreeable that we should know beforehand, where this figure
+will be turning round, and where that figure will be lying down, and
+where there will be drapery in folds, and so forth.&nbsp; When I observe
+heads inferior to the subject, in pictures of merit, in Italian galleries,
+I do not attach that reproach to the Painter, for I have a suspicion
+that these great men, who were, of necessity, very much in the hands
+of monks and priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too often.&nbsp;
+I frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below the story
+and the painter: and I invariably observe that those heads are of the
+Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the Convent inmates
+of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that, in such cases, the
+lameness was not with the painter, but with the vanity and ignorance
+of certain of his employers, who would be apostles - on canvas, at all
+events.<br>
+<br>
+The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova&rsquo;s statues; the wonderful
+gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both in
+the Capitol and the Vatican; and the strength and fire of many others;
+are, in their different ways, beyond all reach of words.&nbsp; They
+are especially impressive and delightful, after the works of Bernini
+and his disciples, in which the churches of Rome, from St. Peter&rsquo;s
+downward, abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most detestable
+class of productions in the wide world.&nbsp; I would infinitely rather
+(as mere works of art) look upon the three deities of the Past, the
+Present, and the Future, in the Chinese Collection, than upon the best
+of these breezy maniacs; whose every fold of drapery is blown inside-out;
+whose smallest vein, or artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger;
+whose hair is like a nest of lively snakes; and whose attitudes put
+all other extravagance to shame.&nbsp; Insomuch that I do honestly believe,
+there can be no place in the world, where such intolerable abortions,
+begotten of the sculptor&rsquo;s chisel, are to be found in such profusion,
+as in Rome.<br>
+<br>
+There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican;
+and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are arranged, are painted
+to represent a starlight sky in the Desert.&nbsp; It may seem an odd
+idea, but it is very effective.&nbsp; The grim, half-human monsters
+from the temples, look more grim and monstrous underneath the deep dark
+blue; it sheds a strange uncertain gloomy air on everything - a mystery
+adapted to the objects; and you leave them, as you find them, shrouded
+in a solemn night.<br>
+<br>
+In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advantage.&nbsp;
+There are seldom so many in one place that the attention need become
+distracted, or the eye confused.&nbsp; You see them very leisurely;
+and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of people.&nbsp; There are portraits
+innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke; heads by Guido,
+and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects by Correggio, and
+Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and Spagnoletto - many of which
+it would be difficult, indeed, to praise too highly, or to praise enough;
+such is their tenderness and grace; their noble elevation, purity, and
+beauty.<br>
+<br>
+The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a picture
+almost impossible to be forgotten.&nbsp; Through the transcendent sweetness
+and beauty of the face, there is a something shining out, that haunts
+me.&nbsp; I see it now, as I see this paper, or my pen.&nbsp; The head
+is loosely draped in white; the light hair falling down below the linen
+folds.&nbsp; She has turned suddenly towards you; and there is an expression
+in the eyes - although they are very tender and gentle - as if the wildness
+of a momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome,
+that instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,
+and a desolate earthly helplessness remained.&nbsp; Some stories say
+that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other stories,
+that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on her way to
+the scaffold.&nbsp; I am willing to believe that, as you see her on
+his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from the first
+sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which he has stamped
+on mine as though I had stood beside him in the concourse.&nbsp; The
+guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole quarter of the town, as
+it stands withering away by grains: had that face, to my fancy, in its
+dismal porch, and at its black, blind windows, and flitting up and down
+its dreary stairs, and growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries.&nbsp;
+The History is written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl&rsquo;s
+face, by Nature&rsquo;s own hand.&nbsp; And oh! how in that one touch
+she puts to flight (instead of making kin) the puny world that claim
+to be related to her, in right of poor conventional forgeries!<br>
+<br>
+I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at whose
+base Caesar fell.&nbsp; A stern, tremendous figure!&nbsp; I imagined
+one of greater finish: of the last refinement: full of delicate touches:
+losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose blood was ebbing
+before it, and settling into some such rigid majesty as this, as Death
+came creeping over the upturned face.<br>
+<br>
+The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would
+be full of interest were it only for the changing views they afford,
+of the wild Campagna.&nbsp; But, every inch of ground, in every direction,
+is rich in associations, and in natural beauties.&nbsp; There is Albano,
+with its lovely lake and wooded shore, and with its wine, that certainly
+has not improved since the days of Horace, and in these times hardly
+justifies his panegyric.&nbsp; There is squalid Tivoli, with the river
+Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging down, headlong, some eighty
+feet in search of it.&nbsp; With its picturesque Temple of the Sibyl,
+perched high on a crag; its minor waterfalls glancing and sparkling
+in the sun; and one good cavern yawning darkly, where the river takes
+a fearful plunge and shoots on, low down under beetling rocks.&nbsp;
+There, too, is the Villa d&rsquo;Este, deserted and decaying among groves
+of melancholy pine and cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state.&nbsp;
+Then, there is Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum,
+where Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his favourite house (some
+fragments of it may yet be seen there), and where Cato was born.&nbsp;
+We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a grey, dull day, when a shrill March
+wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old city lay
+strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as the ashes
+of a long extinguished fire.<br>
+<br>
+One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen
+miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the ancient
+Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown.&nbsp; We started at half-past
+seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out upon the open
+Campagna.&nbsp; For twelve miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken
+succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.&nbsp; Tombs and
+temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes,
+pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown
+and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about
+us.&nbsp; Sometimes, loose walls, built up from these fragments by the
+shepherds, came across our path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds
+of broken stones, obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments
+themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter
+to advance; but it was always ruin.&nbsp; Now, we tracked a piece of
+the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering,
+as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin.&nbsp; In the distance,
+ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along the plain;
+and every breath of wind that swept towards us, stirred early flowers
+and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin.&nbsp; The
+unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the awful silence, had their
+nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now
+and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed
+in ruin.&nbsp; The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction,
+where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what
+is the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a
+Desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth
+from which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their Dead,
+have fallen like their Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but
+a heap of idle dust!&nbsp; Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking,
+from the distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost
+feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun
+would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined
+world.<br>
+<br>
+To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
+fitting close to such a day.&nbsp; The narrow streets, devoid of footways,
+and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dunghill-rubbish, contrast
+so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth, and darkness,
+with the broad square before some haughty church: in the centre of which,
+a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the
+Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps
+an ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supports a Christian
+saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter.&nbsp;
+Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from the spoliation of
+the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like mountains: while here and
+there, are broken arches and rent walls, through which it gushes freely,
+as the life comes pouring from a wound.&nbsp; The little town of miserable
+houses, walled, and shut in by barred gates, is the quarter where the
+Jews are locked up nightly, when the clock strikes eight - a miserable
+place, densely populated, and reeking with bad odours, but where the
+people are industrious and money-getting.&nbsp; In the day-time, as
+you make your way along the narrow streets, you see them all at work:
+upon the pavement, oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing
+old clothes, and driving bargains.<br>
+<br>
+Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the moon once
+more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and rolling
+over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear.&nbsp; In the narrow
+little throat of street, beyond, a booth, dressed out with flaring lamps,
+and boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky Romans round its smoky
+coppers of hot broth, and cauliflower stew; its trays of fried fish,
+and its flasks of wine.&nbsp; As you rattle round the sharply-twisting
+corner, a lumbering sound is heard.&nbsp; The coachman stops abruptly,
+and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by, preceded by a man who bears
+a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a priest: the latter chaunting
+as he goes.&nbsp; It is the Dead Cart, with the bodies of the poor,
+on their way to burial in the Sacred Field outside the walls, where
+they will be thrown into the pit that will be covered with a stone to-night,
+and sealed up for a year.<br>
+<br>
+But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns ancient
+temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums: it is strange to see,
+how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended into some
+modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose - a wall, a
+dwelling-place, a granary, a stable - some use for which it never was
+designed, and associated with which it cannot otherwise than lamely
+assort.&nbsp; It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old
+mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance: have
+been incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how,
+in numberless respects, the false faith and the true are fused into
+a monstrous union.<br>
+<br>
+From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a squat and
+stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius) makes an opaque
+triangle in the moonlight.&nbsp; But, to an English traveller, it serves
+to mark the grave of Shelley too, whose ashes lie beneath a little garden
+near it.&nbsp; Nearer still, almost within its shadow, lie the bones
+of Keats, &lsquo;whose name is writ in water,&rsquo; that shines brightly
+in the landscape of a calm Italian night.<br>
+<br>
+The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attractions to all
+visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sunday, I would counsel
+those who go to Rome for its own interest, to avoid it at that time.&nbsp;
+The ceremonies, in general, are of the most tedious and wearisome kind;
+the heat and crowd at every one of them, painfully oppressive; the noise,
+hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting.&nbsp; We abandoned the pursuit
+of these shows, very early in the proceedings, and betook ourselves
+to the Ruins again.&nbsp; But, we plunged into the crowd for a share
+of the best of the sights; and what we saw, I will describe to you.<br>
+<br>
+At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little, for by
+the time we reached it (though we were early) the besieging crowd had
+filled it to the door, and overflowed into the adjoining hall, where
+they were struggling, and squeezing, and mutually expostulating, and
+making great rushes every time a lady was brought out faint, as if at
+least fifty people could be accommodated in her vacant standing-room.&nbsp;
+Hanging in the doorway of the chapel, was a heavy curtain, and this
+curtain, some twenty people nearest to it, in their anxiety to hear
+the chaunting of the Miserere, were continually plucking at, in opposition
+to each other, that it might not fall down and stifle the sound of the
+voices.&nbsp; The consequence was, that it occasioned the most extraordinary
+confusion, and seemed to wind itself about the unwary, like a Serpent.&nbsp;
+Now, a lady was wrapped up in it, and couldn&rsquo;t be unwound.&nbsp;
+Now, the voice of a stifling gentleman was heard inside it, beseeching
+to be let out.&nbsp; Now, two muffled arms, no man could say of which
+sex, struggled in it as in a sack.&nbsp; Now, it was carried by a rush,
+bodily overhead into the chapel, like an awning.&nbsp; Now, it came
+out the other way, and blinded one of the Pope&rsquo;s Swiss Guard,
+who had arrived, that moment, to set things to rights.<br>
+<br>
+Being seated at a little distance, among two or three of the Pope&rsquo;s
+gentlemen, who were very weary and counting the minutes - as perhaps
+his Holiness was too - we had better opportunities of observing this
+eccentric entertainment, than of hearing the Miserere.&nbsp; Sometimes,
+there was a swell of mournful voices that sounded very pathetic and
+sad, and died away, into a low strain again; but that was all we heard.<br>
+<br>
+At another time, there was the Exhibition of Relics in St. Peter&rsquo;s,
+which took place at between six and seven o&rsquo;clock in the evening,
+and was striking from the cathedral being dark and gloomy, and having
+a great many people in it.&nbsp; The place into which the relics were
+brought, one by one, by a party of three priests, was a high balcony
+near the chief altar.&nbsp; This was the only lighted part of the church.&nbsp;
+There are always a hundred and twelve lamps burning near the altar,
+and there were two tall tapers, besides, near the black statue of St.
+Peter; but these were nothing in such an immense edifice.&nbsp; The
+gloom, and the general upturning of faces to the balcony, and the prostration
+of true believers on the pavement, as shining objects, like pictures
+or looking-glasses, were brought out and shown, had something effective
+in it, despite the very preposterous manner in which they were held
+up for the general edification, and the great elevation at which they
+were displayed; which one would think rather calculated to diminish
+the comfort derivable from a full conviction of their being genuine.<br>
+<br>
+On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament from the
+Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina, another chapel
+in the Vatican; - a ceremony emblematical of the entombment of the Saviour
+before His Resurrection.&nbsp; We waited in a great gallery with a great
+crowd of people (three-fourths of them English) for an hour or so, while
+they were chaunting the Miserere, in the Sistine chapel again.&nbsp;
+Both chapels opened out of the gallery; and the general attention was
+concentrated on the occasional opening and shutting of the door of the
+one for which the Pope was ultimately bound.&nbsp; None of these openings
+disclosed anything more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting
+a great quantity of candles; but at each and every opening, there was
+a terrific rush made at this ladder and this man, something like (I
+should think) a charge of the heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.&nbsp;
+The man was never brought down, however, nor the ladder; for it performed
+the strangest antics in the world among the crowd - where it was carried
+by the man, when the candles were all lighted; and finally it was stuck
+up against the gallery wall, in a very disorderly manner, just before
+the opening of the other chapel, and the commencement of a new chaunt,
+announced the approach of his Holiness.&nbsp; At this crisis, the soldiers
+of the guard, who had been poking the crowd into all sorts of shapes,
+formed down the gallery: and the procession came up, between the two
+lines they made.<br>
+<br>
+There were a few choristers, and then a great many priests, walking
+two and two, and carrying - the good-looking priests at least - their
+lighted tapers, so as to throw the light with a good effect upon their
+faces: for the room was darkened.&nbsp; Those who were not handsome,
+or who had not long beards, carried <i>their</i> tapers anyhow, and
+abandoned themselves to spiritual contemplation.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the
+chaunting was very monotonous and dreary.&nbsp; The procession passed
+on, slowly, into the chapel, and the drone of voices went on, and came
+on, with it, until the Pope himself appeared, walking under a white
+satin canopy, and bearing the covered Sacrament in both hands; cardinals
+and canons clustered round him, making a brilliant show.&nbsp; The soldiers
+of the guard knelt down as he passed; all the bystanders bowed; and
+so he passed on into the chapel: the white satin canopy being removed
+from over him at the door, and a white satin parasol hoisted over his
+poor old head, in place of it.&nbsp; A few more couples brought up the
+rear, and passed into the chapel also.&nbsp; Then, the chapel door was
+shut; and it was all over; and everybody hurried off headlong, as for
+life or death, to see something else, and say it wasn&rsquo;t worth
+the trouble.<br>
+<br>
+I think the most popular and most crowded sight (excepting those of
+Easter Sunday and Monday, which are open to all classes of people) was
+the Pope washing the feet of Thirteen men, representing the twelve apostles,
+and Judas Iscariot.&nbsp; The place in which this pious office is performed,
+is one of the chapels of St. Peter&rsquo;s, which is gaily decorated
+for the occasion; the thirteen sitting, &lsquo;all of a row,&rsquo;
+on a very high bench, and looking particularly uncomfortable, with the
+eyes of Heaven knows how many English, French, Americans, Swiss, Germans,
+Russians, Swedes, Norwegians, and other foreigners, nailed to their
+faces all the time.&nbsp; They are robed in white; and on their heads
+they wear a stiff white cap, like a large English porter-pot, without
+a handle.&nbsp; Each carries in his hand, a nosegay, of the size of
+a fine cauliflower; and two of them, on this occasion, wore spectacles;
+which, remembering the characters they sustained, I thought a droll
+appendage to the costume.&nbsp; There was a great eye to character.&nbsp;
+St. John was represented by a good-looking young man.&nbsp; St. Peter,
+by a grave-looking old gentleman, with a flowing brown beard; and Judas
+Iscariot by such an enormous hypocrite (I could not make out, though,
+whether the expression of his face was real or assumed) that if he had
+acted the part to the death and had gone away and hanged himself, he
+would have left nothing to be desired.<br>
+<br>
+As the two large boxes, appropriated to ladies at this sight, were full
+to the throat, and getting near was hopeless, we posted off, along with
+a great crowd, to be in time at the Table, where the Pope, in person,
+waits on these Thirteen; and after a prodigious struggle at the Vatican
+staircase, and several personal conflicts with the Swiss guard, the
+whole crowd swept into the room.&nbsp; It was a long gallery hung with
+drapery of white and red, with another great box for ladies (who are
+obliged to dress in black at these ceremonies, and to wear black veils),
+a royal box for the King of Naples and his party; and the table itself,
+which, set out like a ball supper, and ornamented with golden figures
+of the real apostles, was arranged on an elevated platform on one side
+of the gallery.&nbsp; The counterfeit apostles&rsquo; knives and forks
+were laid out on that side of the table which was nearest to the wall,
+so that they might be stared at again, without let or hindrance.<br>
+<br>
+The body of the room was full of male strangers; the crowd immense;
+the heat very great; and the pressure sometimes frightful.&nbsp; It
+was at its height, when the stream came pouring in, from the feet-washing;
+and then there were such shrieks and outcries, that a party of Piedmontese
+dragoons went to the rescue of the Swiss guard, and helped them to calm
+the tumult.<br>
+<br>
+The ladies were particularly ferocious, in their struggles for places.&nbsp;
+One lady of my acquaintance was seized round the waist, in the ladies&rsquo;
+box, by a strong matron, and hoisted out of her place; and there was
+another lady (in a back row in the same box) who improved her position
+by sticking a large pin into the ladies before her.<br>
+<br>
+The gentlemen about me were remarkably anxious to see what was on the
+table; and one Englishman seemed to have embarked the whole energy of
+his nature in the determination to discover whether there was any mustard.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;By Jupiter there&rsquo;s vinegar!&rsquo; I heard him say to his
+friend, after he had stood on tiptoe an immense time, and had been crushed
+and beaten on all sides.&nbsp; &lsquo;And there&rsquo;s oil!&nbsp; I
+saw them distinctly, in cruets!&nbsp; Can any gentleman, in front there,
+see mustard on the table?&nbsp; Sir, will you oblige me!&nbsp; <i>Do</i>
+you see a Mustard-Pot?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The apostles and Judas appearing on the platform, after much expectation,
+were marshalled, in line, in front of the table, with Peter at the top;
+and a good long stare was taken at them by the company, while twelve
+of them took a long smell at their nosegays, and Judas - moving his
+lips very obtrusively - engaged in inward prayer.&nbsp; Then, the Pope,
+clad in a scarlet robe, and wearing on his head a skull-cap of white
+satin, appeared in the midst of a crowd of Cardinals and other dignitaries,
+and took in his hand a little golden ewer, from which he poured a little
+water over one of Peter&rsquo;s hands, while one attendant held a golden
+basin; a second, a fine cloth; a third, Peter&rsquo;s nosegay, which
+was taken from him during the operation.&nbsp; This his Holiness performed,
+with considerable expedition, on every man in the line (Judas, I observed,
+to be particularly overcome by his condescension); and then the whole
+Thirteen sat down to dinner.&nbsp; Grace said by the Pope.&nbsp; Peter
+in the chair.<br>
+<br>
+There was white wine, and red wine: and the dinner looked very good.&nbsp;
+The courses appeared in portions, one for each apostle: and these being
+presented to the Pope, by Cardinals upon their knees, were by him handed
+to the Thirteen.&nbsp; The manner in which Judas grew more white-livered
+over his victuals, and languished, with his head on one side, as if
+he had no appetite, defies all description.&nbsp; Peter was a good,
+sound, old man, and went in, as the saying is, &lsquo;to win;&rsquo;
+eating everything that was given him (he got the best: being first in
+the row) and saying nothing to anybody.&nbsp; The dishes appeared to
+be chiefly composed of fish and vegetables.&nbsp; The Pope helped the
+Thirteen to wine also; and, during the whole dinner, somebody read something
+aloud, out of a large book - the Bible, I presume - which nobody could
+hear, and to which nobody paid the least attention.&nbsp; The Cardinals,
+and other attendants, smiled to each other, from time to time, as if
+the thing were a great farce; and if they thought so, there is little
+doubt they were perfectly right.&nbsp; His Holiness did what he had
+to do, as a sensible man gets through a troublesome ceremony, and seemed
+very glad when it was all over.<br>
+<br>
+The Pilgrims&rsquo; Suppers: where lords and ladies waited on the Pilgrims,
+in token of humility, and dried their feet when they had been well washed
+by deputy: were very attractive.&nbsp; But, of all the many spectacles
+of dangerous reliance on outward observances, in themselves mere empty
+forms, none struck me half so much as the Scala Santa, or Holy Staircase,
+which I saw several times, but to the greatest advantage, or disadvantage,
+on Good Friday.<br>
+<br>
+This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have
+belonged to Pontius Pilate&rsquo;s house and to be the identical stair
+on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat.&nbsp;
+Pilgrims ascend it, only on their knees.&nbsp; It is steep; and, at
+the summit, is a chapel, reported to be full of relics; into which they
+peep through some iron bars, and then come down again, by one of two
+side staircases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on.<br>
+<br>
+On Good Friday, there were, on a moderate computation, a hundred people,
+slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees, at one time; while
+others, who were going up, or had come down - and a few who had done
+both, and were going up again for the second time - stood loitering
+in the porch below, where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-box, rattled
+a tin canister, with a slit in the top, incessantly, to remind them
+that he took the money.&nbsp; The majority were country-people, male
+and female.&nbsp; There were four or five Jesuit priests, however, and
+some half-dozen well-dressed women.&nbsp; A whole school of boys, twenty
+at least, were about half-way up - evidently enjoying it very much.&nbsp;
+They were all wedged together, pretty closely; but the rest of the company
+gave the boys as wide a berth as possible, in consequence of their betraying
+some recklessness in the management of their boots.<br>
+<br>
+I never, in my life, saw anything at once so ridiculous, and so unpleasant,
+as this sight - ridiculous in the absurd incidents inseparable from
+it; and unpleasant in its senseless and unmeaning degradation.&nbsp;
+There are two steps to begin with, and then a rather broad landing.&nbsp;
+The more rigid climbers went along this landing on their knees, as well
+as up the stairs; and the figures they cut, in their shuffling progress
+over the level surface, no description can paint.&nbsp; Then, to see
+them watch their opportunity from the porch, and cut in where there
+was a place next the wall!&nbsp; And to see one man with an umbrella
+(brought on purpose, for it was a fine day) hoisting himself, unlawfully,
+from stair to stair!&nbsp; And to observe a demure lady of fifty-five
+or so, looking back, every now and then, to assure herself that her
+legs were properly disposed!<br>
+<br>
+There were such odd differences in the speed of different people, too.&nbsp;
+Some got on as if they were doing a match against time; others stopped
+to say a prayer on every step.&nbsp; This man touched every stair with
+his forehead, and kissed it; that man scratched his head all the way.&nbsp;
+The boys got on brilliantly, and were up and down again before the old
+lady had accomplished her half-dozen stairs.&nbsp; But most of the penitents
+came down, very sprightly and fresh, as having done a real good substantial
+deed which it would take a good deal of sin to counterbalance; and the
+old gentleman in the watch-box was down upon them with his canister
+while they were in this humour, I promise you.<br>
+<br>
+As if such a progress were not in its nature inevitably droll enough,
+there lay, on the top of the stairs, a wooden figure on a crucifix,
+resting on a sort of great iron saucer: so rickety and unsteady, that
+whenever an enthusiastic person kissed the figure, with more than usual
+devotion, or threw a coin into the saucer, with more than common readiness
+(for it served in this respect as a second or supplementary canister),
+it gave a great leap and rattle, and nearly shook the attendant lamp
+out: horribly frightening the people further down, and throwing the
+guilty party into unspeakable embarrassment.<br>
+<br>
+On Easter Sunday, as well as on the preceding Thursday, the Pope bestows
+his benediction on the people, from the balcony in front of St. Peter&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+This Easter Sunday was a day so bright and blue: so cloudless, balmy,
+wonderfully bright: that all the previous bad weather vanished from
+the recollection in a moment.&nbsp; I had seen the Thursday&rsquo;s
+Benediction dropping damply on some hundreds of umbrellas, but there
+was not a sparkle then, in all the hundred fountains of Rome - such
+fountains as they are! - and on this Sunday morning they were running
+diamonds.&nbsp; The miles of miserable streets through which we drove
+(compelled to a certain course by the Pope&rsquo;s dragoons: the Roman
+police on such occasions) were so full of colour, that nothing in them
+was capable of wearing a faded aspect.&nbsp; The common people came
+out in their gayest dresses; the richer people in their smartest vehicles;
+Cardinals rattled to the church of the Poor Fishermen in their state
+carriages; shabby magnificence flaunted its thread-bare liveries and
+tarnished cocked hats, in the sun; and every coach in Rome was put in
+requisition for the Great Piazza of St. Peter&rsquo;s.<br>
+<br>
+One hundred and fifty thousand people were there at least!&nbsp; Yet
+there was ample room.&nbsp; How many carriages were there, I don&rsquo;t
+know; yet there was room for them too, and to spare.&nbsp; The great
+steps of the church were densely crowded.&nbsp; There were many of the
+Contadini, from Albano (who delight in red), in that part of the square,
+and the mingling of bright colours in the crowd was beautiful.&nbsp;
+Below the steps the troops were ranged.&nbsp; In the magnificent proportions
+of the place they looked like a bed of flowers.&nbsp; Sulky Romans,
+lively peasants from the neighbouring country, groups of pilgrims from
+distant parts of Italy, sight-seeing foreigners of all nations, made
+a murmur in the clear air, like so many insects; and high above them
+all, plashing and bubbling, and making rainbow colours in the light,
+the two delicious fountains welled and tumbled bountifully.<br>
+<br>
+A kind of bright carpet was hung over the front of the balcony; and
+the sides of the great window were bedecked with crimson drapery.&nbsp;
+An awning was stretched, too, over the top, to screen the old man from
+the hot rays of the sun.&nbsp; As noon approached, all eyes were turned
+up to this window.&nbsp; In due time, the chair was seen approaching
+to the front, with the gigantic fans of peacock&rsquo;s feathers, close
+behind.&nbsp; The doll within it (for the balcony is very high) then
+rose up, and stretched out its tiny arms, while all the male spectators
+in the square uncovered, and some, but not by any means the greater
+part, kneeled down.&nbsp; The guns upon the ramparts of the Castle of
+St. Angelo proclaimed, next moment, that the benediction was given;
+drums beat; trumpets sounded; arms clashed; and the great mass below,
+suddenly breaking into smaller heaps, and scattering here and there
+in rills, was stirred like parti-coloured sand.<br>
+<br>
+What a bright noon it was, as we rode away!&nbsp; The Tiber was no longer
+yellow, but blue.&nbsp; There was a blush on the old bridges, that made
+them fresh and hale again.&nbsp; The Pantheon, with its majestic front,
+all seamed and furrowed like an old face, had summer light upon its
+battered walls.&nbsp; Every squalid and desolate hut in the Eternal
+City (bear witness every grim old palace, to the filth and misery of
+the plebeian neighbour that elbows it, as certain as Time has laid its
+grip on its patrician head!) was fresh and new with some ray of the
+sun.&nbsp; The very prison in the crowded street, a whirl of carriages
+and people, had some stray sense of the day, dropping through its chinks
+and crevices: and dismal prisoners who could not wind their faces round
+the barricading of the blocked-up windows, stretched out their hands,
+and clinging to the rusty bars, turned <i>them</i> towards the overflowing
+street: as if it were a cheerful fire, and could be shared in, that
+way.<br>
+<br>
+But, when the night came on, without a cloud to dim the full moon, what
+a sight it was to see the Great Square full once more, and the whole
+church, from the cross to the ground, lighted with innumerable lanterns,
+tracing out the architecture, and winking and shining all round the
+colonnade of the piazza!&nbsp; And what a sense of exultation, joy,
+delight, it was, when the great bell struck half-past seven - on the
+instant - to behold one bright red mass of fire, soar gallantly from
+the top of the cupola to the extremest summit of the cross, and the
+moment it leaped into its place, become the signal of a bursting out
+of countless lights, as great, and red, and blazing as itself, from
+every part of the gigantic church; so that every cornice, capital, and
+smallest ornament of stone, expressed itself in fire: and the black,
+solid groundwork of the enormous dome seemed to grow transparent as
+an egg-shell!<br>
+<br>
+A train of gunpowder, an electric chain - nothing could be fired, more
+suddenly and swiftly, than this second illumination; and when we had
+got away, and gone upon a distant height, and looked towards it two
+hours afterwards, there it still stood, shining and glittering in the
+calm night like a jewel!&nbsp; Not a line of its proportions wanting;
+not an angle blunted; not an atom of its radiance lost.<br>
+<br>
+The next night - Easter Monday - there was a great display of fireworks
+from the Castle of St. Angelo.&nbsp; We hired a room in an opposite
+house, and made our way, to our places, in good time, through a dense
+mob of people choking up the square in front, and all the avenues leading
+to it; and so loading the bridge by which the castle is approached,
+that it seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below.&nbsp; There
+are statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great
+vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely on the faces
+of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone counterfeits above
+them.<br>
+<br>
+The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for
+twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant sheet
+of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour, size, and
+speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or
+scores, but hundreds at a time.&nbsp; The concluding burst - the Girandola
+- was like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle,
+without smoke or dust.<br>
+<br>
+In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed; the
+moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the river; and
+half-a-dozen men and boys, with bits of lighted candle in their hands:
+moving here and there, in search of anything worth having, that might
+have been dropped in the press: had the whole scene to themselves.<br>
+<br>
+By way of contrast we rode out into old ruined Rome, after all this
+firing and booming, to take our leave of the Coliseum.&nbsp; I had seen
+it by moonlight before (I could never get through a day without going
+back to it), but its tremendous solitude that night is past all telling.&nbsp;
+The ghostly pillars in the Forum; the Triumphal Arches of Old Emperors;
+those enormous masses of ruins which were once their palaces; the grass-grown
+mounds that mark the graves of ruined temples; the stones of the Via
+Sacra, smooth with the tread of feet in ancient Rome; even these were
+dimmed, in their transcendent melancholy, by the dark ghost of its bloody
+holidays, erect and grim; haunting the old scene; despoiled by pillaging
+Popes and fighting Princes, but not laid; wringing wild hands of weed,
+and grass, and bramble; and lamenting to the night in every gap and
+broken arch - the shadow of its awful self, immovable!<br>
+<br>
+As we lay down on the grass of the Campagna, next day, on our way to
+Florence, hearing the larks sing, we saw that a little wooden cross
+had been erected on the spot where the poor Pilgrim Countess was murdered.&nbsp;
+So, we piled some loose stones about it, as the beginning of a mound
+to her memory, and wondered if we should ever rest there again, and
+look back at Rome.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XI - A RAPID DIORAMA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We are bound for Naples!&nbsp; And we cross the threshold of the Eternal
+City at yonder gate, the Gate of San Giovanni Laterano, where the two
+last objects that attract the notice of a departing visitor, and the
+two first objects that attract the notice of an arriving one, are a
+proud church and a decaying ruin - good emblems of Rome.<br>
+<br>
+Our way lies over the Campagna, which looks more solemn on a bright
+blue day like this, than beneath a darker sky; the great extent of ruin
+being plainer to the eye: and the sunshine through the arches of the
+broken aqueducts, showing other broken arches shining through them in
+the melancholy distance.&nbsp; When we have traversed it, and look back
+from Albano, its dark, undulating surface lies below us like a stagnant
+lake, or like a broad, dull Lethe flowing round the walls of Rome, and
+separating it from all the world!&nbsp; How often have the Legions,
+in triumphant march, gone glittering across that purple waste, so silent
+and unpeopled now!&nbsp; How often has the train of captives looked,
+with sinking hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population
+pouring out, to hail the return of their conqueror!&nbsp; What riot,
+sensuality and murder, have run mad in the vast palaces now heaps of
+brick and shattered marble!&nbsp; What glare of fires, and roar of popular
+tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the
+wild plain where nothing is now heard but the wind, and where the solitary
+lizards gambol unmolested in the sun!<br>
+<br>
+The train of wine-carts going into Rome, each driven by a shaggy peasant
+reclining beneath a little gipsy-fashioned canopy of sheep-skin, is
+ended now, and we go toiling up into a higher country where there are
+trees.&nbsp; The next day brings us on the Pontine Marshes, wearily
+flat and lonesome, and overgrown with brushwood, and swamped with water,
+but with a fine road made across them, shaded by a long, long avenue.&nbsp;
+Here and there, we pass a solitary guard-house; here and there a hovel,
+deserted, and walled up.&nbsp; Some herdsmen loiter on the banks of
+the stream beside the road, and sometimes a flat-bottomed boat, towed
+by a man, comes rippling idly along it.&nbsp; A horseman passes occasionally,
+carrying a long gun cross-wise on the saddle before him, and attended
+by fierce dogs; but there is nothing else astir save the wind and the
+shadows, until we come in sight of Terracina.<br>
+<br>
+How blue and bright the sea, rolling below the windows of the inn so
+famous in robber stories!&nbsp; How picturesque the great crags and
+points of rock overhanging to-morrow&rsquo;s narrow road, where galley-slaves
+are working in the quarries above, and the sentinels who guard them
+lounge on the sea-shore!&nbsp; All night there is the murmur of the
+sea beneath the stars; and, in the morning, just at daybreak, the prospect
+suddenly becoming expanded, as if by a miracle, reveals - in the far
+distance, across the sea there! - Naples with its islands, and Vesuvius
+spouting fire!&nbsp; Within a quarter of an hour, the whole is gone
+as if it were a vision in the clouds, and there is nothing but the sea
+and sky.<br>
+<br>
+The Neapolitan frontier crossed, after two hours&rsquo; travelling;
+and the hungriest of soldiers and custom-house officers with difficulty
+appeased; we enter, by a gateless portal, into the first Neapolitan
+town - Fondi.&nbsp; Take note of Fondi, in the name of all that is wretched
+and beggarly.<br>
+<br>
+A filthy channel of mud and refuse meanders down the centre of the miserable
+streets, fed by obscene rivulets that trickle from the abject houses.&nbsp;
+There is not a door, a window, or a shutter; not a roof, a wall, a post,
+or a pillar, in all Fondi, but is decayed, and crazy, and rotting away.&nbsp;
+The wretched history of the town, with all its sieges and pillages by
+Barbarossa and the rest, might have been acted last year.&nbsp; How
+the gaunt dogs that sneak about the miserable streets, come to be alive,
+and undevoured by the people, is one of the enigmas of the world.<br>
+<br>
+A hollow-cheeked and scowling people they are!&nbsp; All beggars; but
+that&rsquo;s nothing.&nbsp; Look at them as they gather round.&nbsp;
+Some, are too indolent to come down-stairs, or are too wisely mistrustful
+of the stairs, perhaps, to venture: so stretch out their lean hands
+from upper windows, and howl; others, come flocking about us, fighting
+and jostling one another, and demanding, incessantly, charity for the
+love of God, charity for the love of the Blessed Virgin, charity for
+the love of all the Saints.&nbsp; A group of miserable children, almost
+naked, screaming forth the same petition, discover that they can see
+themselves reflected in the varnish of the carriage, and begin to dance
+and make grimaces, that they may have the pleasure of seeing their antics
+repeated in this mirror.&nbsp; A crippled idiot, in the act of striking
+one of them who drowns his clamorous demand for charity, observes his
+angry counterpart in the panel, stops short, and thrusting out his tongue,
+begins to wag his head and chatter.&nbsp; The shrill cry raised at this,
+awakens half-a-dozen wild creatures wrapped in frowsy brown cloaks,
+who are lying on the church-steps with pots and pans for sale.&nbsp;
+These, scrambling up, approach, and beg defiantly.&nbsp; &lsquo;I am
+hungry.&nbsp; Give me something.&nbsp; Listen to me, Signor.&nbsp; I
+am hungry!&rsquo;&nbsp; Then, a ghastly old woman, fearful of being
+too late, comes hobbling down the street, stretching out one hand, and
+scratching herself all the way with the other, and screaming, long before
+she can be heard, &lsquo;Charity, charity!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go and pray
+for you directly, beautiful lady, if you&rsquo;ll give me charity!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Lastly, the members of a brotherhood for burying the dead: hideously
+masked, and attired in shabby black robes, white at the skirts, with
+the splashes of many muddy winters: escorted by a dirty priest, and
+a congenial cross-bearer: come hurrying past.&nbsp; Surrounded by this
+motley concourse, we move out of Fondi: bad bright eyes glaring at us,
+out of the darkness of every crazy tenement, like glistening fragments
+of its filth and putrefaction.<br>
+<br>
+A noble mountain-pass, with the ruins of a fort on a strong eminence,
+traditionally called the Fort of Fra Diavolo; the old town of Itr&iacute;,
+like a device in pastry, built up, almost perpendicularly, on a hill,
+and approached by long steep flights of steps; beautiful Mola di Ga&euml;ta,
+whose wines, like those of Albano, have degenerated since the days of
+Horace, or his taste for wine was bad: which is not likely of one who
+enjoyed it so much, and extolled it so well; another night upon the
+road at St. Agatha; a rest next day at Capua, which is picturesque,
+but hardly so seductive to a traveller now, as the soldiers of Praetorian
+Rome were wont to find the ancient city of that name; a flat road among
+vines festooned and looped from tree to tree; and Mount Vesuvius close
+at hand at last! - its cone and summit whitened with snow; and its smoke
+hanging over it, in the heavy atmosphere of the day, like a dense cloud.&nbsp;
+So we go, rattling down hill, into Naples.<br>
+<br>
+A funeral is coming up the street, towards us.&nbsp; The body, on an
+open bier, borne on a kind of palanquin, covered with a gay cloth of
+crimson and gold.&nbsp; The mourners, in white gowns and masks.&nbsp;
+If there be death abroad, life is well represented too, for all Naples
+would seem to be out of doors, and tearing to and fro in carriages.&nbsp;
+Some of these, the common Vettur&iacute;no vehicles, are drawn by three
+horses abreast, decked with smart trappings and great abundance of brazen
+ornament, and always going very fast.&nbsp; Not that their loads are
+light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside, four
+in front, four or five more hanging on behind, and two or three more,
+in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie half-suffocated
+with mud and dust.&nbsp; Exhibitors of Punch, buffo singers with guitars,
+reciters of poetry, reciters of stories, a row of cheap exhibitions
+with clowns and showmen, drums, and trumpets, painted cloths representing
+the wonders within, and admiring crowds assembled without, assist the
+whirl and bustle.&nbsp; Ragged lazzaroni lie asleep in doorways, archways,
+and kennels; the gentry, gaily dressed, are dashing up and down in carriages
+on the Chiaji, or walking in the Public Gardens; and quiet letter-writers,
+perched behind their little desks and inkstands under the Portico of
+the Great Theatre of San Carlo, in the public street, are waiting for
+clients.<br>
+<br>
+Here is a galley-slave in chains, who wants a letter written to a friend.&nbsp;
+He approaches a clerkly-looking man, sitting under the corner arch,
+and makes his bargain.&nbsp; He has obtained permission of the sentinel
+who guards him: who stands near, leaning against the wall and cracking
+nuts.&nbsp; The galley-slave dictates in the ear of the letter-writer,
+what he desires to say; and as he can&rsquo;t read writing, looks intently
+in his face, to read there whether he sets down faithfully what he is
+told.&nbsp; After a time, the galley-slave becomes discursive - incoherent.&nbsp;
+The secretary pauses and rubs his chin.&nbsp; The galley-slave is voluble
+and energetic.&nbsp; The secretary, at length, catches the idea, and
+with the air of a man who knows how to word it, sets it down; stopping,
+now and then, to glance back at his text admiringly.&nbsp; The galley-slave
+is silent.&nbsp; The soldier stoically cracks his nuts.&nbsp; Is there
+anything more to say? inquires the letter-writer.&nbsp; No more.&nbsp;
+Then listen, friend of mine.&nbsp; He reads it through.&nbsp; The galley-slave
+is quite enchanted.&nbsp; It is folded, and addressed, and given to
+him, and he pays the fee.&nbsp; The secretary falls back indolently
+in his chair, and takes a book.&nbsp; The galley-slave gathers up an
+empty sack.&nbsp; The sentinel throws away a handful of nut-shells,
+shoulders his musket, and away they go together.<br>
+<br>
+Why do the beggars rap their chins constantly, with their right hands,
+when you look at them?&nbsp; Everything is done in pantomime in Naples,
+and that is the conventional sign for hunger.&nbsp; A man who is quarrelling
+with another, yonder, lays the palm of his right hand on the back of
+his left, and shakes the two thumbs - expressive of a donkey&rsquo;s
+ears - whereat his adversary is goaded to desperation.&nbsp; Two people
+bargaining for fish, the buyer empties an imaginary waistcoat pocket
+when he is told the price, and walks away without a word: having thoroughly
+conveyed to the seller that he considers it too dear.&nbsp; Two people
+in carriages, meeting, one touches his lips, twice or thrice, holding
+up the five fingers of his right hand, and gives a horizontal cut in
+the air with the palm.&nbsp; The other nods briskly, and goes his way.&nbsp;
+He has been invited to a friendly dinner at half-past five o&rsquo;clock,
+and will certainly come.<br>
+<br>
+All over Italy, a peculiar shake of the right hand from the wrist, with
+the forefinger stretched out, expresses a negative - the only negative
+beggars will ever understand.&nbsp; But, in Naples, those five fingers
+are a copious language.<br>
+<br>
+All this, and every other kind of out-door life and stir, and macaroni-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.&nbsp; But, lovers and hunters
+of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable
+depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan
+life is inseparably associated!&nbsp; It is not well to find Saint Giles&rsquo;s
+so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive.&nbsp; A pair of naked
+legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make <i>all</i> the difference between
+what is interesting and what is coarse and odious?&nbsp; 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&rsquo;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.<br>
+<br>
+Capri - once made odious by the deified beast Tiberius - Ischia, Procida,
+and the thousand distant beauties 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.&nbsp; The fairest country in the world, is
+spread about us.&nbsp; Whether we turn towards the Miseno shore of the
+splendid watery amphitheatre, and go by the Grotto of Posilipo to the
+Grotto del Cane and away to Baiae: or take the other way, towards Vesuvius
+and Sorrento, it is one succession of delights.&nbsp; In the last-named
+direction, where, over doors and archways, there are countless little
+images of San Gennaro, with his Canute&rsquo;s hand stretched out, to
+check the fury of the Burning Mountain, we are carried pleasantly, by
+a railroad on the beautiful Sea Beach, past the town of Torre del Greco,
+built upon the ashes of the former town destroyed by an eruption of
+Vesuvius, within a hundred years; and past the flat-roofed houses, granaries,
+and macaroni manufactories; to Castel-a-Mare, with its ruined castle,
+now inhabited by fishermen, standing in the sea upon a heap of rocks.&nbsp;
+Here, the railroad terminates; but, hence we may ride on, by an unbroken
+succession of enchanting bays, and beautiful scenery, sloping from the
+highest summit of Saint Angelo, the highest neighbouring mountain, down
+to the water&rsquo;s edge - among vineyards, olive-trees, gardens of
+oranges and lemons, orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills
+- and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small towns
+with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors - and pass delicious summer
+villas - to Sorrento, where the Poet Tasso drew his inspiration from
+the beauty surrounding him.&nbsp; Returning, we may climb the heights
+above Castel-a-Mare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see
+the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses
+in distant Naples, dwindling, in the great extent of prospect, down
+to dice.&nbsp; The coming back to the city, by the beach again, at sunset:
+with the glowing sea on one side, and the darkening mountain, with its
+smoke and flame, upon the other: is a sublime conclusion to the glory
+of the day.<br>
+<br>
+That church by the Porta Capuana - near the old fisher-market in the
+dirtiest quarter of dirty Naples, where the revolt of Masaniello began
+- is memorable for having been the scene of one of his earliest proclamations
+to the people, and is particularly remarkable for nothing else, unless
+it be its waxen and bejewelled Saint in a glass case, with two odd hands;
+or the enormous number of beggars who are constantly rapping their chins
+there, like a battery of castanets.&nbsp; The cathedral with the beautiful
+door, and the columns of African and Egyptian granite that once ornamented
+the temple of Apollo, contains the famous sacred blood of San Gennaro
+or Januarius: which is preserved in two phials in a silver tabernacle,
+and miraculously liquefies three times a-year, to the great admiration
+of the people.&nbsp; At the same moment, the stone (distant some miles)
+where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes faintly red.&nbsp; It is
+said that the officiating priests turn faintly red also, sometimes,
+when these miracles occur.<br>
+<br>
+The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these ancient
+catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem waiting here, to
+be buried themselves, are members of a curious body, called the Royal
+Hospital, who are the official attendants at funerals.&nbsp; Two of
+these old spectres totter away, with lighted tapers, to show the caverns
+of death - as unconcerned as if they were immortal.&nbsp; They were
+used as burying-places for three hundred years; and, in one part, is
+a large pit full of skulls and bones, said to be the sad remains of
+a great mortality occasioned by a plague.&nbsp; In the rest there is
+nothing but dust.&nbsp; They consist, chiefly, of great wide corridors
+and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock.&nbsp; At the end of some of these
+long passages, are unexpected glimpses of the daylight, shining down
+from above.&nbsp; It looks as ghastly and as strange; among the torches,
+and the dust, and the dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.<br>
+<br>
+The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the city
+and Vesuvius.&nbsp; The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and sixty-five
+pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and prisons, and
+are unclaimed by their friends.&nbsp; The graceful new cemetery, at
+no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has already many graves
+among its shrubs and flowers, and airy colonnades.&nbsp; It might be
+reasonably objected elsewhere, that some of the tombs are meretricious
+and too fanciful; but the general brightness seems to justify it here;
+and Mount Vesuvius, separated from them by a lovely slope of ground,
+exalts and saddens the scene.<br>
+<br>
+If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its dark
+smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and impressive is
+it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii!<br>
+<br>
+Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look up
+the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and Isis,
+over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to the day,
+away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful distance; and
+lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in the strange and
+melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and the Destroyer making
+this quiet picture in the sun.&nbsp; Then, ramble on, and see, at every
+turn, the little familiar tokens of human habitation and every-day pursuits;
+the chafing of the bucket-rope in the stone rim of the exhausted well;
+the track of carriage-wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks
+of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae
+in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed
+to this hour - all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of
+the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its
+fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the bottom of
+the sea.<br>
+<br>
+After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption, workmen
+were employed in shaping out, in stone, new ornaments for temples and
+other buildings that had suffered.&nbsp; Here lies their work, outside
+the city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.<br>
+<br>
+In the cellar of Diomede&rsquo;s house, where certain skeletons were
+found huddled together, close to the door, the impression of their bodies
+on the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped and fixed
+there, after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones.&nbsp; So, in
+the theatre of Herculaneum, a comic mask, floating on the stream when
+it was hot and liquid, stamped its mimic features in it as it hardened
+into stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the fantastic look it
+turned upon the audiences in that same theatre two thousand years ago.<br>
+<br>
+Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out
+of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the temples of
+a religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many fresh
+traces of remote antiquity: as if the course of Time had been stopped
+after this desolation, and there had been no nights and days, months,
+years, and centuries, since: nothing is more impressive and terrible
+than the many evidences of the searching nature of the ashes, as bespeaking
+their irresistible power, and the impossibility of escaping them.&nbsp;
+In the wine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen vessels:
+displacing the wine and choking them, to the brim, with dust.&nbsp;
+In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns,
+and rained new ruin even into them.&nbsp; The mouths, and eyes, and
+skulls of all the skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail.&nbsp;
+In Herculaneum, where the flood was of a different and a heavier kind,
+it rolled in, like a sea.&nbsp; Imagine a deluge of water turned to
+marble, at its height - and that is what is called &lsquo;the lava&rsquo;
+here.<br>
+<br>
+Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we now
+stand, looking down, when they came on some of the stone benches of
+the theatre - those steps (for such they seem) at the bottom of the
+excavation - and found the buried city of Herculaneum.&nbsp; Presently
+going down, with lighted torches, we are perplexed by great walls of
+monstrous thickness, rising up between the benches, shutting out the
+stage, obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd places, confusing the
+whole plan, and making it a disordered dream.&nbsp; We cannot, at first,
+believe, or picture to ourselves, that THIS came rolling in, and drowned
+the city; and that all that is not here, has been cut away, by the axe,
+like solid stone.&nbsp; But this perceived and understood, the horror
+and oppression of its presence are indescribable.<br>
+<br>
+Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of both
+cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh and
+plain, as if they had been executed yesterday.&nbsp; Here are subjects
+of still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses, and the like;
+familiar classical stories, or mythological fables, always forcibly
+and plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling, sporting, working
+at trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading their productions to
+their friends; inscriptions chalked upon the walls; political squibs,
+advertisements, rough drawings by schoolboys; everything to people and
+restore the ancient cities, in the fancy of their wondering visitor.&nbsp;
+Furniture, too, you see, of every kind - lamps, tables, couches; vessels
+for eating, drinking, and cooking; workmen&rsquo;s tools, surgical instruments,
+tickets for the theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches
+of keys found clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards
+and warriors; little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic
+tones.<br>
+<br>
+The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the interest of
+Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination.&nbsp; The looking,
+from either ruined city, into the neighbouring grounds overgrown with
+beautiful vines and luxuriant trees; and remembering that house upon
+house, temple on temple, building after building, and street after street,
+are still lying underneath the roots of all the quiet cultivation, waiting
+to be turned up to the light of day; is something so wonderful, so full
+of mystery, so captivating to the imagination, that one would think
+it would be paramount, and yield to nothing else.&nbsp; To nothing but
+Vesuvius; but the mountain is the genius of the scene.&nbsp; From every
+indication of the ruin it has worked, we look, again, with an absorbing
+interest to where its smoke is rising up into the sky.&nbsp; It is beyond
+us, as we thread the ruined streets: above us, as we stand upon the
+ruined walls, we follow it through every vista of broken columns, as
+we wander through the empty court-yards of the houses; and through the
+garlandings and interlacings of every wanton vine.&nbsp; Turning away
+to Paestum yonder, to see the awful structures built, the least aged
+of them, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and standing
+yet, erect in lonely majesty, upon the wild, malaria-blighted plain
+- we watch Vesuvius as it disappears from the prospect, and watch for
+it again, on our return, with the same thrill of interest: as the doom
+and destiny of all this beautiful country, biding its terrible time.<br>
+<br>
+It is very warm in the sun, on this early spring-day, when we return
+from Paestum, but very cold in the shade: insomuch, that although we
+may lunch, pleasantly, at noon, in the open air, by the gate of Pompeii,
+the neighbouring rivulet supplies thick ice for our wine.&nbsp; But,
+the sun is shining brightly; there is not a cloud or speck of vapour
+in the whole blue sky, looking down upon the bay of Naples; and the
+moon will be at the full to-night.&nbsp; No matter that the snow and
+ice lie thick upon the summit of Vesuvius, or that we have been on foot
+all day at Pompeii, or that croakers maintain that strangers should
+not be on the mountain by night, in such an unusual season.&nbsp; Let
+us take advantage of the fine weather; make the best of our way to Resina,
+the little village at the foot of the mountain; prepare ourselves, as
+well as we can, on so short a notice, at the guide&rsquo;s house; ascend
+at once, and have sunset half-way up, moonlight at the top, and midnight
+to come down in!<br>
+<br>
+At four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, there is a terrible uproar in
+the little stable-yard of Signior Salvatore, the recognised head-guide,
+with the gold band round his cap; and thirty under-guides who are all
+scuffling and screaming at once, are preparing half-a-dozen saddled
+ponies, three litters, and some stout staves, for the journey.&nbsp;
+Every one of the thirty, quarrels with the other twenty-nine, and frightens
+the six ponies; and as much of the village as can possibly squeeze itself
+into the little stable-yard, participates in the tumult, and gets trodden
+on by the cattle.<br>
+<br>
+After much violent skirmishing, and more noise than would suffice for
+the storming of Naples, the procession starts.&nbsp; The head-guide,
+who is liberally paid for all the attendants, rides a little in advance
+of the party; the other thirty guides proceed on foot.&nbsp; Eight go
+forward with the litters that are to be used by-and-by; and the remaining
+two-and-twenty beg.<br>
+<br>
+We ascend, gradually, by stony lanes like rough broad flights of stairs,
+for some time.&nbsp; At length, we leave these, and the vineyards on
+either side of them, and emerge upon a bleak bare region where the lava
+lies confusedly, in enormous rusty masses; as if the earth had been
+ploughed up by burning thunderbolts.&nbsp; And now, we halt to see the
+sun set.&nbsp; The change that falls upon the dreary region, and on
+the whole mountain, as its red light fades, and the night comes on -
+and the unutterable solemnity and dreariness that reign around, who
+that has witnessed it, can ever forget!<br>
+<br>
+It is dark, when after winding, for some time, over the broken ground,
+we arrive at the foot of the cone: which is extremely steep, and seems
+to rise, almost perpendicularly, from the spot where we dismount.&nbsp;
+The only light is reflected from the snow, deep, hard, and white, with
+which the cone is covered.&nbsp; It is now intensely cold, and the air
+is piercing.&nbsp; The thirty-one have brought no torches, knowing that
+the moon will rise before we reach the top.&nbsp; Two of the litters
+are devoted to the two ladies; the third, to a rather heavy gentleman
+from Naples, whose hospitality and good-nature have attached him to
+the expedition, and determined him to assist in doing the honours of
+the mountain.&nbsp; The rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen
+men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen.&nbsp; We who walk, make the
+best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labour upward
+over the snow, - as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian
+Twelfth-cake.<br>
+<br>
+We are a long time toiling up; and the head-guide looks oddly about
+him when one of the company - not an Italian, though an habitu&eacute;
+of the mountain for many years: whom we will call, for our present purpose,
+Mr. Pickle of Portici - suggests that, as it is freezing hard, and the
+usual footing of ashes is covered by the snow and ice, it will surely
+be difficult to descend.&nbsp; But the sight of the litters above, tilting
+up and down, and jerking from this side to that, as the bearers continually
+slip and tumble, diverts our attention; more especially as the whole
+length of the rather heavy gentleman is, at that moment, presented to
+us alarmingly foreshortened, with his head downwards.<br>
+<br>
+The rising of the moon soon afterwards, revives the flagging spirits
+of the bearers.&nbsp; Stimulating each other with their usual watchword,
+&lsquo;Courage, friend!&nbsp; It is to eat macaroni!&rsquo; they press
+on, gallantly, for the summit.<br>
+<br>
+From tingeing the top of the snow above us, with a band of light, and
+pouring it in a stream through the valley below, while we have been
+ascending in the dark, the moon soon lights the whole white mountain-side,
+and the broad sea down below, and tiny Naples in the distance, and every
+village in the country round.&nbsp; The whole prospect is in this lovely
+state, when we come upon the platform on the mountain-top - the region
+of Fire - an exhausted crater formed of great masses of gigantic cinders,
+like blocks of stone from some tremendous waterfall, burnt up; from
+every chink and crevice of which, hot, sulphurous smoke is pouring out:
+while, from another conical-shaped hill, the present crater, rising
+abruptly from this platform at the end, great sheets of fire are streaming
+forth: reddening the night with flame, blackening it with smoke, and
+spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders, that fly up into the air
+like feathers, and fall down like lead.&nbsp; What words can paint the
+gloom and grandeur of this scene!<br>
+<br>
+The broken ground; the smoke; the sense of suffocation from the sulphur:
+the fear of falling down through the crevices in the yawning ground;
+the stopping, every now and then, for somebody who is missing in the
+dark (for the dense smoke now obscures the moon); the intolerable noise
+of the thirty; and the hoarse roaring of the mountain; make it a scene
+of such confusion, at the same time, that we reel again.&nbsp; But,
+dragging the ladies through it, and across another exhausted crater
+to the foot of the present Volcano, we approach close to it on the windy
+side, and then sit down among the hot ashes at its foot, and look up
+in silence; faintly estimating the action that is going on within, from
+its being full a hundred feet higher, at this minute, than it was six
+weeks ago.<br>
+<br>
+There is something in the fire and roar, that generates an irresistible
+desire to get nearer to it.&nbsp; We cannot rest long, without starting
+off, two of us, on our hands and knees, accompanied by the head-guide,
+to climb to the brim of the flaming crater, and try to look in.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile, the thirty yell, as with one voice, that it is a dangerous
+proceeding, and call to us to come back; frightening the rest of the
+party out of their wits.<br>
+<br>
+What with their noise, and what with the trembling of the thin crust
+of ground, that seems about to open underneath our feet and plunge us
+in the burning gulf below (which is the real danger, if there be any);
+and what with the flashing of the fire in our faces, and the shower
+of red-hot ashes that is raining down, and the choking smoke and sulphur;
+we may well feel giddy and irrational, like drunken men.&nbsp; But,
+we contrive to climb up to the brim, and look down, for a moment, into
+the Hell of boiling fire below.&nbsp; Then, we all three come rolling
+down; blackened, and singed, and scorched, and hot, and giddy: and each
+with his dress alight in half-a-dozen places.<br>
+<br>
+You have read, a thousand times, that the usual way of descending, is,
+by sliding down the ashes: which, forming a gradually-increasing ledge
+below the feet, prevent too rapid a descent.&nbsp; But, when we have
+crossed the two exhausted craters on our way back and are come to this
+precipitous place, there is (as Mr. Pickle has foretold) no vestige
+of ashes to be seen; the whole being a smooth sheet of ice.<br>
+<br>
+In this dilemma, ten or a dozen of the guides cautiously join hands,
+and make a chain of men; of whom the foremost beat, as well as they
+can, a rough track with their sticks, down which we prepare to follow.&nbsp;
+The way being fearfully steep, and none of the party: even of the thirty:
+being able to keep their feet for six paces together, the ladies are
+taken out of their litters, and placed, each between two careful persons;
+while others of the thirty hold by their skirts, to prevent their falling
+forward - a necessary precaution, tending to the immediate and hopeless
+dilapidation of their apparel.&nbsp; The rather heavy gentleman is abjured
+to leave his litter too, and be escorted in a similar manner; but he
+resolves to be brought down as he was brought up, on the principle that
+his fifteen bearers are not likely to tumble all at once, and that he
+is safer so, than trusting to his own legs.<br>
+<br>
+In this order, we begin the descent: sometimes on foot, sometimes shuffling
+on the ice: always proceeding much more quietly and slowly, than on
+our upward way: and constantly alarmed by the falling among us of somebody
+from behind, who endangers the footing of the whole party, and clings
+pertinaciously to anybody&rsquo;s ankles.&nbsp; It is impossible for
+the litter to be in advance, too, as the track has to be made; and its
+appearance behind us, overhead - with some one or other of the bearers
+always down, and the rather heavy gentleman with his legs always in
+the air - is very threatening and frightful.&nbsp; We have gone on thus,
+a very little way, painfully and anxiously, but quite merrily, and regarding
+it as a great success - and have all fallen several times, and have
+all been stopped, somehow or other, as we were sliding away - when Mr.
+Pickle of Portici, in the act of remarking on these uncommon circumstances
+as quite beyond his experience, stumbles, falls, disengages himself,
+with quick presence of mind, from those about him, plunges away head
+foremost, and rolls, over and over, down the whole surface of the cone!<br>
+<br>
+Sickening as it is to look, and be so powerless to help him, I see him
+there, in the moonlight - I have had such a dream often - skimming over
+the white ice, like a cannon-ball.&nbsp; Almost at the same moment,
+there is a cry from behind; and a man who has carried a light basket
+of spare cloaks on his head, comes rolling past, at the same frightful
+speed, closely followed by a boy.&nbsp; At this climax of the chapter
+of accidents, the remaining eight-and-twenty vociferate to that degree,
+that a pack of wolves would be music to them!<br>
+<br>
+Giddy, and bloody, and a mere bundle of rags, is Pickle of Portici when
+we reach the place where we dismounted, and where the horses are waiting;
+but, thank God, sound in limb!&nbsp; And never are we likely to be more
+glad to see a man alive and on his feet, than to see him now - making
+light of it too, though sorely bruised and in great pain.&nbsp; The
+boy is brought into the Hermitage on the Mountain, while we are at supper,
+with his head tied up; and the man is heard of, some hours afterwards.&nbsp;
+He too is bruised and stunned, but has broken no bones; the snow having,
+fortunately, covered all the larger blocks of rock and stone, and rendered
+them harmless.<br>
+<br>
+After a cheerful meal, and a good rest before a blazing fire, we again
+take horse, and continue our descent to Salvatore&rsquo;s house - very
+slowly, by reason of our bruised friend being hardly able to keep the
+saddle, or endure the pain of motion.&nbsp; Though it is so late at
+night, or early in the morning, all the people of the village are waiting
+about the little stable-yard when we arrive, and looking up the road
+by which we are expected.&nbsp; Our appearance is hailed with a great
+clamour of tongues, and a general sensation for which in our modesty
+we are somewhat at a loss to account, until, turning into the yard,
+we find that one of a party of French gentlemen who were on the mountain
+at the same time is lying on some straw in the stable, with a broken
+limb: looking like Death, and suffering great torture; and that we were
+confidently supposed to have encountered some worse accident.<br>
+<br>
+So &lsquo;well returned, and Heaven be praised!&rsquo; as the cheerful
+Vettur&iacute;no, who has borne us company all the way from Pisa, says,
+with all his heart!&nbsp; And away with his ready horses, into sleeping
+Naples!<br>
+<br>
+It wakes again to Policinelli and pickpockets, buffo singers and beggars,
+rags, puppets, flowers, brightness, dirt, and universal degradation;
+airing its Harlequin suit in the sunshine, next day and every day; singing,
+starving, dancing, gaming, on the sea-shore; and leaving all labour
+to the burning mountain, which is ever at its work.<br>
+<br>
+Our English dilettanti would be very pathetic on the subject of the
+national taste, if they could hear an Italian opera half as badly sung
+in England as we may hear the Foscari performed, to-night, in the splendid
+theatre of San Carlo.&nbsp; But, for astonishing truth and spirit in
+seizing and embodying the real life about it, the shabby little San
+Carlino Theatre - the rickety house one story high, with a staring picture
+outside: down among the drums and trumpets, and the tumblers, and the
+lady conjurer - is without a rival anywhere.<br>
+<br>
+There is one extraordinary feature in the real life of Naples, at which
+we may take a glance before we go - the Lotteries.<br>
+<br>
+They prevail in most parts of Italy, but are particularly obvious, in
+their effects and influences, here.&nbsp; They are drawn every Saturday.&nbsp;
+They bring an immense revenue to the Government; and diffuse a taste
+for gambling among the poorest of the poor, which is very comfortable
+to the coffers of the State, and very ruinous to themselves.&nbsp; The
+lowest stake is one grain; less than a farthing.&nbsp; One hundred numbers
+- from one to a hundred, inclusive - are put into a box.&nbsp; Five
+are drawn.&nbsp; Those are the prizes.&nbsp; I buy three numbers.&nbsp;
+If one of them come up, I win a small prize.&nbsp; If two, some hundreds
+of times my stake.&nbsp; If three, three thousand five hundred times
+my stake.&nbsp; I stake (or play as they call it) what I can upon my
+numbers, and buy what numbers I please.&nbsp; The amount I play, I pay
+at the lottery office, where I purchase the ticket; and it is stated
+on the ticket itself.<br>
+<br>
+Every lottery office keeps a printed book, an Universal Lottery Diviner,
+where every possible accident and circumstance is provided for, and
+has a number against it.&nbsp; For instance, let us take two carlini
+- about sevenpence.&nbsp; On our way to the lottery office, we run against
+a black man.&nbsp; When we get there, we say gravely, &lsquo;The Diviner.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+It is handed over the counter, as a serious matter of business.&nbsp;
+We look at black man.&nbsp; Such a number.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give us that.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+We look at running against a person in the street.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give
+us that. &rsquo; We look at the name of the street itself.&nbsp; &lsquo;Give
+us that.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, we have our three numbers.<br>
+<br>
+If the roof of the theatre of San Carlo were to fall in, so many people
+would play upon the numbers attached to such an accident in the Diviner,
+that the Government would soon close those numbers, and decline to run
+the risk of losing any more upon them.&nbsp; This often happens.&nbsp;
+Not long ago, when there was a fire in the King&rsquo;s Palace, there
+was such a desperate run on fire, and king, and palace, that further
+stakes on the numbers attached to those words in the Golden Book were
+forbidden.&nbsp; Every accident or event, is supposed, by the ignorant
+populace, to be a revelation to the beholder, or party concerned, in
+connection with the lottery.&nbsp; Certain people who have a talent
+for dreaming fortunately, are much sought after; and there are some
+priests who are constantly favoured with visions of the lucky numbers.<br>
+<br>
+I heard of a horse running away with a man, and dashing him down, dead,
+at the corner of a street.&nbsp; Pursuing the horse with incredible
+speed, was another man, who ran so fast, that he came up, immediately
+after the accident.&nbsp; He threw himself upon his knees beside the
+unfortunate rider, and clasped his hand with an expression of the wildest
+grief.&nbsp; &lsquo;If you have life,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;speak one
+word to me!&nbsp; If you have one gasp of breath left, mention your
+age for Heaven&rsquo;s sake, that I may play that number in the lottery.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It is four o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, and we may go to see our
+lottery drawn.&nbsp; The ceremony takes place every Saturday, in the
+Tribunale, or Court of Justice - this singular, earthy-smelling room,
+or gallery, as mouldy as an old cellar, and as damp as a dungeon.&nbsp;
+At the upper end is a platform, with a large horse-shoe table upon it;
+and a President and Council sitting round - all judges of the Law.&nbsp;
+The man on the little stool behind the President, is the Capo Lazzarone,
+a kind of tribune of the people, appointed on their behalf to see that
+all is fairly conducted: attended by a few personal friends.&nbsp; A
+ragged, swarthy fellow he is: with long matted hair hanging down all
+over his face: and covered, from head to foot, with most unquestionably
+genuine dirt.&nbsp; All the body of the room is filled with the commonest
+of the Neapolitan people: and between them and the platform, guarding
+the steps leading to the latter, is a small body of soldiers.<br>
+<br>
+There is some delay in the arrival of the necessary number of judges;
+during which, the box, in which the numbers are being placed, is a source
+of the deepest interest.&nbsp; When the box is full, the boy who is
+to draw the numbers out of it becomes the prominent feature of the proceedings.&nbsp;
+He is already dressed for his part, in a tight brown Holland coat, with
+only one (the left) sleeve to it, which leaves his right arm bared to
+the shoulder, ready for plunging down into the mysterious chest.<br>
+<br>
+During the hush and whisper that pervade the room, all eyes are turned
+on this young minister of fortune.&nbsp; People begin to inquire his
+age, with a view to the next lottery; and the number of his brothers
+and sisters; and the age of his father and mother; and whether he has
+any moles or pimples upon him; and where, and how many; when the arrival
+of the last judge but one (a little old man, universally dreaded as
+possessing the Evil Eye) makes a slight diversion, and would occasion
+a greater one, but that he is immediately deposed, as a source of interest,
+by the officiating priest, who advances gravely to his place, followed
+by a very dirty little boy, carrying his sacred vestments, and a pot
+of Holy Water.<br>
+<br>
+Here is the last judge come at last, and now he takes his place at the
+horse-shoe table.<br>
+<br>
+There is a murmur of irrepressible agitation.&nbsp; In the midst of
+it, the priest puts his head into the sacred vestments, and pulls the
+same over his shoulders.&nbsp; Then he says a silent prayer; and dipping
+a brush into the pot of Holy Water, sprinkles it over the box - and
+over the boy, and gives them a double-barrelled blessing, which the
+box and the boy are both hoisted on the table to receive.&nbsp; The
+boy remaining on the table, the box is now carried round the front of
+the platform, by an attendant, who holds it up and shakes it lustily
+all the time; seeming to say, like the conjurer, &lsquo;There is no
+deception, ladies and gentlemen; keep your eyes upon me, if you please!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+At last, the box is set before the boy; and the boy, first holding up
+his naked arm and open hand, dives down into the hole (it is made like
+a ballot-box) and pulls out a number, which is rolled up, round something
+hard, like a bonbon.&nbsp; This he hands to the judge next him, who
+unrolls a little bit, and hands it to the President, next to whom he
+sits.&nbsp; The President unrolls it, very slowly.&nbsp; The Capo Lazzarone
+leans over his shoulder.&nbsp; The President holds it up, unrolled,
+to the Capo Lazzarone.&nbsp; The Capo Lazzarone, looking at it eagerly,
+cries out, in a shrill, loud voice, &lsquo;Sessantadue!&rsquo; (sixty-two),
+expressing the two upon his fingers, as he calls it out.&nbsp; Alas!
+the Capo Lazzarone himself has not staked on sixty-two.&nbsp; His face
+is very long, and his eyes roll wildly.<br>
+<br>
+As it happens to be a favourite number, however, it is pretty well received,
+which is not always the case.&nbsp; They are all drawn with the same
+ceremony, omitting the blessing.&nbsp; One blessing is enough for the
+whole multiplication-table.&nbsp; The only new incident in the proceedings,
+is the gradually deepening intensity of the change in the Cape Lazzarone,
+who has, evidently, speculated to the very utmost extent of his means;
+and who, when he sees the last number, and finds that it is not one
+of his, clasps his hands, and raises his eyes to the ceiling before
+proclaiming it, as though remonstrating, in a secret agony, with his
+patron saint, for having committed so gross a breach of confidence.&nbsp;
+I hope the Capo Lazzarone may not desert him for some other member of
+the Calendar, but he seems to threaten it.<br>
+<br>
+Where the winners may be, nobody knows.&nbsp; They certainly are not
+present; the general disappointment filling one with pity for the poor
+people.&nbsp; They look: when we stand aside, observing them, in their
+passage through the court-yard down below: as miserable as the prisoners
+in the gaol (it forms a part of the building), who are peeping down
+upon them, from between their bars; or, as the fragments of human heads
+which are still dangling in chains outside, in memory of the good old
+times, when their owners were strung up there, for the popular edification.<br>
+<br>
+Away from Naples in a glorious sunrise, by the road to Capua, and then
+on a three days&rsquo; journey along by-roads, that we may see, on the
+way, the monastery of Monte Cassino, which is perched on the steep and
+lofty hill above the little town of San Germano, and is lost on a misty
+morning in the clouds.<br>
+<br>
+So much the better, for the deep sounding of its bell, which, as we
+go winding up, on mules, towards the convent, is heard mysteriously
+in the still air, while nothing is seen but the grey mist, moving solemnly
+and slowly, like a funeral procession.&nbsp; Behold, at length the shadowy
+pile of building close before us: its grey walls and towers dimly seen,
+though so near and so vast: and the raw vapour rolling through its cloisters
+heavily.<br>
+<br>
+There are two black shadows walking to and fro in the quadrangle, near
+the statues of the Patron Saint and his sister; and hopping on behind
+them, in and out of the old arches, is a raven, croaking in answer to
+the bell, and uttering, at intervals, the purest Tuscan.&nbsp; How like
+a Jesuit he looks!&nbsp; There never was a sly and stealthy fellow so
+at home as is this raven, standing now at the refectory door, with his
+head on one side, and pretending to glance another way, while he is
+scrutinizing the visitors keenly, and listening with fixed attention.&nbsp;
+What a dull-headed monk the porter becomes in comparison!<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;He speaks like us!&rsquo; says the porter: &lsquo;quite as plainly.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Quite as plainly, Porter.&nbsp; Nothing could be more expressive than
+his reception of the peasants who are entering the gate with baskets
+and burdens.&nbsp; There is a roll in his eye, and a chuckle in his
+throat, which should qualify him to be chosen Superior of an Order of
+Ravens.&nbsp; He knows all about it.&nbsp; &lsquo;It&rsquo;s all right,&rsquo;
+he says.&nbsp; &lsquo;We know what we know.&nbsp; Come along, good people.&nbsp;
+Glad to see you!&rsquo;&nbsp; How was this extraordinary structure ever
+built in such a situation, where the labour of conveying the stone,
+and iron, and marble, so great a height, must have been prodigious?&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says the raven, welcoming the peasants.&nbsp; How,
+being despoiled by plunder, fire and earthquake, has it risen from its
+ruins, and been again made what we now see it, with its church so sumptuous
+and magnificent?&nbsp; &lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says the raven, welcoming
+the peasants.&nbsp; These people have a miserable appearance, and (as
+usual) are densely ignorant, and all beg, while the monks are chaunting
+in the chapel.&nbsp; &lsquo;Caw!&rsquo; says the raven, &lsquo;Cuckoo!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+So we leave him, chuckling and rolling his eye at the convent gate,
+and wind slowly down again through the cloud.&nbsp; At last emerging
+from it, we come in sight of the village far below, and the flat green
+country intersected by rivulets; which is pleasant and fresh to see
+after the obscurity and haze of the convent - no disrespect to the raven,
+or the holy friars.<br>
+<br>
+Away we go again, by muddy roads, and through the most shattered and
+tattered of villages, where there is not a whole window among all the
+houses, or a whole garment among all the peasants, or the least appearance
+of anything to eat, in any of the wretched hucksters&rsquo; shops.&nbsp;
+The women wear a bright red bodice laced before and behind, a white
+skirt, and the Neapolitan head-dress of square folds of linen, primitively
+meant to carry loads on.&nbsp; The men and children wear anything they
+can get.&nbsp; The soldiers are as dirty and rapacious as the dogs.&nbsp;
+The inns are such hobgoblin places, that they are infinitely more attractive
+and amusing than the best hotels in Paris.&nbsp; Here is one near Valmontone
+(that is Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which
+is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep.&nbsp; There is a wild
+colonnade below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and
+a great long kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form,
+where a party of travellers, with two priests among them, are crowding
+round the fire while their supper is cooking.&nbsp; Above stairs, is
+a rough brick gallery to sit in, with very little windows with very
+small patches of knotty glass in them, and all the doors that open from
+it (a dozen or two) off their hinges, and a bare board on tressels for
+a table, at which thirty people might dine easily, and a fireplace large
+enough in itself for a breakfast-parlour, where, as the faggots blaze
+and crackle, they illuminate the ugliest and grimmest of faces, drawn
+in charcoal on the whitewashed chimney-sides by previous travellers.&nbsp;
+There is a flaring country lamp on the table; and, hovering about it,
+scratching her thick black hair continually, a yellow dwarf of a woman,
+who stands on tiptoe to arrange the hatchet knives, and takes a flying
+leap to look into the water-jug.&nbsp; The beds in the adjoining rooms
+are of the liveliest kind.&nbsp; There is not a solitary scrap of looking-glass
+in the house, and the washing apparatus is identical with the cooking
+utensils.&nbsp; But the yellow dwarf sets on the table a good flask
+of excellent wine, holding a quart at least; and produces, among half-a-dozen
+other dishes, two-thirds of a roasted kid, smoking hot.&nbsp; She is
+as good-humoured, too, as dirty, which is saying a great deal.&nbsp;
+So here&rsquo;s long life to her, in the flask of wine, and prosperity
+to the establishment.<br>
+<br>
+Rome gained and left behind, and with it the Pilgrims who are now repairing
+to their own homes again - each with his scallop shell and staff, and
+soliciting alms for the love of God - we come, by a fair country, to
+the Falls of Terni, where the whole Velino river dashes, headlong, from
+a rocky height, amidst shining spray and rainbows.&nbsp; Perugia, strongly
+fortified by art and nature, on a lofty eminence, rising abruptly from
+the plain where purple mountains mingle with the distant sky, is glowing,
+on its market-day, with radiant colours.&nbsp; They set off its sombre
+but rich Gothic buildings admirably.&nbsp; The pavement of its market-place
+is strewn with country goods.&nbsp; All along the steep hill leading
+from the town, under the town wall, there is a noisy fair of calves,
+lambs, pigs, horses, mules, and oxen.&nbsp; Fowls, geese, and turkeys,
+flutter vigorously among their very hoofs; and buyers, sellers, and
+spectators, clustering everywhere, block up the road as we come shouting
+down upon them.<br>
+<br>
+Suddenly, there is a ringing sound among our horses.&nbsp; The driver
+stops them.&nbsp; Sinking in his saddle, and casting up his eyes to
+Heaven, he delivers this apostrophe, &lsquo;Oh Jove Omnipotent! here
+is a horse has lost his shoe!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Notwithstanding the tremendous nature of this accident, and the utterly
+forlorn look and gesture (impossible in any one but an Italian Vettur&iacute;no)
+with which it is announced, it is not long in being repaired by a mortal
+Farrier, by whose assistance we reach Castiglione the same night, and
+Arezzo next day.&nbsp; Mass is, of course, performing in its fine cathedral,
+where the sun shines in among the clustered pillars, through rich stained-glass
+windows: half revealing, half concealing the kneeling figures on the
+pavement, and striking out paths of spotted light in the long aisles.<br>
+<br>
+But, how much beauty of another kind is here, when, on a fair clear
+morning, we look, from the summit of a hill, on Florence!&nbsp; See
+where it lies before us in a sun-lighted valley, bright with the winding
+Arno, and shut in by swelling hills; its domes, and towers, and palaces,
+rising from the rich country in a glittering heap, and shining in the
+sun like gold!<br>
+<br>
+Magnificently stern and sombre are the streets of beautiful Florence;
+and the strong old piles of building make such heaps of shadow, on the
+ground and in the river, that there is another and a different city
+of rich forms and fancies, always lying at our feet.&nbsp; Prodigious
+palaces, constructed for defence, with small distrustful windows heavily
+barred, and walls of great thickness formed of huge masses of rough
+stone, frown, in their old sulky state, on every street.&nbsp; In the
+midst of the city - in the Piazza of the Grand Duke, adorned with beautiful
+statues and the Fountain of Neptune - rises the Palazzo Vecchio, with
+its enormous overhanging battlements, and the Great Tower that watches
+over the whole town.&nbsp; In its court-yard - worthy of the Castle
+of Otranto in its ponderous gloom - is a massive staircase that the
+heaviest waggon and the stoutest team of horses might be driven up.&nbsp;
+Within it, is a Great Saloon, faded and tarnished in its stately decorations,
+and mouldering by grains, but recording yet, in pictures on its walls,
+the triumphs of the Medici and the wars of the old Florentine people.&nbsp;
+The prison is hard by, in an adjacent court-yard of the building - a
+foul and dismal place, where some men are shut up close, in small cells
+like ovens; and where others look through bars and beg; where some are
+playing draughts, and some are talking to their friends, who smoke,
+the while, to purify the air; and some are buying wine and fruit of
+women-vendors; and all are squalid, dirty, and vile to look at.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;They are merry enough, Signore,&rsquo; says the jailer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;They are all blood-stained here,&rsquo; he adds, indicating,
+with his hand, three-fourths of the whole building.&nbsp; Before the
+hour is out, an old man, eighty years of age, quarrelling over a bargain
+with a young girl of seventeen, stabs her dead, in the market-place
+full of bright flowers; and is brought in prisoner, to swell the number.<br>
+<br>
+Among the four old bridges that span the river, the Ponte Vecchio -
+that bridge which is covered with the shops of Jewellers and Goldsmiths
+- is a most enchanting feature in the scene.&nbsp; The space of one
+house, in the centre, being left open, the view beyond is shown as in
+a frame; and that precious glimpse of sky, and water, and rich buildings,
+shining so quietly among the huddled roofs and gables on the bridge,
+is exquisite.&nbsp; Above it, the Gallery of the Grand Duke crosses
+the river.&nbsp; It was built to connect the two Great Palaces by a
+secret passage; and it takes its jealous course among the streets and
+houses, with true despotism: going where it lists, and spurning every
+obstacle away, before it.<br>
+<br>
+The Grand Duke has a worthier secret passage through the streets, in
+his black robe and hood, as a member of the Compagnia della Misericordia,
+which brotherhood includes all ranks of men.&nbsp; If an accident take
+place, their office is, to raise the sufferer, and bear him tenderly
+to the Hospital.&nbsp; If a fire break out, it is one of their functions
+to repair to the spot, and render their assistance and protection.&nbsp;
+It is, also, among their commonest offices, to attend and console the
+sick; and they neither receive money, nor eat, nor drink, in any house
+they visit for this purpose.&nbsp; Those who are on duty for the time,
+are all called together, on a moment&rsquo;s notice, by the tolling
+of the great bell of the Tower; and it is said that the Grand Duke has
+been seen, at this sound, to rise from his seat at table, and quietly
+withdraw to attend the summons.<br>
+<br>
+In this other large Piazza, where an irregular kind of market is held,
+and stores of old iron and other small merchandise are set out on stalls,
+or scattered on the pavement, are grouped together, the Cathedral with
+its great Dome, the beautiful Italian Gothic Tower the Campanile, and
+the Baptistery with its wrought bronze doors.&nbsp; And here, a small
+untrodden square in the pavement, is &lsquo;the Stone of DANTE,&rsquo;
+where (so runs the story) he was used to bring his stool, and sit in
+contemplation.&nbsp; I wonder was he ever, in his bitter exile, withheld
+from cursing the very stones in the streets of Florence the ungrateful,
+by any kind remembrance of this old musing-place, and its association
+with gentle thoughts of little Beatrice!<br>
+<br>
+The chapel of the Medici, the Good and Bad Angels, of Florence; the
+church of Santa Croce where Michael Angelo lies buried, and where every
+stone in the cloisters is eloquent on great men&rsquo;s deaths; innumerable
+churches, often masses of unfinished heavy brickwork externally, but
+solemn and serene within; arrest our lingering steps, in strolling through
+the city.<br>
+<br>
+In keeping with the tombs among the cloisters, is the Museum of Natural
+History, famous through the world for its preparations in wax; beginning
+with models of leaves, seeds, plants, inferior animals; and gradually
+ascending, through separate organs of the human frame, up to the whole
+structure of that wonderful creation, exquisitely presented, as in recent
+death.&nbsp; Few admonitions of our frail mortality can be more solemn
+and more sad, or strike so home upon the heart, as the counterfeits
+of Youth and Beauty that are lying there, upon their beds, in their
+last sleep.<br>
+<br>
+Beyond the walls, the whole sweet Valley of the Arno, the convent at
+Fiesole, the Tower of Galileo, BOCCACCIO&rsquo;S house, old villas and
+retreats; innumerable spots of interest, all glowing in a landscape
+of surpassing beauty steeped in the richest light; are spread before
+us.&nbsp; Returning from so much brightness, how solemn and how grand
+the streets again, with their great, dark, mournful palaces, and many
+legends: not of siege, and war, and might, and Iron Hand alone, but
+of the triumphant growth of peaceful Arts and Sciences.<br>
+<br>
+What light is shed upon the world, at this day, from amidst these rugged
+Palaces of Florence!&nbsp; Here, open to all comers, in their beautiful
+and calm retreats, the ancient Sculptors are immortal, side by side
+with Michael Angelo, Canova, Titian, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poets, Historians,
+Philosophers - those illustrious men of history, beside whom its crowned
+heads and harnessed warriors show so poor and small, and are so soon
+forgotten.&nbsp; Here, the imperishable part of noble minds survives,
+placid and equal, when strongholds of assault and defence are overthrown;
+when the tyranny of the many, or the few, or both, is but a tale; when
+Pride and Power are so much cloistered dust.&nbsp; The fire within the
+stern streets, and among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled by
+rays from Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flickering of
+war is extinguished and the household fires of generations have decayed;
+as thousands upon thousands of faces, rigid with the strife and passion
+of the hour, have faded out of the old Squares and public haunts, while
+the nameless Florentine Lady, preserved from oblivion by a Painter&rsquo;s
+hand, yet lives on, in enduring grace and youth.<br>
+<br>
+Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining Dome
+is seen no more, go travelling through cheerful Tuscany, with a bright
+remembrance of it; for Italy will be the fairer for the recollection.&nbsp;
+The summer-time being come: and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como
+lying far behind us: and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village, near
+the awful rocks and mountains, the everlasting snows and roaring cataracts,
+of the Great Saint Gothard: hearing the Italian tongue for the last
+time on this journey: let us part from Italy, with all its miseries
+and wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural
+and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness
+towards a people, naturally well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tempered.&nbsp;
+Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change
+their nature and reduce their spirit; miserable jealousies, fomented
+by petty Princes to whom union was destruction, and division strength,
+have been a canker at their root of nationality, and have barbarized
+their language; but the good that was in them ever, is in them yet,
+and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes.&nbsp;
+Let us entertain that hope!&nbsp; And let us not remember Italy the
+less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her fallen Temples,
+and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate
+the lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end, and that the
+world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing,
+and more hopeful, as it rolls!<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a>&nbsp; This was
+written in 1846.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a>&nbsp; A far more
+liberal and just recognition of the public has arisen in Westminster
+Abbey since this was written.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PICTURES FROM ITALY ***<br>
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