He was a poet however, and could make epigrams himself; there is a very fine edition of his poems printed at Paris under the title of Maffei Barberini Poemata; and such was his knowledge of Greek literature, that he was called the Attic bee. The drunken faun asleep at Palazzo Barberini, by some accounted the first statue in Rome, we owe wholly to his care in its preservation.
But the Pantheon must not be quitted till we have mentioned its pavement, where the precious stones are not disposed, as in many churches, without taste or care, apparently by chance; here all is inlaid, so as to enchant the eye with its elegance, while it dazzles one with its riches: the black porphyry, in small squares, disposed in compartments, and inscribed as one may call it in pavonazzino perhaps; the red, bounded by serpentine; the granites, in giall antique, have an undescribable effect; no Florence table was ever so beautiful: nor can we here regret the caryatid pillars said by Pliny to have graced this temple in his time; while the four prodigious columns, two of Egyptian granite, two of porphyry, still remain, and replace them so very well. Montiosius, who sought for the pillars said by Pliny to have been placed by Diogenes, an Athenian architect, as supporters of this temple, relates however, that in the year 1580 he saw four of them buried in the ground as high as their shoulders: but it does not seem a tale much attended to; though I confess my own desire of digging, as he points out the place so exactly, on the right hand side of the portico. The best modern caryatids are in the old Louvre at Paris, done by Goujon; but those of Villa Albani are true antiques, perfect in beauty, inestimable in value.
The church that now stands where a temple to Bacchus was built, fuori delle mura, engaged our attention this morning. Nothing can be fresher than the old decorations in honour of this jocund deity; the figures of men and women carrying grapes, oxen drawing barrels, &c. all the progress of a gay and plenteous vintage; a sacrifice at the end. I forget to whom the church is now dedicated, but it is a church; and from under it has been dug up a sarcophagus, all of one piece of red porphyry, which represents on its sides a Bacchanalian triumph; the coffin is nine feet long, and the Pope intends removing it to the Vatican, as a companion to that of Scipio Æmilianus, found a few months ago; his name engraven on it, and his bones inside. Before the proper precautions could be taken however, they were flung away by mistaken zeal and prejudice; but an Englishman, say they, who loves an unbeliever, got possession of a tooth: meantime the ashes of the emperor Adrian, who, as Eusebius tells us, set up the figure of a swine on the gates of Bethlehem, built a temple in honour of Venus, on Mount Calvary; another to Jupiter, upon the hill whence our Saviour ascended into heaven in sight of his disciples;—his ashes are kept in a gilt pine-apple, brought from Castle St. Angelo, and preserved among other rarities in the Pope’s musæum. So poor Scipio’s remains needed not to have been treated worse than his, as we know not how good a Christian he might have made, had he lived but 150 years later: we are sure that he was a wise and a warlike man; that he fulfilled the scriptures unwittingly by burning Carthage; and that he protected Polybius, whom he would scarcely suffer out of his sight.
After looking often at the pictures of St. Sebastian, I have now seen his church founded by Constantine: he lies here in white marble, done by Bernini; and here are more marvellous columns.—I am tired of looking out words to express their various merits.
The catacombs attract me more strongly; here, and here alone, can one obtain a just idea of the melancholy lives, and dismal deaths, endured by those who first dared at Rome to profess a religion inoffensive and beneficial to all mankind. San Filippo Neri has his body somewhat distinguished from the rest of these old pious Christians, among whom he lived to a surprising age, making a cave his residence. Relics are now dug up every day from these retreats, and venerated as having once belonged to martyrs murdered for their early attachment to a belief now happily displayed over one quarter of the world, and making daily progress in another not discovered when those heroic mortals died to attest its truth. There is however great danger of deception in digging out the relics, these catacombs having been in Trajan’s time made a burial-place for slaves; and such it continued to be during the reign of those Roman emperors who despised rather than persecuted the new religion in its infancy. The consciousness of this fact should cure the passion many here shew for relics, the authenticity of which can never be ascertained. Those shewn to the people in St. Peter’s church one evening in the holy week, all came from here it seems; and loudly do our Protestant travellers exclaim at their idolatry who kneel during the exposure; though for my life I cannot see how the custom is idolatrous. He who at the moment a dead martyr’s robe is shewn him, begs grace of God to follow that great example, is certainly doing no harm, or in any wise contradicting the rules of our Anglican church, whose collects for every saint’s day express a like supplication for power to imitate that saint’s good example; if once they worship the relics indeed, it were better they were burned; and to say true, they should not be exposed without a sermon explaining their use, lest vulgar minds might be unhappily misled to mistake the real end of their exposure, and profanely substitute the creature for the Creator. Meanwhile no one has a right to ridicule the love of what once belonged to a favourite character, who has ever felt attachment to a dead friend’s snuff-box, or desire of possessing Scipio Æmilianus’s tooth.
But the best effort to excite temporary devotion, and commemorate sacred seasons, was the illuminated cross upon Good Friday night, depending from the high dome of St. Peter’s church; where its effect upon the architecture is strangely powerful, so large are the masses both of light and shade; whilst the sublime images raised in one’s mind by its noble simplicity and solitary light, hover before the fancy, and lead recollection round through a thousand gloomy and mysterious passages, with no unsteady pace however, while she follows the rays which beam from the Redeemer’s cross. Being obliged indeed to go with company to these solemnities, takes off from their effect, and turns imagination into another channel, disagreeably enough, but it must be so; where there is a thing to be seen every one will go to see it, and that which was intended to produce sensations of gladness, gratitude, or wonder, ends in being a show. The consciousness of this fact only kept me from wishing to see the Duomo di Milano, or the cathedral of Canterbury illuminated just so, with lamps placed in rows upon a plain wooden cross; which surely would have, upon those old Gothic structures, an unequalled effect as to the forming of light and shadow.
But let us wish for any thing now rather than a fine sight. I am tired with the very word a sight; while the Jesuits church here at Rome, with the figure of St. Ignatius all covered with precious stones, with bronze angels by Bernini, and every decoration that money can purchase and industry collect, rather dazzles than delights one, I think.
The Italians seem to find out, I know not why, that it is a good thing the Jesuits are gone; though they steadily endeavour to retain those principles of despotism which it was their peculiar province to inspire and confirm, and whilst all men must see that the work of education goes on worse in other hands. Indeed nothing can be wilder than committing youth to the tuition of monks and nuns, unless, like them, they were intended for the cloister. Young people are but too ready to find fault with their teachers, and these are given into the hands of those teachers who have a fault ready found. Every christian, every moral instruction driven into their tender minds, weakens with the experience that he or she who inculcated it was a recluse; and that they who are to live in the world forsooth, must have more enlarged notions: whereas, to a Jesuit tutor, no such objection could be made; they were themselves men of the world, their institution not only permitted but obliged them to mingle with mankind, to study characters, to attend to the various transactions passing round them, and take an active part. It was indeed this spirit pushed too far, which undid and destroyed their order, so useful to the church of Rome. Connections with various nations they found best obtained by commerce, and the sweets of commerce once tasted, what body of men has been yet able to relinquish? But the principles of trade are formed in direct opposition to that spirit of subordination by which alone their existence could continue; and it is unjust to charge any single event or person with the dissolution of a body, incompatible with that state of openness and freedom to which Europe is hastening. Incorporated societies too carry, like individuals, the seeds of their own destruction in their bosoms;
As man perhaps the moment of his breath
Receives the lurking principle of death;