But we prowled round here for some time, and there is one big, vivid memory that I brung away from Rome; it stands up in my foretop some as in Naples Mount Vesuvius stands, with the Bay of Naples a-layin’ placid and fair at its treacherous old feet.
The treasures of the Vatican (which makes my brain reel and my feet kinder ache to this day when I think of ’em), the biggest palace in the world, so I spoze. And then St. Peter’s Church, more’n five times as big as the big Catholic Cathedral in New York—two hundred and twelve thousand feet; we can’t hardly understand it, it is so big.
But Martin kep’ us there more’n half an hour; for, as he sed, he wanted to git a thorough idee of it, so that he wouldn’t have to come agin. Sez he:
“I travel as I do everything else; I do it laboriously and thoroughly.”
Wall, mebby he did, but I carried away from St. Peter’s and the Vatican, which is jest by the side on’t, a sort of a dizzy, achin’ memory of pillows and picters and statutes and illimitable space, and picters and carvin’s and statutes, and statutes and carvin’s and picters—a few of which stands out prominent—the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvidere (he wuz as handsome as Thomas Jefferson, and that is sayin’ all I can say), and the Annunciation, and the Transfiguration by Raphael, and great picters by Da Vinci and Murillo. Picters, statutes, mosaics, carvin’s, chapels, altars, picters, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., and I might go on so all day, but I won’t.
Why, the treasures of art in the Vatican is the finest collection in the world, and when you realize how big the world is—take it from Jonesville to Chicago, and so by New York to Ingy, and back agin by the North Pole to Loontown and Zoar, you can git a faint idee on’t.
There is everything in it besides the glorious picters and statutes made by the greatest artists and sculpters that ever lived. There are ancient coins and household utensils of every age, tapestry, mosaics, jewels, embroideries, carvin’s, etc., etc.
Why, imagine what treasures of art could be put into these ten thousand rooms by onlimited wealth and power through hundreds of years, and then see if you expect anybody is a-goin’ to describe ’em; specially if they are hurried on by a Martin, and goaded on the right and the left by the hungry groanin’s of a Josiah, and the endless questions of a child of eight.
Al Faizi got considerable good out on’t, I guess.
He writ down a lot, I see, in that delicate, small handwritin’ of hisen—I d’no but it is shorthand.