ROME IN 1860.*
6 Tim e Rome of which Mr. Dicey has here presented so striking and apparently so faithful a portrait, is not the Eternal City—eternal because ideal—which no outward changes, no political vicissitudes, can evermore deprive of its weird dominion over the minds of all who approach its enchanted site. It is the Rome of real life he has depicted, the Rome of Pius IX. and Antonelli, in the penultimate year of its squalid and miserable existence. He shows us the papal city as it would appear to the eyes of a stranger who entered for the first time, caring nothing and knowing nothing of the past, its narrow, dingy, dirty, ill-paved streets, with no light of any kind at night, and gloomy even at midday ; flanked by houses that "one and all look as if, commenced on too large a scale, they had ruined their builders before their completion, had been left standing empty for years, and were now occupied by tenants too poor to keep them from decay ;" with here and there a desolate-looking piazza or square, each one like the other, emptier, quieter, and cleaner than the street, but that is all ; in its centre a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy ; on one side a church, dull and bare without, gaudy and dull within; on the other side some grim old palace, which bears a striking resem- blance to Newgate gone to ruin. In his walk through the town from one end of it to the other, the stranger discovers no signs of commerce or manufactures, and all the trade he sees is but huckstering ; he passes no fine buildings, for there are none in Rome except St. Peter's and ; the Colosseum, both of which lie away from the town.. The streets I and shops in the modern quarter, brilliant though they seem by cog trast with the rest of the city, would after all be only third-rate ones in any other European capital, and beyond them again lie the narrow streets and the decayed piazzas, through which one emerges on the dreary and altogether desolate Campagna.
By this time, perhaps, the visitor begins to doubt the universal assumption that the maintenance of the Papal court at Rome is, at least in a material point of view, an immense advantage to the city. In truth, it is the very thing which has made Rome what it now is ; no class gains by it, not even the priests, whose daily bread depends on the continuance of the very system, which has forced numbers of them into the priesthood for want of any other occupation, and miserably underpays their services ; for "it is a Protestant delusion that the priests in Rome live upon the fat of the land. What fat there is is certainly theirs, but then there are too many months to eat it." Of the hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants of Rome, some ten thousand are in holy orders, and probably there are not far short of forty thousand persons who, in some form or other, live upon and by the Church, that is to say, upon the labour of the rest
• Row is 1850. By Edward Dicey. Macmillan and Co.
of the population, every thirteen of whom, men, women, and children, are thus charged with the support of four unproductive persons. "In other countries," a Roman once said to Mr. Dicey, "you have one man who lives in wealth, and a thousand who live in comfort. Here the one man lives in comfort, and the thousand live in misery."
It is with the poor of Rome just as it is with the priests; they are not allowed to starve, but the Papal Government makes them paupers and keeps them so. The system of clerical charity is of that kind which exasperates the evil it pretends to palliate, and it is aided by every other moral influence which the Government can exert in favour of idleness and against industry. Hence, the workmen in Rome are not Romans, for the Romans proper never work ; they prefer begging; it is a recognized and respected profession among them, and the winter, when visitors abound, is their harvest time. Strangers have no notion of the distress which prevails among them in summer, when the visitors are gone and the streets deserted. It is true that they are not afraid of actual starvation, for all "well- disposed" persons, with a good word from the priests, can obtain food from the convents of the Mendicant friars ; and yet they do not love the hand that feeds them. Mr. Dicey is convinced that they have no affection or regard whatever for the existing Government, not even the sort of attachment, valueless though it be, which the lazzaroni of Naples had for their Bourbon princes. "It is incredible, if any such feeling did exist, that it should refuse to give any sign of its existence at such a time as the present." If the Pope and all his priestly followers were to depart to-morrow, Rome would lose nothing by their absence, not even her visitors, upon whom she lives quite as much as Ramsgate and Margate live upon theirs. The Romans do not fear that travellers would then cease to come to them, Or even come in diminished numbers. When Ring James threatened the Londoners that he would withdraw his Court from among them, they told him he could not take the Thames away with him; and the Romans know that if the Pope go, he must leave all the grand attractions of the Eternal City behind him, and that under a secular Court it would become a far more lively, and in many respects a more pleasant place for strangers. As for the pomps and pageantry of the Papal services, regarded in a business point of view as means of attracting visitors, they hold them in low esteem, and Mr. Dicey is entirely of the same opinion. He abstains from any discussion of them in their religious aspect, but he holds himself pretty well qualified, by experience, to judge of them as great spec- tacles got up with the aid of music and upholstery and dramatic mechanism, and in this sense he denies that they are imposing and effective ; nay; he does not hesitate to express his " deliberate con- viction that the ceremonies of the Holy Week at Rome are—the word must come out sooner or later—an imposture." This he main- tains in the teeth of a received article of faith in Protestant England as to the seductive character of the Papal ceremonies; nor does he even except the most famous of them all, the Misereres in the Sistine Chapel The music, no doubt, is very fine; but besides that you hear it in a state of prolonged and excessive bodily discomfort, "it is not music that addresses itself to popular taste, or produces any feel- ing save that of weariness in nine-tenths of its hearers. You can mark clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as candle after candle of the stack of wax-lights before the altar is put out successively at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be im- pressive, hut a dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance." It is only tourists and priests that compose the perspiring, struggling, and ill-tempered crowd that press m to hear the Miserere; Italian laymen care nothing for an entertamment with which English men and women are forced by the slavery of con- ventional rules to profess themselves delighted.
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