The art of the Renascence has left us splendid pictures of mediæval public life, which are naturally accepted as equally faithful representations of the life of every day. Princes and knights, in gorgeous robes and highly polished armour, ride on faultlessly caparisoned milk-white steeds; wondrous ladies wear not less wonderful gowns, fitted with a perfection which women seek in vain today, and embroidered with pearls and precious stones that might ransom a rajah; young pages, with glorious golden hair, stand ready at the elbows of their lords and ladies, or kneel in graceful attitude to deliver a letter, or stoop to bear a silken train, clad in garments which the modern costumer strives in vain to copy. After three or four centuries, the colours of those painted silks and satins are still richer than anything the loom can weave. In the great fresco, each individual of the multitude that fills a public place, or defiles in open procession under the noonday light, is not only a masterpiece of fashion, but a model of neatness; linen, delicate as woven gossamer, falls into folds as finely exact as an engraver's point could draw; velvet shoes tread without speck or spot upon the well-scoured pavement of a public street; men-at-arms grasp weapons and hold bridles with hands as carefully tended as any idle fine gentleman's, and there is neither fleck nor breath of dimness on the mirror-like steel of their armour; the very flowers, the roses and lilies that strew the way, are the perfection of fresh-cut hothouse blossoms; and when birds and beasts chance to be necessary to the composition of the picture, they are represented with no less care for a more than possible neatness, their coats are combed and curled, their attitudes are studied and graceful, they wear carefully made collars, ornamented with chased silver and gold.

Centuries have dimmed the wall-painting, sunshine has faded it, mould has mottled the broad surfaces of red and blue and green, and a later age has done away with the dresses represented; yet, when the frescos in the library of the Cathedral at Siena, for instance, were newly finished, they were the fashion-plates of the year and month, executed by a great artist, it is true, grouped with matchless skill and drawn with supreme mastery of art, but as far from representing the ordinary scenes of daily life as those terrible coloured prints published nowadays for tailors, in which a number of beautiful young gentlemen, in perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the æsthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective relations of the great artist's masterpiece and of the poor modern lithograph to the realities of each period, there is the clue to the daily life of the Middle Age.

Living was outwardly rough as compared with the representations of it, though it was far more refined than in any other part of Europe, and Italy long set the fashion to the world in habits and manners. People kept their fine clothes for great occasions, there was a keeper of robes in every large household, and there were rooms set apart for the purpose. In every-day life, the Barons wore patched hose and leathern jerkins, stained and rusted by the joints of the armour that was so often buckled over them, or they went about their dwellings in long dressing-gowns which hid many shortcomings. When gowns, and hose, and jerkins were well worn, they were cut down for the boys of the family, and the fine dresses, only put on for great days, were preserved as heirlooms from generation to generation, whether they fitted the successive wearers or not. The beautiful tight-fitting hose which, in the paintings of the time, seem to fit like theatrical tights, were neither woven nor knitted, but were made of stout cloth, and must often have been baggy at the knees in spite of the most skilful cutting; and the party-coloured hose, having one leg of one piece of stuff and one of another, and sometimes each leg of two or more colours, were very likely first invented from motives of economy, to use up cuttings and leavings. Clothes were looked upon as permanent and very desirable property, and kings did not despise a gift of fine scarlet cloth, in the piece, to make them a gown or a cloak. As for linen, as late as the sixteenth century, the English thought the French nobles very extravagant because they put on a clean shirt once a fortnight and changed their ruffles once a week.

The mediæval Roman nobles were most of them great farmers as well as fighters. Then, as now, land was the ultimate form of property, and its produce the usual form of wealth; and then, as now, many families were 'land-poor,' in the sense of owning tracts of country which yielded little or no income but represented considerable power, and furnished the owners with most of the necessaries of life, such rents as were collected being usually paid in kind, in oil and wine, in grain, fruit and vegetables, and even in salt meat, and horses, cattle for slaughtering and beasts of burden, not to speak of wool, hemp and flax, as well as firewood. But money was scarce and, consequently, all the things which only money could buy, so that a gown was a possession, and a corselet or a good sword a treasure. The small farmer of our times knows what it means to have plenty to eat and little to wear. His position is not essentially different from that of the average landed gentry in the Middle Age, not only in Italy, but all over Europe. In times when superiority lay in physical strength, courage, horsemanship and skill in the use of arms, the so-called gentleman was not distinguished from the plebeian by the newness or neatness of his clothes so much as by the nature and quality of the weapons he wore when he went abroad in peace or war, and very generally by being mounted on a good horse.

In his home he was simple, even primitive. He desired space more than comfort, and comfort more than luxury. His furniture consisted almost entirely of beds, chests and benches, with few tables except such as were needed for eating. Beds were supported by boards laid on trestles, raised very high above the floor to be beyond the reach of rats, mice and other creatures. The lower mattress was filled with the dried leaves of the maize, and the upper one contained wool, with which the pillows also were stuffed. The floors of dwelling rooms were generally either paved with bricks or made of a sort of cement, composed of lime, sand and crushed brick, the whole being beaten down with iron pounders, while in the moist state, during three days. There were no carpets, and fresh rushes were strewn everywhere on the floors, which in summer were first watered, like a garden path, to lay the dust. There was no glass in the windows of ordinary rooms, and the consequence was that during the daytime people lived almost in the open air, in winter as well as summer; sunshine was a necessity of existence, and sheltered courts and cloistered walks were built like reservoirs for the light and heat.

In the rooms, ark-shaped chests stood against the walls, to contain the ordinary clothes not kept in the general 'guardaroba.' In the deep embrasures of the windows there were stone seats, but there were few chairs, or none at all, in the bedrooms. At the head of each bed hung a rough little cross of dark wood—later, as carving became more general, a crucifix—and a bit of an olive branch preserved from Palm Sunday throughout the year. The walls themselves were scrupulously whitewashed; the ceilings were of heavy beams, supporting lighter cross-beams, on which in turn thick boards were laid to carry the cement floor of the room overhead.

Many hundred men-at-arms could be drawn up in the courtyards, and their horses stalled in the spacious stables. The kitchens, usually situated on the ground floor, were large enough to provide meals for half a thousand retainers, if necessary; and the cellars and underground prisons were a vast labyrinth of vaulted chambers, which not unfrequently communicated with the Tiber by secret passages. In restoring the palace of the Santacroce, a few years ago, a number of skeletons were discovered, some still wearing armour, and all most evidently the remains of men who had died violent deaths. One of them was found with a dagger driven through the skull and helmet. The hand that drove it must have been strong beyond the hands of common men.

The grand staircase led up from the sunny court to the state apartments, such as they were in those days. There, at least, there were sometimes carpets, luxuries of enormous value, and even before the Renascence the white walls were hung with tapestries, at least in part. In those times, too, there were large fireplaces in almost every room, for fuel was still plentiful in the Campagna and in the near mountains; and where the houses were practically open to the air all day, fires were an absolute necessity. Even in ancient times it is recorded that the Roman Senate, amidst the derisive jests of the plebeians, once had to adjourn on account of the extreme cold. People rose early in the Middle Age, dined at noon, slept in the afternoon when the weather was warm, and supped, as a rule, at 'one hour of the night,' that is to say an hour after 'Ave Maria,' which was rung half an hour after sunset, and was the end of the day of twenty-four hours. Noon was taken from the sun, but did not fall at a regular hour of the clock, and never fell at twelve. In winter, for instance, if the Ave Maria bell rang at half-past five of our modern time, the noon of the following day fell at 'half-past eighteen o'clock' by the mediæval clocks. In summer, it might fall as early as three quarters past fifteen; and this manner of reckoning time was common in Rome thirty-five years ago, and is not wholly unpractised in some parts of Italy still.

It was always an Italian habit, and a very healthy one, to get out of doors immediately on rising, and to put off making anything like a careful toilet till a much later hour. Breakfast, as we understand it, is an unknown meal in Italy, even now. Most people drink a cup of black coffee, standing; many eat a morsel of bread or biscuit with it and get out of doors as soon as they can; but the greediness of an Anglo-Saxon breakfast disgusts all Latins alike, and two set meals daily are thought to be enough for anyone, as indeed they are. The hard-working Italian hill peasant will sometimes toast himself a piece of corn bread before going to work, and eat it with a few drops of olive oil; and in the absence of tea or coffee, the people of the Middle Age often drank a mouthful of wine on rising to 'move the blood,' as they said. But that was all.

Every mediæval palace had its chapel, which was sometimes an adjacent church communicating with the house, and in many families it is even now the custom to hear the short low Mass at a very early hour. But probably nothing can give an adequate idea of the idleness of the Middle Age, when the day was once begun. Before the Renascence, there was no such thing as study, and there were hardly any pastimes except gambling and chess, both of which the girls and youths of the Decameron seem to have included in one contemptuous condemnation when they elected to spend their time in telling stories. The younger men of the household, of course, when not actually fighting, passed a certain number of hours in the practice of horsemanship and arms; but the only real excitement they knew was in love and war, the latter including everything between the battles of the Popes and Emperors, and the street brawls of private enemies, which generally drew blood and often ended in a death.

It does not appear that the idea of 'housekeeping' as the chief occupation of the Baron's wife ever entered into the Roman mind. In northern countries there has always been more equality between men and women, more respect for woman as an intelligent being, and less care for her as a valuable possession to be guarded against possible attacks from without. In Rome and the south of Italy the women in a great household were carefully separated from the men, and beyond the outer halls in which visitors were received, business transacted and politics discussed, there were closed doors, securely locked, leading to the women's apartments beyond. In every Roman palace and fortress there was a revolving 'dumb-waiter' between the women's quarters and the men's, called the 'wheel,' and used as a means of communication. Through this the household supplies were daily handed in, for the cooking was very generally done by women, and through the same machine the prepared food was passed out to the men, the wheel being so arranged that men and women could not see each other, though they might hear each other speak. To all intents and purposes the system was oriental and the women were shut up in a harem. The use of the dumb-waiter survived the revolution in manners under the Renascence, and the wheel itself remains as a curiosity of past times in more than one Roman dwelling today. It had its uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle, where such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing but fear of the Baron himself, of his sons, when they were grown up, and of his poorer kinsmen who lived with him. There were no crimes which such malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen, brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally married to respectable retainers. The position of twenty or thirty women and girls under the same roof with several hundreds of the most atrocious cutthroats of any age was undeniably such as to justify the most tyrannical measures for their protection.

There are traces, even now, of the enforced privacy in which they lived. For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby the men and women occupy different parts of the house.

One must try to call up the pictures of one day, to get any idea of those times; one must try and see the grey dawn stealing down the dark, unwindowed lower walls of the fortress that flanks the Church of the Holy Apostles,—the narrow and murky street below, the broad, dim space beyond, the mystery of the winding distances whence comes the first sound of the day, the far, high cry of the waterman driving his little donkey with its heavy load of water-casks. The beast stumbles along in the foul gloom, through the muddy ruts, over heaps of garbage at the corners, picking its way as best it can, till it starts with a snort and almost falls with its knees upon a dead man, whose thrice-stabbed body lies right across the way. The waterman, ragged, sandal-shod, stops, crosses himself, and drags his beast back hurriedly with a muttered exclamation of mingled horror, disgust and fear for himself, and makes for the nearest corner, stumbling along in his haste lest he should be found with the corpse and taken for the murderer. As the dawn forelightens, and the cries go up from the city, the black-hooded Brothers of Prayer and Death come in a little troop, their lantern still burning as they carry their empty stretcher, seeking for dead men; and they take up the poor nameless body and bear it away quickly from the sight of the coming day.

Then, as they disappear, the great bell of the Apostles' Church begins to toll the morning Angelus, half an hour before sunrise,—three strokes, then four, then five, then one, according to ancient custom, and then after a moment's silence, the swinging peal rings out, taken up and answered from end to end of the half-wasted city. A troop of men-at-arms ride up to the great closed gate 'in rusty armour marvellous ill-favoured,' as Shakespeare's stage direction has it, mud-splashed, their brown cloaks half concealing their dark and war-worn mail, their long swords hanging down and clanking against their huge stirrups, their beasts jaded and worn and filthy from the night raid in the Campagna, or the long gallop from Palestrina. The leader pounds three times at the iron-studded door with the hilt of his dagger, a sleepy porter, grey-bearded and cloaked, slowly swings back one half of the gate and the ruffians troop in, followed by the waterman who has gone round the fortress to avoid the dead body. The gate shuts again, with a long thundering rumble. High up, wooden shutters, behind which there is no glass, are thrown open upon the courtyard, and one window after another is opened to the morning air; on one side, girls and women look out, muffled in dark shawls; from the other grim, unwashed, bearded men call down to their companions, who have dismounted and are unsaddling their weary horses, and measuring out a little water to them, where water is a thing of price.

The leader goes up into the house to his master, to tell him of the night's doings, and while he speaks the Baron sits in a great wooden chair, in his long gown of heavy cloth, edged with coarse fox's fur, his feet in fur slippers, and a shabby cap upon his head, but a manly and stern figure, all the same, slowly munching a piece of toasted bread and sipping a few drops of old white wine from a battered silver cup.

Then Mass in the church, the Baron, his kinsmen, the ladies and the women kneeling in the high gallery above the altar, the men-at-arms and men-servants and retainers crouching below on the stone pavement; a dusky multitude, with a gleam of steel here and there, and red flashing eyes turned up with greedy longing towards the half-veiled faces of the women, met perhaps, now and then, by a furtive answering glance from under a veil or hoodlike shawl, for every woman's head is covered, but of the men only the old lord wears his cap, which he devoutly lifts at 'Gloria Patri' and 'Verbum Caro,' and at 'Sanctus' and at the consecration. It is soon over, and the day is begun, for the sun is fully risen and streams through the open unglazed windows as the maids sprinkle water on the brick floors, and sweep and strew fresh rushes, and roll back the mattresses on the trestle beds, which are not made again till evening. In the great courtyard, the men lead out the horses and mount them bareback and ride out in a troop, each with his sword by his side, to water them at the river, half a mile away, for not a single public fountain is left in Rome; and the grooms clean out the stables, while the peasants come in from the country, driving mules laden with provisions for the great household, and far away, behind barred doors, the women light the fires in the big kitchen.

Later again, the children of the noble house are taught to ride and fence in the open court; splendid boys with flowing hair, bright as gold or dark as night, dressed in rough hose and leathern jerkin, bright-eyed, fearless, masterful already in their play as a lion's whelps, watched from an upper window by their lady mother and their little sisters, and not soon tired of saddle or sword—familiar with the grooms and men by the great common instinct of fighting, but as far from vulgar as Polonius bade Laertes learn to be.

So morning warms to broad noon, and hunger makes it dinner-time, and the young kinsmen who have strolled abroad come home, one of them with his hand bound up in a white rag that has drops of blood on it, for he has picked a quarrel in the street and steel has been out, as usual, though no one has been killed, because the 'bargello' and his men were in sight, down there near the Orsini's theatre-fortress. And at dinner when the priest has blessed the table, the young men laugh about the scrimmage, while the Baron himself, who has killed a dozen men in battle, with his own hand, rebukes his sons and nephews with all the useless austerity which worn-out age wears in the face of unbroken youth. The meal is long, and they eat much, for there will be nothing more till night; they eat meat broth, thick with many vegetables and broken bread and lumps of boiled meat, and there are roasted meats and huge earthen bowls of salad, and there is cheese in great blocks, and vast quantities of bread, with wine in abundance, poured for each man by the butler into little earthen jugs from big earthenware flagons. They eat from trenchers of wood, well scoured with ashes; forks they have none, and most of the men use their own knives or daggers when they are not satisfied with the carving done for them by the carver. Each man, when he has picked a bone, throws it under the table to the house-dogs lying in wait on the floor, and from time to time a basin is passed and a little water poured upon the fingers. The Baron has a napkin of his own; there is one napkin for all the other men; the women generally eat by themselves in their own apartments, the so-called 'gentlemen' in the 'tinello,' and the men-at-arms and grooms, and all the rest, in the big lower halls near the kitchens, whence their food is passed out to them through the wheel.

After dinner, if it be summer and the weather hot, the gates are barred, the windows shut, and the whole household sleeps. Early or late, as the case may be, the lords and ladies and children take the air, guarded by scores of mounted men, riding towards that part of the city where they may neither meet their enemies nor catch a fever in the warm months. In rainy weather they pass the time as they can, with telling of many tales, short, dramatic and strong as the framework of a good play, with music, sometimes, and with songs, and with discussing of such news as there may be in such times. And at dusk the great bells ring to even-song, the oil lamp is swung up in the great staircase, the windows and gates are shut again, the torches and candles and little lamps are lit for supper, and at last, with rushlights, each finds the way along the ghostly corridors to bed and sleep. That was the day's round, and there was little to vary it in more peaceful times.

Over all life there was the hopeless, resentful dulness that oppressed men and women till it drove them half mad, to the doing of desperate things in love and war; there was the everlasting restraint of danger without and of forced idleness within—danger so constant that it ceased to be exciting and grew tiresome, idleness so oppressive that battle, murder and sudden death were a relief from the inactivity of sluggish peace; a state in which the mind was no longer a moving power in man, but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to slash and burn the world with a history of unimaginable horror.

That was the Middle Age in Italy. A poorer race would have gone down therein to a bloody destruction; but it was out of the Middle Age that the Italians were born again in the Renascence. It deserved the name.

REGION IV CAMPO MARZO

It was harvest time when the Romans at last freed themselves from the very name of Tarquin. In all the great field, between the Tiber and the City, the corn stood high and ripe, waiting for the sickle, while Brutus did justice upon his two sons, and upon the sons of his sister, and upon those 'very noble youths,' still the Tarquins' friends, who laid down their lives for their mistaken loyalty and friendship, and for whose devotion no historian has ever been brave enough, or generous enough, to say a word. It has been said that revolution is patriotism when it succeeds, treason when it fails, and in the converse, more than one brave man has died a traitor's death for keeping faith with a fallen king. Successful revolution denied those young royalists the charitable handful of earth and the four words of peace—'sit eis terra levis'—that should have laid their unquiet ghosts, and the brutal cynicism of history has handed down their names to the perpetual execration of mankind.

The corn stood high in the broad field which the Tarquins had taken from Mars and had ploughed and tilled for generations. The people went out and reaped the crop, and bound it in sheaves to be threshed for the public bread, but their new masters told them that it would be impious to eat what had been meant for kings, and they did as was commanded to them, meekly, and threw all into the river. Sheaf upon sheaf, load upon load, the yellow stream swept away the yellow ears and stalks, down to the shallows, where the whole mass stuck fast, and the seeds took root in the watery mud, and the stalks rotted in great heaps, and the island of the Tiber was first raised above the level of the water. Then the people burned the stubble and gave back the land to Mars, calling it the Campus Martius, after him.

There the young Romans learned the use of arms, and were taught to ride; and under sheds there stood those rows of wooden horses, upon which youths learned to vault, without step or stirrup, in their armour and sword in hand. There they ran foot-races in the clouds of dust whirled up from the dry ground, and threw the discus by the twisted thong as the young men of the hills do today, and the one who could reach the goal with the smallest number of throws was the winner,—there, under the summer sun and in the biting wind of winter, half naked, and tough as wolves, the boys of Rome laboured to grow up and be Roman men.

There, also, the great assemblies were held, the public meetings and the elections, when the people voted by passing into the wooden lists that were called 'Sheepfolds,' till Julius Cæsar planned the great marble portico for voting, and Agrippa finished it, making it nearly a mile round; and behind it, on the west side, a huge space was kept open for centuries, called the Villa Publica, where the censors numbered the people. The ancient Campus took in a wide extent of land, for it included everything outside the Servian wall, from the Colline Gate to the river. All that visibly bears its name today is a narrow street that runs southward from the western end of San Lorenzo in Lucina. The Region of Campo Marzo, however, is still one of the largest in the city, including all that lies within the walls from Porta Pinciana, by Capo le Case, Via Frattina, Via di Campo Marzo and Via della Stelletta, past the Church of the Portuguese and the Palazzo Moroni,—known by Hawthorne's novel as 'Hilda's Tower,'—and thence to the banks of the Tiber.

From the Renascence until the recent extension of the city on the south and southeast, this Region was the more modern part of Rome. In the Middle Age it was held by the Colonna, who had fortified the tomb of Augustus and one or two other ruins. Later it became the strangers' quarter. The Lombards established themselves near the Church of Saint Charles, in the Corso; the English, near Saint Ives, the little church with the strange spiral tower, built against the University of the Sapienza; the Greeks lived in the Via de' Greci; the Burgundians in the Via Borgognona, and thence to San Claudio, where they had their Hospice; and so on, almost every nationality being established in a colony of its own; and the English visitors of today are still inclined to think the Piazza di Spagna the most central point of Rome, whereas to Romans it seems to be very much out of the way.

The tomb of Augustus, which served as the model for the greater Mausoleum of Hadrian, dominated the Campus Martius, and its main walls are still standing, though hidden by many modern houses. The tomb of the Julian Cæsars rose on white marble foundations, a series of concentric terraces, planted with cypress trees, to the great bronze statue of Augustus that crowned the summit. Here rested the ashes of Augustus, of the young Marcellus, of Livia, of Tiberius, of Caligula, and of many others whose bodies were burned in the family Ustrinum near the tomb itself. Plundered by Alaric, and finally ruined by Robert Guiscard, when he burnt the city, it became a fortress under the Colonna, and is included, with the fortress of Monte Citorio, in a transfer of property made by one member of the family to another in the year 1252. Ruined at last, it became a bull ring in the last century and in the beginning of this one, when Leo the Twelfth forbade bull-fighting. Then it was a theatre, the scene of Salvini's early triumphs. Today it is a circus, dignified by the name of the reigning sovereign.

Few people know that bull-fights were common in Rome eighty years ago. The indefatigable Baracconi once talked with the son of the last bull-fighter. So far as one may judge, it appears that during the Middle Age, and much later, it was the practice of butchers to bait animals in their own yards, before slaughtering them, in the belief that the cruel treatment made the meat more tender, and they admitted the people to see the sport. From this to a regular arena was but a step, and no more suitable place than the tomb of the Cæsars could be found for the purpose. A regular manager took possession of it, provided the victims, both bulls and Roman buffaloes, and hired the fighters. It does not appear that the beasts were killed during the entertainment, and one of the principal attractions was the riding of the maddened bull three times round the circus; savage dogs were also introduced, but in all other respects the affair was much like a Spanish bull-fight, and quite as popular; when the chosen bulls were led in from the Campagna, the Roman princes used to ride far out to meet them with long files of mounted servants in gala liveries, coming back at night in torchlight procession. And again, after the fight was over, the circus was illuminated, and there was a small display of Bengal lights, while the fashionable world of Rome met and gossiped away the evening in the arena, happily thoughtless and forgetful of all the spot had been and had meant in history.

The new Rome sinks out of sight below the level of the old, as one climbs the heights of the Janiculum on the west of the city, or the gardens of the Pincio on the east. The old monuments and the old churches still rise above the dreary wastes of modern streets, and from the spot whence Messalina looked down upon the cypresses of the first Emperor's mausoleum, the traveller of today descries the cheap metallic roof which makes a circus of the ancient tomb.

For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls up a tragedy of shades. Less than thirty years after Augustus had breathed out his old age in peace, Rome was ruled again by terror and blood, and the triumph of a woman's sins was the beginning of the end of the Julian race. The great historian who writes of her guesses that posterity may call the truth a fable, and tells the tale so tersely and soberly from first to last, that the strength of his words suggests a whole mystery of evil. Without Tiberius, there could have been no Messalina, nor, without her, could Nero have been possible; and the worst of the three is the woman—the archpriestess of all conceivable crime. Tacitus gives Tiberius one redeeming touch. Often the old Emperor came almost to Rome, even to the gardens by the Tiber, and then turned back to the rocks of Capri and the solitude of the sea, in mortal shame of his monstrous deeds, as if not daring to show himself in the city. With Nero, the measure was full, and the world rose and destroyed him. Messalina knew no shame, and the Romans submitted to her, and but for a court intrigue and a frightened favourite she might have lived out her life unhurt. In the eyes of the historian and of the people of her time her greatest misdeed was that while her husband Claudius, the Emperor, was alive she publicly celebrated her marriage with the handsome Silius, using all outward legal forms. Our modern laws of divorce have so far accustomed our minds to such deeds that, although we miss the legal formalities which would necessarily precede such an act in our time, we secretly wonder at the effect it produced upon the men of that day, and are inclined to smile at the epithets of 'impious' and 'sacrilegious' which it called down upon Messalina, whose many other frightful crimes had elicited much more moderate condemnation. Claudius, himself no novice or beginner in horrors, hesitated long after he knew the truth, and it was the favourite Narcissus who took upon himself to order the Empress' death. Euodus, his freedman, and a tribune of the guard were sent to make an end of her. Swiftly they went up to the gardens—the gardens of the Pincian—and there they found her, beautiful, dark, dishevelled, stretched upon the marble floor, her mother Lepida crouching beside her, her mother, who in the bloom of her daughter's evil life had turned from her, but in her extreme need was overcome with pity. There knelt Domitia Lepida, urging the terror-mad woman not to wait the executioner, since life was over and nothing remained but to lend death the dignity of suicide. But the dishonoured self was empty of courage, and long-drawn weeping choked her useless lamentations. Then suddenly the doors were flung open with a crash, and the stern tribune stood silent in the hall, while the freedman Euodus screamed out curses, after the way of triumphant slaves. From her mother's hand the lost Empress took the knife at last and trembling laid it to her breast and throat, with weakly frantic fingers that could not hurt herself; the silent tribune killed her with one straight thrust, and when they brought the news to Claudius sitting at supper, and told him that Messalina had perished, his face did not change, and he said nothing as he held out his cup to be filled.

She died somewhere on the Pincian hill. Romance would choose the spot exactly where the nunnery of the Sacred Heart stands, at the Trinità de' Monti, looking down De Sanctis' imposing 'Spanish' steps; and the house in which the noble girls of modern Rome are sent to school may have risen upon the foundations of Messalina's last abode. Or it may be that the place was further west, in the high grounds of the French Academy, or on the site of the academy itself, at the gates of the public garden, just where the old stone fountain bubbles and murmurs under the shade of the thick ilex trees. Most of that land once belonged to Lucullus, the conqueror of Mithridates, the Academic philosopher, the arch feaster, and the man who first brought cherries to Italy.

The last descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a woman who had loved him. And during ten centuries the people believed that his terrible ghost haunted the hill, attended and served by thousands of demon crows that rested in the branches of the trees about his tomb, and flew forth to do evil at his bidding, till at last Pope Paschal the Second cut down with his own hands the walnut trees which crowned the summit, and commanded that the mausoleum should be destroyed, and the ashes of Nero scattered to the winds, that he might build a parish church on the spot and dedicate it to Saint Mary. It is said, too, that the Romans took the marble urn in which the ashes had been, and used it as a public measure for salt in the old market-place of the Capitol. A number of the rich Romans of the Renascence afterwards contributed money to the restoration of the church and built themselves chapels within it, as tombs for their descendants, so that it is the burial-place of many of those wealthy families that settled in Rome and took possession of the Corso when the Barons still held the less central parts of the city with their mediæval fortresses. Sixtus the Fourth and Julius the Second are buried in Saint Peter's, but their chapel was here, and here lie others of the della Rovere race, and many of the Chigi and Pallavicini and Theodoli; and here, in strange coincidence, Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the Popes, erected a high altar on the very spot where the worst of the Emperors had been buried. It is gone now, but the strange fact is not forgotten.

Far across the beautiful square, at the entrance to the Corso, twin churches seem to guard the way like sentinels, built, it is said, to replace two chapels which once stood at the head of the bridge of Sant' Angelo; demolished because, when Rome was sacked by the Constable of Bourbon, they had been held as important points by the Spanish soldiers in besieging the Castle, and it was not thought wise to leave such useful outworks for any possible enemy in the future. Alexander the Seventh, the Chigi Pope, died, and left the work unfinished; and a folk story tells how a poor old woman who lived near by saved what she could for many years, and, dying, left one hundred and fifty scudi to help the completion of the buildings; and Cardinal Gastaldi, who had been refused the privilege of placing his arms upon a church which he had desired to build in Bologna, and was looking about for an opportunity of perpetuating his name, finished the two churches, his attention having been first called to them by the old woman's humble bequest.

As for the Pincio itself, and the ascent to it from the Piazza del Popolo, all that land was but a grass-grown hillside, crowned by a few small and scattered villas and scantily furnished with trees, until the beginning of the present century; and the public gardens of the earlier time were those of the famous and beautiful Villa Medici, which Napoleon the First bestowed upon the French Academy. It was there that the fashionable Romans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used to meet, and walk, and be carried about in gilded sedan-chairs, and flirt, and gossip, and exchange views on politics and opinions about the latest scandal. That was indeed a very strange society, further from us in many ways than the world of the Renascence, or even of the Crusades; for the Middle Age was strong in the sincerity of its beliefs, as we are powerful in the cynicism of our single-hearted faith in riches; but the fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was founded upon the abuse of an already declining power; it was built up in the most extraordinary and elaborate affectation, and it was guarded by a system of dissimulation which outdid that of our own day by many degrees, and possibly surpassed the hypocrisy of any preceding age.

No one, indeed, can successfully uphold the idea that the high development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong growth of religion or moral conviction. Perugino made no secret of being an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation, lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result of a faith that has been, since although it is possible to conceive of religion without art, it is out of the question to think of art as a whole, without a religious origin; and as the majority of writers find it easier to describe scenes and emotions, when a certain lapse of time has given them what painters call atmospheric perspective, so the Renascence began when memory already clothed the ferocious realism of mediæval Christianity in the softer tones of gentle chivalry and tender romance. It is often said, half in jest, that, in order to have intellectual culture, a man must at least have forgotten Latin, if he cannot remember it, because the fact of having learned it leaves something behind that cannot be acquired in any other way. Similarly, I think that art of all sorts has reached its highest level in successive ages when it has aimed at recalling, by an illusion, a once vivid reality from a not too distant past. And so when it gives itself up to the realism of the present, it impresses the senses rather than the thoughts, and misses its object, which is to bring within our mental reach what is beyond our physical grasp; and when, on the other hand, it goes back too far, it fails in execution, because its models are not only out of sight, but out of mind, and it cannot touch us because we can no longer feel even a romantic interest in the real or imaginary events which it attempts to describe.

The subject is too high to be lightly touched, and too wide to be touched more than lightly here; but in this view of it may perhaps be found some explanation of the miserable poverty of Italian art in the eighteenth century, foreshadowed by the decadence of the seventeenth, which again is traceable to the dissipation of force and the disappearance of individuality that followed the Renascence, as inevitably as old age follows youth. Besides all necessary gifts of genius, the development of art seems to require that a race should not only have leisure for remembering, but should also have something to remember which may be worthy of being recalled and perhaps of being imitated. Progress may be the road to wealth and health, and to such happiness as may be derived from both; but the advance of civilization is the path of thought, and its landmarks are not inventions nor discoveries, but those very great creations of the mind which ennoble the heart in all ages; and as the idea of progress is inseparable from that of growing riches, so is the true conception of civilization indivisible from thoughts of beauty and nobility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy had almost altogether lost sight of these; art was execrable, fashion was hideous, morality meant hypocrisy; the surest way to power lay in the most despicable sort of intrigue, and inward and spiritual faith was as rare as outward and visible devoutness was general.

That was the society which frequented the Villa Medici on fine afternoons, and it is hard to see wherein its charm lay, if, indeed, it had any. Instead of originality, its conversation teemed with artificial conventionalisms; instead of nature, it exhibited itself in the disguise of fashions more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly nonsensical 'pastoral' verses which we find too silly to read; and in place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical austerity which marked England's ascent, from the death of Edward the Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her long struggle for life. It had little which we are accustomed to respect in men and women, and yet it had something which we lack today, and which we unconsciously envy—it had a colour of its own. Wandering under the ancient ilexes of those sad and beautiful gardens, meeting here and there a few silent and soberly clad strangers, one cannot but long for the brilliancy of two centuries ago, when the walks were gay with brilliant dresses, and gilded chairs, and servants in liveries of scarlet and green and gold, and noble ladies, tottering a few steps on their ridiculous high heels, and men bewigged and becurled, their useless little hats under their arms, and their embroidered coat tails flapping against their padded, silk-stockinged calves; and red-legged, unpriestly Cardinals who were not priests even in name, but only the lay life-peers of the Church; and grave Bishops with their secretaries; and laughing abbés, whose clerical dress was the accustomed uniform of government office, which they still wore when they were married, and were fathers of families. There is little besides colour to recommend the picture, but at least there is that.

The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward, and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the Trinità de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged. Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there, calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle, full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the abbé's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that extinct world.