"What do you call bad cases?"
"Why, I call it a bad case to kill a man for nothing."
"Well, but theft to any amount is not so bad as taking away life."
"Oh! as to that, the police are quite right! A decent and a devout man does not commit homicides every day: but he that steals at all, steals always!" So that our culprit reasoned, like Paley, on the tendency of crimes. It was his Chapter of the Silver Spoon, with a new exposition from the mouth of a Galeote! And they pluck men at Cambridge for not getting up their Paley! Our philosophical criminal seemed satisfied with his lot.
"We are not so badly off after all: we walk out with an obliging escort, who let us do pretty much as we like; and all our work is confined to sweeping the courts in front of the king's palace. We are free of the castle, and allowed to conduct strangers over it, as in your case. Oh! for the fellows at St Stefano, it is quite another matter; as a part of their punishment, they are compelled to be idle!"
Our rascal was allowed a new coat once every eighteen months, with two pair of drawers and as many shirts, and a penny a-day for pocket-money! These piccoli omicidii at home do not get off so cheap, but stabbing is endemic at Naples. When a queen of Naples brings the Neapolitans a new prince—great joy of course!—all the penal settlements except St Stefano receive three years' mitigation of their sentence; but the crimes that consign to that island are senza grazia—the rays of royal bounty do not reach those dark and solitary cells. The St Stefano convicts form a body of three hundred doomed men, incorrigible housebreakers or systematic assassins. The food of all classes of criminals is the same, whatever the offence, and consists of twenty-four ounces of bread, with half-a-pint measure of beans and some oil—a basin of cabbage soup, without meat, for dinner, and meat once in fourteen days: there are eight thousand out-of-doors convicts, many of whom being under sentence for a less space than two years, work in their own clothes—which is, of course, a considerable saving to government. Although all the galley-slave establishments are full, no place swarms like Naples with so many meritorious candidates for the red and yellow liveries of the state.
St Carlo, &c.
St Carlo is, as the guide-books tell us, "a very fine theatre." What we particularly like, is the absence of all side-lights round its boxes. Two hundred burners, arranged in three rows round a small chandelier, give just light enough to set off the fine chastened white and gold, and the one quiet fresco which embellishes the ceiling. A pit of vast size, divided into comfortable sittings, six tiers of boxes, and an orchestra of great space, suited to the extraordinary size of the house, secure a far less adulterated playhouse atmosphere than we are used to; and so exempt from the ordinary inconveniences, that we were able to sit out the Semiramide, even with Ronzi di Begnis, now old and out of keeping, for the heroine. Surely she never should have been Semiramis, even in her palmy day! Actors and actresses will not know that words written for them, scenery and dresses adapted for them, and attitudes invented for them, can never make them the personages mentioned in the playbill. On returning home, we stood at our balcony gazing on the lovely face of a true Naples night—a night beyond description!—the whole vault of heaven lighted by one light: a full moon, like a subdued sunshine over earth and water. A world of light, that shone on a world of darkness, tinging the air, gilding the mountain-tops, and making the sea run like melted phosphorus. And what a silence abroad! not the perilous cessation of sound which so often only anticipates the storm; nor the sultry stillness of an exhausting noon; but a mighty and godlike display, as it were, of the first full moon after creation shining on an entranced world!
Pozzuoli.
An amphitheatre is one of those few ruins that leave no problem to solve. Here we have a grey antiquity without any mutilation of form, and merely spoliated of its benches. The patron saint of Naples was, they say, imprisoned here. A little chapel ascertains the spot, but he does no miracles on this arena. When we come to temples, we are always at a great loss for proprietors. The very large one here is called of Jupiter Serapis. The remaining columns of this temple, whatever it was, exhibit a very remarkable appearance. Three pillars, forty-two feet in height, up to about twelve feet above their pedestals, have the surface of the marble as smooth as any in the Forum; then comes a portion of nine or ten feet, of which the marble has been bored, drilled in all directions, by that persevering bivalve the Lithodomus; the perforations are so considerable, and go so deep, as to prove "the long-continued abode" of these animals within the stone, and by consequence, as Mr Lyell observes, "a long-continued immersion of the columns in the sea at some period recent, comparatively, with that of its erection." Indeed, there is abundant evidence adduced in the fourth volume of his Geology to show, that all this ground was at a no very distant period under the sea, like Monte Nuovo in its neighbourhood, and was thrust out of the water to its present level. When the ground on which this temple stood, collapsed, the bottom part of its columns was protected by "the rubbish of decayed buildings and strata of turf;" the middle or perforated part was left exposed to the action of the sea bivalves above alluded to; and the upper part, which was never under the water, remained smooth and free from perforation. But these columns not only prove by internal evidence the general fact of the ground on which they stand having been submerged—they also furnish an exact measure of the degree to which it sunk; viz. twenty feet—i.e. the height where these perforations terminate at present. You can only cross the floor of this building on stepping-stones; and as you do so, you see shoals of small sea-fish darting about in the shallow water which occupies its area, into which the sea has been admitted on purpose, to prevent the accumulation of the stagnant water that had infected this particular spot with intense malaria.