The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER XIX

MY ROMAN CONSULATE

The convenient road from London to Rome, when I went there as consul, was via Paris to Marseilles, and thence by sea to Civita Vecchia. It was December when I left London, and the journey from Paris to Marseilles, in a third-class carriage, took twenty-six hours. The Mont Cenis tunnel had not been opened yet, and the voyage by diligence was tedious, costly, and at that season uncomfortable on account of the cold. I arrived at Rome shortly before Christmas, when the city was astir with the preparations for the great ceremonies which were then the principal attraction for foreigners there, but the number of visitors was very small compared with that which now gathers to their diminished religious and spectacular interest. The foreign quarter was limited to that immediately about the Piazza di Spagna, and only the artist folk lived in the remoter quarters, where they found cheap and commodious apartments in the palaces of fallen nobility, glad to let their upper stories; and there were few or no new houses.

Rome was given up to art and religion; it was still decaying, picturesque, pathetic, and majestic. Where now we find the prosperous and hideous new quarters,—the Via Nazionale, and the expanse of structures to the east of it, the region between the Coliseum and the Lateran, the 20 Settembre, Via Veneto, and the vicinity where were the Ludovisi gardens, and now are long streets of ugly houses, with the entirely new quarter of the Prati, were then expanses of vineyards and gardens, and we used to cross the Tiber by a ferry to visit the farm of Cincinnatus, now buried under twenty feet of rubbish, on which are built the palaces of the Prati, huge, ugly barracks; and even the Campagna has lost much of its desolate beauty. Down the Tiber, where the ghastly embankment walls in the yellow stream, there was then a picturesque riverbank, with a delightful foreground in every rood of it. Where now is the Piazza delle Terme and the great railway station, we used to go to get studies of the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, one of the most picturesque objects of the region.

Political or social life there was none, and the foreign element, whether the regular or the transitory, was divided by its nationalities, and cut off absolutely from the Roman. Only the English and American mingled to any extent, the foreign Catholics finding their way, with such Protestants as gave hope of conversion, into the clerical world, which, from all that I could see of it, offered little attraction to the fugitive visitors. Wide-eyed, hurried Americans came, saw, and bought a picture, and went away again; English sightseers came for Christmas or Easter, and bought a few old masters; but the mass of those who stayed for long were invalids, who settled down and tried to keep as much in the sun as possible, for the universal belief then was that to live out of the sunshine was to contract mortal malaria. It was the most unreal world I have ever lived in, whether we use the word unreal in the sense of shadowy or poetical.

Rome was in fact at that time a spectacle never before or since seen in the world. Ruled by an absolute government, theocratic and therefore considering its authority beyond all human attack, but besieged on all sides by an invading liberalism, which had already captured all its outposts and undermined its position at the centre, it, still defiant, refused to make a single concession to the spirit of the epoch, and bade defiance to diplomacy and insurrection alike. All its former allies from north and south were in refuge within the walls of the city, the King of Naples and all his court offering the daily spectacle of a parade of their downfall as they drove through the streets. Rome itself was a huge cloister in which the only animation was in the processions of priests and students of the theological seminaries, or the more melancholy funerals in which the hooded and gowned friars added gloom to the mystery of our common lot,—no industry except those of jewelry and art and that of ecclesiastical apparatus. The principal revenues were the charity of the outside world,—St. Peter's pence. Government was not by law, but by the arbitrary decisions of the most incompetent of officials, enforced by the bayonets of a foreign army, the soldiers of which despised the population, and lived in the most complete separation from it. The Pope himself had little affection for his French protectorate, which urged, and sometimes effected, certain improvements which he regarded as innovations and invasions.

I had, soon after my arrival, a case before the lower tribunal which showed how the administration of justice was regarded. Having a relapse into the malady that had followed my breakdown in Switzerland, which was exaggerated by the heat of Rome, I was ordered by my physician to Ariccia to recruit, and I left my apartment, which was also the consulate, and took quarters at the little Ariccian inn which was the resort of the artists at that date.

As I could not absent myself from the office longer than ten days at a time without permission of the government at Washington, I had to return pro forma at that term, when, to my surprise, I found my apartment in possession of a stranger. I intimated his dislodging, to which he replied that he had taken the rooms and paid his rent and would not go. At that time there was a temporary occupation—merely nominal, however—of the legation by ex-Governor Randall of Wisconsin. The minister had taken an apartment where he could mount the arms of the Republic, and had then gone off on his European tour, leaving me in occupation of the post as chargé d'affaires and in care of his rooms. As I had thus another place to sleep in, I evacuated the consular quarters not unwillingly, removing all my effects except a set of silver spoons which my mother had given me on my leaving home, and which were heirlooms. The spoons were being cleaned, the landlady said, and would be ready the next day. I called for them again, and was again deferred, when I went at once to the tribunal and made a claim for my spoons. On statement of the case, the judge gave an order for the immediate and unconditional delivery of the plate; but when I went to get them at the tribunal, he said it was lucky for me that I came when I did, as the landlady had come in the afternoon and applied for an order against me to pay another month's rent (always paid in advance), and that if she had come first he should have been obliged to give it to her. I explained that I had been driven out of the apartment by another occupant; but that, he said, made no difference, the first applicant for justice would alone have been heard.

Not long after, a similar case called for my more or less official recognition. My colleague the consul at Florence had come for a visit to Rome, and had taken a cab to make the rounds of the sights, and, making his visit to the church of Ara Coeli, he of course left the cab at the foot of the stairs. He found little which interested him in the church, and, returning sooner than the cabman expected, he found no cab there. In the course of the day he went to the police court and asked for a punishment for the cabman for having deserted him on his round. The cabman was summoned and fined accordingly; but the magistrate remarked to my friend when he came to give evidence that it was fortunate for him that he complained first, for the cabman had come later in the day and asked for his fare for the night which he had passed at the foot of the stairs waiting for the return of the forestiero; and he added that if the cabman had come first, my friend would have been obliged to pay the claim. It was simple and expeditious, first come being first served, but hardly good civil administration.

At the time of the expedition of Garibaldi which ended at Aspromonte, the excitement in the city was intense, and the panic on the part of the ecclesiastical population so great that they mainly took refuge in the convents and villages of the mountain country. I had occasion to see the Pope at that time, and found him in profound despondency, evidently persuaded that Garibaldi would come to Rome. He said to me that he was convinced that the great day of tribulation prophesied for the church had come, and it would have its fifty years of oppression, after which it would arise again more glorious than ever; but there was no question that in his mind the French garrison was not for the moment an efficient protection. The Italian party in the city was very small, but active, and in those days especially so. The priests were insulted and menaced whenever it was possible to reach them covertly, and finally one was stabbed in a crowd. Many arrests were made, and amongst those arrested was an exile who had ventured into the city to visit his friends. He was put on trial for the stabbing, and, though he proved an alibi, he was condemned to death, for "some example must be made," they said. There was not the slightest evidence against him except that he was an exile who had no right to be in the city, and he was executed. Every day the police had to obliterate rebellious inscriptions from the walls, and a constant correspondence was kept up with the patriots in Florence. To belong to the order of Freemasons was punishable by death, but a lodge was in full activity, and when Lincoln was assassinated it sent me, for his widow, a letter of condolence. It was given me by Castellani, who, not being initiated, had received it from a brother known to him. About the same time, the revolutionary committee decided to contribute a stone from the agger of Servius Tullius to the Washington monument at Washington, and got out one of the largest, had it dressed and appropriately inscribed, and forwarded it to Leghorn for shipment to America, the bill of lading being sent to me for transmission.

The police regulations were extremely severe against heresy, but brigandage was common, and the darker streets were unsafe at night to strangers. People were not infrequently robbed in their own doorways, and there was a recognized system of violent robbery known as "doorway robbing." The streets were very badly lighted, and the entrance halls on the ground floor were scarcely ever lighted, so that we always carried wax tapers to light ourselves up to our rooms, or to visit our friends. Incautious foreigners, ignorant of this need for precaution, entering the dark passages, were sometimes seized by robbers hidden behind the door, gagged, and stripped of all valuables without a possibility of assistance unless a friend happened to enter the house at the moment, for the police were never seen about the streets at night. I had, in the second year of my residence, a very narrow escape from capture by brigands, which might have been a serious matter. I was making, with my wife and son, our villeggiatura at Porto d'Anzio, then a miserable fishing village, but, except Civita Vecchia, the only convenient seaside locality in the States of the Church where one could find lodgings. With an American lady friend staying with us, we planned to make an excursion by boat to the Punta d'Astura, where are the ruins of a villa of Cicero; but when half way there we were driven back by a passing shower. On the same day a party of Roman sportsmen, out quail shooting, were "held up" in the ruins and obliged to pay a ransom of five thousand scudi. The brigands of the kingdom of Naples were constantly given refuge and sustenance on our side the frontier, and on a visit to Olevano, in the Sabine hills, I was witness of a band of over two hundred taking refuge from the Italian troops in the Papal territory, and being furnished with provisions and refreshments as at a festa. Artists out sketching were never molested, not because the Papal influence protected us, but because the brigands knew their poverty, and had a tinge of sympathy with the arts.

The ecclesiastical authorities were so severe on heresy that a friend of mine, who had married an English lady who remained a Protestant, was brought before the Inquisition (the "Holy Office") and put under the severest pressure to compel his wife to abstain from attending the English church outside the Porta del Popolo. He escaped ulterior consequences only by appealing to the French authorities, he being a surgeon in the service of the French garrison. For common morality there was little care. The sexual relations were flagrantly loose, and the scandal even of some of the great dignitaries was widespread. Antonelli's amours were the subject of common gossip, and most of the parish priests were in undisguised marital relations with their housekeepers; nor was this considered as at all to their discredit by the population at large. One of the leading Liberals, permitted to remain in the city on account of the importance of his industry, one of the great goldsmiths' works, told me that the Liberals never permitted the priests to frequent their houses, as they invariably conspired to corrupt the newly married women, unmarried girls being unmolested. In the lower circles of the bourgeoisie it was a matter of common knowledge that the husbands openly made a traffic of the virtue of their wives; and in my personal acquaintance amongst the artists, I knew of a number of cases in which the artist had the wife as a mistress for a fixed compensation to the husband.

For this kind of immorality the police had no eyes, and, admitting enormous exaggeration in the common report of the conduct of the younger priesthood and the students of the theological schools (and there is no smoke without some fire), the conditions of morality amongst the younger Italian clergy was a gross scandal. Houses of ill-fame were notorious, and it used to be said that when Pius IX. was urged by the French authorities to put them under control and license he replied that "every house was a brothel, and it was useless to license any." There was another saying which I heard often, that "if you wanted to go to a brothel you must go in the daytime, for at night they were full of priests." How far this was justified I do not know, but I remember that two American acquaintances went one night to one of the best recognized houses of the kind, a place of the most common notoriety on the Corso, and they were told at the door that there was no room,—"every place was occupied."

Let me not be charged with making of this state of things an accusation against the Catholic religion. The English, Irish, and American students, who were those with whom I principally came in contact, were ardent and enthusiastic devotees, as earnest in their religious observances as any of the most devoted members of any other church I have known. Indeed, it is my personal experience that so far as regards the younger men, I have never found so many animated by the true apostolical spirit as amongst the students of theology of British and American birth whom I then knew at Rome. At the head of all the Catholics of all nations whom I have ever known are the English, in respect of sincere and ardent devotion to their church, with the minimum of animosity towards other creeds, and the most healthy morality. With the great majority of Italian ecclesiastics, on the contrary, religion is a mere formality, and its influence on the life is inconsiderable and unconsidered. It was, therefore, not because it was a Catholic city that the morality of Rome was so low, but because the energies of the hierarchy were so occupied with the difficulties of the position of a government of priests unused to civil administration and by their own education disqualified for it, that the ordinary functions of government were impossible to it. The situation was made still worse by the Italian constitutional indifference to questions of common morality. As the government of the church lies in the hands of the Italian clergy, it will be forever impossible for a government organized on the principles of the Papal temporal power to be other than that which has been suppressed by Italy. To the majority of the higher Italian ecclesiastics, the church has become merely a political instrument, into the management of which the spiritual interests of the people do not enter, and the efforts of the Catholics of other countries to bring about a reform will never succeed while the power is in the hands of the Italian clergy, which it will be as long as the Papacy is an Italian institution; and as the Pope is Pope merely because he is the Bishop of Rome, it is difficult to see how the situation can be made different.

Pius IX. was personally a most sincere and devout, though worldly, man, and it is difficult to believe that any other than a devotee could now be elected to the Holy See, for even the most corrupt civil or ecclesiastical intellect must see the importance of a reputation for sanctity in the Pontiff, while, as the influence of the Papacy is no longer of vital importance to the government of any country in the world (though doubtless of considerable utility to several), there is little political importance in the personality of the Pontiff, and slight motive for foreign governments to exercise influence on the election. If removed from Italy and established in a seat surrounded by a population like that of the masses in France (out of Paris and the large cities), amenable to purely spiritual influences, the church would revert to its normal functions and abandon politics,—a result never to be hoped for while it remains Italian. I have no sympathy with its creed, or any other of the creeds, for I conceive no healthy conformity of belief possible to men and women differing in intellectual and spiritual capacities; but I have seen good work done by the Catholic church in many quarters, and I have many and admirable Catholic friends, and, to be frank, I do not believe that the creed makes much difference in the religion.

As to Pius IX., I am convinced that he was not only a devout man, but an excellent and admirable man, as men go, a genuine believer in the divine direction of his pontificate, and incapacitated for civil government simply because no one could carry on a civil government on ecclesiastical principles. He loved his people, and, personally and generally, was beloved by them; but the progress of liberalism and democracy had driven out of the Papal States, or into a mute and inflexible opposition, all the most active and potent intellects amongst them, and the clergy without them could not administer the government; so that, wishing to do good to his subjects, he could not improve their political condition without inviting those elements of liberalism which he considered the inexorable enemies of the church, which was to him the highest interest of humanity, He reposed his faith on the abilities of clerics who knew nothing of human nature or practical politics, but comprehended only a paternal control, absolute, and to be enforced by the rod, actual or figurative; or on those of civilian devotees and fanatics less intelligent even than the clerical functionaries.

As I was, for the greater part of my term, in charge of the legation interests and duties, I saw Pius IX. often and liked him much. One day when I was having an audience in his little room, the windows of which looked west, there came up a great thunder storm, with frequent flashes of lightning, at each of which he crossed himself and devoutly said a prayer. His conversation convinced me that he felt profoundly convinced of his divinely appointed function as the vicegerent of God on earth, and his sincerity inspired me with great respect for the man; but, naturally, with little for his intellect. His bonhomie was remarkable, and he had a keen sense of humor, which led him to make sarcastic, and often telling remarks, on men and things, in which he was sometimes the reverse of diplomatic. He had, for my advantage, many jibes at our past ministers, of some of whom he had diverting memories, and especially of Major Cass,—of whom he always spoke as "quel Cass," who had curious habits of night wandering and adventure seeking, or, as Pius put it, "could not be quiet of nights." Either he or his predecessor, I forget which, had insisted on putting his horse through a ride round the parapet of the Pincian balustrade, where a slip or a yielding stone meant death to the rider, which might have been of no importance, but to the horse also, which would have been a pity. And the old man liked a sly thrust at any of us who had made a blunder.

While thus in charge of the diplomatic relations of my government without its recognition, the Department sent out a chaplain, an ex-chaplain of the House of Representatives, who, having served his time in that capacity, was entitled to a vacation in Europe, and came with recommendations to me. Protestant worship was forbidden within the walls of Rome, but to induce the English Protestants to come to Rome and spend their money there, they were allowed to worship in a sort of warehouse outside the Porta del Popolo. This was repugnant to our democratic ways, and the new chaplain insisted on having his chapel inside the walls. So I "put on cheek" and hired in the name of the legation an apartment with a huge reception room close to the Piazza di Spagna, put up the arms of the United States of America, and opened the reception room for public worship as the chapel of the legation,—the first instance in recorded time of Protestant worship in the Papal city. The sequel was amusing, for as Sunday was my only holiday, and I always spent it on the Campagna, the chaplain cut me dead for not attending his services and keeping Sunday.

I expected some admonitory allusion to this achievement when next I saw the Pope, but no notice was ever taken of it either by the superior or the lower authorities, and so far as I know the church of my planting flourished as long as the city remained under the Papal rule, but with no more of my watering. The Pope was, I am persuaded, quite indifferent to it, for, devout and unquestioning believer in his own divine authority as he was, he was not a bigot, and not of a persecuting disposition, but he was only a part of an immense and intricate machine, over the movements of which neither he nor any other Pope could have much control. He had every possible disposition to be that ideal ruler, a benevolent despot, but even in that little realm the details of government were impossible of control by the most competent head of a government; they were necessarily left to the incompetent, bigoted, and zealous administrators chosen by the secondary chiefs of the departments, all the most conservative of men, with a reverence for the abuses and usages of the old régime. It was personal government down to the lowest grade of responsibility. The Pope presided and bore the responsibility of the proceedings, but Antonelli was the real ruler of the States of the Church.

And Antonelli was the very impersonation of unscrupulous and malignant intellect, subtle with all the Italian subtlety, and unscrupulous as any of the brigands from the community in which he had his origin. He was in those days a cardinal of the order of deacons, and only in his later career a priest, which fact is sometimes made the excuse for his frank and notorious disregard of the rule of chastity, nor did he seem to be concerned that his amours were the common gossip of Rome. I was one day in his anteroom waiting for an audience when a lady came to visit him, and when she was announced he flew to receive her with the ardor of a boy in love, and with such open and passionate expressions of affection as could be seen only in a southern nature. But he had none of the slowness of action or decision which we attribute sometimes to the languor of tropical natures. In business, as in love, he lost no time, and never was at a loss for his expedient, but came at once to a decision, and gave it on the spot. When the cruise of the Alabama gave rise to diplomatic correspondence, and our government protested against her receiving such treatment from neutrals as would facilitate her career, I was, amongst my colleagues under similar obligations, charged to protest against her being admitted to the privileges of a national man-of-war in the port of Civita Vecchia. Antonelli replied to my communication of the protest that she would be admitted to the port with the same privileges as a man-of-war of any other nation, and the reply was given with almost explosive promptness and vivacity. But until a request for relaxation of the passport regulations in favor of Southerners was made by some one professing to speak on behalf of our own government, which was in my second year, he never permitted the least bending of them, and only in important cases, where strong personal influence was brought to bear, issued passports of the Foreign Office for Southern Americans to leave the city.

Antonelli had a face which gave one an idea of the expression "beauté du Diable," for a more perfect type of Satanic intelligence and malignity than it showed at times I cannot conceive. If I had been a figure painter, I should certainly have painted him as Mephistopheles, as he appeared in the audience room in his close-fitting purple costume with scarlet trimmings, his long coat-tails flying behind him when he moved like the fringe of a flame. He was the most curious contrast to the Pope, with his humorous and kindly manner, that it is possible to conceive, for the Cardinal was nothing if not sardonic and serious. The very slightest trace of humor would have transformed him completely.

Unique as was the government, so was the position of a consul. It had something of the exterritoriality of the same position in the Turkish empire. The arms of my government over my door were a protection against legal process, and I imagine that my predecessor had so employed it, for when I had my first clothes made the tailor refused to send them to the consulate till they were paid for. I had a right to carry arms and shoot anywhere in the territory of the Pope, and I had an absolute control over the passports, i.e. over the movements of my fellow citizens, for no one who had come to Rome with the passport of the United States of America could leave it without my visa, and I could sequestrate the passport whenever I saw fit. But on the part of my own government the consideration afforded was the minimum of its kind. I had no salary, and my compensation was in fees, viz. those on passports and the few invoices of goods sent to America, with such notarial business as might arise. The late consul had resigned, and gone home to fight for the Confederate cause, leaving the consulate in the hands of a French secretary, an old and needy teacher of his native language whenever he could find a pupil. He was satisfied with the pittance my own means allowed me to give him, and he wrote, in a much better French than mine would have been, the dispatches to the Vatican. I could talk French fluently if not correctly, and that sufficed. Before leaving Washington, I had received a hint from a friend in the Department of State that the fewer dispatches I troubled them with the higher would be my favor in the department, so that, with the exception of my quarterly accounts, I had little official writing to do; but when I came to Rome again in 1882, I was told by my successor of that date that my file of dispatches to the department was the only one which existed in the consular archives of the Papal occupation of Rome.

Rome was in those days the Lotophagitis of our century, whose population lived in an artificial peace, a sort of dreamland—artists who, whether German, French, English, Americans, or Russians, were more or less imbued with the feeling of the old art, and who found their clientéle in people who believed, as I have heard some say, that any picture painted in Rome was better than any picture painted elsewhere! There was, therefore, a continual exportation of copies, good and bad, of the old masters and a few landscapes for the remembering of localities, but the quality of the art was of trifling importance to the buyers—it was "done in Rome," and that sufficed as merit. The Café Greco, haunt of the race of artists since Salvator Rosa, was in its original and charming, if rude, simplicity, and there came all the artists to take their after-dinner cup. Old John Gibson, though not the oldest of the habitués, was the chief of our Anglo-American community; Randolph Rogers, Mosier, Reinhart, Story, and two or three other sculptors, whose names I have forgotten, and two or three American landscape painters, of whom Tilton was chief at the time of my arrival, had the monopoly of American patronage, and every wealthy American who came conceived it his duty to patronize American art, while our government had the tradition of always sending an artist to Rome as consul.

Charlotte Cushman, a famous actress of her day, was the nucleus of a little clique of women sculptors, Miss Stebbins, Harriet Hosmer, and one or two others of lesser fame. Accordingly, she made war on sculptors of the other sex in all the curious ways of womanly malice, in order to the exclusive reaping by her protégées of the golden harvest. I had known her years before, when she was still on the stage and I the dramatic and art critic of the New York "Evening Post," and, as our relations had then been cordial, it was natural that she should "take me up" on my arrival. Her hospitality was large—dinners, musical evenings, etc., and she had a "salon," to all which I was a welcome guest, and the cordiality lasted until she thought it time to make use of me. She then proposed to me to undertake the demolition of the fictitious reputations of the leading American sculptors, especially Story, Mosier, and Rogers, and, when I replied that I had then the intention of returning to the occupation of a landscape painter, and that in that position, as well as in that of consul and in a manner the protector of all my countrymen, it would be inconsistent with the position to publish criticisms on my fellow artists, the thermometer of her regard fell at once, and I had instant evidence that I was out of her list of friends.

Her coolness was changed to active hostility by another case of conflicting interests. The recognition of passports issued before the rebellion having been interdicted by the government, the consuls received an order to cancel all such as had been issued prior to the order, and to issue new ones only on the oath of allegiance being taken by the recipient. There was also a charge of five dollars for the passport, which was to be renewed after a year. Charlotte was, amongst her other qualities, avaricious, and though wealthy and ostentatious she rebelled at expenditure which did not show, and when it came time for her to leave Rome for the summer, and her passport came for visa, I stopped it and notified her to take out a new one. She refused, and confiding in the friendly personal relations which had existed between her and Seward, she wrote to the department protesting against my action and making formal complaint of my discourtesy. Seward replied that I was obeying my orders and that the passport must be taken and paid for. From that day war was open and malignant. Of course I was interdicted from responding in any way to her attacks, but I found them of no great importance; though when I was sent to Crete, four years later, she had influence enough to get her nephew appointed consul in succession.

In the years when Miss Cushman was on the stage I had understood her pretty well, and, though she had done what was possible to give me a good impression of her, I do not think I was ever much persuaded of her goodness or surprised at the enmity she showed when I came into collision with her interests. I think she possessed an utterly selfish nature, was not at all scrupulous in the attainment of her purposes, and was, in effect, that most dangerous member of society, a strong-willed and large-brained woman without a vestige of principle. She had a diabolical magnetism which in her best part, Meg Merrilies, had a sensuous attraction I have never known so powerful in another woman. Her Queen Katherine was a failure, and she could not play the part of a refined woman, but into that of Meg Merrilies, an adaptation of her own of Sir Walter Scott's novel, she put her whole nature—it was her very self as far as she would let herself be seen.

When I had a studio in New York I had as next-door neighbor an artist who was scene painter to the company in which Charlotte used to play at the old Park Theatre, and the stories he told me of her in that connection were terrible. My friend had never dared to speak of her openly, and only did so to me with a caution that if what he told me got to Miss Cushman's ears she was quite capable of silencing him in the most effective manner. I am of opinion that he judged her correctly, for she must have been a tiger when her passions were aroused, capable of anything, and I was careful never to give her more serious cause of offense than the doing of my official duty. Over those whom she chose to fascinate, she had an extraordinary power, and I have known young women who were so completely under her control as to be unable to escape from it when they found out her real nature except by flight.

If she had been beautiful she might have set the social world topsy-turvy. I think she was the cleverest woman I ever knew. Her tact was extraordinary, and she never failed to impress the visitors to Rome with her sincerity and benevolence, though she really possessed neither of those qualities. She was an immense illustration of a maxim of Dante Rossetti to the effect that artists had nothing to do with morality. She was always on the stage—in the most familiar act and in the presence of strangers she never lost sight of the footlights, and the best acting I ever saw her in was in private and in the representation of some comedy or tragedy of her own interests. She played with a marvelous power one part, and all others were but variations of that or failures—it was not art which dominated her, but the simulation of nature, and that her own, which is not the same thing as art, as we all ought to know.

Between herself and the sculptor Rogers, who was, in his way, as clever as she, there was an implacable war, veiled by the ordinary forms of civility, which both were careful never to break over. Miss Cushman had begun her career as a singer, but, her voice failing, she had to be content to remain on the stage of the theatre; but she always retained a certain dramatic quality of voice, and, within a very limited register, she sang with great power and pathos. Two of her favorite songs were Kingsley's "The Sands of Dee" and the "Three Fishermen," which, as she sang them, rarely failed to affect those who heard them for the first time to tears. Rogers was an admirable mimic and sang those songs with such a close rendering of the voice and manner (for Miss Cushman's voice was rather that of a man than one belonging to her own sex), with just a touch of burlesque, that he brought out roars of laughter; and when the two cordial enemies met in society somebody was sure to ask Rogers to sing "The Sands of Dee," which he did with good will, and Miss Cushman was obliged, to her intense anger, to applaud the caricature of her best performance. It was cruel, but he was merciless, and spared no exaggeration of her voice, her dramatic manner, and a way she had of sprawling over the piano, producing an ensemble which made it impossible to hear her again in the same songs without a disposition to laugh.

An incident occurred at this time which made Miss Cushman's position in regard to the quarrel with the consulate still more difficult. It was not long after the advent of the famous horse-tamer John S. Rarey, of whom she had been a pupil in America when he first came out. A person professing to be Rarey was touring Europe and teaching his manner of breaking horses, beginning at Copenhagen and following the seashore to Naples, whence he came to Rome and was received with great enthusiasm by Miss Cushman, for at that time, and while the war was in its critical stage, American lions were very rare in Rome. The horse-tamer was, on her authority, made the guest of the American community, breakfasted, dined, and fêted, and a large subscription was made for a class in horse-breaking. At this juncture I heard of a performance of the soi-disant Rarey at Naples, in which he had nearly killed a beautiful young mare, and, knowing that the system of Rarey did not include cruelty, I began to doubt the identity of the tamer. I called for the passport with which he had come, and which was, as usual, deposited at the police office, and discovered that it was issued by a "vice-consul pro tempore" at Dresden, an officer not recognized by our regulations, bad and loose as they were, and a man whose name, moreover, was not on the consular list, though the passport was on a regular form. I at once wrote to the police, requesting them to cause the said John S. Rarey to prove his identity.

The summons to the police office brought him to the consulate the next morning before I was out of bed (the office and my bedroom constituted the headquarters of the government of the United States of America at Rome), with a petition to me to request the police to delay the examination until the next day, as he had two friends who would identify him, but who were that day (it was Sunday) at Tivoli for the day. As an escape was impossible, and he was in a nervous trepidation which, it was clear to see, was awful funk, I wrote the note desired; and, before the day was out, he had gone to my English colleague, the amiable Severn, and confessed that he was an impostor, a Canadian, and asked for English protection. Severn replied that without my consent he could do nothing for him; he had come with an American passport and must abide by it, unless I gave him up. He was wilted, in such a fright as I never saw a man in before or since, and he had good reason, for the penalty of coming to Rome with a false passport was imprisonment in St. Angelo. Meanwhile Miss Cushman had gone into heroics over the insult I was offering so distinguished a man as to suspect his identity, and all her clique were united in abusing me; but on Monday the impostor slipped out of Rome by the connivance of Severn, the police, and myself, after I had attached the amount of the subscriptions for his class, which were still lying at the bankers', and pledged him to abstain in future from any similar impersonation. As Miss Cushman had stood sponsor for him, she having been a pupil of the real Rarey, his confession was a mortification which she visited on my head, but as it disarmed her I was tranquil over the consequences.

I was continually at war with the Confederate Americans, galled to extreme bitterness by the right I had of compelling them to take the oath of allegiance before renewing their passports. Amongst them was a very beautiful woman, a Virginian, and the wife of a commodore in the navy of the United States of America, then on service in the Potomac. She refused to take the oath, and insulted me in the grossest manner and in public, as an insulter of ladies, etc., etc. But all the influence she could bring to bear could not get her passport from the police without my visa; and at last, despairing of escape from Rome, she came to make her peace, meeting me at the bank, but unwilling to accept the degradation of coming to the consulate. "You are not going to make me come to your dirty little consulate, are you?" she said; to which I replied, "Oh, no; my secretary shall administer the oath to you in your bedroom, if you choose;" but, in the end, she had to take the oath and sign it, as did many of her compatriots. Amongst the Southerners who came under my administration was the wife of General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of our army, who actually died under my care, without a friend or relative near her.

This social warfare, the consequence of my official position, had the effect of giving me occupation and excitement, and I was sustained cordially by the loyal Americans in Rome, so that the position, though unremunerative, was rather pleasant than otherwise. In the course of the summer after my arrival, ex-Governor Randall of Wisconsin came as minister, his appointment being intended to "keep the place warm" for General Rufus King, a personal friend of Seward, to whom the place was promised whenever he should be tired of fighting, or qualified by glory for future political contests. Randall was a mere party hack; he knew nothing of diplomacy or good manners, or of any language but Western American. I took for him the house on the Pincian now known as the House of the Four Winds, a magnificent situation for the summer. He saw the sights, generally in a carriage, with a paper of fruit on the front seat and me as cicerone; was presented at the Vatican, presented me as chargé d'affaires, and, having his leave of absence in his pocket, departed for a tour of Europe, bequeathing to me the honor of paying his bills, rent, etc., down to the washing bill, to be settled on his return, and never appeared again. I was left to pay out of my empty pocket; and I never heard from him, though, a long time after, I succeeded in recovering from the Treasury the amount of those bills I had paid for Randall for which I could show vouchers; those for which I had none I had to put to account of profit and loss, which was, as long as I was in Rome, largely to the loss account, drafts on my brother making up the deficiency. I was also, until it suspended publication, Roman correspondent of John Bright's paper, which I think was called the "Star."

After an interregnum of some months came another bed-warmer for General King, this one a New York politician, also a friend of Seward's, an ancient politician, who had recently married a young wife desirous of a stay in some European capital, and, if possible, at the expense of the government. These at least were gentlefolk, and paid their bills without doing anything to scandalize the Romans. They spent the winter and went home, and finally came General King.

Finding that my fees and sales of pictures (for I had taken up my painting again and had sold a few small pictures) amounted to about six hundred dollars a year, and were slowly increasing, I decided to go home and bring my wife and child out. I had been absent more than a year, and several months after being in Rome had the news of the birth of a son. It was near being my death, for, on the evening of receiving the news, I had gone to make a call on an English lady who lived in the Villa Negroni, where the railway station now is, and close by the prison where all the political offenders were kept, and which was guarded by French soldiers. I was in a vein of profound meditation on the news I had just received, and absorbed to that extent that I kept on my course along the sidewalk in front of the prison, walking towards the sentry, and did not hear his challenge till it had been repeated three times, when I heard his rifle rattle as it came down to the take aim, and suddenly became conscious that I had heard a sound, the meaning of which must be "Qui vive?" I sung out lustily, "Ami" and was told that if I was a friend the other side of the road was my place.

I had discovered that the consular agent left by my predecessor at Civita Vecchia was engaged in a system of espionage on behalf of the Papal authorities, and had been issuing American passports to spies whom they were employing in Italian territory, and I at once dismissed him and informed the Italian government through Mr. Marsh, our minister to Italy, and received a letter of thanks from that government. From Washington a new consular agent was sent, and, putting him in charge of the consulate, I started for home, going by way of Turin, to see Mr. Marsh, and by diligence over Mont Cenis. Subsequent events brought me much in contact with that admirable diplomat and scholar, at that time the one bright feature of our diplomatic service on the Continent. Our government received great credit for sending such a man abroad to represent us, but the chance of it was in the fact that he was closely related to Senator Edmunds of Vermont, whose influence with the administration was sufficient to secure any single nomination he insisted on, and who did insist on the maintenance of Marsh in the diplomatic service. As Marsh had been conspicuous in the advocacy of the Italian cause during the unitary movement, he was designated by the circumstances for the American legation to Italy, in which he honored his appointment as few of our representatives at that epoch had done.

In fact, with the exception of Adams, at London, and Marsh, at Turin, we had hardly a representative abroad, either consular or diplomatic, who was a credit to the country. As the war continued, the importance of being respected in Europe became more evident, and a change took place; but the few men of respectable standing who were in foreign countries representing the United States of America were appointed on account of political pressure, and not on their merits. My colleague at Venice, Howells, one of Mr. Lincoln's most fortunate appointments, owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the successful candidate as entitling the biographer to some appointment. A term of consular service was and is still considered the reward for campaign services, personal or vicarious, and at the next change of administration the consul was superseded by another, equally crude, and with all to learn in his business.

What the character of the Americans as well as of the government, as such, has suffered of derogation abroad from this political huckstering with public offices, no one can know who was not much abroad in the years preceding our war. Marsh was honored and beloved at Rome by both King and people, as was Adams by the Court of St. James, but the dead weight which the standing disrepute of our diplomacy imposed on both those distinguished men can hardly now be estimated. My predecessors at Rome, and the ministers before my time, had left a bad odor behind them. One of them was notorious for his devotion to a form of dissipation much and scandalously known at Naples during the reign of the Bourbons as a springtime sport, and which has since been the occasion of a noted crusade in England led by Mr. Stead. Of a minister of the United States of America found drunk in the streets of Berlin by the police, and a chargé d'affaires who, in an outbreak at Constantinople, hoisted the flag over a brothel he frequented, the memory is perhaps too old to have reached men born much later than I, but for the twenty years of my first knowledge of European matters our representation abroad was a disgrace to America.

I landed in New York the day after the battle of Gettysburg, and for the first time in the history of our trouble I felt assured as to the end, for I perceived that the attempt at invasion by the Confederacy showed that the government of it felt its affairs to be in a desperate condition, and the determination on the part of the North was evidently unshaken. From that time I never felt any anxiety as to the final result. I found my brother at the head of the construction department of the revenue service, his friend Salmon P. Chase being Secretary of the Treasury. He was desirous to keep me at home to assist him, with which desire I was ready to conform, but the opposition of his wife was so bitter that he had to decide against my staying, and, taking my wife and boy, I returned to Rome. My brother was already attacked by the malady of which, two years later, he died.

Arriving in Rome, and resuming the direction of the consulate, I found to my dismay that General King had appointed as secretary of legation a local American banker, a "Copperhead," who had in the name of the government, but without authority, requested the Roman Ministry of Foreign Affairs to dispense with the visa on the passports of all American visitors, and Antonelli was, of course, too glad to be relieved of the embarrassment which had been often caused him by the regulation, which all the Southerners had asked to be relieved from. Thus I found that the principal resource of the consulate was gone. As the home government had given the strongest orders to protest against any such exception being made of American passports, I, of course, protested, but was informed that the rule had been taken at the request of my own government; and, though Antonelli knew perfectly that Hooker had no authority to enter into any negotiations with him on any subject, and that he had no official position, it suited him to accept the contrary, and my remonstrances to the minister, General King, had no effect. I then laid the matter before the Department of State at Washington, but, as General King was the close personal friend of Seward, who was quite indifferent to diplomatic scandals away from England, no attention was paid to my complaints, and I gave up the consulate to Brown, the consular agent at Civita Vecchia, to get what he could from it, and devoted myself entirely to painting, by which, with a little writing, I made enough to live in the simple manner which I was accustomed to.

Released from all obligations to remain at the consulate, I spent the most of my time in sketching on the Campagna. Of all the landscape I have ever seen, in the Alps, Sicily, Greece, the American forests and lakes, or semi-tropical Florida, nothing has impressed me as did the Roman Campagna in its then condition of decay and neglect. The beauty of line of its mountain framework is still there, and passages here and there are untouched, but the improvements of progress have intruded in so many points that, as a whole, the solemn and poetic aspect of those days is irretrievably lost. I used to sit out in the most lonely passages painting into the twilight until I could no longer distinguish my colors, and then tramp back to Rome at my fastest, to get in before the gates closed for the night. If it was not the rapture of art, it was the passion of poetic nature.

As fortune would have it, there was in Rome that winter Mr. George G. Fogg, the minister of the United States of America at Berne, a personal friend of Lincoln, and chairman of the Young Men's National Committee, which arranged the convention that nominated him. On Lincoln's election Fogg was offered his choice of the diplomatic appointments, and selected Berne, the most modest position he could take. He came to pass the Christmas holidays at Rome, and of course I laid my case before him. He in turn put it before his late colleagues in the House, and the committee on foreign affairs made a strong representation at the Department of State; and, when Seward refused to recall King, or take any measures to correct the injustice done me, they struck out from the consular and diplomatic appropriation bill the appropriation for the legation at Rome, which meant the abolition of the legation, and I was a little later transferred to Crete, a salaried post, where there was supposed to be nothing to do but make my quarterly report.

My commission must have been one of the very last Lincoln signed, for he was assassinated before it reached me. I was spending the evening at the quarters of one of my best Roman friends, Mr. John A. King (a cousin of, but not a sympathizer with, the general), when the news came of the murder of Lincoln and the attempt on Seward, and very vivid still is the recollection of the horror and grief we all felt. But we also felt that the President's work was done, and that his fame was set securely in history, beyond the chance of any political blunder to damage it. Could he ever have devised a better death in view of his future influence and honor? I learned from one of Lincoln's Illinois friends, whom I later saw in Rome, that the appointment in Crete was intended by the President as the recognition of the injustice with which Seward had treated my case. My experience of Seward's way of looking at public appointments and public interests, when crossed by his personal relations, certainly went to confirm the apprehensions of Mr. Fogg and his friends that Seward's personal following would stand between him and the best interests of the state. As Fogg used to put it, "He won't steal, himself, but he don't care how much his friends steal." But my misfortune brought about the abolition of what had always been a scandal and a job—the legation of the United States of America to the Pope.