(Enter Two Sisters of Mercy to beg for the poor.)
Englishman. What! cannot I even have a minute to myself in my own room? (Shoots himself.) Now I’m dead perhaps I shall have five minutes!
(Enter a Dozen Men masked, who seize Englishman.)
Englishman. Here! leave me alone; I’m dead.
Masked Men. All right, but you must be removed at once. You’ve got to be underground by to-morrow in Rome, you know.
Englishman. Oh, hang this! I’m off, then!
(Rushes to railway-station, has a fight with fifty porters, who struggle to carry his umbrella and his overcoat for him, leaps into a train, and departs for England.)
Doctor in England (feeling Englishman’s pulse). Why, you’re in a raging fever, and your nerves are overwrought, and you’re quite delirious!
Englishman. Yes, doctor. I unfortunately went out for a Quiet Walk in Rome!
One thing that has surprised me more than any other in a land of so much art as Italy is the striking mock modesty which has ruthlessly disfigured the statuary in the galleries and churches. The suggestion of putting the legs of a table into drawers is only paralleled by what one sees in the Uffizzi and Pitti galleries of Florence, and in St. Peter’s at Rome. In the latter, a marble figure is actually adorned with a ridiculous zinc petticoat. The force of the ridiculous can only go a step farther, and put Achilles into trousers, and the Gladiator into a Highland kilt. A hundred years hence the Venus de Medici may have to be studied through a robe de chambre, and Hercules in an ulster and chimneypot hat may be the last contribution to the adaptation of ancient art to modern views.