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by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: The Innocents Abroad, Part 3 of 6

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: June 15, 2004 [EBook #5690]
[Last updated: July 16, 2011]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, PART 3 OF 6 ***




Produced by David Widger





INNOCENTS ABROAD

by Mark Twain

[From an 1869--1st Edition]

Part 3.




CHAPTER XXI.


We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain
scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco.
They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient city of Bergamo,
and that we would arrive there in good season for the railway train.  We
got an open barouche and a wild, boisterous driver, and set out.  It was
delightful.  We had a fast team and a perfectly smooth road.  There were
towering cliffs on our left, and the pretty Lago di Lecco on our right,
and every now and then it rained on us.  Just before starting, the driver
picked up, in the street, a stump of a cigar an inch long, and put it in
his mouth.  When he had carried it thus about an hour, I thought it would
be only Christian charity to give him a light.  I handed him my cigar,
which I had just lit, and he put it in his mouth and returned his stump
to his pocket!  I never saw a more sociable man.  At least I never saw a
man who was more sociable on a short acquaintance.

We saw interior Italy, now.  The houses were of solid stone, and not
often in good repair.  The peasants and their children were idle, as a
general thing, and the donkeys and chickens made themselves at home in
drawing-room and bed-chamber and were not molested.  The drivers of each
and every one of the slow-moving market-carts we met were stretched in
the sun upon their merchandise, sound a sleep.  Every three or four
hundred yards, it seemed to me, we came upon the shrine of some saint or
other--a rude picture of him built into a huge cross or a stone pillar by
the road-side.--Some of the pictures of the Saviour were curiosities in
their way.  They represented him stretched upon the cross, his
countenance distorted with agony.  From the wounds of the crown of
thorns; from the pierced side; from the mutilated hands and feet; from
the scourged body--from every hand-breadth of his person streams of blood
were flowing!  Such a gory, ghastly spectacle would frighten the children
out of their senses, I should think.  There were some unique auxiliaries
to the painting which added to its spirited effect.  These were genuine
wooden and iron implements, and were prominently disposed round about the
figure: a bundle of nails; the hammer to drive them; the sponge; the reed
that supported it; the cup of vinegar; the ladder for the ascent of the
cross; the spear that pierced the Saviour's side.  The crown of thorns
was made of real thorns, and was nailed to the sacred head.  In some
Italian church-paintings, even by the old masters, the Saviour and the
Virgin wear silver or gilded crowns that are fastened to the pictured
head with nails.  The effect is as grotesque as it is incongruous.

Here and there, on the fronts of roadside inns, we found huge, coarse
frescoes of suffering martyrs like those in the shrines.  It could not
have diminished their sufferings any to be so uncouthly represented.
We were in the heart and home of priest craft--of a happy, cheerful,
contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and
everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.  And we said fervently: it suits
these people precisely; let them enjoy it, along with the other animals,
and Heaven forbid that they be molested.  We feel no malice toward these
fumigators.

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of old towns, wedded
to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly
unaware that the world turns round!  And perfectly indifferent, too, as
to whether it turns around or stands still.  They have nothing to do but
eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a
friend to stand by and keep them awake.  They are not paid for thinking
--they are not paid to fret about the world's concerns.  They were not
respectable people--they were not worthy people--they were not learned
and wise and brilliant people--but in their breasts, all their stupid
lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!  How can men,
calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy.

We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick with ivy that
swung its green banners down from towers and turrets where once some old
Crusader's flag had floated.  The driver pointed to one of these ancient
fortresses, and said, (I translate):

"Do you see that great iron hook that projects from the wall just under
the highest window in the ruined tower?"

We said we could not see it at such a distance, but had no doubt it was
there.

"Well," he said; "there is a legend connected with that iron hook.
Nearly seven hundred years ago, that castle was the property of the noble
Count Luigi Gennaro Guido Alphonso di Genova----"

"What was his other name?"  said Dan.

"He had no other name.  The name I have spoken was all the name he had.
He was the son of----"

"Poor but honest parents--that is all right--never mind the particulars
--go on with the legend."

                               THE LEGEND.

Well, then, all the world, at that time, was in a wild excitement about
the Holy Sepulchre.  All the great feudal lords in Europe were pledging
their lands and pawning their plate to fit out men-at-arms so that they
might join the grand armies of Christendom and win renown in the Holy
Wars.  The Count Luigi raised money, like the rest, and one mild
September morning, armed with battle-ax, portcullis and thundering
culverin, he rode through the greaves and bucklers of his donjon-keep
with as gallant a troop of Christian bandits as ever stepped in Italy.
He had his sword, Excalibur, with him.  His beautiful countess and her
young daughter waved him a tearful adieu from the battering-rams and
buttresses of the fortress, and he galloped away with a happy heart.

He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his outfit with the
booty secured.  He then razed the castle to the ground, massacred the
family and moved on.  They were hardy fellows in the grand old days of
chivalry.  Alas!  Those days will never come again.

Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land.  He plunged into the carnage
of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur always brought him out
alive, albeit often sorely wounded.  His face became browned by exposure
to the Syrian sun in long marches; he suffered hunger and thirst; he
pined in prisons, he languished in loathsome plague-hospitals.  And many
and many a time he thought of his loved ones at home, and wondered if all
was well with them.  But his heart said, Peace, is not thy brother
watching over thy household?

                              * * * * * * *

Forty-two years waxed and waned; the good fight was won; Godfrey reigned
in Jerusalem--the Christian hosts reared the banner of the cross above
the Holy Sepulchre!

Twilight was approaching.  Fifty harlequins, in flowing robes, approached
this castle wearily, for they were on foot, and the dust upon their
garments betokened that they had traveled far.  They overtook a peasant,
and asked him if it were likely they could get food and a hospitable bed
there, for love of Christian charity, and if perchance, a moral parlor
entertainment might meet with generous countenance--"for," said they,
"this exhibition hath no feature that could offend the most fastidious
taste."

"Marry," quoth the peasant, "an' it please your worships, ye had better
journey many a good rood hence with your juggling circus than trust your
bones in yonder castle."

"How now, sirrah!"  exclaimed the chief monk, "explain thy ribald speech,
or by'r Lady it shall go hard with thee."

"Peace, good mountebank, I did but utter the truth that was in my heart.
San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find the stout Count Leonardo in
his cups, sheer from the castle's topmost battlements would he hurl ye
all!  Alack-a-day, the good Lord Luigi reigns not here in these sad
times."

"The good Lord Luigi?"

"Aye, none other, please your worship.  In his day, the poor rejoiced in
plenty and the rich he did oppress; taxes were not known, the fathers of
the church waxed fat upon his bounty; travelers went and came, with none
to interfere; and whosoever would, might tarry in his halls in cordial
welcome, and eat his bread and drink his wine, withal.  But woe is me!
some two and forty years agone the good count rode hence to fight for
Holy Cross, and many a year hath flown since word or token have we had of
him.  Men say his bones lie bleaching in the fields of Palestine."

"And now?"

"Now!  God 'a mercy, the cruel Leonardo lords it in the castle.  He
wrings taxes from the poor; he robs all travelers that journey by his
gates; he spends his days in feuds and murders, and his nights in revel
and debauch; he roasts the fathers of the church upon his kitchen spits,
and enjoyeth the same, calling it pastime.  These thirty years Luigi's
countess hath not been seen by any [he] in all this land, and many
whisper that she pines in the dungeons of the castle for that she will
not wed with Leonardo, saying her dear lord still liveth and that she
will die ere she prove false to him.  They whisper likewise that her
daughter is a prisoner as well.  Nay, good jugglers, seek ye refreshment
other wheres.  'Twere better that ye perished in a Christian way than
that ye plunged from off yon dizzy tower.  Give ye good-day."

"God keep ye, gentle knave--farewell."

But heedless of the peasant's warning, the players moved straightway
toward the castle.

Word was brought to Count Leonardo that a company of mountebanks besought
his hospitality.

"'Tis well.  Dispose of them in the customary manner.  Yet stay!  I have
need of them.  Let them come hither.  Later, cast them from the
battlements--or--how many priests have ye on hand?"

"The day's results are meagre, good my lord.  An abbot and a dozen
beggarly friars is all we have."

"Hell and furies!  Is the estate going to seed?  Send hither the
mountebanks.  Afterward, broil them with the priests."

The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered.  The grim Leonardo sate in
state at the head of his council board.  Ranged up and down the hall on
either hand stood near a hundred men-at-arms.

"Ha, villains!"  quoth the count, "What can ye do to earn the hospitality
ye crave."

"Dread lord and mighty, crowded audiences have greeted our humble efforts
with rapturous applause.  Among our body count we the versatile and
talented Ugolino; the justly celebrated Rodolpho; the gifted and
accomplished Roderigo; the management have spared neither pains nor
expense--"

"S'death!  What can ye do?  Curb thy prating tongue."

"Good my lord, in acrobatic feats, in practice with the dumb-bells, in
balancing and ground and lofty tumbling are we versed--and sith your
highness asketh me, I venture here to publish that in the truly marvelous
and entertaining Zampillaerostation--"

"Gag him! throttle him!  Body of Bacchus! am I a dog that I am to be
assailed with polysyllabled blasphemy like to this?  But hold!  Lucretia,
Isabel, stand forth!  Sirrah, behold this dame, this weeping wench.  The
first I marry, within the hour; the other shall dry her tears or feed the
vultures.  Thou and thy vagabonds shall crown the wedding with thy
merry-makings.  Fetch hither the priest!"

The dame sprang toward the chief player.

"O, save me!"  she cried; "save me from a fate far worse than death!
Behold these sad eyes, these sunken cheeks, this withered frame!  See
thou the wreck this fiend hath made, and let thy heart be moved with
pity!  Look upon this damosel; note her wasted form, her halting step,
her bloomless cheeks where youth should blush and happiness exult in
smiles!  Hear us and have compassion.  This monster was my husband's
brother.  He who should have been our shield against all harm, hath kept
us shut within the noisome caverns of his donjon-keep for lo these thirty
years.  And for what crime?  None other than that I would not belie my
troth, root out my strong love for him who marches with the legions of
the cross in Holy Land, (for O, he is not dead!) and wed with him!  Save
us, O, save thy persecuted suppliants!"

She flung herself at his feet and clasped his knees.

"Ha!-ha!-ha!"  shouted the brutal Leonardo.  "Priest, to thy work!"  and
he dragged the weeping dame from her refuge.  "Say, once for all, will
you be mine?--for by my halidome, that breath that uttereth thy refusal
shall be thy last on earth!"

"NE-VER?"

"Then die!" and the sword leaped from its scabbard.

Quicker than thought, quicker than the lightning's flash, fifty monkish
habits disappeared, and fifty knights in splendid armor stood revealed!
fifty falchions gleamed in air above the men-at-arms, and brighter,
fiercer than them all, flamed Excalibur aloft, and cleaving downward
struck the brutal Leonardo's weapon from his grasp!

"A Luigi to the rescue!  Whoop!"

"A Leonardo! 'tare an ouns!'"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my husband!"

"Oh, God, Oh, God, my wife!"

"My father!"

"My precious!"  [Tableau.]

Count Luigi bound his usurping brother hand and foot.  The practiced
knights from Palestine made holyday sport of carving the awkward
men-at-arms into chops and steaks.  The victory was complete.  Happiness
reigned.  The knights all married the daughter.  Joy! wassail! finis!

"But what did they do with the wicked brother?"

"Oh nothing--only hanged him on that iron hook I was speaking of.  By the
chin."

"As how?"

"Passed it up through his gills into his mouth."

"Leave him there?"

"Couple of years."

"Ah--is--is he dead?"

"Six hundred and fifty years ago, or such a matter."

"Splendid legend--splendid lie--drive on."

We reached the quaint old fortified city of Bergamo, the renowned in
history, some three-quarters of an hour before the train was ready to
start.  The place has thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and is
remarkable for being the birthplace of harlequin.  When we discovered
that, that legend of our driver took to itself a new interest in our
eyes.

Rested and refreshed, we took the rail happy and contented.  I shall not
tarry to speak of the handsome Lago di Gardi; its stately castle that
holds in its stony bosom the secrets of an age so remote that even
tradition goeth not back to it; the imposing mountain scenery that
ennobles the landscape thereabouts; nor yet of ancient Padua or haughty
Verona; nor of their Montagues and Capulets, their famous balconies and
tombs of Juliet and Romeo et al., but hurry straight to the ancient city
of the sea, the widowed bride of the Adriatic.  It was a long, long ride.
But toward evening, as we sat silent and hardly conscious of where we
were--subdued into that meditative calm that comes so surely after a
conversational storm--some one shouted--
"VENICE!"

And sure enough, afloat on the placid sea a league away, lay a great
city, with its towers and domes and steeples drowsing in a golden mist of
sunset.




CHAPTER XXII.

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for
nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's
applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held
dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest
oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every
clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay.  Six
hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the
great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous
trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world.  To-day her
piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are
vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories.  Her glory is
departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about
her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten
of the world.  She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a
hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her
puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,
--a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for
school-girls and children.

The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for
flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists.  It seems a sort of
sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us
softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and
her desolation from our view.  One ought, indeed, to turn away from her
rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was
when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick
Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of
Constantinople.

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging
to the Grand Hotel d'Europe.  At any rate, it was more like a hearse than
any thing else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola.  And this
was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely
cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit
canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician
beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar
and sang as only gondoliers can sing!  This the famed gondola and this
the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable
hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy,
barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which
should have been sacred from public scrutiny.  Presently, as he turned a
corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of
towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to
the traditions of his race.  I stood it a little while.  Then I said:

"Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a
stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such
caterwauling as that.  If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.
It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted
forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this
system of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse,
under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I
register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing.  Another yelp, and
overboard you go."

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed
forever.  But I was too hasty.  In a few minutes we swept gracefully out
into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry
and romance stood revealed.  Right from the water's edge rose long lines
of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and
thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys;
ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves.
There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a
hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret
enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half
in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to
have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such
enterprises as these at that same moment.  Music came floating over the
waters--Venice was complete.

It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful.  But what
was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight?  Nothing.  There
was a fete--a grand fete in honor of some saint who had been instrumental
in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was
abroad on the water.  It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not
know how soon they might need the saint's services again, now that the
cholera was spreading every where.  So in one vast space--say a third of
a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and
every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored
lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants.  Just as
far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together
--like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms
were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling
together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy
evolutions.  Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a
rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the
boats around it.  Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and
pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the
faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;
and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,
so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture
likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful.  Many and many a party
of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely
decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed,
white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables
tricked out as if for a bridal supper.  They had brought along the
costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken
curtains from the same places, I suppose.  And they had also brought
pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian
paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded
around to stare and listen.

There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,
every thing.  I was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence
and loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and
sang one tune myself.  However, when I observed that the other gondolas
had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I
stopped.

The fete was magnificent.  They kept it up the whole night long, and I
never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.

What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is!  Narrow streets,
vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,
and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks
worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the
restaurant, you must call a gondola.  It must be a paradise for cripples,
for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town,
because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the
houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming
in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the
impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet,
and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water
mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.

In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the
charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered
sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once
more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.  It is easy,
then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and
fair ladies--with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon
the rich argosies of Venetian commerce--with Othellos and Desdemonas,
with Iagos and Roderigos--with noble fleets and victorious legions
returning from the wars.  In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice
decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless--forgotten and
utterly insignificant.  But in the moonlight, her fourteen centuries of
greatness fling their glories about her, and once more is she the
princeliest among the nations of the earth.

          "There is a glorious city in the sea;
          The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
          Ebbing and flowing; and the salt-sea weed
          Clings to the marble of her palaces.
          No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,
          Lead to her gates!  The path lies o'er the sea,
          Invisible: and from the land we went,
          As to a floating city--steering in,
          And gliding up her streets, as in a dream,
          So smoothly, silently--by many a dome,
          Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
          The statues ranged along an azure sky;
          By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride,
          Of old the residence of merchant kings;
          The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them,
          Still glowing with the richest hues of art,
          As tho' the wealth within them had run o'er."

What would one naturally wish to see first in Venice?  The Bridge of
Sighs, of course--and next the Church and the Great Square of St. Mark,
the Bronze Horses, and the famous Lion of St. Mark.

We intended to go to the Bridge of Sighs, but happened into the Ducal
Palace first--a building which necessarily figures largely in Venetian
poetry and tradition.  In the Senate Chamber of the ancient Republic we
wearied our eyes with staring at acres of historical paintings by
Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, but nothing struck us forcibly except the
one thing that strikes all strangers forcibly--a black square in the
midst of a gallery of portraits.  In one long row, around the great hall,
were painted the portraits of the Doges of Venice (venerable fellows,
with flowing white beards, for of the three hundred Senators eligible to
the office, the oldest was usually chosen Doge,) and each had its
complimentary inscription attached--till you came to the place that
should have had Marino Faliero's picture in it, and that was blank and
black--blank, except that it bore a terse inscription, saying that the
conspirator had died for his crime.  It seemed cruel to keep that
pitiless inscription still staring from the walls after the unhappy
wretch had been in his grave five hundred years.

At the head of the Giant's Staircase, where Marino Faliero was beheaded,
and where the Doges were crowned in ancient times, two small slits in the
stone wall were pointed out--two harmless, insignificant orifices that
would never attract a stranger's attention--yet these were the terrible
Lions' Mouths!  The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during
their occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which went
the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an
enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to walk the Bridge of Sighs and
descend into the dungeon which none entered and hoped to see the sun
again.  This was in the old days when the Patricians alone governed
Venice--the common herd had no vote and no voice.  There were one
thousand five hundred Patricians; from these, three hundred Senators were
chosen; from the Senators a Doge and a Council of Ten were selected, and
by secret ballot the Ten chose from their own number a Council of Three.
All these were Government spies, then, and every spy was under
surveillance himself--men spoke in whispers in Venice, and no man trusted
his neighbor--not always his own brother.  No man knew who the Council of
Three were--not even the Senate, not even the Doge; the members of that
dread tribunal met at night in a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed
from head to foot in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other,
unless by voice.  It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes,
and from their sentence there was no appeal.  A nod to the executioner
was sufficient.  The doomed man was marched down a hall and out at a
door-way into the covered Bridge of Sighs, through it and into the
dungeon and unto his death.  At no time in his transit was he visible to
any save his conductor.  If a man had an enemy in those old days, the
cleverest thing he could do was to slip a note for the Council of Three
into the Lion's mouth, saying "This man is plotting against the
Government."  If the awful Three found no proof, ten to one they would
drown him anyhow, because he was a deep rascal, since his plots were
unsolvable.  Masked judges and masked executioners, with unlimited power,
and no appeal from their judgements, in that hard, cruel age, were not
likely to be lenient with men they suspected yet could not convict.

We walked through the hall of the Council of Ten, and presently entered
the infernal den of the Council of Three.

The table around which they had sat was there still, and likewise the
stations where the masked inquisitors and executioners formerly stood,
frozen, upright and silent, till they received a bloody order, and then,
without a word, moved off like the inexorable machines they were, to
carry it out.  The frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the
place.  In all the other saloons, the halls, the great state chambers of
the palace, the walls and ceilings were bright with gilding, rich with
elaborate carving, and resplendent with gallant pictures of Venetian
victories in war, and Venetian display in foreign courts, and hallowed
with portraits of the Virgin, the Saviour of men, and the holy saints
that preached the Gospel of Peace upon earth--but here, in dismal
contrast, were none but pictures of death and dreadful suffering!--not a
living figure but was writhing in torture, not a dead one but was smeared
with blood, gashed with wounds, and distorted with the agonies that had
taken away its life!

From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might almost jump
across the narrow canal that intervenes.  The ponderous stone Bridge of
Sighs crosses it at the second story--a bridge that is a covered tunnel
--you can not be seen when you walk in it.  It is partitioned lengthwise,
and through one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in
ancient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches whom the
Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter oblivion in the dungeons,
or to sudden and mysterious death.  Down below the level of the water, by
the light of smoking torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells
where many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long-drawn
miseries of solitary imprisonment--without light, air, books; naked,
unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin; his useless tongue forgetting
its office, with none to speak to; the days and nights of his life no
longer marked, but merged into one eternal eventless night; far away from
all cheerful sounds, buried in the silence of a tomb; forgotten by his
helpless friends, and his fate a dark mystery to them forever; losing his
own memory at last, and knowing no more who he was or how he came there;
devouring the loaf of bread and drinking the water that were thrust into
the cell by unseen hands, and troubling his worn spirit no more with
hopes and fears and doubts and longings to be free; ceasing to scratch
vain prayers and complainings on walls where none, not even himself,
could see them, and resigning himself to hopeless apathy, driveling
childishness, lunacy!  Many and many a sorrowful story like this these
stony walls could tell if they could but speak.

In a little narrow corridor, near by, they showed us where many a
prisoner, after lying in the dungeons until he was forgotten by all save
his persecutors, was brought by masked executioners and garroted, or
sewed up in a sack, passed through a little window to a boat, at dead of
night, and taken to some remote spot and drowned.

They used to show to visitors the implements of torture wherewith the
Three were wont to worm secrets out of the accused--villainous machines
for crushing thumbs; the stocks where a prisoner sat immovable while
water fell drop by drop upon his head till the torture was more than
humanity could bear; and a devilish contrivance of steel, which inclosed
a prisoner's head like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a
screw.  It bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints
long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the torturer rested
his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to catch the moanings of the
sufferer perishing within.

Of course we went to see the venerable relic of the ancient glory of
Venice, with its pavements worn and broken by the passing feet of a
thousand years of plebeians and patricians--The Cathedral of St. Mark.
It is built entirely of precious marbles, brought from the Orient
--nothing in its composition is domestic.  Its hoary traditions make it an
object of absorbing interest to even the most careless stranger, and thus
far it had interest for me; but no further.  I could not go into
ecstasies over its coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture,
or its five hundred curious interior columns from as many distant
quarries.  Every thing was worn out--every block of stone was smooth and
almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers who
devoutly idled here in by-gone centuries and have died and gone to the
dev--no, simply died, I mean.

Under the altar repose the ashes of St. Mark--and Matthew, Luke and John,
too, for all I know.  Venice reveres those relics above all things
earthly.  For fourteen hundred years St. Mark has been her patron saint.
Every thing about the city seems to be named after him or so named as to
refer to him in some way--so named, or some purchase rigged in some way
to scrape a sort of hurrahing acquaintance with him.  That seems to be
the idea.  To be on good terms with St. Mark, seems to be the very summit
of Venetian ambition.  They say St. Mark had a tame lion, and used to
travel with him--and every where that St. Mark went, the lion was sure to
go.  It was his protector, his friend, his librarian.  And so the Winged
Lion of St. Mark, with the open Bible under his paw, is a favorite emblem
in the grand old city.  It casts its shadow from the most ancient pillar
in Venice, in the Grand Square of St. Mark, upon the throngs of free
citizens below, and has so done for many a long century.  The winged lion
is found every where--and doubtless here, where the winged lion is, no
harm can come.

St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt.  He was martyred, I think.
However, that has nothing to do with my legend.  About the founding of
the city of Venice--say four hundred and fifty years after Christ--(for
Venice is much younger than any other Italian city,) a priest dreamed
that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to
Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations;
that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent
church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to
be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish
from off the face of the earth.  The priest proclaimed his dream, and
forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark.  One
expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never
abandoned during four hundred years.  At last it was secured by
stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something.  The commander of a
Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them,
and packed them in vessels filled with lard.  The religion of Mahomet
causes its devotees to abhor anything that is in the nature of pork, and
so when the Christian was stopped by the officers at the gates of the
city, they only glanced once into his precious baskets, then turned up
their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go.  The bones were buried in
the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to
receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were
secured.  And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if
those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a
dream, and its foundations be buried forever in the unremembering sea.




CHAPTER XXIII.

The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as
a serpent.  It is twenty or thirty feet long, and is narrow and deep,
like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like
the horns of a crescent with the abruptness of the curve slightly
modified.

The bow is ornamented with a steel comb with a battle-ax attachment which
threatens to cut passing boats in two occasionally, but never does.  The
gondola is painted black because in the zenith of Venetian magnificence
the gondolas became too gorgeous altogether, and the Senate decreed that
all such display must cease, and a solemn, unembellished black be
substituted.  If the truth were known, it would doubtless appear that
rich plebeians grew too prominent in their affectation of patrician show
on the Grand Canal, and required a wholesome snubbing.  Reverence for the
hallowed Past and its traditions keeps the dismal fashion in force now
that the compulsion exists no longer.  So let it remain.  It is the color
of mourning.  Venice mourns.  The stern of the boat is decked over and
the gondolier stands there.  He uses a single oar--a long blade, of
course, for he stands nearly erect.  A wooden peg, a foot and a half
high, with two slight crooks or curves in one side of it and one in the
other, projects above the starboard gunwale.  Against that peg the
gondolier takes a purchase with his oar, changing it at intervals to the
other side of the peg or dropping it into another of the crooks, as the
steering of the craft may demand--and how in the world he can back and
fill, shoot straight ahead, or flirt suddenly around a corner, and make
the oar stay in those insignificant notches, is a problem to me and a
never diminishing matter of interest.  I am afraid I study the
gondolier's marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we
glide among.  He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses
another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself
"scrooching," as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel
grazes his elbow.  But he makes all his calculations with the nicest
precision, and goes darting in and out among a Broadway confusion of busy
craft with the easy confidence of the educated hackman.  He never makes a
mistake.

Sometimes we go flying down the great canals at such a gait that we can
get only the merest glimpses into front doors, and again, in obscure
alleys in the suburbs, we put on a solemnity suited to the silence, the
mildew, the stagnant waters, the clinging weeds, the deserted houses and
the general lifelessness of the place, and move to the spirit of grave
meditation.

The gondolier is a picturesque rascal for all he wears no satin harness,
no plumed bonnet, no silken tights.  His attitude is stately; he is lithe
and supple; all his movements are full of grace.  When his long canoe,
and his fine figure, towering from its high perch on the stern, are cut
against the evening sky, they make a picture that is very novel and
striking to a foreign eye.

We sit in the cushioned carriage-body of a cabin, with the curtains
drawn, and smoke, or read, or look out upon the passing boats, the
houses, the bridges, the people, and enjoy ourselves much more than we
could in a buggy jolting over our cobble-stone pavements at home.  This
is the gentlest, pleasantest locomotion we have ever known.

But it seems queer--ever so queer--to see a boat doing duty as a private
carriage.  We see business men come to the front door, step into a
gondola, instead of a street car, and go off down town to the
counting-room.

We see visiting young ladies stand on the stoop, and laugh, and kiss
good-bye, and flirt their fans and say "Come soon--now do--you've been
just as mean as ever you can be--mother's dying to see you--and we've
moved into the new house, O such a love of a place!--so convenient to the
post office and the church, and the Young Men's Christian Association;
and we do have such fishing, and such carrying on, and such
swimming-matches in the back yard--Oh, you must come--no distance at all,
and if you go down through by St. Mark's and the Bridge of Sighs, and cut
through the alley and come up by the church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and
into the Grand Canal, there isn't a bit of current--now do come, Sally
Maria--by-bye!" and then the little humbug trips down the steps, jumps
into the gondola, says, under her breath, "Disagreeable old thing, I hope
she won't!" goes skimming away, round the corner; and the other girl
slams the street door and says, "Well, that infliction's over, any way,
--but I suppose I've got to go and see her--tiresome stuck-up thing!"
Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world.  We see the
diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent of hair, indigent of
brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her father's mansion, tell his
hackman to bail out and wait, start fearfully up the steps and meet "the
old gentleman" right on the threshold!--hear him ask what street the new
British Bank is in--as if that were what he came for--and then bounce
into his boat and skurry away with his coward heart in his boots!--see
him come sneaking around the corner again, directly, with a crack of the
curtain open toward the old gentleman's disappearing gondola, and out
scampers his Susan with a flock of little Italian endearments fluttering
from her lips, and goes to drive with him in the watery avenues down
toward the Rialto.

We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, and flit from
street to street and from store to store, just in the good old fashion,
except that they leave the gondola, instead of a private carriage,
waiting at the curbstone a couple of hours for them,--waiting while they
make the nice young clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets
and moire antiques and those things; and then they buy a paper of pins
and go paddling away to confer the rest of their disastrous patronage on
some other firm.  And they always have their purchases sent home just in
the good old way.  Human nature is very much the same all over the world;
and it is so like my dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a
store and buy ten cents' worth of blue ribbon and have it sent home in a
scow.  Ah, it is these little touches of nature that move one to tears in
these far-off foreign lands.

We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an
airing.  We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the
gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church.  And at
midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious
youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold
the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go
skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there,
and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter
and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the
strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water
--of stately buildings--of blotting shadows--of weird stone faces
creeping into the moonlight--of deserted bridges--of motionless boats at
anchor.  And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy
quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.

We have been pretty much every where in our gondola.  We have bought
beads and photographs in the stores, and wax matches in the Great Square
of St. Mark.  The last remark suggests a digression.  Every body goes to
this vast square in the evening.  The military bands play in the centre
of it and countless couples of ladies and gentlemen promenade up and down
on either side, and platoons of them are constantly drifting away toward
the old Cathedral, and by the venerable column with the Winged Lion of
St. Mark on its top, and out to where the boats lie moored; and other
platoons are as constantly arriving from the gondolas and joining the
great throng.  Between the promenaders and the side-walks are seated
hundreds and hundreds of people at small tables, smoking and taking
granita, (a first cousin to ice-cream;) on the side-walks are more
employing themselves in the same way.  The shops in the first floor of
the tall rows of buildings that wall in three sides of the square are
brilliantly lighted, the air is filled with music and merry voices, and
altogether the scene is as bright and spirited and full of cheerfulness
as any man could desire.  We enjoy it thoroughly.  Very many of the young
women are exceedingly pretty and dress with rare good taste.  We are
gradually and laboriously learning the ill-manners of staring them
unflinchingly in the face--not because such conduct is agreeable to us,
but because it is the custom of the country and they say the girls like
it.  We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the
different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when
we get home.  We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with
our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.  All our
passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in
view which I have mentioned.  The gentle reader will never, never know
what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.  I speak now,
of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad,
and therefore is not already a consummate ass.  If the case be otherwise,
I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and
call him brother.  I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own
heart when I shall have finished my travels.

On this subject let me remark that there are Americans abroad in Italy
who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months--forgot
it in France.  They can not even write their address in English in a
hotel register.  I append these evidences, which I copied verbatim from
the register of a hotel in a certain Italian city:

     "John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis.  "Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he
     meant traveler, I suppose,) Etats Unis.  "George P. Morton et fils,
     d'Amerique.  "Lloyd B.  Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston,
     Amerique.  "J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de
     naissance Amerique, destination la Grand Bretagne."

I love this sort of people.  A lady passenger of ours tells of a
fellow-citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned
home and addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr.
"Er-bare!"  He apologized, though, and said, "'Pon my soul it is
aggravating, but I cahn't help it--I have got so used to speaking
nothing but French, my dear Erbare--damme there it goes again!--got so
used to French pronunciation that I cahn't get rid of it--it is
positively annoying, I assure you."  This entertaining idiot, whose name
was Gordon, allowed himself to be hailed three times in the street
before he paid any attention, and then begged a thousand pardons and
said he had grown so accustomed to hearing himself addressed as "M'sieu
Gor-r-dong," with a roll to the r, that he had forgotten the legitimate
sound of his name! He wore a rose in his button-hole; he gave the French
salutation--two flips of the hand in front of the face; he called Paris
Pairree in ordinary English conversation; he carried envelopes bearing
foreign postmarks protruding from his breast-pocket; he cultivated a
moustache and imperial, and did what else he could to suggest to the
beholder his pet fancy that he resembled Louis Napoleon--and in a spirit
of thankfulness which is entirely unaccountable, considering the slim
foundation there was for it, he praised his Maker that he was as he was,
and went on enjoying his little life just the same as if he really had
been deliberately designed and erected by the great Architect of the
Universe.

Think of our Whitcombs, and our Ainsworths and our Williamses writing
themselves down in dilapidated French in foreign hotel registers!  We
laugh at Englishmen, when we are at home, for sticking so sturdily to
their national ways and customs, but we look back upon it from abroad
very forgivingly.  It is not pleasant to see an American thrusting his
nationality forward obtrusively in a foreign land, but Oh, it is pitiable
to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female,
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite
Frenchman!

Among a long list of churches, art galleries, and such things, visited by
us in Venice, I shall mention only one--the church of Santa Maria dei
Frari.  It is about five hundred years old, I believe, and stands on
twelve hundred thousand piles.  In it lie the body of Canova and the
heart of Titian, under magnificent monuments.  Titian died at the age of
almost one hundred years.  A plague which swept away fifty thousand lives
was raging at the time, and there is notable evidence of the reverence in
which the great painter was held, in the fact that to him alone the state
permitted a public funeral in all that season of terror and death.

In this church, also, is a monument to the doge Foscari, whose name a
once resident of Venice, Lord Byron, has made permanently famous.

The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity
in the way of mortuary adornment.  It is eighty feet high and is fronted
like some fantastic pagan temple.  Against it stand four colossal
Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments.  The black
legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of
shiny black marble, shows.  The artist was as ingenious as his funeral
designs were absurd.  There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and
two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus.  On high, amid all this
grotesqueness, sits the departed doge.

In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state
archives of Venice.  We did not see them, but they are said to number
millions of documents.  "They are the records of centuries of the most
watchful, observant and suspicious government that ever existed--in which
every thing was written down and nothing spoken out."  They fill nearly
three hundred rooms.  Among them are manuscripts from the archives of
nearly two thousand families, monasteries and convents.  The secret
history of Venice for a thousand years is here--its plots, its hidden
trials, its assassinations, its commissions of hireling spies and masked
bravoes--food, ready to hand, for a world of dark and mysterious
romances.

Yes, I think we have seen all of Venice.  We have seen, in these old
churches, a profusion of costly and elaborate sepulchre ornamentation
such as we never dreampt of before.  We have stood in the dim religious
light of these hoary sanctuaries, in the midst of long ranks of dusty
monuments and effigies of the great dead of Venice, until we seemed
drifting back, back, back, into the solemn past, and looking upon the
scenes and mingling with the peoples of a remote antiquity.  We have been
in a half-waking sort of dream all the time.  I do not know how else to
describe the feeling.  A part of our being has remained still in the
nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some
unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.

We have seen famous pictures until our eyes are weary with looking at
them and refuse to find interest in them any longer.  And what wonder,
when there are twelve hundred pictures by Palma the Younger in Venice and
fifteen hundred by Tintoretto?  And behold there are Titians and the
works of other artists in proportion.  We have seen Titian's celebrated
Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice.  We have
seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I
do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture.
We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate
the world.  I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no
opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I
could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I
may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that
to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them
all.  They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they dress
alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all bald headed,
they all stand in about the same attitude, and without exception they are
gazing heavenward with countenances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons and
the Williamses, et fils, inform me are full of "expression."  To me there
is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can
grasp and take a living interest in.  If great Titian had only been
gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, and gone over to England
and painted a portrait of Shakspeare, even as a youth, which we could all
have confidence in now, the world down to the latest generations would
have forgiven him the lost martyr in the rescued seer.  I think posterity
could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a great historical
picture of Titian's time and painted by his brush--such as Columbus
returning in chains from the discovery of a world, for instance.  The old
masters did paint some Venetian historical pictures, and these we did not
tire of looking at, notwithstanding representations of the formal
introduction of defunct doges to the Virgin Mary in regions beyond the
clouds clashed rather harshly with the proprieties, it seemed to us.

But humble as we are, and unpretending, in the matter of art, our
researches among the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly in
vain.  We have striven hard to learn.  We have had some success.  We have
mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the
learned, but to us they give pleasure, and we take as much pride in our
little acquirements as do others who have learned far more, and we love
to display them full as well.  When we see a monk going about with a lion
and looking tranquilly up to heaven, we know that that is St. Mark.  When
we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven,
trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew.  When we see
a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human
skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St.
Jerome.  Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter
of baggage.  When we see a party looking tranquilly up to heaven,
unconscious that his body is shot through and through with arrows, we
know that that is St. Sebastian.  When we see other monks looking
tranquilly up to heaven, but having no trade-mark, we always ask who
those parties are.  We do this because we humbly wish to learn.  We have
seen thirteen thousand St. Jeromes, and twenty-two thousand St. Marks,
and sixteen thousand St. Matthews, and sixty thousand St. Sebastians, and
four millions of assorted monks, undesignated, and we feel encouraged to
believe that when we have seen some more of these various pictures, and
had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in
them like our cultivated countrymen from Amerique.

Now it does give me real pain to speak in this almost unappreciative way
of the old masters and their martyrs, because good friends of mine in the
ship--friends who do thoroughly and conscientiously appreciate them and
are in every way competent to discriminate between good pictures and
inferior ones--have urged me for my own sake not to make public the fact
that I lack this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself.  I
believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will
give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it.  I even promised that I
would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.  But alas!  I never
could keep a promise.  I do not blame myself for this weakness, because
the fault must lie in my physical organization.  It is likely that such a
very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to
make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was
crowded out.  But I grieve not.  I like no half-way things.  I had rather
have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary
capacity.  I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not
do it.  It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking of
pictures, and can I see them through others' eyes?

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me
every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I
should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of
the beautiful, whatsoever.

It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have
discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all
praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a
beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation.  This very
thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice.  In every
single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the
remark:

"It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance."

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I
had to simply say,

"Ah! so it is--I had not observed it before."

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring
of a South Carolina slave.  But it occurred too often for even my
self-complacency, did that exasperating "It is nothing--it is of the
Renaissance."  I said at last:

"Who is this Renaissance?  Where did he come from?  Who gave him
permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?"

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a
term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of
art.  The guide said that after Titian's time and the time of the other
great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it
partially rose again--an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these
shabby pictures were the work of their hands.  Then I said, in my heat,
that I "wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years
sooner."  The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say
its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge
enough in martyrs.

The guide I have spoken of is the only one we have had yet who knew any
thing.  He was born in South Carolina, of slave parents.  They came to
Venice while he was an infant.  He has grown up here.  He is well
educated.  He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and
French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly
conversant with it; knows the history of Venice by heart and never tires
of talking of her illustrious career.  He dresses better than any of us,
I think, and is daintily polite.  Negroes are deemed as good as white
people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his
native land.  His judgment is correct.

I have had another shave.  I was writing in our front room this afternoon
and trying hard to keep my attention on my work and refrain from looking
out upon the canal.  I was resisting the soft influences of the climate
as well as I could, and endeavoring to overcome the desire to be indolent
and happy.  The boys sent for a barber.  They asked me if I would be
shaved.  I reminded them of my tortures in Genoa, Milan, Como; of my
declaration that I would suffer no more on Italian soil.  I said "Not any
for me, if you please."

I wrote on.  The barber began on the doctor.  I heard him say:

"Dan, this is the easiest shave I have had since we left the ship."

He said again, presently:

"Why Dan, a man could go to sleep with this man shaving him."

Dan took the chair.  Then he said:

"Why this is Titian.  This is one of the old masters."

I wrote on.  Directly Dan said:

"Doctor, it is perfect luxury.  The ship's barber isn't any thing to
him."

My rough beard was distressing me beyond measure.  The barber was rolling
up his apparatus.  The temptation was too strong.  I said:

"Hold on, please.  Shave me also."

I sat down in the chair and closed my eyes.  The barber soaped my face,
and then took his razor and gave me a rake that well nigh threw me into
convulsions.  I jumped out of the chair: Dan and the doctor were both
wiping blood off their faces and laughing.

I said it was a mean, disgraceful fraud.

They said that the misery of this shave had gone so far beyond any thing
they had ever experienced before, that they could not bear the idea of
losing such a chance of hearing a cordial opinion from me on the subject.

It was shameful.  But there was no help for it.  The skinning was begun
and had to be finished.  The tears flowed with every rake, and so did the
fervent execrations.  The barber grew confused, and brought blood every
time.  I think the boys enjoyed it better than any thing they have seen
or heard since they left home.

We have seen the Campanile, and Byron's house and Balbi's the geographer,
and the palaces of all the ancient dukes and doges of Venice, and we have
seen their effeminate descendants airing their nobility in fashionable
French attire in the Grand Square of St. Mark, and eating ices and
drinking cheap wines, instead of wearing gallant coats of mail and
destroying fleets and armies as their great ancestors did in the days of
Venetian glory.  We have seen no bravoes with poisoned stilettos, no
masks, no wild carnival; but we have seen the ancient pride of Venice,
the grim Bronze Horses that figure in a thousand legends.  Venice may
well cherish them, for they are the only horses she ever had.  It is said
there are hundreds of people in this curious city who never have seen a
living horse in their lives.  It is entirely true, no doubt.

And so, having satisfied ourselves, we depart to-morrow, and leave the
venerable Queen of the Republics to summon her vanished ships, and
marshal her shadowy armies, and know again in dreams the pride of her old
renown.




CHAPTER XXIV.

Some of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Venice from
Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were
expected every day.  We heard of no casualties among them, and no
sickness.

We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we rattled through a
good deal of country by rail without caring to stop.  I took few notes.
I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we
arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the
place is so justly celebrated.

Pistoia awoke but a passing interest.

Florence pleased us for a while.  I think we appreciated the great figure
of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape
of the Sabines.  We wandered through the endless collections of paintings
and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course.  I make that
statement in self-defense; there let it stop.  I could not rest under the
imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles
of picture galleries.  We tried indolently to recollect something about
the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose
quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine
history, but the subject was not attractive.  We had been robbed of all
the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of
railroading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of
daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence.  We had
seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed
the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because
his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a
damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had
accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great
men, they had still let him rot there.  That we had lived to see his dust
in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of
literati, and not to Florence or her rulers.  We saw Dante's tomb in that
church, also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that
the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give
much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor
to herself.  Medicis are good enough for Florence.  Let her plant Medicis
and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was
wont to lick the hand that scourged her.

Magnanimous Florence!  Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in
mosaic.  Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world.  Florence
loves to have that said.  Florence is proud of it.  Florence would foster
this specialty of hers.  She is grateful to the artists that bring to her
this high credit and fill her coffers with foreign money, and so she
encourages them with pensions.  With pensions!  Think of the lavishness
of it.  She knows that people who piece together the beautiful trifles
die early, because the labor is so confining, and so exhausting to hand
and brain, and so she has decreed that all these people who reach the age
of sixty shall have a pension after that!  I have not heard that any of
them have called for their dividends yet.  One man did fight along till
he was sixty, and started after his pension, but it appeared that there
had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up
and died.

These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a
mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud,
so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color
the pieces bear, as to form a pigmy rose with stem, thorn, leaves, petals
complete, and all as softly and as truthfully tinted as though Nature had
builded it herself.  They will counterfeit a fly, or a high-toned bug, or
the ruined Coliseum, within the cramped circle of a breastpin, and do it
so deftly and so neatly that any man might think a master painted it.

I saw a little table in the great mosaic school in Florence--a little
trifle of a centre table--whose top was made of some sort of precious
polished stone, and in the stone was inlaid the figure of a flute, with
bell-mouth and a mazy complication of keys.  No painting in the world
could have been softer or richer; no shading out of one tint into another
could have been more perfect; no work of art of any kind could have been
more faultless than this flute, and yet to count the multitude of little
fragments of stone of which they swore it was formed would bankrupt any
man's arithmetic!  I do not think one could have seen where two particles
joined each other with eyes of ordinary shrewdness.  Certainly we could
detect no such blemish.  This table-top cost the labor of one man for ten
long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand
dollars.

We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to
weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli,
(I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside
elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties--such being the fashion
in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and
admire the Arno.  It is popular to admire the Arno.  It is a great
historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating
around.  It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water
into it.  They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a
river, do these dark and bloody Florentines.  They even help out the
delusion by building bridges over it.  I do not see why they are too good
to wade.

How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices
sometimes!  I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence
and find it all beautiful, all attractive.  But I do not care to think of
it now, at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy
marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe
--copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be
shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of.  I
got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that
labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all
alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning.  It was a pleasant
night and at first there were a good many people abroad, and there were
cheerful lights about.  Later, I grew accustomed to prowling about
mysterious drifts and tunnels and astonishing and interesting myself with
coming around corners expecting to find the hotel staring me in the face,
and not finding it doing any thing of the kind.  Later still, I felt
tired.  I soon felt remarkably tired.  But there was no one abroad, now
--not even a policeman.  I walked till I was out of all patience, and very
hot and thirsty.  At last, somewhere after one o'clock, I came
unexpectedly to one of the city gates.  I knew then that I was very far
from the hotel.  The soldiers thought I wanted to leave the city, and
they sprang up and barred the way with their muskets.  I said:

"Hotel d'Europe!"

It was all the Italian I knew, and I was not certain whether that was
Italian or French.  The soldiers looked stupidly at each other and at me,
and shook their heads and took me into custody.  I said I wanted to go
home.  They did not understand me.  They took me into the guard-house and
searched me, but they found no sedition on me.  They found a small piece
of soap (we carry soap with us, now,) and I made them a present of it,
seeing that they regarded it as a curiosity.  I continued to say Hotel
d'Europe, and they continued to shake their heads, until at last a young
soldier nodding in the corner roused up and said something.  He said he
knew where the hotel was, I suppose, for the officer of the guard sent
him away with me.  We walked a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, it
appeared to me, and then he got lost.  He turned this way and that, and
finally gave it up and signified that he was going to spend the remainder
of the morning trying to find the city gate again.  At that moment it
struck me that there was something familiar about the house over the way.
It was the hotel!

It was a happy thing for me that there happened to be a soldier there
that knew even as much as he did; for they say that the policy of the
government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly
and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the
people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies
with friends.  My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant.  I
will change the subject.

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has
any knowledge of--the Leaning Tower.  As every one knows, it is in the
neighborhood of one hundred and eighty feet high--and I beg to observe
that one hundred and eighty feet reach to about the hight of four
ordinary three-story buildings piled one on top of the other, and is a
very considerable altitude for a tower of uniform thickness to aspire to,
even when it stands upright--yet this one leans more than thirteen feet
out of the perpendicular.  It is seven hundred years old, but neither
history or tradition say whether it was built as it is, purposely, or
whether one of its sides has settled.  There is no record that it ever
stood straight up.  It is built of marble.  It is an airy and a beautiful
structure, and each of its eight stories is encircled by fluted columns,
some of marble and some of granite, with Corinthian capitals that were
handsome when they were new.  It is a bell tower, and in its top hangs a
chime of ancient bells.  The winding staircase within is dark, but one
always knows which side of the tower he is on because of his naturally
gravitating from one side to the other of the staircase with the rise or
dip of the tower.  Some of the stone steps are foot-worn only on one end;
others only on the other end; others only in the middle.  To look down
into the tower from the top is like looking down into a tilted well.  A
rope that hangs from the centre of the top touches the wall before it
reaches the bottom.  Standing on the summit, one does not feel altogether
comfortable when he looks down from the high side; but to crawl on your
breast to the verge on the lower side and try to stretch your neck out
far enough to see the base of the tower, makes your flesh creep, and
convinces you for a single moment in spite of all your philosophy, that
the building is falling.  You handle yourself very carefully, all the
time, under the silly impression that if it is not falling, your trifling
weight will start it unless you are particular not to "bear down" on it.

The Duomo, close at hand, is one of the finest cathedrals in Europe.  It
is eight hundred years old.  Its grandeur has outlived the high
commercial prosperity and the political importance that made it a
necessity, or rather a possibility.  Surrounded by poverty, decay and
ruin, it conveys to us a more tangible impression of the former greatness
of Pisa than books could give us.

The Baptistery, which is a few years older than the Leaning Tower, is a
stately rotunda, of huge dimensions, and was a costly structure.  In it
hangs the lamp whose measured swing suggested to Galileo the pendulum.
It looked an insignificant thing to have conferred upon the world of
science and mechanics such a mighty extension of their dominions as it
has.  Pondering, in its suggestive presence, I seemed to see a crazy
universe of swinging disks, the toiling children of this sedate parent.
He appeared to have an intelligent expression about him of knowing that
he was not a lamp at all; that he was a Pendulum; a pendulum disguised,
for prodigious and inscrutable purposes of his own deep devising, and not
a common pendulum either, but the old original patriarchal Pendulum--the
Abraham Pendulum of the world.

This Baptistery is endowed with the most pleasing echo of all the echoes
we have read of.  The guide sounded two sonorous notes, about half an
octave apart; the echo answered with the most enchanting, the most
melodious, the richest blending of sweet sounds that one can imagine.  It
was like a long-drawn chord of a church organ, infinitely softened by
distance.  I may be extravagant in this matter, but if this be the case
my ear is to blame--not my pen.  I am describing a memory--and one that
will remain long with me.

The peculiar devotional spirit of the olden time, which placed a higher
confidence in outward forms of worship than in the watchful guarding of
the heart against sinful thoughts and the hands against sinful deeds, and
which believed in the protecting virtues of inanimate objects made holy
by contact with holy things, is illustrated in a striking manner in one
of the cemeteries of Pisa.  The tombs are set in soil brought in ships
from the Holy Land ages ago.  To be buried in such ground was regarded by
the ancient Pisans as being more potent for salvation than many masses
purchased of the church and the vowing of many candles to the Virgin.

Pisa is believed to be about three thousand years old.  It was one of the
twelve great cities of ancient Etruria, that commonwealth which has left
so many monuments in testimony of its extraordinary advancement, and so
little history of itself that is tangible and comprehensible.  A Pisan
antiquarian gave me an ancient tear-jug which he averred was full four
thousand years old.  It was found among the ruins of one of the oldest of
the Etruscan cities.  He said it came from a tomb, and was used by some
bereaved family in that remote age when even the Pyramids of Egypt were
young, Damascus a village, Abraham a prattling infant and ancient Troy
not yet [dreampt] of, to receive the tears wept for some lost idol of a
household.  It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos
more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the
long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar
footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the
chorus, a vanished form!--a tale which is always so new to us, so
startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how
threadbare and old it is!  No shrewdly-worded history could have brought
the myths and shadows of that old dreamy age before us clothed with human
flesh and warmed with human sympathies so vividly as did this poor little
unsentient vessel of pottery.

Pisa was a republic in the middle ages, with a government of her own,
armies and navies of her own and a great commerce.  She was a warlike
power, and inscribed upon her banners many a brilliant fight with Genoese
and Turks.  It is said that the city once numbered a population of four
hundred thousand; but her sceptre has passed from her grasp, now, her
ships and her armies are gone, her commerce is dead.  Her battle-flags
bear the mold and the dust of centuries, her marts are deserted, she has
shrunken far within her crumbling walls, and her great population has
diminished to twenty thousand souls.  She has but one thing left to boast
of, and that is not much, viz: she is the second city of Tuscany.

We reached Leghorn in time to see all we wished to see of it long before
the city gates were closed for the evening, and then came on board the
ship.

We felt as though we had been away from home an age.  We never entirely
appreciated, before, what a very pleasant den our state-room is; nor how
jolly it is to sit at dinner in one's own seat in one's own cabin, and
hold familiar conversation with friends in one's own language.  Oh, the
rare happiness of comprehending every single word that is said, and
knowing that every word one says in return will be understood as well!
We would talk ourselves to death, now, only there are only about ten
passengers out of the sixty-five to talk to.  The others are wandering,
we hardly know where.  We shall not go ashore in Leghorn.  We are
surfeited with Italian cities for the present, and much prefer to walk
the familiar quarterdeck and view this one from a distance.

The stupid magnates of this Leghorn government can not understand that so
large a steamer as ours could cross the broad Atlantic with no other
purpose than to indulge a party of ladies and gentlemen in a pleasure
excursion.  It looks too improbable.  It is suspicious, they think.
Something more important must be hidden behind it all.  They can not
understand it, and they scorn the evidence of the ship's papers.  They
have decided at last that we are a battalion of incendiary, blood-thirsty
Garibaldians in disguise!  And in all seriousness they have set a
gun-boat to watch the vessel night and day, with orders to close down on
any revolutionary movement in a twinkling!  Police boats are on patrol
duty about us all the time, and it is as much as a sailor's liberty is
worth to show himself in a red shirt.  These policemen follow the
executive officer's boat from shore to ship and from ship to shore and
watch his dark maneuvres with a vigilant eye.  They will arrest him yet
unless he assumes an expression of countenance that shall have less of
carnage, insurrection and sedition in it.  A visit paid in a friendly
way to General Garibaldi yesterday (by cordial invitation,) by some of
our passengers, has gone far to confirm the dread suspicions the
government harbors toward us.  It is thought the friendly visit was only
the cloak of a bloody conspiracy.  These people draw near and watch us
when we bathe in the sea from the ship's side.  Do they think we are
communing with a reserve force of rascals at the bottom?

It is said that we shall probably be quarantined at Naples.  Two or three
of us prefer not to run this risk.  Therefore, when we are rested, we
propose to go in a French steamer to Civita and from thence to Rome, and
by rail to Naples.  They do not quarantine the cars, no matter where they
got their passengers from.




CHAPTER XXV.

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand
--and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can
have such palatial railroad depots and such marvels of turnpikes.  Why,
these latter are as hard as adamant, as straight as a line, as smooth as
a floor, and as white as snow.  When it is too dark to see any other
object, one can still see the white turnpikes of France and Italy; and
they are clean enough to eat from, without a table-cloth.  And yet no
tolls are charged.

As for the railways--we have none like them.  The cars slide as smoothly
along as if they were on runners.  The depots are vast palaces of cut
marble, with stately colonnades of the same royal stone traversing them
from end to end, and with ample walls and ceilings richly decorated with
frescoes.  The lofty gateways are graced with statues, and the broad
floors are all laid in polished flags of marble.

These things win me more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art
treasures, because I can understand the one and am not competent to
appreciate the other.  In the turnpikes, the railways, the depots, and
the new boulevards of uniform houses in Florence and other cities here, I
see the genius of Louis Napoleon, or rather, I see the works of that
statesman imitated.  But Louis has taken care that in France there shall
be a foundation for these improvements--money.  He has always the
wherewithal to back up his projects; they strengthen France and never
weaken her.  Her material prosperity is genuine.  But here the case is
different.  This country is bankrupt.  There is no real foundation for
these great works.  The prosperity they would seem to indicate is a
pretence.  There is no money in the treasury, and so they enfeeble her
instead of strengthening.  Italy has achieved the dearest wish of her
heart and become an independent State--and in so doing she has drawn an
elephant in the political lottery.  She has nothing to feed it on.
Inexperienced in government, she plunged into all manner of useless
expenditure, and swamped her treasury almost in a day.  She squandered
millions of francs on a navy which she did not need, and the first time
she took her new toy into action she got it knocked higher than
Gilderoy's kite--to use the language of the Pilgrims.

But it is an ill-wind that blows nobody good.  A year ago, when Italy saw
utter ruin staring her in the face and her greenbacks hardly worth the
paper they were printed on, her Parliament ventured upon a 'coup de main'
that would have appalled the stoutest of her statesmen under less
desperate circumstances.  They, in a manner, confiscated the domains of
the Church!  This in priest-ridden Italy!  This in a land which has
groped in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred
years!  It was a rare good fortune for Italy, the stress of weather that
drove her to break from this prison-house.

They do not call it confiscating the church property.  That would sound
too harshly yet.  But it amounts to that.  There are thousands of
churches in Italy, each with untold millions of treasures stored away in
its closets, and each with its battalion of priests to be supported.
And then there are the estates of the Church--league on league of the
richest lands and the noblest forests in all Italy--all yielding immense
revenues to the Church, and none paying a cent in taxes to the State.
In some great districts the Church owns all the property--lands,
watercourses, woods, mills and factories.  They buy, they sell, they
manufacture, and since they pay no taxes, who can hope to compete with
them?

Well, the Government has seized all this in effect, and will yet seize it
in rigid and unpoetical reality, no doubt.  Something must be done to
feed a starving treasury, and there is no other resource in all Italy
--none but the riches of the Church.  So the Government intends to take to
itself a great portion of the revenues arising from priestly farms,
factories, etc., and also intends to take possession of the churches and
carry them on, after its own fashion and upon its own responsibility.
In a few instances it will leave the establishments of great pet churches
undisturbed, but in all others only a handful of priests will be retained
to preach and pray, a few will be pensioned, and the balance turned
adrift.

Pray glance at some of these churches and their embellishments, and see
whether the Government is doing a righteous thing or not.  In Venice,
today, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, there are twelve hundred
priests.  Heaven only knows how many there were before the Parliament
reduced their numbers.  There was the great Jesuit Church.  Under the old
regime it required sixty priests to engineer it--the Government does it
with five, now, and the others are discharged from service.  All about
that church wretchedness and poverty abound.  At its door a dozen hats
and bonnets were doffed to us, as many heads were humbly bowed, and as
many hands extended, appealing for pennies--appealing with foreign words
we could not understand, but appealing mutely, with sad eyes, and sunken
cheeks, and ragged raiment, that no words were needed to translate.  Then
we passed within the great doors, and it seemed that the riches of the
world were before us!  Huge columns carved out of single masses of
marble, and inlaid from top to bottom with a hundred intricate figures
wrought in costly verde antique; pulpits of the same rich materials,
whose draperies hung down in many a pictured fold, the stony fabric
counterfeiting the delicate work of the loom; the grand altar brilliant
with polished facings and balustrades of oriental agate, jasper, verde
antique, and other precious stones, whose names, even, we seldom hear
--and slabs of priceless lapis lazuli lavished every where as recklessly as
if the church had owned a quarry of it.  In the midst of all this
magnificence, the solid gold and silver furniture of the altar seemed
cheap and trivial.  Even the floors and ceilings cost a princely fortune.

Now, where is the use of allowing all those riches to lie idle, while
half of that community hardly know, from day to day, how they are going
to keep body and soul together?  And, where is the wisdom in permitting
hundreds upon hundreds of millions of francs to be locked up in the
useless trumpery of churches all over Italy, and the people ground to
death with taxation to uphold a perishing Government?

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her
energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a
vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens
to accomplish it.  She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and
misery.  All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could
hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.  And
for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred--and rags and
vermin to match.  It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence--a vast pile that has been sapping
the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly
finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but
when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking,
too suggestive, and I said, "O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of
enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye?
Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?"

Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that Cathedral.

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I
can think of.  They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built
to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.  It sounds
blasphemous, but it is true, and here they act blasphemy.  The dead and
damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse
for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults,
and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been set up.  The
expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize it got into trouble and could not
accomplish the burglary, and so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant
now.  They say the entire mausoleum was intended for the Holy Sepulchre,
and was only turned into a family burying place after the Jerusalem
expedition failed--but you will excuse me.  Some of those Medicis would
have smuggled themselves in sure.--What they had not the effrontery to
do, was not worth doing.  Why, they had their trivial, forgotten exploits
on land and sea pictured out in grand frescoes (as did also the ancient
Doges of Venice) with the Saviour and the Virgin throwing bouquets to
them out of the clouds, and the Deity himself applauding from his throne
in Heaven!  And who painted these things?  Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul
Veronese, Raphael--none other than the world's idols, the "old masters."

Andrea del Sarto glorified his princes in pictures that must save them
for ever from the oblivion they merited, and they let him starve.  Served
him right.  Raphael pictured such infernal villains as Catherine and
Marie de Medicis seated in heaven and conversing familiarly with the
Virgin Mary and the angels, (to say nothing of higher personages,) and
yet my friends abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old
masters--because I fail sometimes to see the beauty that is in their
productions.  I can not help but see it, now and then, but I keep on
protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters
to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as
the French, Venetian and Florentine Princes of two and three hundred
years ago, all the same.

I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful things for bread,
the princes and potentates being the only patrons of art.  If a grandly
gifted man may drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread
rather than starve with the nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse
is a valid one.  It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wellingtons,
and unchastity in women as well.

But somehow, I can not keep that Medici mausoleum out of my memory.  It
is as large as a church; its pavement is rich enough for the pavement of
a King's palace; its great dome is gorgeous with frescoes; its walls are
made of--what?  Marble?--plaster?--wood?--paper?  No.  Red porphyry
--verde antique--jasper--oriental agate--alabaster--mother-of-pearl
--chalcedony--red coral--lapis lazuli!  All the vast walls are made wholly
of these precious stones, worked in, and in and in together in elaborate
patterns and figures, and polished till they glow like great mirrors
with the pictured splendors reflected from the dome overhead.  And before
a statue of one of those dead Medicis reposes a crown that blazes with
diamonds and emeralds enough to buy a ship-of-the-line, almost.  These
are the things the Government has its evil eye upon, and a happy thing it
will be for Italy when they melt away in the public treasury.

And now----.  However, another beggar approaches.  I will go out and
destroy him, and then come back and write another chapter of
vituperation.

Having eaten the friendless orphan--having driven away his comrades
--having grown calm and reflective at length--I now feel in a kindlier
mood.  I feel that after talking so freely about the priests and the
churches, justice demands that if I know any thing good about either I
ought to say it.  I have heard of many things that redound to the credit
of the priesthood, but the most notable matter that occurs to me now is
the devotion one of the mendicant orders showed during the prevalence of
the cholera last year.  I speak of the Dominican friars--men who wear a
coarse, heavy brown robe and a cowl, in this hot climate, and go
barefoot.  They live on alms altogether, I believe.  They must
unquestionably love their religion, to suffer so much for it.  When the
cholera was raging in Naples; when the people were dying by hundreds and
hundreds every day; when every concern for the public welfare was
swallowed up in selfish private interest, and every citizen made the
taking care of himself his sole object, these men banded themselves
together and went about nursing the sick and burying the dead.  Their
noble efforts cost many of them their lives.  They laid them down
cheerfully, and well they might.  Creeds mathematically precise, and
hair-splitting niceties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the
salvation of some kinds of souls, but surely the charity, the purity, the
unselfishness that are in the hearts of men like these would save their
souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion--which is ours.

One of these fat bare-footed rascals came here to Civita Vecchia with us
in the little French steamer.  There were only half a dozen of us in the
cabin.  He belonged in the steerage.  He was the life of the ship, the
bloody-minded son of the Inquisition!  He and the leader of the marine
band of a French man-of-war played on the piano and sang opera turn
about; they sang duets together; they rigged impromptu theatrical
costumes and gave us extravagant farces and pantomimes.  We got along
first-rate with the friar, and were excessively conversational, albeit he
could not understand what we said, and certainly he never uttered a word
that we could guess the meaning of.

This Civita Vecchia is the finest nest of dirt, vermin and ignorance we
have found yet, except that African perdition they call Tangier, which is
just like it.  The people here live in alleys two yards wide, which have
a smell about them which is peculiar but not entertaining.  It is well
the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person
can stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and
then the people would die.  These alleys are paved with stone, and
carpeted with deceased cats, and decayed rags, and decomposed
vegetable-tops, and remnants of old boots, all soaked with dish-water,
and the people sit around on stools and enjoy it.  They are indolent, as
a general thing, and yet have few pastimes.  They work two or three
hours at a time, but not hard, and then they knock off and catch flies.
This does not require any talent, because they only have to grab--if
they do not get the one they are after, they get another.  It is all the
same to them.  They have no partialities.  Whichever one they get is the
one they want.

They have other kinds of insects, but it does not make them arrogant.
They are very quiet, unpretending people.  They have more of these kind
of things than other communities, but they do not boast.

They are very uncleanly--these people--in face, in person and dress.
When they see any body with a clean shirt on, it arouses their scorn.
The women wash clothes, half the day, at the public tanks in the streets,
but they are probably somebody else's.  Or may be they keep one set to
wear and another to wash; because they never put on any that have ever
been washed.  When they get done washing, they sit in the alleys and
nurse their cubs.  They nurse one ash-cat at a time, and the others
scratch their backs against the door-post and are happy.

All this country belongs to the Papal States.  They do not appear to have
any schools here, and only one billiard table.  Their education is at a
very low stage.  One portion of the men go into the military, another
into the priesthood, and the rest into the shoe-making business.

They keep up the passport system here, but so they do in Turkey.  This
shows that the Papal States are as far advanced as Turkey.  This fact
will be alone sufficient to silence the tongues of malignant
calumniators.  I had to get my passport vised for Rome in Florence, and
then they would not let me come ashore here until a policeman had
examined it on the wharf and sent me a permit.  They did not even dare to
let me take my passport in my hands for twelve hours, I looked so
formidable.  They judged it best to let me cool down.  They thought I
wanted to take the town, likely.  Little did they know me.  I wouldn't
have it.  They examined my baggage at the depot.  They took one of my
ablest jokes and read it over carefully twice and then read it backwards.
But it was too deep for them.  They passed it around, and every body
speculated on it awhile, but it mastered them all.

It was no common joke.  At length a veteran officer spelled it over
deliberately and shook his head three or four times and said that in his
opinion it was seditious.  That was the first time I felt alarmed.  I
immediately said I would explain the document, and they crowded around.
And so I explained and explained and explained, and they took notes of
all I said, but the more I explained the more they could not understand
it, and when they desisted at last, I could not even understand it
myself.  They said they believed it was an incendiary document, leveled
at the government.  I declared solemnly that it was not, but they only
shook their heads and would not be satisfied.  Then they consulted a good
while; and finally they confiscated it.  I was very sorry for this,
because I had worked a long time on that joke, and took a good deal of
pride in it, and now I suppose I shall never see it any more.  I suppose
it will be sent up and filed away among the criminal archives of Rome,
and will always be regarded as a mysterious infernal machine which would
have blown up like a mine and scattered the good Pope all around, but for
a miraculous providential interference.  And I suppose that all the time
I am in Rome the police will dog me about from place to place because
they think I am a dangerous character.

It is fearfully hot in Civita Vecchia.  The streets are made very narrow
and the houses built very solid and heavy and high, as a protection
against the heat.  This is the first Italian town I have seen which does
not appear to have a patron saint.  I suppose no saint but the one that
went up in the chariot of fire could stand the climate.

There is nothing here to see.  They have not even a cathedral, with
eleven tons of solid silver archbishops in the back room; and they do not
show you any moldy buildings that are seven thousand years old; nor any
smoke-dried old fire-screens which are chef d'oeuvres of Reubens or
Simpson, or Titian or Ferguson, or any of those parties; and they haven't
any bottled fragments of saints, and not even a nail from the true cross.
We are going to Rome.  There is nothing to see here.




CHAPTER XXVI.

What is it that confers the noblest delight?  What is that which swells a
man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring
to him?  Discovery!  To know that you are walking where none others have
walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that
you are breathing a virgin atmosphere.  To give birth to an idea--to
discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of
a field that many a brain--plow had gone over before.  To find a new
planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings
carry your messages.  To be the first--that is the idea.  To do
something, say something, see something, before any body else--these are
the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are
tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.  Morse, with his
first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton, in that
long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the
throttle-valve and lo, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with
the cow's virus in his blood, walked through the smallpox hospitals
unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred
and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of
the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old
age that is forgotten, now, and gloated upon the finished Laocoon;
Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the
landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus,
in the Pinta's shrouds, when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and
gazed abroad upon an unknown world!  These are the men who have really
lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded
long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.

What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me?
What is there for me to touch that others have not touched?  What is
there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me
before it pass to others?  What can I discover?--Nothing.  Nothing
whatsoever.  One charm of travel dies here.  But if I were only a Roman!
--If, added to my own I could be gifted with modern Roman sloth, modern
Roman superstition, and modern Roman boundlessness of ignorance, what
bewildering worlds of unsuspected wonders I would discover!  Ah, if I
were only a habitant of the Campagna five and twenty miles from Rome!
Then I would travel.

I would go to America, and see, and learn, and return to the Campagna and
stand before my countrymen an illustrious discoverer.  I would say:

"I saw there a country which has no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet
the people survive.  I saw a government which never was protected by
foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that required to carry on the
government itself.  I saw common men and common women who could read;
I even saw small children of common country people reading from books;
if I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write,
also.

"In the cities I saw people drinking a delicious beverage made of chalk
and water, but never once saw goats driven through their Broadway or
their Pennsylvania Avenue or their Montgomery street and milked at the
doors of the houses.  I saw real glass windows in the houses of even the
commonest people.  Some of the houses are not of stone, nor yet of
bricks; I solemnly swear they are made of wood.  Houses there will take
fire and burn, sometimes--actually burn entirely down, and not leave a
single vestige behind.  I could state that for a truth, upon my
death-bed.  And as a proof that the circumstance is not rare, I aver
that they have a thing which they call a fire-engine, which vomits forth
great streams of water, and is kept always in readiness, by night and by
day, to rush to houses that are burning.  You would think one engine
would be sufficient, but some great cities have a hundred; they keep men
hired, and pay them by the month to do nothing but put out fires.  For a
certain sum of money other men will insure that your house shall not
burn down; and if it burns they will pay you for it.  There are hundreds
and thousands of schools, and any body may go and learn to be wise, like
a priest.  In that singular country if a rich man dies a sinner, he is
damned; he can not buy salvation with money for masses.  There is really
not much use in being rich, there.  Not much use as far as the other
world is concerned, but much, very much use, as concerns this; because
there, if a man be rich, he is very greatly honored, and can become a
legislator, a governor, a general, a senator, no matter how ignorant an
ass he is--just as in our beloved Italy the nobles hold all the great
places, even though sometimes they are born noble idiots.  There, if a
man be rich, they give him costly presents, they ask him to feasts, they
invite him to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in
debt, they require him to do that which they term to "settle."  The
women put on a different dress almost every day; the dress is usually
fine, but absurd in shape; the very shape and fashion of it changes
twice in a hundred years; and did I but covet to be called an
extravagant falsifier, I would say it changed even oftener.  Hair does
not grow upon the American women's heads; it is made for them by cunning
workmen in the shops, and is curled and frizzled into scandalous and
ungodly forms. Some persons wear eyes of glass which they see through
with facility perhaps, else they would not use them; and in the mouths
of some are teeth made by the sacrilegious hand of man.  The dress of
the men is laughably grotesque.  They carry no musket in ordinary life,
nor no long-pointed pole; they wear no wide green-lined cloak; they wear
no peaked black felt hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no
goat-skin breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no
prodigious spurs.  They wear a conical hat termed a "nail-kag;" a coat
of saddest black; a shirt which shows dirt so easily that it has to be
changed every month, and is very troublesome; things called pantaloons,
which are held up by shoulder straps, and on their feet they wear boots
which are ridiculous in pattern and can stand no wear.  Yet dressed in
this fantastic garb, these people laughed at my costume.  In that
country, books are so common that it is really no curiosity to see one.
Newspapers also.  They have a great machine which prints such things by
thousands every hour.

"I saw common men, there--men who were neither priests nor princes--who
yet absolutely owned the land they tilled.  It was not rented from the
church, nor from the nobles.  I am ready to take my oath of this.  In
that country you might fall from a third story window three several
times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.--The scarcity of such
people is astonishing.  In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for
every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher.  Jews, there,
are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.  They can work at
any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to;
they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians;
they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can
associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another
human being; they don't have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns;
they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even
have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves,
though I doubt that, myself; they never have had to run races naked
through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in
carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a
church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their
religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that
curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a
rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if
the government don't suit him!  Ah, it is wonderful.  The common people
there know a great deal; they even have the effrontery to complain if
they are not properly governed, and to take hold and help conduct the
government themselves; if they had laws like ours, which give one dollar
of every three a crop produces to the government for taxes, they would
have that law altered: instead of paying thirty-three dollars in taxes,
out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if they have to pay
seven.  They are curious people.  They do not know when they are well
off.  Mendicant priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging for
the church and eating up their substance.  One hardly ever sees a
minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a
basket, begging for subsistence.  In that country the preachers are not
like our mendicant orders of friars--they have two or three suits of
clothing, and they wash sometimes.  In that land are mountains far higher
than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long
and full forty broad, is really small compared to the United States of
America; the Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its
mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely
throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as the
American Mississippi--nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson.  In America
the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their
grandfathers did.  They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with
a three-cornered block of wood that merely scratches the top of the
ground.  We do that because our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I
suppose.  But those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors.
They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts
into the earth full five inches.  And this is not all.  They cut their
grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day.  If I
dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous plow that works
by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour--but
--but--I see by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling
you.  Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded speaker of
untruths!"

Of course we have been to the monster Church of St. Peter, frequently.
I knew its dimensions.  I knew it was a prodigious structure.  I knew it
was just about the length of the capitol at Washington--say seven hundred
and thirty feet.  I knew it was three hundred and sixty-four feet wide,
and consequently wider than the capitol.  I knew that the cross on the
top of the dome of the church was four hundred and thirty-eight feet
above the ground, and therefore about a hundred or may be a hundred and
twenty-five feet higher than the dome of the capitol.--Thus I had one
gauge.  I wished to come as near forming a correct idea of how it was
going to look, as possible; I had a curiosity to see how much I would
err.  I erred considerably.  St. Peter's did not look nearly so large as
the capitol, and certainly not a twentieth part as beautiful, from the
outside.

When we reached the door, and stood fairly within the church, it was
impossible to comprehend that it was a very large building.  I had to
cipher a comprehension of it.  I had to ransack my memory for some more
similes.  St. Peter's is bulky.  Its height and size would represent two
of the Washington capitol set one on top of the other--if the capitol
were wider; or two blocks or two blocks and a half of ordinary buildings
set one on top of the other.  St. Peter's was that large, but it could
and would not look so.  The trouble was that every thing in it and about
it was on such a scale of uniform vastness that there were no contrasts
to judge by--none but the people, and I had not noticed them.  They were
insects.  The statues of children holding vases of holy water were
immense, according to the tables of figures, but so was every thing else
around them.  The mosaic pictures in the dome were huge, and were made of
thousands and thousands of cubes of glass as large as the end of my
little finger, but those pictures looked smooth, and gaudy of color, and
in good proportion to the dome.  Evidently they would not answer to
measure by.  Away down toward the far end of the church (I thought it was
really clear at the far end, but discovered afterward that it was in the
centre, under the dome,) stood the thing they call the baldacchino--a
great bronze pyramidal frame-work like that which upholds a mosquito bar.
It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead--nothing more.  Yet
I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls.  It
was overshadowed by a dome so mighty that its own height was snubbed.
The four great square piers or pillars that stand equidistant from each
other in the church, and support the roof, I could not work up to their
real dimensions by any method of comparison.  I knew that the faces of
each were about the width of a very large dwelling-house front, (fifty or
sixty feet,) and that they were twice as high as an ordinary three-story
dwelling, but still they looked small.  I tried all the different ways I
could think of to compel myself to understand how large St. Peter's was,
but with small success.  The mosaic portrait of an Apostle who was
writing with a pen six feet long seemed only an ordinary Apostle.

But the people attracted my attention after a while.  To stand in the
door of St. Peter's and look at men down toward its further extremity,
two blocks away, has a diminishing effect on them; surrounded by the
prodigious pictures and statues, and lost in the vast spaces, they look
very much smaller than they would if they stood two blocks away in the
open air.  I "averaged" a man as he passed me and watched him as he
drifted far down by the baldacchino and beyond--watched him dwindle to an
insignificant school-boy, and then, in the midst of the silent throng of
human pigmies gliding about him, I lost him.  The church had lately been
decorated, on the occasion of a great ceremony in honor of St. Peter, and
men were engaged, now, in removing the flowers and gilt paper from the
walls and pillars.  As no ladders could reach the great heights, the men
swung themselves down from balustrades and the capitals of pilasters by
ropes, to do this work.  The upper gallery which encircles the inner
sweep of the dome is two hundred and forty feet above the floor of the
church--very few steeples in America could reach up to it.  Visitors
always go up there to look down into the church because one gets the best
idea of some of the heights and distances from that point.  While we
stood on the floor one of the workmen swung loose from that gallery at
the end of a long rope.  I had not supposed, before, that a man could
look so much like a spider.  He was insignificant in size, and his rope
seemed only a thread.  Seeing that he took up so little space, I could
believe the story, then, that ten thousand troops went to St. Peter's,
once, to hear mass, and their commanding officer came afterward, and not
finding them, supposed they had not yet arrived.  But they were in the
church, nevertheless--they were in one of the transepts.  Nearly fifty
thousand persons assembled in St. Peter's to hear the publishing of the
dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  It is estimated that the floor of
the church affords standing room for--for a large number of people; I
have forgotten the exact figures.  But it is no matter--it is near
enough.

They have twelve small pillars, in St. Peter's, which came from Solomon's
Temple.  They have, also--which was far more interesting to me--a piece
of the true cross, and some nails, and a part of the crown of thorns.

Of course we ascended to the summit of the dome, and of course we also
went up into the gilt copper ball which is above it.--There was room
there for a dozen persons, with a little crowding, and it was as close
and hot as an oven.  Some of those people who are so fond of writing
their names in prominent places had been there before us--a million or
two, I should think.  From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every
notable object in Rome, from the Castle of St. Angelo to the Coliseum.
He can discern the seven hills upon which Rome is built.  He can see the
Tiber, and the locality of the bridge which Horatius kept "in the brave
days of old" when Lars Porsena attempted to cross it with his invading
host.  He can see the spot where the Horatii and the Curatii fought their
famous battle.  He can see the broad green Campagna, stretching away
toward the mountains, with its scattered arches and broken aqueducts of
the olden time, so picturesque in their gray ruin, and so daintily
festooned with vines.  He can see the Alban Mountains, the Appenines, the
Sabine Hills, and the blue Mediterranean.  He can see a panorama that is
varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history
than any other in Europe.--About his feet is spread the remnant of a
city that once had a population of four million souls; and among its
massed edifices stand the ruins of temples, columns, and triumphal arches
that knew the Caesars, and the noonday of Roman splendor; and close by
them, in unimpaired strength, is a drain of arched and heavy masonry that
belonged to that older city which stood here before Romulus and Remus
were born or Rome thought of.  The Appian Way is here yet, and looking
much as it did, perhaps, when the triumphal processions of the Emperors
moved over it in other days bringing fettered princes from the confines
of the earth.  We can not see the long array of chariots and mail-clad
men laden with the spoils of conquest, but we can imagine the pageant,
after a fashion.  We look out upon many objects of interest from the dome
of St. Peter's; and last of all, almost at our feet, our eyes rest upon
the building which was once the Inquisition.  How times changed, between
the older ages and the new!  Some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago,
the ignorant men of Rome were wont to put Christians in the arena of the
Coliseum yonder, and turn the wild beasts in upon them for a show.  It
was for a lesson as well.  It was to teach the people to abhor and fear
the new doctrine the followers of Christ were teaching.  The beasts tore
the victims limb from limb and made poor mangled corpses of them in the
twinkling of an eye.  But when the Christians came into power, when the
holy Mother Church became mistress of the barbarians, she taught them the
error of their ways by no such means.  No, she put them in this pleasant
Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so
merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and
they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him--first by
twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their
flesh with pincers--red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable
in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by
roasting them in public.  They always convinced those barbarians.  The
true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to
administer it, is very, very soothing.  It is wonderfully persuasive,
also.  There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts
and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition.  One is the
system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized
people.  It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more.

I prefer not to describe St. Peter's.  It has been done before.  The
ashes of Peter, the disciple of the Saviour, repose in a crypt under the
baldacchino.  We stood reverently in that place; so did we also in the
Mamertine Prison, where he was confined, where he converted the soldiers,
and where tradition says he caused a spring of water to flow in order
that he might baptize them.  But when they showed us the print of Peter's
face in the hard stone of the prison wall and said he made that by
falling up against it, we doubted.  And when, also, the monk at the
church of San Sebastian showed us a paving-stone with two great
footprints in it and said that Peter's feet made those, we lacked
confidence again.  Such things do not impress one.  The monk said that
angels came and liberated Peter from prison by night, and he started away
from Rome by the Appian Way.  The Saviour met him and told him to go
back, which he did.  Peter left those footprints in the stone upon which
he stood at the time.  It was not stated how it was ever discovered whose
footprints they were, seeing the interview occurred secretly and at
night.  The print of the face in the prison was that of a man of common
size; the footprints were those of a man ten or twelve feet high.  The
discrepancy confirmed our unbelief.

We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassinated, and also
the Tarpeian Rock.  We saw the Dying Gladiator at the Capitol, and I
think that even we appreciated that wonder of art; as much, perhaps, as
we did that fearful story wrought in marble, in the Vatican--the Laocoon.
And then the Coliseum.

Every body knows the picture of the Coliseum; every body recognizes at
once that "looped and windowed" band-box with a side bitten out.  Being
rather isolated, it shows to better advantage than any other of the
monuments of ancient Rome.  Even the beautiful Pantheon, whose pagan
altars uphold the cross, now, and whose Venus, tricked out in consecrated
gimcracks, does reluctant duty as a Virgin Mary to-day, is built about
with shabby houses and its stateliness sadly marred.  But the monarch of
all European ruins, the Coliseum, maintains that reserve and that royal
seclusion which is proper to majesty.  Weeds and flowers spring from its
massy arches and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from
its lofty walls.  An impressive silence broods over the monstrous
structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in
other days.  The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of
fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago, and the lizards sun
themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor.  More vividly than all the
written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome's grandeur and
Rome's decay.  It is the worthiest type of both that exists.  Moving
about the Rome of to-day, we might find it hard to believe in her old
magnificence and her millions of population; but with this stubborn
evidence before us that she was obliged to have a theatre with sitting
room for eighty thousand persons and standing room for twenty thousand
more, to accommodate such of her citizens as required amusement, we find
belief less difficult.  The Coliseum is over one thousand six hundred
feet long, seven hundred and fifty wide, and one hundred and sixty-five
high.  Its shape is oval.

In America we make convicts useful at the same time that we punish them
for their crimes.  We farm them out and compel them to earn money for the
State by making barrels and building roads.  Thus we combine business
with retribution, and all things are lovely.  But in ancient Rome they
combined religious duty with pleasure.  Since it was necessary that the
new sect called Christians should be exterminated, the people judged it
wise to make this work profitable to the State at the same time, and
entertaining to the public.  In addition to the gladiatorial combats and
other shows, they sometimes threw members of the hated sect into the
arena of the Coliseum and turned wild beasts in upon them.  It is
estimated that seventy thousand Christians suffered martyrdom in this
place.  This has made the Coliseum holy ground, in the eyes of the
followers of the Saviour.  And well it might; for if the chain that bound
a saint, and the footprints a saint has left upon a stone he chanced to
stand upon, be holy, surely the spot where a man gave up his life for his
faith is holy.

Seventeen or eighteen centuries ago this Coliseum was the theatre of
Rome, and Rome was mistress of the world.  Splendid pageants were
exhibited here, in presence of the Emperor, the great ministers of State,
the nobles, and vast audiences of citizens of smaller consequence.
Gladiators fought with gladiators and at times with warrior prisoners
from many a distant land.  It was the theatre of Rome--of the world--and
the man of fashion who could not let fall in a casual and unintentional
manner something about "my private box at the Coliseum" could not move in
the first circles.  When the clothing-store merchant wished to consume
the corner grocery man with envy, he bought secured seats in the front
row and let the thing be known.  When the irresistible dry goods clerk
wished to blight and destroy, according to his native instinct, he got
himself up regardless of expense and took some other fellow's young lady
to the Coliseum, and then accented the affront by cramming her with ice
cream between the acts, or by approaching the cage and stirring up the
martyrs with his whalebone cane for her edification.  The Roman swell was
in his true element only when he stood up against a pillar and fingered
his moustache unconscious of the ladies; when he viewed the bloody
combats through an opera-glass two inches long; when he excited the envy
of provincials by criticisms which showed that he had been to the
Coliseum many and many a time and was long ago over the novelty of it;
when he turned away with a yawn at last and said,

"He a star! handles his sword like an apprentice brigand! he'll do for
the country, may be, but he don't answer for the metropolis!"

Glad was the contraband that had a seat in the pit at the Saturday
matinee, and happy the Roman street-boy who ate his peanuts and guyed the
gladiators from the dizzy gallery.

For me was reserved the high honor of discovering among the rubbish of
the ruined Coliseum the only playbill of that establishment now extant.
There was a suggestive smell of mint-drops about it still, a corner of it
had evidently been chewed, and on the margin, in choice Latin, these
words were written in a delicate female hand:

     "Meet me on the Tarpeian Rock tomorrow evening, dear, at sharp
     seven.  Mother will be absent on a visit to her friends in the
     Sabine Hills.        CLAUDIA."

Ah, where is that lucky youth to-day, and where the little hand that
wrote those dainty lines?  Dust and ashes these seventeen hundred years!

Thus reads the bill:


                            ROMAN COLISEUM.
                        UNPARALLELED ATTRACTION!
               NEW PROPERTIES!  NEW LIONS!  NEW GLADIATORS!
                       Engagement of the renowned
                        MARCUS MARCELLUS VALERIAN!
                           FOR SIX NIGHTS ONLY!

The management beg leave to offer to the public an entertainment
surpassing in magnificence any thing that has heretofore been attempted
on any stage.  No expense has been spared to make the opening season one
which shall be worthy the generous patronage which the management feel
sure will crown their efforts.  The management beg leave to state that
they have succeeded in securing the services of a

                            GALAXY OF TALENT!
such as has not been beheld in Rome before.

The performance will commence this evening with a

                         GRAND BROADSWORD COMBAT!
between two young and promising amateurs and a celebrated Parthian
gladiator who has just arrived a prisoner from the Camp of Verus.

This will be followed by a grand moral

                          BATTLE-AX ENGAGEMENT!
between the renowned Valerian (with one hand tied behind him,) and two
gigantic savages from Britain.

After which the renowned Valerian (if he survive,) will fight with the
broad-sword,

                               LEFT HANDED!
against six Sophomores and a Freshman from the Gladiatorial College!

A long series of brilliant engagements will follow, in which the finest
talent of the Empire will take part

After which the celebrated Infant Prodigy known as

                          "THE YOUNG ACHILLES,"
will engage four tiger whelps in combat, armed with no other weapon than
his little spear!

The whole to conclude with a chaste and elegant

                            GENERAL SLAUGHTER!
In which thirteen African Lions and twenty-two Barbarian Prisoners will
war with each other until all are exterminated.

                           BOX OFFICE NOW OPEN.

Dress Circle One Dollar; Children and Servants half price.

An efficient police force will be on hand to preserve order and keep the
wild beasts from leaping the railings and discommoding the audience.

Doors open at 7; performance begins at 8.

POSITIVELY NO FREE LIST.

                          Diodorus Job Press.


It was as singular as it was gratifying that I was also so fortunate as
to find among the rubbish of the arena, a stained and mutilated copy of
the Roman Daily Battle-Ax, containing a critique upon this very
performance.  It comes to hand too late by many centuries to rank as
news, and therefore I translate and publish it simply to show how very
little the general style and phraseology of dramatic criticism has
altered in the ages that have dragged their slow length along since the
carriers laid this one damp and fresh before their Roman patrons:

     "THE OPENING SEASON.--COLISEUM.--Notwithstanding the inclemency of
     the weather, quite a respectable number of the rank and fashion of
     the city assembled last night to witness the debut upon metropolitan
     boards of the young tragedian who has of late been winning such
     golden opinions in the amphitheatres of the provinces.  Some sixty
     thousand persons were present, and but for the fact that the streets
     were almost impassable, it is fair to presume that the house would
     have been full.  His august Majesty, the Emperor Aurelius, occupied
     the imperial box, and was the cynosure of all eyes.  Many
     illustrious nobles and generals of the Empire graced the occasion
     with their presence, and not the least among them was the young
     patrician lieutenant whose laurels, won in the ranks of the
     "Thundering Legion," are still so green upon his brow.  The cheer
     which greeted his entrance was heard beyond the Tiber!

     "The late repairs and decorations add both to the comeliness and the
     comfort of the Coliseum.  The new cushions are a great improvement
     upon the hard marble seats we have been so long accustomed to.  The
     present management deserve well of the public.  They have restored
     to the Coliseum the gilding, the rich upholstery and the uniform
     magnificence which old Coliseum frequenters tell us Rome was so
     proud of fifty years ago.

     "The opening scene last night--the broadsword combat between two
     young amateurs and a famous Parthian gladiator who was sent here a
     prisoner--was very fine.  The elder of the two young gentlemen
     handled his weapon with a grace that marked the possession of
     extraordinary talent.  His feint of thrusting, followed instantly by
     a happily delivered blow which unhelmeted the Parthian, was received
     with hearty applause.  He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded
     stroke, but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know
     that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect.  However,
     he was killed.  His sisters, who were present, expressed
     considerable regret.  His mother left the Coliseum.  The other youth
     maintained the contest with such spirit as to call forth
     enthusiastic bursts of applause.  When at last he fell a corpse, his
     aged mother ran screaming, with hair disheveled and tears streaming
     from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands were clutching at
     the railings of the arena.  She was promptly removed by the police.
     Under the circumstances the woman's conduct was pardonable, perhaps,
     but we suggest that such exhibitions interfere with the decorum
     which should be preserved during the performances, and are highly
     improper in the presence of the Emperor.  The Parthian prisoner
     fought bravely and well; and well he might, for he was fighting for
     both life and liberty.  His wife and children were there to nerve
     his arm with their love, and to remind him of the old home he should
     see again if he conquered.  When his second assailant fell, the
     woman clasped her children to her breast and wept for joy.  But it
     was only a transient happiness.  The captive staggered toward her
     and she saw that the liberty he had earned was earned too late.  He
     was wounded unto death.  Thus the first act closed in a manner which
     was entirely satisfactory.  The manager was called before the
     curtain and returned his thanks for the honor done him, in a speech
     which was replete with wit and humor, and closed by hoping that his
     humble efforts to afford cheerful and instructive entertainment
     would continue to meet with the approbation of the Roman public

     "The star now appeared, and was received with vociferous applause
     and the simultaneous waving of sixty thousand handkerchiefs.  Marcus
     Marcellus Valerian (stage name--his real name is Smith,) is a
     splendid specimen of physical development, and an artist of rare
     merit.  His management of the battle-ax is wonderful.  His gayety
     and his playfulness are irresistible, in his comic parts, and yet
     they are inferior to his sublime conceptions in the grave realm of
     tragedy.  When his ax was describing fiery circles about the heads
     of the bewildered barbarians, in exact time with his springing body
     and his prancing legs, the audience gave way to uncontrollable
     bursts of laughter; but when the back of his weapon broke the skull
     of one and almost in the same instant its edge clove the other's
     body in twain, the howl of enthusiastic applause that shook the
     building, was the acknowledgment of a critical assemblage that he
     was a master of the noblest department of his profession.  If he has
     a fault, (and we are sorry to even intimate that he has,) it is that
     of glancing at the audience, in the midst of the most exciting
     moments of the performance, as if seeking admiration.  The pausing
     in a fight to bow when bouquets are thrown to him is also in bad
     taste.  In the great left-handed combat he appeared to be looking at
     the audience half the time, instead of carving his adversaries; and
     when he had slain all the sophomores and was dallying with the
     freshman, he stooped and snatched a bouquet as it fell, and offered
     it to his adversary at a time when a blow was descending which
     promised favorably to be his death-warrant.  Such levity is proper
     enough in the provinces, we make no doubt, but it ill suits the
     dignity of the metropolis.  We trust our young friend will take
     these remarks in good part, for we mean them solely for his benefit.
     All who know us are aware that although we are at times justly
     severe upon tigers and martyrs, we never intentionally offend
     gladiators.

     "The Infant Prodigy performed wonders.  He overcame his four tiger
     whelps with ease, and with no other hurt than the loss of a portion
     of his scalp.  The General Slaughter was rendered with a
     faithfulness to details which reflects the highest credit upon the
     late participants in it.

     "Upon the whole, last night's performances shed honor not only upon
     the management but upon the city that encourages and sustains such
     wholesome and instructive entertainments.  We would simply suggest
     that the practice of vulgar young boys in the gallery of shying
     peanuts and paper pellets at the tigers, and saying "Hi-yi!" and
     manifesting approbation or dissatisfaction by such observations as
     "Bully for the lion!"  "Go it, Gladdy!"  "Boots!"  "Speech!"  "Take
     a walk round the block!"  and so on, are extremely reprehensible,
     when the Emperor is present, and ought to be stopped by the police.
     Several times last night, when the supernumeraries entered the arena
     to drag out the bodies, the young ruffians in the gallery shouted,
     "Supe! supe!"  and also, "Oh, what a coat!"  and "Why don't you pad
     them shanks?"  and made use of various other remarks expressive of
     derision.  These things are very annoying to the audience.

     "A matinee for the little folks is promised for this afternoon, on
     which occasion several martyrs will be eaten by the tigers.  The
     regular performance will continue every night till further notice.
     Material change of programme every evening.  Benefit of Valerian,
     Tuesday, 29th, if he lives."


I have been a dramatic critic myself, in my time, and I was often
surprised to notice how much more I knew about Hamlet than Forrest did;
and it gratifies me to observe, now, how much better my brethren of
ancient times knew how a broad sword battle ought to be fought than the
gladiators.




CHAPTER XXVII.

So far, good.  If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and
satisfied, surely it is I.  For I have written about the Coliseum, and
the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used
the phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday."  I am the only free white
man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the
expression.

Butchered to make a Roman holiday sounds well for the first seventeen or
eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it
begins to grow tiresome.  I find it in all the books concerning Rome--and
here latterly it reminds me of Judge Oliver.  Oliver was a young lawyer,
fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to
begin life.  He found that country, and our ways of life, there, in those
early days, different from life in New England or Paris.  But he put on a
woollen shirt and strapped a navy revolver to his person, took to the
bacon and beans of the country, and determined to do in Nevada as Nevada
did.  Oliver accepted the situation so completely that although he must
have sorrowed over many of his trials, he never complained--that is, he
never complained but once.  He, two others, and myself, started to the
new silver mines in the Humboldt mountains--he to be Probate Judge of
Humboldt county, and we to mine.  The distance was two hundred miles.  It
was dead of winter.  We bought a two-horse wagon and put eighteen hundred
pounds of bacon, flour, beans, blasting-powder, picks and shovels in it;
we bought two sorry-looking Mexican "plugs," with the hair turned the
wrong way and more corners on their bodies than there are on the mosque
of Omar; we hitched up and started.  It was a dreadful trip.  But Oliver
did not complain.  The horses dragged the wagon two miles from town and
then gave out.  Then we three pushed the wagon seven miles, and Oliver
moved ahead and pulled the horses after him by the bits.  We complained,
but Oliver did not.  The ground was frozen, and it froze our backs while
we slept; the wind swept across our faces and froze our noses.  Oliver
did not complain.  Five days of pushing the wagon by day and freezing by
night brought us to the bad part of the journey--the Forty Mile Desert,
or the Great American Desert, if you please.  Still, this
mildest-mannered man that ever was, had not complained.  We started across
at eight in the morning, pushing through sand that had no bottom; toiling
all day long by the wrecks of a thousand wagons, the skeletons of ten
thousand oxen; by wagon-tires enough to hoop the Washington Monument to
the top, and ox-chains enough to girdle Long Island; by human graves;
with our throats parched always, with thirst; lips bleeding from the
alkali dust; hungry, perspiring, and very, very weary--so weary that when
we dropped in the sand every fifty yards to rest the horses, we could
hardly keep from going to sleep--no complaints from Oliver: none the next
morning at three o'clock, when we got across, tired to death.

Awakened two or three nights afterward at midnight, in a narrow canon, by
the snow falling on our faces, and appalled at the imminent danger of
being "snowed in," we harnessed up and pushed on till eight in the
morning, passed the "Divide" and knew we were saved.  No complaints.
Fifteen days of hardship and fatigue brought us to the end of the two
hundred miles, and the Judge had not complained.  We wondered if any
thing could exasperate him.  We built a Humboldt house.  It is done in
this way.  You dig a square in the steep base of the mountain, and set up
two uprights and top them with two joists.  Then you stretch a great
sheet of "cotton domestic" from the point where the joists join the
hill-side down over the joists to the ground; this makes the roof and the
front of the mansion; the sides and back are the dirt walls your digging
has left.  A chimney is easily made by turning up one corner of the roof.
Oliver was sitting alone in this dismal den, one night, by a sage-brush
fire, writing poetry; he was very fond of digging poetry out of himself
--or blasting it out when it came hard.  He heard an animal's footsteps
close to the roof; a stone or two and some dirt came through and fell by
him.  He grew uneasy and said "Hi!--clear out from there, can't you!"
--from time to time.  But by and by he fell asleep where he sat, and pretty
soon a mule fell down the chimney!  The fire flew in every direction, and
Oliver went over backwards.  About ten nights after that, he recovered
confidence enough to go to writing poetry again.  Again he dozed off to
sleep, and again a mule fell down the chimney.  This time, about half of
that side of the house came in with the mule.  Struggling to get up, the
mule kicked the candle out and smashed most of the kitchen furniture, and
raised considerable dust.  These violent awakenings must have been
annoying to Oliver, but he never complained.  He moved to a mansion on
the opposite side of the canon, because he had noticed the mules did not
go there.  One night about eight o'clock he was endeavoring to finish his
poem, when a stone rolled in--then a hoof appeared below the canvas--then
part of a cow--the after part.  He leaned back in dread, and shouted
"Hooy! hooy! get out of this!"  and the cow struggled manfully--lost
ground steadily--dirt and dust streamed down, and before Oliver could get
well away, the entire cow crashed through on to the table and made a
shapeless wreck of every thing!

Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver complained.  He
said,

"This thing is growing monotonous!"

Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county.  "Butchered to
make a Roman holyday" has grown monotonous to me.

In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo
Buonarotti.  I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that
man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great in
every thing he undertook.  But I do not want Michael Angelo for
breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between
meals.  I like a change, occasionally.  In Genoa, he designed every
thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the
Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of,
from guides, but Michael Angelo?  In Florence, he painted every thing,
designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit
on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone.  In Pisa
he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have
attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the
perpendicular.  He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house
regulations of Civita Vecchia.  But, here--here it is frightful.  He
designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the
uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the
Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the
Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the
Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the
Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing
in it!  Dan said the other day to the guide, "Enough, enough, enough!
Say no more!  Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from
designs by Michael Angelo!"

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled
with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael
Angelo was dead.

But we have taken it out of this guide.  He has marched us through miles
of pictures and sculpture in the vast corridors of the Vatican; and
through miles of pictures and sculpture in twenty other palaces; he has
shown us the great picture in the Sistine Chapel, and frescoes enough to
frescoe the heavens--pretty much all done by Michael Angelo.  So with him
we have played that game which has vanquished so many guides for us
--imbecility and idiotic questions.  These creatures never suspect--they
have no idea of a sarcasm.

He shows us a figure and says: "Statoo brunzo."  (Bronze statue.)

We look at it indifferently and the doctor asks: "By Michael Angelo?"

"No--not know who."

Then he shows us the ancient Roman Forum.  The doctor asks: "Michael
Angelo?"

A stare from the guide.  "No--thousan' year before he is born."

Then an Egyptian obelisk.  Again: "Michael Angelo?"

"Oh, mon dieu, genteelmen!  Zis is two thousan' year before he is born!"

He grows so tired of that unceasing question sometimes, that he dreads to
show us any thing at all.  The wretch has tried all the ways he can think
of to make us comprehend that Michael Angelo is only responsible for the
creation of a part of the world, but somehow he has not succeeded yet.
Relief for overtasked eyes and brain from study and sightseeing is
necessary, or we shall become idiotic sure enough.  Therefore this guide
must continue to suffer.  If he does not enjoy it, so much the worse for
him.  We do.

In this place I may as well jot down a chapter concerning those necessary
nuisances, European guides.  Many a man has wished in his heart he could
do without his guide; but knowing he could not, has wished he could get
some amusement out of him as a remuneration for the affliction of his
society.  We accomplished this latter matter, and if our experience can
be made useful to others they are welcome to it.

Guides know about enough English to tangle every thing up so that a man
can make neither head or tail of it.  They know their story by heart--the
history of every statue, painting, cathedral or other wonder they show
you.  They know it and tell it as a parrot would--and if you interrupt,
and throw them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again.
All their lives long, they are employed in showing strange things to
foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration.  It is human
nature to take delight in exciting admiration.  It is what prompts
children to say "smart" things, and do absurd ones, and in other ways
"show off" when company is present.  It is what makes gossips turn out in
rain and storm to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news.
Think, then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege it
is, every day, to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect
ecstasies of admiration!  He gets so that he could not by any possibility
live in a soberer atmosphere.  After we discovered this, we never went
into ecstasies any more--we never admired any thing--we never showed any
but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the
sublimest wonders a guide had to display.  We had found their weak point.
We have made good use of it ever since.  We have made some of those
people savage, at times, but we have never lost our own serenity.

The doctor asks the questions, generally, because he can keep his
countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, and throw more
imbecility into the tone of his voice than any man that lives.  It comes
natural to him.

The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American party, because
Americans so much wonder, and deal so much in sentiment and emotion
before any relic of Columbus.  Our guide there fidgeted about as if he
had swallowed a spring mattress.  He was full of animation--full of
impatience.  He said:

"Come wis me, genteelmen!--come!  I show you ze letter writing by
Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!--write it wis his own hand!
--come!"

He took us to the municipal palace.  After much impressive fumbling of
keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread
before us.  The guide's eyes sparkled.  He danced about us and tapped the
parchment with his finger:

"What I tell you, genteelmen!  Is it not so?  See! handwriting
Christopher Colombo!--write it himself!"

We looked indifferent--unconcerned.  The doctor examined the document
very deliberately, during a painful pause.--Then he said, without any
show of interest:

"Ah--Ferguson--what--what did you say was the name of the party who wrote
this?"

"Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!"

Another deliberate examination.

"Ah--did he write it himself; or--or how?"

"He write it himself!--Christopher Colombo!  He's own hand-writing, write
by himself!"

Then the doctor laid the document down and said:

"Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could
write better than that."

"But zis is ze great Christo--"

"I don't care who it is!  It's the worst writing I ever saw.  Now you
musn't think you can impose on us because we are strangers.  We are not
fools, by a good deal.  If you have got any specimens of penmanship of
real merit, trot them out!--and if you haven't, drive on!"

We drove on.  The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more
venture.  He had something which he thought would overcome us.  He said:

"Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me!  I show you beautiful, O, magnificent
bust Christopher Colombo!--splendid, grand, magnificent!"

He brought us before the beautiful bust--for it was beautiful--and sprang
back and struck an attitude:

"Ah, look, genteelmen!--beautiful, grand,--bust Christopher Colombo!
--beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!"

The doctor put up his eye-glass--procured for such occasions:

"Ah--what did you say this gentleman's name was?"

"Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!"

"Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo.  Well, what did he
do?"

"Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!"

"Discover America.  No--that statement will hardly wash.  We are just
from America ourselves.  We heard nothing about it.  Christopher Colombo
--pleasant name--is--is he dead?"

"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"

"What did he die of?"

"I do not know!--I can not tell."

"Small-pox, think?"

"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"

"Measles, likely?"

"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."

"Parents living?"

"Im-poseeeble!"

"Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?"

"Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!"

"Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed.
Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"

That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties
of the American joke.

We have made it interesting for this Roman guide.  Yesterday we spent
three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of
curiosities.  We came very near expressing interest, sometimes--even
admiration--it was very hard to keep from it.  We succeeded though.
Nobody else ever did, in the Vatican museums.  The guide was bewildered
--non-plussed.  He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary
things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we
never showed any interest in any thing.  He had reserved what he
considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian
mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps.  He took us there.  He
felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to
him:

"See, genteelmen!--Mummy!  Mummy!"

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name
was?"

"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"

"Yes, yes.  Born here?"

"No! 'Gyptian mummy!"

"Ah, just so.  Frenchman, I presume?"

"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"

"Born in Egypta.  Never heard of Egypta before.  Foreign locality,
likely.  Mummy--mummy.  How calm he is--how self-possessed.  Is, ah--is
he dead?"

"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"

The doctor turned on him savagely:

"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this!  Playing us for
Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn!  Trying to impose
your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a
notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by
George we'll brain you!"

We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman.  However, he has
paid us back, partly, without knowing it.  He came to the hotel this
morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to
describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant.  He
finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics.  The observation
was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a
guide to say.

There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet has failed to
disgust these guides.  We use it always, when we can think of nothing
else to say.  After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out
to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or
broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five,
ten, fifteen minutes--as long as we can hold out, in fact--and then ask:

"Is--is he dead?"

That conquers the serenest of them.  It is not what they are looking for
--especially a new guide.  Our Roman Ferguson is the most patient,
unsuspecting, long-suffering subject we have had yet.  We shall be sorry
to part with him.  We have enjoyed his society very much.  We trust he
has enjoyed ours, but we are harassed with doubts.

We have been in the catacombs.  It was like going down into a very deep
cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it.  The narrow passages
are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pass along, the
hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a
corpse once.  There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or
sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every
sarcophagus.  The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian
era, of course.  Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians
sometimes burrowed to escape persecution.  They crawled out at night to
get food, but remained under cover in the day time.  The priest told us
that St. Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was being
hunted; he went out one day, and the soldiery discovered and shot him to
death with arrows.  Five or six of the early Popes--those who reigned
about sixteen hundred years ago--held their papal courts and advised with
their clergy in the bowels of the earth.  During seventeen years--from
A.D. 235 to A.D. 252--the Popes did not appear above ground.  Four were
raised to the great office during that period.  Four years apiece, or
thereabouts.  It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground
graveyards as places of residence.  One Pope afterward spent his entire
pontificate in the catacombs--eight years.  Another was discovered in
them and murdered in the episcopal chair.  There was no satisfaction in
being a Pope in those days.  There were too many annoyances.  There are
one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow
passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to
the top with scooped graves its entire length.  A careful estimate makes
the length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine
hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions.  We did not go
through all the passages of all the catacombs.  We were very anxious to
do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time
obliged us to give up the idea.  So we only groped through the dismal
labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian.  In the
various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here
the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly
lights.  Think of mass and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns
under ground!

In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of
the most celebrated of the saints.  In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St.
Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles
Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there.  It was also the
scene of a very marvelous thing.

     "Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love
     as to burst his ribs."

I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and
written by "Rev. William H. Neligan, LL.D., M. A., Trinity College,
Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain."
Therefore, I believe it.  Otherwise, I could not.  Under other
circumstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for
dinner.

This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then.  He tells
of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited
only the house--the priest has been dead two hundred years.  He says the
Virgin Mary appeared to this saint.  Then he continues:

     "His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century
     to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization,
     are still preserved in a glass case, and after two centuries the
     heart is still whole.  When the French troops came to Rome, and when
     Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it."

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages,
would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is
seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of
finished education, an LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it
sounds strangely enough.  Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for
Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

The old gentleman's undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare
freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing
days.  Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:

     "In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is
     engraved, 'Regina Coeli laetare Alleluia."  In the sixth century
     Rome was visited by a fearful pestilence.  Gregory the Great urged
     the people to do penance, and a general procession was formed.  It
     was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter's.  As it passed before
     the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of
     heavenly voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn,) Regina
     Coeli, laetare! alleluia! quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia!
     resurrexit sicut dixit; alleluia!"  The Pontiff, carrying in his
     hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and
     is said to have been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the
     astonished people, 'Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia!'  At the same time
     an angel was seen to put up a sword in a scabbard, and the
     pestilence ceased on the same day.  There are four circumstances
     which 'CONFIRM'--[The italics are mine--M. T.]--this miracle: the
     annual procession which takes place in the western church on the
     feast of St Mark; the statue of St. Michael, placed on the mole of
     Adrian, which has since that time been called the Castle of St.
     Angelo; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the Catholic church sings
     during paschal time; and the inscription in the church."




CHAPTER XXVIII.

From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the
Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the
picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent.  We stopped a moment in a
small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St. Michael vanquishing
Satan--a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it
belongs to the reviled "Renaissance," notwithstanding I believe they told
us one of the ancient old masters painted it--and then we descended into
the vast vault underneath.

Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves!  Evidently the old masters had
been at work in this place.  There were six divisions in the apartment,
and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to
itself--and these decorations were in every instance formed of human
bones!  There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there
were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were
quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and
the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving
vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were
made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and
toe-nails.  Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in
these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) and there
was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that
betrayed the artist's love of his labors as well as his schooled ability.
I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this?  And he
said, "We did it"--meaning himself and his brethren up stairs.  I could
see that the old friar took a high pride in his curious show.  We made
him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to guides.

"Who were these people?"

"We--up stairs--Monks of the Capuchin order--my brethren."

"How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?"

"These are the bones of four thousand."

"It took a long time to get enough?"

"Many, many centuries."

"Their different parts are well separated--skulls in one room, legs in
another, ribs in another--there would be stirring times here for a while
if the last trump should blow.  Some of the brethren might get hold of
the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves
limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer
together than they were used to.  You can not tell any of these parties
apart, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, I know many of them."

He put his finger on a skull.  "This was Brother Anselmo--dead three
hundred years--a good man."

He touched another.  "This was Brother Alexander--dead two hundred and
eighty years.  This was Brother Carlo--dead about as long."

Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked reflectively
upon it, after the manner of the grave-digger when he discourses of
Yorick.

"This," he said, "was Brother Thomas.  He was a young prince, the scion
of a proud house that traced its lineage back to the grand old days of
Rome well nigh two thousand years ago.  He loved beneath his estate.  His
family persecuted him; persecuted the girl, as well.  They drove her from
Rome; he followed; he sought her far and wide; he found no trace of her.
He came back and offered his broken heart at our altar and his weary life
to the service of God.  But look you.  Shortly his father died, and
likewise his mother.  The girl returned, rejoicing.  She sought every
where for him whose eyes had used to look tenderly into hers out of this
poor skull, but she could not find him.  At last, in this coarse garb we
wear, she recognized him in the street.  He knew her.  It was too late.
He fell where he stood.  They took him up and brought him here.  He never
spoke afterward.  Within the week he died.  You can see the color of his
hair--faded, somewhat--by this thin shred that clings still to the
temple.  This, [taking up a thigh bone,] was his.  The veins of this
leaf in the decorations over your head, were his finger-joints, a hundred
and fifty years ago."

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by
laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was
as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed.  I
hardly knew whether to smile or shudder.  There are nerves and muscles in
our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort
of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical
technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this
kind.  Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and
such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and
observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to
this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its
ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part
goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion,
another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates
intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this
passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that
lie in the rear of the eye.  Thus, by this simple and beautiful process,
the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps."  Horrible!

I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this
place when they died.  He answered quietly:

"We must all lie here at last."

See what one can accustom himself to.--The reflection that he must some
day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner
is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did
not distress this monk in the least.  I thought he even looked as if he
were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well
on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which
possibly they lacked at present.

Here and there, in ornamental alcoves, stretched upon beds of bones, lay
dead and dried-up monks, with lank frames dressed in the black robes one
sees ordinarily upon priests.  We examined one closely.  The skinny hands
were clasped upon the breast; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the
skull; the skin was brown and sunken; it stretched tightly over the cheek
bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp dead eyes were deep in
the sockets; the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose
being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and
brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a
weird laugh a full century old!

It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can
imagine.  Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke
this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done
laughing at it yet.  At this moment I saw that the old instinct was
strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St. Peter's.
They were trying to keep from asking, "Is--is he dead?"

It makes me dizzy, to think of the Vatican--of its wilderness of statues,
paintings, and curiosities of every description and every age.  The "old
masters" (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there.  I can not write
about the Vatican.  I think I shall never remember any thing I saw there
distinctly but the mummies, and the Transfiguration, by Raphael, and some
other things it is not necessary to mention now.  I shall remember the
Transfiguration partly because it was placed in a room almost by itself;
partly because it is acknowledged by all to be the first oil painting in
the world; and partly because it was wonderfully beautiful.  The colors
are fresh and rich, the "expression," I am told, is fine, the "feeling"
is lively, the "tone" is good, the "depth" is profound, and the width is
about four and a half feet, I should judge.  It is a picture that really
holds one's attention; its beauty is fascinating.  It is fine enough to
be a Renaissance.  A remark I made a while ago suggests a thought--and a
hope.  Is it not possible that the reason I find such charms in this
picture is because it is out of the crazy chaos of the galleries?  If
some of the others were set apart, might not they be beautiful?  If this
were set in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast
galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome?  If, up to
this time, I had seen only one "old master" in each palace, instead of
acres and acres of walls and ceilings fairly papered with them, might I
not have a more civilized opinion of the old masters than I have now?  I
think so.  When I was a school-boy and was to have a new knife, I could
not make up my mind as to which was the prettiest in the show-case, and I
did not think any of them were particularly pretty; and so I chose with a
heavy heart.  But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no
glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see
how handsome it was.  To this day my new hats look better out of the shop
than they did in it with other new hats.  It begins to dawn upon me, now,
that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the
galleries may be uniform beauty after all.  I honestly hope it is, to
others, but certainly it is not to me.  Perhaps the reason I used to
enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there
were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go
through the list.  I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the
Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen
courses.  One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen
frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

There is one thing I am certain of, though.  With all the Michael
Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos and the other old masters, the sublime
history of Rome remains unpainted!  They painted Virgins enough, and
popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost,
and these things are all they did paint.  "Nero fiddling o'er burning
Rome," the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred
thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the coliseum, to
see two skillful gladiators hacking away each others' lives, a tiger
springing upon a kneeling martyr--these and a thousand other matters
which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only in
books--not among the rubbish left by the old masters--who are no more, I
have the satisfaction of informing the public.

They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical scene, and
one only, (of any great historical consequence.) And what was it and why
did they choose it, particularly?  It was the Rape of the Sabines, and
they chose it for the legs and busts.

I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also
--even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and monks looking down in
meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat--and therefore I
drop ill nature to thank the papal government for so jealously guarding
and so industriously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a
stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and unmolested
among them, charging me nothing, and only requiring that I shall behave
myself simply as well as I ought to behave in any other man's house.  I
thank the Holy Father right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty
of happiness.

The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as our
new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics.  In
their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful in art; in
our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics.
When a man invents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and
superior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent to him
that is worth a fortune; when a man digs up an ancient statue in the
Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold coin.  We can make
something of a guess at a man's character by the style of nose he carries
on his face.  The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses,
and they bear a deal of character about them.

The guide showed us a colossal statue of Jupiter, in the Vatican, which
he said looked so damaged and rusty--so like the God of the Vagabonds
--because it had but recently been dug up in the Campagna.  He asked how
much we supposed this Jupiter was worth?  I replied, with intelligent
promptness, that he was probably worth about four dollars--may be four
and a half.  "A hundred thousand dollars!"  Ferguson said.  Ferguson
said, further, that the Pope permits no ancient work of this kind to
leave his dominions.  He appoints a commission to examine discoveries
like this and report upon the value; then the Pope pays the discoverer
one-half of that assessed value and takes the statue.  He said this
Jupiter was dug from a field which had just been bought for thirty-six
thousand dollars, so the first crop was a good one for the new farmer.
I do not know whether Ferguson always tells the truth or not, but I
suppose he does.  I know that an exorbitant export duty is exacted upon
all pictures painted by the old masters, in order to discourage the sale
of those in the private collections.  I am satisfied, also, that genuine
old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and
most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm.  I
proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it
was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it
considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded
not to take it.

I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it:

"Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth TO MEN OF GOOD WILL!"  It is
not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic and human nature.

This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group at the side
of the 'scala santa', church of St. John Lateran, the Mother and Mistress
of all the Catholic churches of the world.  The group represents the
Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne.
Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne.
The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to
Constantine.  No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of
little importance any where in Rome; but an inscription below says,
"Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to king Charles."  It
does not say, "Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father,
for this boon," but "Blessed Peter, give it us."

In all seriousness--without meaning to be frivolous--without meaning to
be irreverent, and more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous,--I
state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I
have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:

First--"The Mother of God"--otherwise the Virgin Mary.

Second--The Deity.

Third--Peter.

Fourth--Some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and martyrs.

Fifth--Jesus Christ the Saviour--(but always as an infant in arms.)

I may be wrong in this--my judgment errs often, just as is the case with
other men's--but it is my judgment, be it good or bad.

Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me.  There are
no "Christ's Churches" in Rome, and no "Churches of the Holy Ghost," that
I can discover.  There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth
of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter.  There are so
many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of
affixes, if I understand the matter rightly.  Then we have churches of
St. Louis; St. Augustine; St. Agnes; St. Calixtus; St. Lorenzo in Lucina;
St. Lorenzo in Damaso; St. Cecilia; St. Athanasius; St. Philip Neri; St.
Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are
not familiar in the world--and away down, clear out of the list of the
churches, comes a couple of hospitals: one of them is named for the
Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!

Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling
wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the
dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries--have brooded over them by
day and dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed moldering away
ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment
to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and
"restored" with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and
set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble
their names on forever and forevermore.

But the surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop.  I wished to
write a real "guide-book" chapter on this fascinating city, but I could
not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop
--there was every thing to choose from, and yet no choice.  I have drifted
along hopelessly for a hundred pages of manuscript without knowing where
to commence.  I will not commence at all.  Our passports have been
examined.  We will go to Naples.




CHAPTER XXIX.

The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples--quarantined.  She has
been here several days and will remain several more.  We that came by
rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune.  Of course no one is allowed
to go on board the ship, or come ashore from her.  She is a prison, now.
The passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out from
under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city--and in swearing.
Think of ten days of this sort of pastime!--We go out every day in a boat
and request them to come ashore.  It soothes them.  We lie ten steps from
the ship and tell them how splendid the city is; and how much better the
hotel fare is here than any where else in Europe; and how cool it is; and
what frozen continents of ice cream there are; and what a time we are
having cavorting about the country and sailing to the islands in the Bay.
This tranquilizes them.

                           ASCENT OF VESUVIUS.

I shall remember our trip to Vesuvius for many a day--partly because of
its sight-seeing experiences, but chiefly on account of the fatigue of
the journey.  Two or three of us had been resting ourselves among the
tranquil and beautiful scenery of the island of Ischia, eighteen miles
out in the harbor, for two days; we called it "resting," but I do not
remember now what the resting consisted of, for when we got back to
Naples we had not slept for forty-eight hours.  We were just about to go
to bed early in the evening, and catch up on some of the sleep we had
lost, when we heard of this Vesuvius expedition.  There was to be eight
of us in the party, and we were to leave Naples at midnight.  We laid in
some provisions for the trip, engaged carriages to take us to
Annunciation, and then moved about the city, to keep awake, till twelve.
We got away punctually, and in the course of an hour and a half arrived
at the town of Annunciation.  Annunciation is the very last place under
the sun.  In other towns in Italy the people lie around quietly and wait
for you to ask them a question or do some overt act that can be charged
for--but in Annunciation they have lost even that fragment of delicacy;
they seize a lady's shawl from a chair and hand it to her and charge a
penny; they open a carriage door, and charge for it--shut it when you get
out, and charge for it; they help you to take off a duster--two cents;
brush your clothes and make them worse than they were before--two cents;
smile upon you--two cents; bow, with a lick-spittle smirk, hat in hand
--two cents; they volunteer all information, such as that the mules will
arrive presently--two cents--warm day, sir--two cents--take you four
hours to make the ascent--two cents.  And so they go.  They crowd you
--infest you--swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look
sneaking and mean, and obsequious.  There is no office too degrading for
them to perform, for money.  I have had no opportunity to find out any
thing about the upper classes by my own observation, but from what I hear
said about them I judge that what they lack in one or two of the bad
traits the canaille have, they make up in one or two others that are
worse.  How the people beg!--many of them very well dressed, too.

I said I knew nothing against the upper classes by personal observation.
I must recall it!  I had forgotten.  What I saw their bravest and their
fairest do last night, the lowest multitude that could be scraped up out
of the purlieus of Christendom would blush to do, I think.  They
assembled by hundreds, and even thousands, in the great Theatre of San
Carlo, to do--what?  Why, simply, to make fun of an old woman--to deride,
to hiss, to jeer at an actress they once worshipped, but whose beauty is
faded now and whose voice has lost its former richness.  Every body spoke
of the rare sport there was to be.  They said the theatre would be
crammed, because Frezzolini was going to sing.  It was said she could not
sing well, now, but then the people liked to see her, anyhow.  And so we
went.  And every time the woman sang they hissed and laughed--the whole
magnificent house--and as soon as she left the stage they called her on
again with applause.  Once or twice she was encored five and six times in
succession, and received with hisses when she appeared, and discharged
with hisses and laughter when she had finished--then instantly encored
and insulted again!  And how the high-born knaves enjoyed it!
White-kidded gentlemen and ladies laughed till the tears came, and
clapped their hands in very ecstacy when that unhappy old woman would
come meekly out for the sixth time, with uncomplaining patience, to meet
a storm of hisses!  It was the cruelest exhibition--the most wanton, the
most unfeeling.  The singer would have conquered an audience of American
rowdies by her brave, unflinching tranquillity (for she answered encore
after encore, and smiled and bowed pleasantly, and sang the best she
possibly could, and went bowing off, through all the jeers and hisses,
without ever losing countenance or temper:) and surely in any other land
than Italy her sex and her helplessness must have been an ample
protection to her--she could have needed no other.  Think what a
multitude of small souls were crowded into that theatre last night.  If
the manager could have filled his theatre with Neapolitan souls alone,
without the bodies, he could not have cleared less than ninety millions
of dollars.  What traits of character must a man have to enable him to
help three thousand miscreants to hiss, and jeer, and laugh at one
friendless old woman, and shamefully humiliate her?  He must have all
the vile, mean traits there are.  My observation persuades me (I do not
like to venture beyond my own personal observation,) that the upper
classes of Naples possess those traits of character.  Otherwise they may
be very good people; I can not say.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

In this city of Naples, they believe in and support one of the
wretchedest of all the religious impostures one can find in Italy--the
miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius.  Twice a year the
priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this vial
of clotted blood and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid
--and every day for eight days, this dismal farce is repeated, while the
priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition.  The
first day, the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes--the church is
crammed, then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around:
after that it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker, every day,
as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few
dozens present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes.

And here, also, they used to have a grand procession, of priests,
citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the City
Government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna--a
stuffed and painted image, like a milliner's dummy--whose hair
miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months.  They still
kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago.  It
was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable
effigy, and the ceremony of the public barbering of her was always
carried out with the greatest possible eclat and display--the more the
better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the
crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced--but at last a
day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the
City Government stopped the Madonna's annual show.

There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans--two of the silliest
possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully
believed, and the other half either believed also or else said nothing
about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture.  I am
very well satisfied to think the whole population believed in those poor,
cheap miracles--a people who want two cents every time they bow to you,
and who abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as they intend to
take, but if you give them what they first demand, they feel ashamed of
themselves for aiming so low, and immediately ask more.  When money is to
be paid and received, there is always some vehement jawing and
gesticulating about it.  One can not buy and pay for two cents' worth of
clams without trouble and a quarrel.  One "course," in a two-horse
carriage, costs a franc--that is law--but the hackman always demands
more, on some pretence or other, and if he gets it he makes a new demand.
It is said that a stranger took a one-horse carriage for a course
--tariff, half a franc.  He gave the man five francs, by way of experiment.
He demanded more, and received another franc.  Again he demanded more,
and got a franc--demanded more, and it was refused.  He grew vehement
--was again refused, and became noisy.  The stranger said, "Well, give me
the seven francs again, and I will see what I can do"--and when he got
them, he handed the hackman half a franc, and he immediately asked for
two cents to buy a drink with.  It may be thought that I am prejudiced.

Perhaps I am.  I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an hour and a
half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started
sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule's tail who
pretended to be driving the brute along, but was really holding on and
getting himself dragged up instead.  I made slow headway at first, but I
began to get dissatisfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to
hold my mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, and so
I discharged him.  I got along faster then.

We had one magnificent picture of Naples from a high point on the
mountain side.  We saw nothing but the gas lamps, of course--two-thirds
of a circle, skirting the great Bay--a necklace of diamonds glinting up
through the darkness from the remote distance--less brilliant than the
stars overhead, but more softly, richly beautiful--and over all the great
city the lights crossed and recrossed each other in many and many a
sparkling line and curve.  And back of the town, far around and abroad
over the miles of level campagna, were scattered rows, and circles, and
clusters of lights, all glowing like so many gems, and marking where a
score of villages were sleeping.  About this time, the fellow who was
hanging on to the tail of the horse in front of me and practicing all
sorts of unnecessary cruelty upon the animal, got kicked some fourteen
rods, and this incident, together with the fairy spectacle of the lights
far in the distance, made me serenely happy, and I was glad I started to
Vesuvius.


                  ASCENT OF MOUNT VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

This subject will be excellent matter for a chapter, and tomorrow or next
day I will write it.




CHAPTER XXX.

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

"See Naples and die."  Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die
after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a
little differently.  To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from
far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.
At that distance its dingy buildings looked white--and so, rank on rank
of balconies, windows and roofs, they piled themselves up from the blue
ocean till the colossal castle of St. Elmo topped the grand white pyramid
and gave the picture symmetry, emphasis and completeness.  And when its
lilies turned to roses--when it blushed under the sun's first kiss--it
was beautiful beyond all description.  One might well say, then, "See
Naples and die."  The frame of the picture was charming, itself.  In
front, the smooth sea--a vast mosaic of many colors; the lofty islands
swimming in a dreamy haze in the distance; at our end of the city the
stately double peak of Vesuvius, and its strong black ribs and seams of
lava stretching down to the limitless level campagna--a green carpet that
enchants the eye and leads it on and on, past clusters of trees, and
isolated houses, and snowy villages, until it shreds out in a fringe of
mist and general vagueness far away.  It is from the Hermitage, there on
the side of Vesuvius, that one should "see Naples and die."

But do not go within the walls and look at it in detail.  That takes away
some of the romance of the thing.  The people are filthy in their habits,
and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells.
There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these
Neapolitans are.  But they have good reason to be.  The cholera generally
vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand,
before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man
dies.  The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty
decent.

The streets are generally about wide enough for one wagon, and how they
do swarm with people!  It is Broadway repeated in every street, in every
court, in every alley!  Such masses, such throngs, such multitudes of
hurrying, bustling, struggling humanity!  We never saw the like of it,
hardly even in New York, I think.  There are seldom any sidewalks, and
when there are, they are not often wide enough to pass a man on without
caroming on him.  So everybody walks in the street--and where the street
is wide enough, carriages are forever dashing along.  Why a thousand
people are not run over and crippled every day is a mystery that no man
can solve.  But if there is an eighth wonder in the world, it must be the
dwelling-houses of Naples.  I honestly believe a good majority of them
are a hundred feet high!  And the solid brick walls are seven feet
through.  You go up nine flights of stairs before you get to the "first"
floor.  No, not nine, but there or thereabouts.  There is a little
bird-cage of an iron railing in front of every window clear away up, up,
up, among the eternal clouds, where the roof is, and there is always
somebody looking out of every window--people of ordinary size looking
out from the first floor, people a shade smaller from the second, people
that look a little smaller yet from the third--and from thence upward
they grow smaller and smaller by a regularly graduated diminution, till
the folks in the topmost windows seem more like birds in an uncommonly
tall martin-box than any thing else.  The perspective of one of these
narrow cracks of streets, with its rows of tall houses stretching away
till they come together in the distance like railway tracks; its
clothes-lines crossing over at all altitudes and waving their bannered
raggedness over the swarms of people below; and the white-dressed women
perched in balcony railings all the way from the pavement up to the
heavens--a perspective like that is really worth going into Neapolitan
details to see.


                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

Naples, with its immediate suburbs, contains six hundred and twenty-five
thousand inhabitants, but I am satisfied it covers no more ground than an
American city of one hundred and fifty thousand.  It reaches up into the
air infinitely higher than three American cities, though, and there is
where the secret of it lies.  I will observe here, in passing, that the
contrasts between opulence and poverty, and magnificence and misery, are
more frequent and more striking in Naples than in Paris even.  One must
go to the Bois de Boulogne to see fashionable dressing, splendid
equipages and stunning liveries, and to the Faubourg St. Antoine to see
vice, misery, hunger, rags, dirt--but in the thoroughfares of Naples
these things are all mixed together.  Naked boys of nine years and the
fancy-dressed children of luxury; shreds and tatters, and brilliant
uniforms; jackass-carts and state-carriages; beggars, Princes and
Bishops, jostle each other in every street.  At six o'clock every
evening, all Naples turns out to drive on the 'Riviere di Chiaja',
(whatever that may mean;) and for two hours one may stand there and see
the motliest and the worst mixed procession go by that ever eyes beheld.
Princes (there are more Princes than policemen in Naples--the city is
infested with them)--Princes who live up seven flights of stairs and
don't own any principalities, will keep a carriage and go hungry; and
clerks, mechanics, milliners and strumpets will go without their dinners
and squander the money on a hack-ride in the Chiaja; the rag-tag and
rubbish of the city stack themselves up, to the number of twenty or
thirty, on a rickety little go-cart hauled by a donkey not much bigger
than a cat, and they drive in the Chiaja; Dukes and bankers, in sumptuous
carriages and with gorgeous drivers and footmen, turn out, also, and so
the furious procession goes.  For two hours rank and wealth, and
obscurity and poverty clatter along side by side in the wild procession,
and then go home serene, happy, covered with glory!

I was looking at a magnificent marble staircase in the King's palace, the
other day, which, it was said, cost five million francs, and I suppose it
did cost half a million, may be.  I felt as if it must be a fine thing to
live in a country where there was such comfort and such luxury as this.
And then I stepped out musing, and almost walked over a vagabond who was
eating his dinner on the curbstone--a piece of bread and a bunch of
grapes.  When I found that this mustang was clerking in a fruit
establishment (he had the establishment along with him in a basket,) at
two cents a day, and that he had no palace at home where he lived, I lost
some of my enthusiasm concerning the happiness of living in Italy.

This naturally suggests to me a thought about wages here.  Lieutenants in
the army get about a dollar a day, and common soldiers a couple of cents.
I only know one clerk--he gets four dollars a month.  Printers get six
dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets
thirteen.

To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally
makes him a bloated aristocrat.  The airs he puts on are insufferable.

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise.  In Paris
you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin's best kid gloves; gloves of
about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen.  You
pay five and six dollars apiece for fine linen shirts in Paris; here and
in Leghorn you pay two and a half.  In Marseilles you pay forty dollars
for a first-class dress coat made by a good tailor, but in Leghorn you
can get a full dress suit for the same money.  Here you get handsome
business suits at from ten to twenty dollars, and in Leghorn you can get
an overcoat for fifteen dollars that would cost you seventy in New York.
Fine kid boots are worth eight dollars in Marseilles and four dollars
here.  Lyons velvets rank higher in America than those of Genoa.  Yet the
bulk of Lyons velvets you buy in the States are made in Genoa and
imported into Lyons, where they receive the Lyons stamp and are then
exported to America.  You can buy enough velvet in Genoa for twenty-five
dollars to make a five hundred dollar cloak in New York--so the ladies
tell me.  Of course these things bring me back, by a natural and easy
transition, to the

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

And thus the wonderful Blue Grotto is suggested to me.  It is situated on
the Island of Capri, twenty-two miles from Naples.  We chartered a little
steamer and went out there.  Of course, the police boarded us and put us
through a health examination, and inquired into our politics, before they
would let us land.  The airs these little insect Governments put on are
in the last degree ridiculous.  They even put a policeman on board of our
boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.
They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose.  It was worth
stealing.  The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide,
and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff--the sea-wall.  You
enter in small boats--and a tight squeeze it is, too.  You can not go in
at all when the tide is up.  Once within, you find yourself in an arched
cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty
wide, and about seventy high.  How deep it is no man knows.  It goes down
to the bottom of the ocean.  The waters of this placid subterranean lake
are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined.  They are as
transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest
sky that ever bent over Italy.  No tint could be more ravishing, no
lustre more superb.  Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny
bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical
fires.  Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver,
tinted with blue.  Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an
armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.

Then we went to Ischia, but I had already been to that island and tired
myself to death "resting" a couple of days and studying human villainy,
with the landlord of the Grande Sentinelle for a model.  So we went to
Procida, and from thence to Pozzuoli, where St. Paul landed after he
sailed from Samos.  I landed at precisely the same spot where St. Paul
landed, and so did Dan and the others.  It was a remarkable coincidence.
St. Paul preached to these people seven days before he started to Rome.

Nero's Baths, the ruins of Baiae, the Temple of Serapis; Cumae, where the
Cumaen Sybil interpreted the oracles, the Lake Agnano, with its ancient
submerged city still visible far down in its depths--these and a hundred
other points of interest we examined with critical imbecility, but the
Grotto of the Dog claimed our chief attention, because we had heard and
read so much about it.  Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane
and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has
held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the
place.  The dog dies in a minute and a half--a chicken instantly.  As a
general thing, strangers who crawl in there to sleep do not get up until
they are called.  And then they don't either.  The stranger that ventures
to sleep there takes a permanent contract.  I longed to see this grotto.
I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and
time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him.  We reached the
grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the
experiments.  But now, an important difficulty presented itself.  We had
no dog.

                     ASCENT OF VESUVIUS--CONTINUED.

At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the
sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent had been pretty abrupt.  For
the next two miles the road was a mixture--sometimes the ascent was
abrupt and sometimes it was not: but one characteristic it possessed all
the time, without failure--without modification--it was all
uncompromisingly and unspeakably infamous.  It was a rough, narrow trail,
and led over an old lava flow--a black ocean which was tumbled into a
thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and
barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of
miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and
twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines,
trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird
shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching
waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action,
of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead
and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed, and
left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!

Finally we stood in a level, narrow valley (a valley that had been
created by the terrific march of some old time irruption) and on either
hand towered the two steep peaks of Vesuvius.  The one we had to climb
--the one that contains the active volcano--seemed about eight hundred or
one thousand feet high, and looked almost too straight-up-and-down for
any man to climb, and certainly no mule could climb it with a man on his
back.  Four of these native pirates will carry you to the top in a sedan
chair, if you wish it, but suppose they were to slip and let you fall,
--is it likely that you would ever stop rolling?  Not this side of
eternity, perhaps.  We left the mules, sharpened our finger-nails, and
began the ascent I have been writing about so long, at twenty minutes to
six in the morning.  The path led straight up a rugged sweep of loose
chunks of pumice-stone, and for about every two steps forward we took, we
slid back one.  It was so excessively steep that we had to stop, every
fifty or sixty steps, and rest a moment.  To see our comrades, we had to
look very nearly straight up at those above us, and very nearly straight
down at those below.  We stood on the summit at last--it had taken an
hour and fifteen minutes to make the trip.

What we saw there was simply a circular crater--a circular ditch, if you
please--about two hundred feet deep, and four or five hundred feet wide,
whose inner wall was about half a mile in circumference.  In the centre
of the great circus ring thus formed, was a torn and ragged upheaval a
hundred feet high, all snowed over with a sulphur crust of many and many
a brilliant and beautiful color, and the ditch inclosed this like the
moat of a castle, or surrounded it as a little river does a little
island, if the simile is better.  The sulphur coating of that island was
gaudy in the extreme--all mingled together in the richest confusion were
red, blue, brown, black, yellow, white--I do not know that there was a
color, or shade of a color, or combination of colors, unrepresented--and
when the sun burst through the morning mists and fired this tinted
magnificence, it topped imperial Vesuvius like a jeweled crown!

The crater itself--the ditch--was not so variegated in coloring, but yet,
in its softness, richness, and unpretentious elegance, it was more
charming, more fascinating to the eye.  There was nothing "loud" about
its well-bred and well-creased look.  Beautiful?  One could stand and
look down upon it for a week without getting tired of it.  It had the
semblance of a pleasant meadow, whose slender grasses and whose velvety
mosses were frosted with a shining dust, and tinted with palest green
that deepened gradually to the darkest hue of the orange leaf, and
deepened yet again into gravest brown, then faded into orange, then into
brightest gold, and culminated in the delicate pink of a new-blown rose.
Where portions of the meadow had sunk, and where other portions had been
broken up like an ice-floe, the cavernous openings of the one, and the
ragged upturned edges exposed by the other, were hung with a lace-work of
soft-tinted crystals of sulphur that changed their deformities into
quaint shapes and figures that were full of grace and beauty.

The walls of the ditch were brilliant with yellow banks of sulphur and
with lava and pumice-stone of many colors.  No fire was visible any
where, but gusts of sulphurous steam issued silently and invisibly from a
thousand little cracks and fissures in the crater, and were wafted to our
noses with every breeze.  But so long as we kept our nostrils buried in
our handkerchiefs, there was small danger of suffocation.

Some of the boys thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them
on fire, and so achieved the glory of lighting their cigars by the flames
of Vesuvius, and others cooked eggs over fissures in the rocks and were
happy.

The view from the summit would have been superb but for the fact that the
sun could only pierce the mists at long intervals.  Thus the glimpses we
had of the grand panorama below were only fitful and unsatisfactory.

                               THE DESCENT.

The descent of the mountain was a labor of only four minutes.  Instead of
stalking down the rugged path we ascended, we chose one which was bedded
knee-deep in loose ashes, and ploughed our way with prodigious strides
that would almost have shamed the performance of him of the seven-league
boots.

The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty
volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it.
It was well worth it.

It is said that during one of the grand eruptions of Vesuvius it
discharged massy rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air,
its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the
firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the
decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea!  I will take the
ashes at a moderate discount, if any one will take the thirty miles of
smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole
story by myself.





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