Rome in 1860 | Page 4

in purple and
priests in rags, standing on the church-steps, stopping at the doorways,
coming down the bye-streets, looking out of the windows--you see
priests everywhere and always. Their faces are, as a rule, not pleasant
to look upon; and I think, at first, with something of the "old bogey"
belief of childhood, you feel more comfortable when they are not too
close to you; but, ere long, this feeling wears away, and you gaze at the
priests and at the beggars with the same stolid indifference.
You are getting, by this time, into the heart of the city, ever and anon
the streets pass through some square or piazza, each like the other. In
the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence

the water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other
some grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars
before its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to
ruin. Grass grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier,
quieter, and cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter
the first church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and
bare outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have
seen one, you have seen all. A crippled beggar crouching at the door, a
few common people kneeling before the candle-lighted shrines, a priest
or two mumbling at a side-altar, half-a-dozen indifferent pictures and a
great deal of gilt and marble everywhere, an odour of stale incense and
mouldy cloth, and, over all, a dim dust-discoloured light. Fancy all this,
and you will have before you a Roman church. On your way you pass
no fine buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings
in Rome, except St Peter's and the Colosseum, both of which lie away
from the town. Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the
wall, bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from
time to time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down
endless hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches
innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants,
soldiers, priests, and beggars, you journey onwards for two miles or so;
you have got at last to the modern quarter, where hotels are found, and
where the English congregate. There in the "Corso," and in one or two
streets leading out of it, there are foot-pavements, lamps at night, and
windows to the shops. A fair sprinkling of second-rate equipages roll
by you, bearing the Roman ladies, with their gaudy dresses, ill-assorted
colours, and their heavy, handsome, sensual features. The young Italian
nobles, with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly. The
peasants are few in number now, but the soldiers and priests and
beggars are never wanting. These streets and shops, brilliant though
they seem by contrast with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be
third-rate ones in any other European capital, and will not detain you
long. On again by the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows
day and night through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps
more, and then you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed
piazzas; on again, between high walls, along roads leading through
desolate ruin-covered vineyards, and you are come to another gate. The

French sentinels are changing guard. The dreary Campagna lies before
you, and you have passed through Rome.
And when our stroll was over, that sceptic and incurious
fellow-traveller of mine would surely turn to take a last look at the dark
heap of roofs and chimney-pots and domes, which lies mouldering in
the valley at his feet. If I were then to tell him, that in that city of some
hundred and seventy thousand souls, there were ten thousand persons
in holy orders, and between three and four hundred churches, of which
nearly half had convents and schools attached; if I were to add, that
taking in novices, scholars, choristers, servitors, beadles, and whole
tribes of clerical attendants, there were probably not far short of forty
thousand persons, who in some form or other lived upon and by the
church, that is, in plainer words, doing no labour themselves, lived on
the labour of others, he, I think, would answer then, that a city so
priest-infested, priest- ruled and priest-ridden, would be much such a
city as he had seen with me; such a city as Rome is now.
CHAPTER II.
THE COST OF THE PAPACY.
In foreign discussions on the Papal question it is always assumed, as an
undisputed fact, that the maintenance of the Papal court at Rome is, in a
material point of view, an immense advantage to the city, whatever