Rome in 1860 | Page 4

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 it may be in a moral one. Now my own observations have led me to doubt the correctness of this assumption, which, if true, forms an important item in the