Enough, touching these minor differences. The essential one, whereof I intended to speak, is the material in which the pair wrought respectively. I have said that the bronze entirely satisfied my critical eye, which is tantamount to saying that it charmed me. Not so with the stone. It is obviously ill-adapted for detached ornamentation, needing the solid adjunct of buttress, window, wall, or pillar, just as ivy needs the oak, or (may I utter such a term?) lace the woman. Indeed, with all my admiration for sundry mediæval specimens of Gothic architecture, wherein I scarcely yield to John Ruskin himself, I confess that the famous Eleanor's Crosses in England never quite pleased me, because therein the tracery and dainty delicacies of the design are not backed by anything massive. The greater part of my readers will not agree with me. I am sorry, but can't help it. Only, I don't want to see any more open-work baskets in stone. Give me the most fantastical of Gothic devices, as many as you please, so long as they have something to cling to.
Finally, I have fallen quite in love with this quaint, irregular old place. Nor do I know how long I might have loitered, had not the inevitable disillusion come, as come it will over so many promising things and fair. Otherwise I might have gone back—in imagination—to those honest old times of Durer, Vischer, Krafft, and Company, and imagined myself a free burgher of a free city. But the spell was doubly broken. At the old castle—whereof some small apartments are unpretendingly fitted up for the King and Queen of Bavaria—there comes upon one, in another part thereof, a vision of certain instruments of torture, used undoubtedly in those good old times to keep the burghers submissive to their oligarchy of merchant princes. And again at the Rath-haus, or Hotel de Ville; the maidenly show-woman lighted us by lanthorn-light through a set of subterranean dungeons, too numerous to have been destined for offenders only against the criminal laws, too horrible to be sanctioned under our creed of comparative gentleness. And so, on the whole, I returned back to actual existence, and to all the boredom of Parliamentary conflicts and Presidential elections, with a certain sense of relief.
ROMAN NOMENCLATURE.
By dint of many rambles I am become fairly versed in the topography of Rome; but its history, as elucidated by monuments or relics, is a perpetual riddle to the beholder. The Republic, the Empire, the Barbarian Invasions, Free Lances, Barons, Kings, and Popes—all are suggested; all come before you in confused array; not unfrequently, three or four at once. You shall go into a church to hear mass amid modern tawdriness, entering through a mediæval porch, taking your place between walls that were put up long before the Christian era, and under a roof supported by pillars whereon the sun of Phrygia has shone. Pagan and Christian—all is jumbled; until finally, unless you have the patience of Job and the zeal of an antiquarian, you begin to doubt all legendary and historic lore, and to measure what you see by its external attractiveness alone. One thing, however, is clearly marked. You are groping about, in a state of vexed uncertainty; suddenly you come upon an inscription, conspicuous, in large legible letters, often gilded. Now you are grateful. You stride up; and lo, there stands, emblazoned before you the interesting fact that such or such a Pontifex Maximus, some Benedict, or Clemens, or Pius, or Leo, or Gregory, restored, excavated, ornamented, or built, as the case may have been, the object upon which you have been pondering. Neither, in the dearth of desirable information, are you compensated by the opportunity of picking up chronological knowledge in regard to the Papacy. These fulsome records omit, not only all description that might be useful; they fail to mention the year of the World, or the year of Grace, altogether. In place thereof, you learn that the digging or decoration in question took place in a certain year of the reign of a certain Pope; but as the chair of St. Peter has had one hundred and sixteen occupants, between A.D. 1000 and A.D. 1860, "Anno VI. of Innocent VI." or "Anno II. of Julius II." does not materially aid the memory as to dates. This petty craving after chiselled or painted immortality is nowhere more contemptibly exhibited than in Raphael's famous Loggie at the Vatican, where, over each separate window, one reads in staring type, "Leo X., Pontifex Maximus." Surely there is something strangely inconsistent, in a power that boasts its remote origin and its endowment in perpetuity, thus taking infinite pains to isolate its historical fragments.
A smile only—not a grunt of indignation—is elicited by another peculiarity of Rome, which comes under the lounger's notice. Something of the same sort is perhaps also observable in all large cities; but it never struck me so strongly. I allude to the names of the streets and squares and public places, which names by the way are carefully and prominently labelled. The jumble is curious, though one starts a little at times from what to Protestant eyes seems irreverent. Take a sample, dispensing with the titles in Italian. You may stroll through the street of the Three Virgins, of the Three Robbers, of Jesus, of the Tarpeian Rock, of the Two Butchers' Shops, of the Baboon, of Divine Love, of the New Benches, of the Prefects, of the House-tops, of Jesus and Mary, of the Greeks, of the Tower of Blood, of the Triton, of the Guardian Angel, of the Strumpet, of the Soul, of the Scrofula, of the Eagle, of the Lion's Mouth, of the Five Moons, of Minerva, of the Incurables, of the Wind, of the Wolf, of St. John Beheaded. You may halt in the square of the Mouth of Truth, in that of the Field of Flowers, in that of the Satyrs, in that of Consolation, in that of the Goose. It is evident that no ruling mind or principle has regulated this public nomenclature. Tot homines, quot sententiæ.
And is it not the same thing in private affairs? What variety of tastes! Here is a specimen. Two young men of my acquaintance, who have been campaigning in India, arrived here, the other day, on their first visit. One of them had a relative here, of a scholastic turn of mind, who was bringing a protracted sojourn to a close; and to him the cavalry officers were in a measure consigned. "Can you tell me what's to be seen at Ostia and Veii?" said one of them to me, forty-eight hours after their arrival. "Our friend, B., is going to take us a day's excursion to each place, to-morrow and the following day." I could scarcely keep my countenance. The poor innocents were sold to an antiquarian. Ostia is destitute of any objects that would repay a half-hour's walk. As for Veii, the learned have only agreed of late whereabouts that ancient city stood.
BRIGANDS, BEGGARS, AND SOUVENIRS.
My last communication was from Rome. It was piquant, on the day of departure thence from Naples, to dine at Terracina with a Prussian family, who had been stopped and robbed by brigands, at eight o'clock the previous morning, at a spot between Velletri and Cisterna. There was however no Fra Diavolo in the case. The respectable père de famille, who with his sons and daughters had been laid under contribution, informed us that the fellows were evidently peasants unused to the trade; that they presented guns, in exacting their demand for money; but that they were nervous in their brief operation, and that they did not ransack the trunks, nor even carry off the watches and rings of the party. The chief sufferer was the vetturino, whom fright and the loss of thirty-six dollars had thrown into a fever, causing the detention which brought us into contact with the narrators. We passed on our way, without adventure; the safest period, there as elsewhere, being that which immediately follows one. I incline to think that extreme destitution induced this recourse to a practice almost obsolete, as it probably gave rise to the personal robberies, unattended with violence, which have been recently rife in Rome itself.
And in connection with this point, I may swell the laments of late travellers as to the chronic prevalence, throughout Southern Italy, of those other unceasing robberies of extortion and mendicancy, which are so much more difficult of toleration. I declare that of all the mythical personages of classic lore brought back to one's memory by local association, whether in the Elysian Fields or on the borders of Lake Avernus, the Harpies are those who alone survive, and who obtrude themselves always and everywhere, in season and out of season. The foul brood have assumed human semblance, and haunt you in all varieties. The unbidden cicerone, or the sturdy beggar—it is hard to say which is the worse.
How I anathematized them both at Sorrento, where there are certain souvenirs of Tasso, not so direct and tangible as those preserved in the Convent of San Onofrio at Rome, but which are worth the tracing. You will remember that the hapless poet found a resting place here in the house of his sister, after he escaped from his seven years' imprisonment at Ferrara. To be adjured, for charity, in the name of the Virgin and every Saint in the calendar—to have a jackass and a guide, or a jackass of a guide, thrust upon you, nolens volens for an excursion that you have no mind to take, or to be importuned to "put out, put out, put out to sea," when you know that March winds and waves make the azure grotto of Capri totally inaccessible—these diversions, I say, do not assist one in gathering up one's reminiscences of Tasso, however much they may chasten and so improve the temper.