It is an amusing journey from Firenze to Rome. The Apennines, no longer imposing to one familiar with the Alps, spin with you; arches that you see above you go round and return nearer to you; then, swinging round once more, you are upon them, and finally above them.

A young Jesuit sat in the corner of the carriage opposite to my corner. On my first sight of him his eyes were closed, and his lips were moving as one sees in the low muttering delirium of the semi-conscious sick. In due time he took out a breviary, counted the beads on a string that hung from him, played with them as a child with sugar-plums, and pursued the silent muttering, as if reading a delirious dream. This went on for a fatiguing length of time. Being unaccustomed to religious manners, I felt sorry, because I thought the good man was fatuously disposed, when suddenly he, having counted his last bead, shut his book joyfully, and his intellect seemed restored.

He addressed me in sweet Italian, in la lingua Toscana in bocca Romana. We were gliding alongside the lake of Perugia, and from that time he did not cease to instruct me until our journey’s end.

A Jesuit is never wanting in knowledge, whatever a priest may be.

If we swept by a ruined bridge, he told me to what period of history it pertained, and to what event it owed its smashed condition; if we came to a hillside town, I heard from him its name, and for what it had been famed. So, as if school itself had become a delicious holiday, we passed by Perugia and Assisi and Terni, and other of these storied towns.

Italians tell one what they are. He was a Jesuit; he had found shelter among the nobles of Florence, who loved their old Government and hated their new, and who were generous to the clergy who had been turned out of their monasteries, then all empty. But a few months of employment awaited him; the libraries had been removed from the monasteries to the capital, and he had been summoned to assist in their arrangement.

“Non mi piace la vostra Roma,” said Victor Emmanuel, after his first session there as king. It gave great offence; yet must I humbly repeat his words on my own account.

I have imagined ancient Rome; I have seen a picture of it restored in all its grandeur. What does it look like now? A grand city that had been lifted bodily from the seven hills and valleys into the air, and let to fall, smashed in pieces, like a service of crockery.

“… Non mi piace la vostra Roma” were the words of the king, so I may venture to repeat them.

The place is very disappointing at first, but they say it grows upon you. The misfortune is that it is called Rome instead of Popesburg—ancient Rome is squeezed out; but Popesburg is a picturesque old Italian town, interspersed scantily with remains yet older. The Pantheon stands up complete on its old pillars, only stripped of all its outside marble; then, near Santa Maria in Cosmedia, there is a lovely little temple of Vesta, encircled by its Corinthian marble columns, but its surroundings are of mud and slush at this hour.

These interspersed antiquities, of which there are many in the form of columns, with a pediment sadly bruised and broken through age and fight, are the most picturesque of the remains. Where they turn up as forums, the wreck is exhibited some twelve or twenty feet deep in large walled-in pits, like outdoor museums—bits of columns arranged in old order, like skittles, ready to be bowled over again. Perhaps the most curious thing of all is to see modern Rome from the bridges, itself decaying and crumbling, when the ancient city has already crumbled and decayed.

During the last eight hundred years there has been a sort of rebuilding, but it is not the urbs recondita of Augustus, whose Pantheon is still standing to connect the present with the past. Why, the columns of that temple, as I paced them, measured a diameter of eight feet! Where other temples had stood, churches have sprung up; and where the sherds of foundations remained, there are palaces now; but the palace of the CÆsars is empty space; the Forum is a skeleton exhumed for show. The gaps will never be filled again; Rome will remain a ruin; its architectural condition only such as one might conceive of Hades, where Hercules wanders still in disaffection. How unlike its later contemporary, Venice, that has been preserved, perfect, under a blue-glass sky!

The antiquarian genius is always very busy at Rome, because its exhumations supply food to greedy minds bent on recovering the earliest history of our race, as if the future of mankind would one day turn up engraved on tiles. These sort of enthusiasts do not comprehend that the further they go back, the greater grows the historic lie, and that as far as it concerns true knowledge, their labours are utterly fruitless. Antiquarians and geologists are both earth-searchers; but does the ruin-grubber deem himself on a par with the inspector of organic remains?

I took my view of the Transfiguration of Rome, moulded by the avenger in a way no man could paint or model. I wanted to see the other Transfiguration, which art-genius pronounced the finest picture in the known world, as if it were as great a miracle as the one it represents.

Rome is rich in metamorphoses, besides being one itself: the fine bronze statue in the cathedral, a figure of Jupiter, has been transfigured into Peter, who reigns in its stead.

But the most valued Transfiguration of all is Raphael’s: it has a fault of the first magnitude, a ghastly fault that hands it over to the ruins.

The great painter was but a fragmentary genius, or he would not have made that hideous epileptic the conspicuous rival of Christ. Our eyes join the eyes of the painted crowd in looking at a sight so loathsome, and that in so healing a Presence.

But let us be thankful: Raphael has left us his mighty cartoons, his portraits, his Madonnas.

There were other treasures of art in the Vatican, notably the Laocoon, that I desired earnestly to examine. I had need to speak of it in my “sculptured poem,” but could draw no inspiration from it in the copy at Florence. Strange to say, though the copy and the original are so alike, the moment I saw this last its life passed into me. I required also to look at the Apollo Belvidere, but found it to be only Lord Chesterfield during his apotheosis.

In the Doge’s palace in Venice there is a striking picture of Ariadne. I knew there was a sculpture of the same in the Vatican gallery, a place which may be called an indoor street of marbles: this, too, I found. Then I made my way to the very end of this Via di Scolpitura, where stood the Athlete. How long I stayed with my eyes and heart upon it, I know not; but while looking at that most natural of all marble wonders, every Apollo had disappeared from mythology, from this world itself.

But now to the Barberini Palace, to visit the apocryphal portrait of Beatrice Cenci. We could kiss the very canvas did we not know that her tragedy is but a myth. She breathed into Shelley her tragic breath, so we all go to see the familiar face; and, hard by the Ghetto, the Cenci palace, too. But this, how changed. It was let out to the dirtier class by its then owner—a cardinal, too; and I saw that the grand entrance at the back was used for a dust-heap. All the property of a cardinal, all going to decay; yet is there a cleanly church opposite, built at the cost of a Cenci.

It is with some loss of equanimity that one thinks of Roma and finds that its citizens are proud of it in its humbled and chastised condition. It is like the worn-out pedigree of a once illustrious name. They may be proud of their tombs, for one is of the Scipios, of Seneca another; but their ruins are a disgrace, the work of their avenging, conquering foes, such as Guiscard in the eleventh century, who battered down every wall that it might never be defended again. But they are proud of their ruins! Their Forum, a bit of Palmyra; their Coliseum, a broken cup; their ghost of the palace of the CÆsars, its own burial-place; of their Baths of Caracalla, an artificial desert; of their Theatre of Marcellus, in one of the fine arches of which I saw a flourishing blacksmith’s forge, blazing to the memory of a glorious past.

Imagine the Florentines proud of their Palazzo Vecchio, with its mighty tower on the pavement; imagine the Venetians proud of a once Doge’s palace, the magnificent court where it was with only a wall or two standing, and the giant’s staircase, like Goliath, in the dust!

There are some old words that one likes better than the new ones: the name of the gate, now del Popolo, does not, to me, sound so Æsthetically as Flaminia, its ancient name! Yet it took centuries to turn the one into the other for the worst, with the patriotic intention of being for the best! The popes do not pretend to be CÆsars, like the latter-day Napoleon, with his Dutch physiognomy; but they have now and then done their best to rebuild. Pius VII., so heavily handicapped by the Corsican parvenu, did much to lay the saddened ghost of CÆsarean times, by beautifying the Piazza del Popolo. Through him, Augustus might have looked on it again with composure. Its semicircular form, its fountains, its statues, would pacify the imperial rebuilder.

From the Porta del Popolo to the Capitol is a line ending in a steep ascent, one of the seven hills, the Capitoline: this long street is the backbone of Rome, from which its ribs more or less radiate. It is not gigantic with a broad stride, like the Via Larga (now Cavoura) at Florence; it is not beautiful, like the Genoese Via Nuova; it is more of a Bond Street, but a long one, with some fine buildings, and, as all long streets should be, it is cut in half by a good big square, the Piazza Colonna. Here we stumble against a column, look up, and for a minute or two we are in ancient Rome. It was set up by Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, a man of fight, in order that his victories might not be forgotten. Its inside is hollow, except that it has steps up it, nearly two hundred—for we always count. We go up these steps, full of the Roman sensation, when, lo, and behold! (En et ecce! as Marcus Aurelius would now say with a stare), St. Paul has got up before us; has been turned into bronze, and gilded! Still there is something in it; he has made conquests over the Germans better than those of Marcus, so we may let him stay at the top, and be thankful; odd as it seems.

The obelisk which we come upon in the square of Monte Clitorio, was brought to Rome by Augustus, as Cleopatra’s Needle was brought to London by Sir Erasmus Wilson, Kt., F.R.C.S.; the one set up in the Campus Martius, the other on the Thames Embankment. That of Augustus got buried, and by a sort of lucky miracle was raised again by the sixth of the Pius popes.

But now stop a little longer than usual: this is the Palazzo Doria Pamfili.

One wants all the time to get up to the top of the Capitoline Hill; so, seeing a tremendous flight of steps, one goes upstairs. The things stuck in one’s way to arrest one’s progress towards the square at the top are first of all two lions. These, notwithstanding they are created out of black granite, and are therefore really dumb animals, unlike live lions, spout water at you, by way of making themselves heard: and this Keats should have done into the public ear, instead of letting his name be writ in the water itself.

But even now we cannot leave the last step to the Campidoglio; we are arrested by Castor and Pollux, two giants. We then look with much interest to see what sort of horses theirs were, and they rise in our estimation, tall as they are already, when we find that their nags are of the true Arab breed, thick-necked and straight-backed, not a bit like the flesh and blood abnormals of Newmarket Heath.

The Campidoglio is a fine square, and one has at least the satisfaction of feeling that the hill it surmounts is a part of ancient Rome. But where is the old Temple of Jupiter? we ask.

No answer.

However, here is something Roman: it is the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius—a survival.

There are other things up here of the Antonine brand, to show that Rome was once Rome; but there is such a variety of job lots here, all curiosities, swept by time into heaps, that the best course is not to puzzle one’s brains about them.

I, for one, wanted to see three things in this Capitol, still so called, but not recalling anything that existed under that name before Boniface IX. took to rebuilding. It is a museum containing a good deal of the private property of the old Roman lords, which belongs now to their natural heirs, and farthest off of kin, the people.

These people had ancestors who were the hereditary property of some seventy or eighty emperors. They are now owners of all these emperors’ heads, and of the heads of all these emperors’ families, which they keep on shelves in their Capitol museum, in a room that makes a sort of Golgotha.

At last we come upon the Dying Gladiator, one of the three figures I was in search of. We have all seen its shadow in casts and engravings; this is the unique original.

Another figure that I had occasion to see was La Bacchante, a marble figure, which is locked up and only shown on the payment of a fee; it is a most expressive statue.

These two figures I have delineated in my “sculptured poem” of Michael Angelo.

A third figure, the Faun, I readily found. It is a celebrated statue, and I desired to ascertain whether the ears were formed correctly; but they were not. In accordance with anatomical structure they should have pointed backwards, but they are erect. Some would say, “Yes; for the ears of lower animals at times are pricked.” But I say (it is in “Valdarno”), the end of all art is repose.

In the human ear may be seen a small rudiment of the elongated ear; it is so placed that, if redeveloped, it would point posteriorly, after the fashion of the lower animals, to the cervix, beneath the occipital bone.

Was it prophetic that, in digging the foundations of the Capitol, when it was first designed, a skull was turned out (caput), whence the name.

Nevertheless, the Capitol was founded upon a rock, though it was the Tarpeian.