IN the Piazza Barberini is the Fountain of the Triton by Bernini, one of the least objectionable of his minor works. A chubby, sonsie fellow is the young Triton, embrowned by wind, water and sun, seated in a shell, supported by four dolphins and blowing into a conch with a single eye to business that should, but does not act as a salutary example to the tribe of beggars, models and gossips who congregate around him.

From the right of the spacious square leads the street on which stands the Palace of the Barberini,—I had nearly written the Bee-hive, so intimate grows the association between the powerful family and these busy stingers to one who has studied the Barberini monuments, erected by them while living, and to them when defunct. I have consistently and resolutely refrained, thus far, from plying my readers with art-criticisms—fore-ordained to be skipped—of pictures and statues which do not interest those who have never seen them, and fail to satisfy those who have. I mention the picture of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni because it is the most wonderful portrait extant. Before seeing it, I fairly detested the baby-face, with a towel wound about the head, that looked slyly backward at me from the window of every print-shop. Of the principal feature so raved about by Byronic youths and bilious school-girls, it might be said,—

The other lineaments would have been passable in a Paris doll. Believing these caricatures—or some of them—to be tolerable copies of the original, we lived in Rome four months; made ourselves pretty well acquainted with the half-dozen good pictures among the host of poor ones in the Palazzo Doria, and the choice gems in the small Academia di San Luca; we had seen the Aurora of the Rospiglioso, the AntinÖus upon the mantel in Villa Albani; Venus Victrix and Daphne in the Borghese, and the unrivaled frescoes upon the walls and ceilings of the Palazzo Farnese, besides going, on an average, once a week to the Capitoline and Vatican museums;—yet never been persuaded by friends wiser or less prejudiced than we, to enter the meagrely supplied art-gallery of the Barberini Palace. When we did go it was with a languor of curiosity clogging our steps and dulling our perceptions, which found no stimulus in the two outer apartments of the suite. There were the usual proportion of Holy Families, Magdalenes, and Portraits, to an unusual number of which conscientious Baedeker had affixed interrogation-points casting worse than doubt upon their origin;—Christ among the Doctors—which it is difficult to imagine was painted by DÜrer, but easy to believe was “done” in five days; Raphael’s Fornarina, a shade more brazen and a thought less handsome than the bar-maid of the same title, in the Uffizzi at Florence, and so plainly what she was, one is sorry to trace Raphael’s name upon her bracelet. Then the guide suddenly turned toward the light a small, shabby frame hung upon a hinge—and a soul looked at us!

“The very saddest picture ever painted or conceived. It involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which came to the observer by a sort of intuition.... It is infinitely heart-breaking to meet her glance and to feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the hopelessness of the case better than we do.”

Hawthorne comprehended and expressed the spirit of the composition (if it be a fancy sketch, as latter-day iconoclasts insinuate), and the language of the doomed girl’s eyes. Even he has told but a part of the story; given but a hint of the nature of the charm that holds cool critic and careless stroller spell-bound before this little square of canvas. There is sorcery in it pen nor tongue can define. It haunted and tormented us until the possession was provoking. After coming many times to experience the same thrill—intense to suffering if we gazed long;—after dreaming of her by day and by night, and shunning, more disgustfully than ever, the burlesques in the shops—“the poor girl with the blubbered eyes,”—we tried to forget her. It was weak to be thus swayed by a twenty-inch painting; unworthy of people who fearlessly pronounced Perugino stiff, and had not been overwhelmed to rapturous incoherence by the sprawling anatomical specimens left by Michael Angelo to the guild of art-lovers under the name of the “Last Judgment.” Saying and feeling thus,—we took every opportunity of slipping without premeditation, or subsequent confession into the Barberini Palace;—finally leaving the picture and Rome, no better able to account for our fascination than after our first grudging visit.

Returning to the square of the Triton after one of these bootless excursions, we ascended a short avenue to the plain old church of the Capuchins. A Barberini founded this also, and the convent next door,—a cardinal, and brother to Urban VIII. He made less use of the bees and Bernini in his edifices than did his kinsman. That he had a juster appreciation of true genius, was evinced by his hospitable attentions to Milton when he was in Rome. Church annals record, moreover, the circumstance that Cardinal Barberini availed himself no further of the family wealth and aggrandizement than to give liberally to the poor and endow this church and monastery. He is buried beneath the high altar, and a modest stone bears the oft-borrowed epitaph—“Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil!”

There are famous paintings in this church,—the chapel nearest the entrance containing Guido Reni’s “St. Michael,” while upon the walls of the next but one is a fine fresco of the “Death of St. Francis,” by Domenichino. The crypts are, however, the popular attraction of the place.

The burial-vaults of the Capuchin brotherhood are not vaults at all in the sense of subterranean chambers. They are four in number, of fair size, open on one side to the corridor which is lighted by grated windows. The inner walls are banks and rows of dried skeletons, whole and dismembered.

“Does it take long to upholster an apartment in this style?” asked Mark Twain, contemplating the decorations of the crypt.

The wicked witticism sounded in our ears in his exquisite drawl, as, amazed to discover how slightly shocked we were, we raised curious eyes to the geometrical figures traced in raised lines upon the ceiling. These are composed of the small bones of the human form, skillfully assorted and matched. Pillars and niches are built of thigh, leg and arm bones. Each niche has its skeleton, stayed in an upright posture by a cord knotted about his waist, securing him to a hook behind. All wear the costume of the order;—a butternut-colored gown, the cowl framing the skull. Some tiny skeletons lie upon compact beds of bones close to the ceiling.

“Children!” we said, in French, to the guide. “How is that?”

“Children of the Barberini,” was the answer. “Therefore, entitled to a place here. Our founder was a Barberini.”

“And were they buried for a while, and then disturbed—dug up?”

“Why not?”

He was a stalwart fellow, with bare, horny feet; a rusty beard falling below his breast; and a surly face, that did not relax at these questions, nor at our comments, in our own tongue, upon what we saw.

The floor of the chambers is light, mellow soil, like that of lately weeded and raked flower-beds. To carry out the conceit, rows of sticks, labeled, were stuck along one side, that might mark seed-rows. So much of the original soil as remains there was brought from Jerusalem. In each grave a deceased monk slumbers twenty-five years, then makes room for the next comer, and is, himself, promoted, intact or piece-meal, as architectural needs demand—

“To a place in the dress, or the family circle,” supplied Prima, with praiseworthy gravity.

Caput, usually an exemplar in the matter of decorum, was now tempted to a quotation as irreverent as the saucy girl’s comment.

“‘Each of the good friars in his turn, enjoys the luxury of a consecrated bed, attended with the slight drawback of being forced to get up long before day-break, as it were, and make room for another lodger.’”

“Miriam’s model, known to the friars as Brother Antonio, was buried in the farthest recess,” said I, leading the way to it. “Do you remember that he lay in state before the altar up-stairs when she and Donatello visited the church? And how the guide explained that a brother, buried thirty years before, had risen to give him place? That is probably the ejected member.”

The worthy designated wore an air of grim jollity, of funereal festivity, indescribable and irresistible. Dangling by the middle from his hempen girdle, his head on one shoulder, his cowl awry, he squinted at us out of its shadow with a leer that would have convicted of drunkenness anybody less holy than a barefoot friar, and less staid of habit than a skeleton of fifty years’ standing. Struggling to maintain composure, I accosted the sacristan. He was standing with his back to us, looking out of the window, and had certainly not seen our smiles.

“Which of these was disinterred last?”

He pointed to one whose robe was less mouldy than the rest, and upon whose chin yet bristled the remnant of a sandy beard.

“Which was his grave?”

Another silent gesture.

“What is the date of the latest interment?”

“1869,” incisively.

“Have there been no deaths in the convent since then?”

“Yes!” The disdainful growl was in good English. “We bury no more in this ground. Victor Emmanuel forbids it!”

An Italian murmur in the depths of his frowsy beard was not a benediction upon the tyrant. Members of monastic orders cursed him more deeply in private, as they would have banned him openly, by bell and by book, had they dared, when he commanded, that same year, the conscription of young men for the Italian army to extend to the native-born neophytes and pupils in convents and church-schools.

“Vittorio Emmanuele!” The musical name was very clearly printed at the foot of a placard, glazed and hung in the vestibule of the Collegio Romano. Guide-books of a date anterior to that enunciated so venomously by our Capuchin, in describing the museum attached to this institution, were fain to add:—“The museum can be seen on Sundays only, 10-11 o’clock, A.M. Ladies not admitted.”

By the grace of the printed proclamation, throwing open the collection of antiquities and library to well-behaved persons of both sexes, we passed the unguarded doors, mounted the stone staircase, dirty as are all Roman stairs, and were, without let or hindrance, in the midst of what we wished to examine and from which there is no conceivable reason for excluding women.

Most of the Catacomb inscriptions that could be removed without injury to the tablets bearing them, have been deposited elsewhere for safe-keeping and more satisfactory inspection than is consistent with the darkness of the underground cemeteries. The shelves, arranged like those in modern vaults, stripped of the stone fronts that once concealed their contents, are still partially filled with fine ashes—sacred dust, mixed with particles from the friable earth walling and flooring the labyrinth of narrow passages. Fragments of sculptured marble lie where they have fallen from broken altars or memorial slabs, and in the wider spaces used as oratories, where burial-rites were performed, and, in times of sorest tribulation, other religious services held, there are traces of frescoes in faded, but still distinguishable colors.

In the Collegio Romano are garnered most interesting specimens of the mural tablets brought from catacombs and columbaria. The Christian Museum of San Giovanni in Laterano embraces a more extensive collection, but in the less spacious corridors and rooms of the Collegio, one sees and studies in comfort and quiet that are not to be had in the more celebrated halls. In the apartment devoted to Christian antiquities are many small marble coffers, sculptured more or less elaborately, taken from columbaria. These were receptacles for the literal ashes of the departed. They are out of keeping with our belief that the early Christians regarded incremation with dread as destructive, in the popular mind, of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. They committed their beloved dead tenderly to the keeping of the earth, with a full recognition of the analogy between this act and seed-planting, so powerfully set forth by St. Paul. Else, why the Catacombs? These cinerary caskets, whether once tenanted by Christian or pagan dust, merit careful notice. They are usually about twelve or fourteen inches in height, and two or three less in width. The lid slopes gently up from the four sides to form a peaked centre like a square house-roof, with pointed turrets or ears at the corners. The covers were firmly cemented in place when deposited in the columbaria. We saw one or two thus secured to protect the contents, but all have probably been broken open, at one time or another, in quest of other treasure than relics precious to none save loving survivors. The lids of many have been lost.

The mural slabs were arranged against the wall as high as a man could reach. The lettering—much of it irregularly and unskillfully done—is more distinct than epitaphs not thirty years old, in our country church-yards. The inscriptions are often ungrammatical and so spelt as to betray the illiterate workman. But there is no doubt what were the belief and trust of those who set them up in the blackness and damps of a Necropolis whose existence was scarcely suspected by their persecutors.

“In Christo, in pace,” is the language of many, the meaning of all. It may be only a cross rudely cut into soft stone; it is often a lamb, sometimes carrying a cross; a dove, a spray meant for olive, in its mouth—dual emblem of peace and the “rest that remaineth.” The Greek Alpha and Omega, repeated again and again, testify that these hunted and smitten ones had read John’s glorious Revelation. On all sides, we saw the, to heathen revilers, mystical cypher, early adopted as a sign and seal by the Christians, a capital P, transfixing a St. Andrew’s Cross.

From one stained little slab, we copied an inscription entire and verbatim.

Above Benjamin Franklin’s baby-daughter, buried beside him in the almost forgotten corner of an intra-mural graveyard, we can, with pains, read—“The dearest child that ever was.” We thought of it and of another “child” whose brief, beautiful life is summed up in words as apt and almost as few:—

O, holy Nature! the throbbing, piercÈd heart of parenthood! the same in the breast of the mother who laid her boy to sleep, until the morning, in the starless night of the Catacombs, as within the Rachel who weeps to-day beside the coffin of her first, or latest-born!

We had seen the wall in Nero’s barracks from which the famous “Graffito Blasphemo” was taken, about ten years before. To behold the sketch itself was one of our errands to this Museum. It is a square of cement, of adamantine hardness, in a black frame, and hangs in a conspicuous position at the end of the principal corridor. The story, as gathered from the caricature and the place in which it was discovered, is probably something like this:—A party of Nero’s soldiery, gathered in a stall or barrack belonging to the Imperial household, amused themselves by ridiculing one of their number who had been converted to Christianity. Paul was, about that time, dwelling in his own hired house in Rome, or as a prisoner awaiting trial or execution. A part of the richly-sculptured marble bar indicating the Tribune in the Basilica Jovis, before which he was tried, is still standing, not a bow-shot from where the lounging guards made a jest of their comrade’s new faith. One of them drew, with the point of his sword, or other sharp instrument, upon the plastered wall, a rough caricature, representing a man with the head of an ass, hanging upon a cross. His hands are bound to the transverse arms, his feet rest upon a shorter cross-piece fastened to the upright beam. From this position, the head looks down upon a small figure below, who raises his hand in a gesture of adoration more intelligible to the pagan of that date than to us. A jumble of Greek and Latin characters, crowded between and under the figures, points the ribald satire, “Alexamenos adores his God.” Nero went to his account. The very site of his Golden House is a matter of dispute among archÆologists who have bared the foundations of the palace of the CÆsars. But after eighteen hundred years, when the rubbish was dug out from the soldiers’ quarters, there appeared the blasphemer’s sketch, as distinct as if drawn at last week’s debauch.

From the observatory of the Collegio Romano a signal is given daily, at twelve o’clock, for the firing of the noon cannon from the Castle of San Angelo. As we entered the Piazza di Spagna on our return, the dull boom shook the air. The streets were full of people, the day being a fine one in early Spring, and, as happens every day in the year, every man, from the cocchiÈre upon his box, to the ÉlÉgant strolling along the shady side of the square to digest his eleven o’clock breakfast, looked at his watch. Not that the Romans are a punctual people, or moderately industrious. “The man who makes haste, dies early,” is one of their mottoes. “Dolce far niente” belongs to them by virtue of tongue and practice. “Lazzaroni” should be spelled with one z, and include, according to the sense thus conveyed to English ears, tens of thousands besides professional beggars.

There is no pleasanter place in which to be lazy than in this bewitching old city. Our own life there was an idyl, rounded and pure, such as does not come twice to the same mortal. The climate, they would have had us believe was the bane of confiding strangers, was to us all blessedness. Not one of us was ill for a day while we resided in the cozy “appartamento” in Via San Sebastiano; nor was there a death, that winter, among American visitors and residents in Rome. For myself, the soft air was curative to the sore lungs; a delicious sedative that quieted the nerves and brought the boon, long and vainly sought—Sleep! My cough left me within a month, not to return while we remained in Italy. We made the natural mistake of tarrying too late in the Spring, unwilling to leave scenes so fair, fraught with such food for Memory and for Imagination. After mid-April, the noon-day heat was debilitating, and I suffered appreciable diminution of vigor.

I do not apologize for these personal details. Knowing how eagerly invalids, and those who have invalid friends, crave information respecting the means that have restored health to others, I write frankly of my own experience in quest of the lost treasure. It would be strange if I could think of Rome and our home there without felt and uttered gratitude. Convalescence was, with me, less a rally of energies to battle with disease and weakness, than a gradual return, by ways of pleasantness and paths of peace, to physical tranquillity, and through rest, to strength. I hardly comprehended, for awhile, that I was really getting better; that I might be well again in time. I only knew that to breathe was no longer pain, nor to live labor that taxed the powers of body and spirit to the utmost. There was so much to draw me away from the contemplation of my own griefs and ailments that I could have supposed the new existence a delusion, my amendment a trick of fancy. I forgot to think of and watch myself. I had all winter but one return—and that a slight one, induced by unusual exertion—of the hÆmorrhages that had alarmed us, from time to time, for two years preceding our departure from America. The angel of healing had touched me, and I knew it not.

One morning I had gone, as was my custom, to a window in the salon, so soon as I left my bed-chamber; thrown it open and leaned upon the balcony-railing to taste the freshness of the new day. We clung to our pillows, as a family rule, until the sonorous cry of the vendor of a morning journal arose to our drowsy ears.

“Popolo Ro-ma-a-no!”

“There is Old Popolo!” Boy would shout from his crib. “It is eight o’clock!”

It was half-past eight on the day of which I speak, and the shops were not yet open; the Piazza deserted but for a flock of goats and the attendant contadini who milked them from one door to another for their customers. Birds were twittering among the trees in the Pincian Gardens upon my left; there was a lingering flush of pink in the sky that would be, within an hour and until evening, of the “incomparable sweet” blue, American heavens put on after one thunder-shower, and before another blackens them. In Italy nobody calls the exquisite depth of color “a weather-breeder.” A church-bell was ringing so far away that it was a musical pulse, not a chime. Down the Via della Croce to my right, over half a mile of tiled roofs, round and distinct in the dry, pure atmosphere, towered the Castle of San Angelo—the bronze angel on the summit sheathing the sword of pestilence, as Pope Gregory affirmed he beheld him at the approach to the Tiber of the penitential procession headed by the pontiff. As the goats turned into the Via del Babuino, the faint tinkle of their bells was blent with the happy laugh of a young contadina. I quaffed slow, delicious draughts of refreshment that seemed to touch and lift the heart; that lulled the brain to divinest dreaming.

Then and there, I had a revelation; bowed my soul before my Angel of Annunciation, I should not die, but live. Then and thus, I accepted the conviction that, apart from the intellectual delight I drew from our present life—the ministry of sky and air, of all goodly sights and sounds and the bright-winged fancies that were a continual ecstasy, was to my body—Health! That hour I thanked God and took courage!