BOOKS.
DAYS NEAR ROME.* TITS first thing a visitor to Rome should do, is to take his Murray, or his Badeker, or better still, Mr. Hare's Walks in Rome, to which the present volumes are a most delightful sequel, to the summit of the Tower of the Capitol, and there make himself thoroughly master of the topography of the Eternal City. From this elevation, " Rome as a mirror," to use Dante's words, " is before his sight;" and if he has but the average acquaintance with Roman story, he will find that a couple of hours spent there will form a new era in his life. Before his ascent, the traveller, after passing the figures of Castor and Pollux, with a snatch of Horace rising to his lips, will, as a matter of course, arrest his progress by the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, and will, probably, as he contemplates the complacent image of the emperor, say to him- self, "Yes, how like the face and figure must be ! Had Aurelius lived in our days, no doubt, he would have written an essay on Literature and Dogma." That a power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, has left its unmistakable impression on the countenance, we do not affirm. Rather there is the expression of the consciousness that Marcus was a very superior person, whose own righteousness must be an article of belief with all ladies and gentlemen who are raised above the dim masses, be these superstitious after the antique fashion or after the type of the insurgent Christians, whose fanatical adherence to dogma compels the Lieutenants in the Provinces to visit them with the doom which will prevent their obstructing the paths of philosophic literature, or claiming to have attained those moral ideas which can only be reached by the elect few after special discipline and self-control.
But once on the height of the Campidoglio, with the blue sky overhead, the clear, delicious atmosphere, the silence, save of bells, or clocks telling the hour, and Rome at your feet, the fascination is simply absolute. The likest experience which the present writer could recollect, after standing there alone, was that of the equilibrium but marvellously exalted function of all the mental faculties which De Quincey has described as one of his moods in the Opium-Eaters. A second sight seemed to take the place of memory and common vision, and the drama of 2,000 years enacted itself before you with a coherence and salience and completeness which your previous reading could only in part account for. Rome regal, Rome republican, Rome imperial, Rome papal, each era unfolded itself before the mental eye so vividly that all sense of time slipped out of consciousness, and you found yourself the passive percipient of the glorious pageants which, as if moved by some occult machinery, traversed in suc- cession the field of vision. From the Aventine of the Kings, which lies behind and to the left of the spectator, as we now con- ceive him to be standing, with the very "yellow" Tiber laving its base, to the Palatine of the Emperors, with its crowded ruins, which comes next in order, and from the Republican Capitol, away up past the Cmlian, Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills, to the Vatican, crowned by St. Peter's—the arc described being from left to right, as if one were swinging a flail round one's head, say from the Monument to Westminster Abbey—the whole area of Roman struggle and centralisation is distinctly visible, and the observer is so dominated by the spell of the situation, tracking the Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus of Roman history, that he will be
• hays near Rome. By Augustus J. C. Hare. London: Daldy, labister, and Co. Ism. startled when a fresh visitor joins him, by discovering that a portion of a day spent on the Capitol has been to him more than a thousand years.
But, as its title tells us, the present work is concerned very little with Rome itself. It treats specially of Rome's surroundings, and of the quite endless excursions which may be undertaken with large profiting of refreshment and information by any one possessed of moderate health, moderate means, and a moderate spirit of adventure. But, unfortunately, as Mr. Hare remarks• in his introduction, "only about one traveller in five hundred of those who cross the Alps ever sees Italy,"—even that bit of Italy which is visible to the naked eye from the Capitol. Of course there is no place in Italy like Rome itself, and the stranger who goes there with his eyes open will find that after months spent in daylight inspection and nightly reading, he has only begun to realise the vastness and variety of the treasures of art and antiquity which are accumulated between the Tiber and the Seven Hills. Even he, however, will do well to break right away out of the city, and under the safe and genial guidance of Mr. Hare take at least a fortnight's outing on the skirts of the Campagna. But what a sea of glory the Campagna itself is !—for "sea" is the only word that can, with any approach to truthful suggestiveness, in- dicate that vast expanse of plain, with its swelling undulations, which stretches on the north and north-cast from the walls of Rome to the nearer line of the Appenincs, and on the south-west and south-east to the Mediterranean at Ostia and Terracina. And no stretch of water we ever looked on by daylight or moon- light showed such a phantasmagoria of dancing colours as one beholds when looking across the Catnpagna from Frascati or Albano to Rome. There is before you a natural chromatrope, such as no art could simulate, and as the marvellous iridescence tremulously hovers above the greensward, you have the sensation as if all the rainbows—and what grand ones we have seen there !—which ever stretched over the Alban Hills had sunk into the earth at their base, and were rising again in newness of form and beauty.
But if the visitor is to accompany Mr. Hare, by which gate is he first to issue from Rome ? " By any one," Mr. David Copper- field's young wife would answer, and so say we. But suppose he first elects to make a short pilgrimage to "St. Paul's, outside the walls." Ile could not do better, and it is thus Mr. Hare, always fresh, always reliable in his statements, leads the way :—
" It was in the freshness of an early morning of most brilliant sun- shine that we drove out of the old crumbling Ostian gate, now called Porta San Paolo, which Belisarins built, and whore Totila and Gonseric entered Rome, and passed beneath the pyramid of Caine Cestius, which for nineteen hundred years has cast its pointed shadow over the turfy slopes whore foreign Christians gathered from so many distant lands now sleep in Christ. This pyramid St. Paul looked upon as he was led out to execution beyond the city walls, and it may be considered as 'the sole surviving witness of his martyrdom.' A little further, and wo pass the 'Chapel of the Farewell,' which marks the site of his legendary leave-taking with St. Peter, and is adorned with a bas-relief of the two aged martyrs embracing for the last time, and inscriptions of the words they are reported to have spoken to one another. Then we reach the great basilica, once surrounded by the flourishing fortified village of Joanopolis, but now standing alone in solitary abandonment, even the monks, who scantily occupy its adjoining convent, being obliged to fly into the town before the summer malaria. Outside, the rostored church has no features of age or grandeur, but within, as the eye passes down its unbroken lines of grey columns, sur- mounted by a complete series of papal portraits, it may rest upon the magnificent mosaics of the tribune, and the grand triumphal arch of Galla Placidia, relics of the venerable basilica which perished by fire on the night of the 15th of July, 1823, on which Pius VII. lay dying."
We cannot afford to journey with Mr. Hare to Ostia, his account of which is admirable, but we turn in quite the oppo- site direction, and follow him to an eminence which to all readers of Horace holds a place of conspicuousness in their memories similar to that which the elevation itself possesses in relation to the Campagna,—we mean Soracte. Of Soracte Mr. Hare thus writes, after describing the journey from Rome to Borghetto, on the Florence line of railway, and then from Borg- hetto to Civita Castellana, through quite a fairy-land of pictur- esqueness and sweet odours,—Civita. Castellana itself, though it stands amid the noblest scenery imaginable, and possesses the most delightful air and exquisite views over the mountains, and though only two hours distant from Rome, being scarcely visited by one traveller in a thousand :—
" No drive can be uninteresting with such an object as Soracto be- fore one, ever becoming more defined. Those who look at it from Rome have no idea whatever of the majestic character of the mountain as seen from this side, where it rises abruptly in the midst of the rich green plain of the table-land. Dennis compares it to the Rock of Gibraltar, Ampere says that it resembles a blue island in the /Egean Sea. At first it is a sharp blue wedge against the sky, darkened by the woods with which it is covered ; then it lengthens into several peaks of sharp cliff succeeding one another, and crowned by white convents and her-
mitages. The lower slopes are rich and green. They melt gradually into thick olive groves, which terminate in steeps of bare, grey rock, white and dazzling when the sun falls upon them. It is a mark of a severe winter when Soracte is capped with snow :—
" Vides, ut alt& stet sive candidum Soracte."—Roases, Odes, i, 9.
And thus crested, it is the most beautiful feature in the well-known view from the terrace of the Pamfili-Doris villa at Rome. But all the snow will have melted before the charms of the fresh spring have attracted visitors to Civits. Casteliana, and its lower slopes will be breaking into such a loveliness of tender green as is quite indescribable. Though of no great altitude, Soracte, from its isolation, its form, and its glorious colour, is far more impressive than many mountains which are five times its height.
'"Athos, Olympus, Etna, At'as, made These hills seem things of lesser dignity ; All, save the lone Soraete's height, displayed Not now In snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid For our remembrance, and from out the plain Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,
And on the crest hangs pausing.' "—BYRON, Childs Harold, o. Iv.
In dealing with volumes like the present, which contain work so uniformly good, and which bring before you in graphic succession hundreds of places which, if not all of equal interest to the artist or antiquarian, have yet all attractions of their own, the reviewer must be content to make his selection of extracts almost at random, and to close his article with the feeling that possibly the pages which would best commend Mr. Hare's Days near Rome to the general reader are just those to which no allusion has been made. In any case, however, it will not be Mr. Hare's fault if the visitor, who has only a few days to spare, should remain unacquainted with the romantic Tivoli ; or Veii, that " oldest and richest" city in Italy, which was a flourishing state at the time of the foundation of Rome, and which once possessed so many attractions that it was a question whether Rome itself should not be abandoned for its sake ; or the Tusculum of Cicero, or the glories of Palestrina, with its tragic story of the Colonnas, and the terrible deception practised on them by "that magnani- mous sinner, Boniface VIII., who entered the Papacy like a fox, reigned like a lion, and died like a dog."
Mr. Hare has so pleasantly refreshed our memories, and given us so much delightful information about places we have not yet seen, that it might seem ungenerous to take leave of his volumes With a word of exception. That exception, however, does not relate to the quality of his book as to descriptive accuracy and painstaking industry and attractiveness, but to a much more serious matter, his assertion that the closing of the conventual establishments was accompanied, not only, as in England of old, by the loss of the pauper doles, but by the robbing of the dowries of many nuns, and that it has thrown thousands of helpless ladies into a state of utter -destitution, for the relief of which the only provision is a miserable and irregularly paid pension of a few pence a day. Very dif- ferent conclusions have been drawn from the Blue-book on monastic establishments abroad which has recently been issued by the English Foreign Office ; and we would venture to ask Mr. Hare if he is not aware of the fact that this charge against the Government of Victor Emanuel, when first published in Good Words, called forth an earnest remonstrance from the late Bishop of Argyll,—no doubt a strongly anti-Romanist authority, but also a most accomplished Italian scholar, as well as a most upright man,—and that Dr. Ewing obtained from the Italian Ambassador of the day an emphatic denial of its truth.
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