18 JANUARY 1851, Page 14

MARIOTTI'S SCENES FROM ITALIAN LIFE. * SIGNOR MAR/triTi is favourably known

to the public, by his " Italy, Past and Present ”; a work which displays exten*Areading and • Scenes from 'Italian Litre: :By L. lifdrlotti; Author- efAcIttili. Past and Pre- sent." Published:by Newby. observation; directed by a keen judgment and vivified by a power- ful style, rarely attained by a foreigner writing in -English. In the present volume Merlotti has passed from history to fiction, though still 'with a lurking historical object, if manners, feelings, opinions, and the actions of individual types of classes, may be called history. The work consists of a series of tales or sketches, designed to exhibit Italian character in some national aspects. This object, however, is so latent that many may read the book and think they are only reading stories distinguished from the common run of non- vellettes by some individuality of the writer. Consideredin this way, the scenes exhibit more power than art. They are wild, if not crude, in their structure and management, and sometimes disregard re- ceived canons as to the manner in which the story should be pre- sented. They have also that " show-off" of art, or artifice, which distinguishes foreign writers of the intense school ; and there is occasionally somewhat of Southern warmth, mingled with Italian contempt for trltramontane people. These features rather add peculiality to the book than detract from its effect. How- ever wild.or fragmentary the intended, of the tales may be, they pro- duce the result the author ntended, and probably with greater brevity and, power than if he had confined himself to a mere jogtrot method. The execution is of a very vigorous and striking kind; the style especially being Nary remarkable; The diction is not merely unrestrained, bat flowing, terse, and idiomatic ; the author having mastered the conventional slang of the day, as well as the more standard style of writing. The peculiar character of the book is the knowledge of Italian life that pervades it ; though, as we have said, this knowledge is rather latent than palpable. The first sketch is entitled- " Jacopo Ruffini," the name of a ,Piedmontese who committed suicide in prison for his connexion with the affair of 1833. The tale in its telling resembles "The Last Days of a Condemned "; and is sup- posed to be a journal of Rufflni's feelings and thoughts in prison, with glimpses of the criminal procedure of Charles Albert's Minis- ters. " Montenero " is another piece on a similar subject. It is the supposed autobiography of an Italian of genius and spirit, who, finding all avenues of high distinction closed against him in Iialy,,tonspires, is exiled, wanders over• the world in search of excitement or a field for his energies; in despair becomes a monk of St. Bernard, but finds that, "except perhaps the darling dogs, the life is commonplace enough on a closer inspection." He is -fluffily 'supposed to have joined the Milanese or Piedmontese army in 1848, and fallen at the Bridge of Goito. " Savelli " seems de- signed to illustrate the effects of celibacy on a conscientious Romish priest ; though not, perhaps, very happily, for Savelli, had he not been professed, could not have married Lady Ada--indeed, would not have known her : but. it is skilful and powerful as a tale, and in addition to a knowledge of the human heart, displays an acquaintance with the coarser man- ners of the. Romish priesthood. " Marcella " is a clever sketch of the ignorant superstition of the peasantry, and the equally ignorant scepticism of the town serving-maid ; as " Natale Fer- roni" exhibits the latter kind of bravado in a dissipated student or " fast " fellow ; while both are vehicles for painting Italian manners in the respective classes of society to which the actors belong. " Anguissola " is the tale of a man whose reason is lost with the loss of his betrothed, through the interference of the family confessor: it seems designed to denounce the influence which' the priesthood exercise in families, especially of weak and commonplace persons. There are a few other stories with a less definite purpose, though still exhibitive of Italy; and an impro- bable but powerfully-written tale of " seduction," the scene of which is laid at some German court. In all that Mariotti does, however, he is separated from the common tale-writer by the possessionof a purpose.

In London we have, or had, the Chapter Coffeehouse, a "house of call " for divines who work by the job : in Rome, it appears, they have many such, and in a larger way of business as regards the bargains to be struck. This sketch is from the opening of " Savelli."

" Paris is said to be the paradise of women. Rome may, most undoubtedly, be looked upon as the Eden of priests ; only of those priests, however, who have interest enough to grease the binges of St. Peter s gate. To the rest it is worse than limbo.

" There are soft-dangling roomy coaches and mellow courtesans for car- dinals and, prelates of princely families ; fat capons and old Orvieto for double-chinned canons and, deacons ; but lean masses and shabby funerals, wrangling and squabbling, heartburning expectation, squalor and sheer starvation, for an innumerable rabble of unbeneficed shaveling&

" For the use and advantage of these wretched step-sons of Mother- Church there are ecclesiastical exchanges and bazaars. "There are certain wine and spirit shops (bettolini) and lottery-offices

tteghini del lotto) in every city in Italy—and no less than a hundred in alone—where Christ is sold to the highest bidder. Masses, pro- cessions, and other windfalls of the ghostly. trade, are there accurately re- ported, put up for competition, and their respective merits diligently weighed and sifted. There are reverend roass-brokers, wholesale and retail dealers in benedictions, matins, and vespers. The •bargains are struck over a salted tartine and a glass ef strong waters. Happy the man who, by ob- taining early information, is able to forestall his brethren and secure the highest fees. He may afterwards he able to make over his minor engage ments, to dispose of there at 'a considerable premium, even as a Bond Street musk-seller will manage-with a ticket for a pit-stall at Her Majesty's The- atre. He has a pocketfull of Misereres at three pains, and Te Deums at a testone. He will overreach himself sometimes, nevertheless ; drop a good bone to jumpat its ahadowi "Suchen sayings and doings of the lower clergy Home ; such the pions devices aftd practices far the Continuation of which the Catholic world will henoeforth be indebted to the,Crusaders and-Paladins of the successor of Charlemagne, the:fated interpreter of Napoleenian ideas—the 'Nephew of his Uncle.' " Pio 'None is pledged to the perpetuation of all that. Ho has tapped now at one, now at the other of the rotten stones of the Catholic edifice. He is now happily restored, with a conviction that any attempt at-repair is sure to bring down the whole fabric about his ears. " It may or may not have survived the reforming velleities of that amiable Pope i it may or may not have withstood the blast of Republican storms ; but in the good golden times of Gregory the Sixteenth, and precisely towards the close of his pontificate, one of the most flourishing haunts of all the loose priests about town—the very mass-monger hall par excellence—was a notorious liquor-shop in the Borgo, which bore the sign of. the Apostle St. Jude, but which the keen-witted townspeople of Pasquin had more appropriately nicknovned the bettolino of Judas Iscariot."

The following double satire upon the midnight mass is from the tale of " Natale Ferroni " Christmas-eve being the time in which the spectre appears to him, and converts him from a dissi- pated student to a ' respectable " man. The period, moreover, furnishes an opportunity for a sketch of home and out-of-door Christmas festivities in Italy.

"Protestant novelists, especially those of the Rookwood and Tower-of-Lon- don school, have made the most of the awful solemnities of those midnight high masses. To read them one would fancy that mass is never said but at mid- night ; at least that mass is said every night at that witching time through-

out the Catholic world. It may have been so, for aught I know or care, in the good old times; but priests in modern ages have an eye to their comforts, and it is a fact that there is now no midnight mass, high or low, except Christ-mass ; and that, far from having any of the harrowing horrors attri- buted to it by romance, is, I am compelled to say, with great concern for the lovers of the terrific, rather a jolly.affiur than otherwise.

Mass, it must be kept in mind, is daily bread to many a poor priest of the

lowest classes. The mourning ceremonies of the holy week, which for eight- and-forty hours swathe up in black hangings all the altars in Catholic Chris- tendom, have the effect of robbing those poor starvelings of their customary fees. Stopping. their mass is actually cutting off their subsistence ; and it is with a view to indemnify them for the losses they have to sustain at the Easter season,. that a bountiful church allows theta to celebrate three masses instead of one on the Feast of the Nativity, and pays them accordingly. "The first of these masses is said at midnight, the second at early dawn,

the last at noon on Christmas-day ; these arrangements, of course, for the high mass only.. The lower clergy have to go through their work at any time between midnight and midday, in which any nook or corner of the church is left vacant for them ; anyhow anywhere, wherever a pair of yellow tapers may be stuck up and a naissae opened. "Two out of the three performances before alluded to are, properly speak-

ing, only mock masses or rehearsals. Inasmuch as the mass is nothing but a communion service, and as the sacrifice implies the strictest fast, and canon]y be taken once in twenty-four hours, it follows that only one of the three Christ-masses is the real thing—the celebration of what is called the bloodless sacrifice.

"Now the midnight high mass on Christmas-eve is said in every one of the eighty-four parish-churches of the city of Parma, to say nothing of ab- bey churches, oratorios, and private chapels ; mid at every mass the bag- pipe tunes are generally played on the organ. Still there is nothing like the bagpipe tunes on• the organ at the Santissima Armunziata. Those good Franciscans keep one of their order for that purpose merely. They have al- ways had one time out of memory. His business is to fatten and play upon I

the organ. In all matters, too, he may be only an average performer ; but as to bagpipe tunn he to expected to beat not only all other organists in the world, not only adimitations of the bagpipe, but actually to beat the bag- pipe itself. "Christmas seems to belong to the jolly Franciscans by right : ever since their foundation they made it their especialstudy, and it is their business so to trick out their shop at this season as to draw all the custom to themselves. They have fairness enough to withdraw from competition in other solem- nities; and will gladly, for instance, allow some of the rival gloomier frater- nities to exercise an equal monopoly over the tragedy of Passion-week and the construction of the Santo Sepolcro.

"The performance of Christmas devolves upon 'them; an egregious pantomime they do make of it. The Presepio at the Santissima Annunsiata Is not merely a bas-relief, or a tableau-vivant, as in other churches—not merely a mummery or a dumb-show; it may well be called a downright opera, inasmuch as it has its stage decorations, its orchestra and choruses. The stage is erected on the left-hand side of the main altar ; as the midnight hour approaches the curtain is drawn aside. The happy mother is discovered in a half-kneeling, half-sitting posture on the straw ; the putative father, about whom the &liana have a great many ribald jokes, is seen resting on his long crook behind her; their two dumb and patient companions looking on, grave and wise ; the angels—heads and wings without bodies—hovering above the family group in the air. The divine Ifant—(for aught that may seem profanation the monks are alone responsible, inasmuch as nothing ever slips from my pen but what I may testify as an eye-witness)--the divine in- fant is taken from the manger ; a wax doll, with flaxen curls and blue glass-bead eyes, all swaddled in brocade and decked out in tinsel and sham jewellery,. is held up before the gazing audience amidst the joyous strains of the piping. organ ; and is then made to go the whole round-of the choir, with all the alacrity of a decanter of port-wine at the convivial board. each of those frolicsome friars, all flushed with their Christmas-eve supper, takes it from his neighbour's hands, hugs and dandles it with all the dexterit(quaint

of an

expert monthly nurse, and tosses it up in the air; while their anthems • sorry old ditties, in the best style of refectory literature) keep time with the swelling organ peals, s inging,

' Lo I the holy babe is born, White and rosy as the morn,

Curly-headed, plump, and sound— Take it, brother, pass it round! ', Such is the prelude to the midnight mass on ekristmas-eve."