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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pictures from Italy, by Charles Dickens
+(#7 in our series by Charles Dickens)
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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+
+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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