For the rest, ideas on the arts, on the philosophic influence of the geniuses which have magnified or protected them, were not yet born. Time does for men what space does for monuments; we judge both one and the other correctly only at a distance and from the point of view of perspective; viewed from too near, we do not see them; from too far, we no longer see them.
The author of the Essayes looked in Rome only for Ancient Rome:
"The buildings in this bastard Rome, which the moderns were raising upon, or appending to, the glorious structures of the antique world, though they sufficed enough to excite the admiration of the present age, yet seemed to him to bear a close resemblance to those nests which the rooks and the swallows construct upon the roofs and walls of the churches in France, which the Huguenots have demolished[606]."
What sort of idea had Montaigne of Ancient Rome, if he regarded St. Peter's as a swallow's nest, hung on to the walls of the Coliseum?
The new Roman citizen by an "authenticke bull" of the year 1581 A.D.[607] had remarked that the Roman ladies wore no masks, as they did in France; they appeared in public resplendent with pearls and precious stones, but "they had the waist exceedingly loose, which gives them all the appearance of being with child." The men were dressed in black, and although they were "dukes, marquisses, counts," they "are somewhat mean-looking[608]."
It is not singular that St. Jerome remarks the gait of the Roman women, which gives them the appearance of being with child: solutis genibus fractus incessus?
Almost every day, when I go out through the Porta Angelica, I see a mean house not far from the Tiber with a smoky French sign-board representing a bear; it was there that Michael Lord of Montaigne landed on arriving at Rome, not far from the hospital which served as an asylum to that poor madman[609], "one most fitted under the ayre of true ancient poesie," whom Montaigne saw "in so piteous a plight" at Ferrara, and "rather spited than pitied him[610]."
It was a memorable event when the seventeenth century deputed its greatest Protestant poet and its most serious genius to visit great Catholic Rome in 1638. Leaning against the Cross, holding the Old and New Testaments in her hands, with the guilty generations driven from Eden behind her and the redeemed generations descended from the Garden of Olives before her, she said to the heretic born of yesterday:
"What do you want of your old mother?"