Part I: The Outline of a City

THi£ OUTLINE OF A CITY

B EFORE beginning this, the ten thousandth attempt at telling the most tremendous of all travellers' tales, it will be well to start with an apology. When it was first suggested to me that I should go to Rome and in some sense report upon the new transformations in that very old transformation-scene, I explained frankly that I am a very bad reporter; just as I am a very bad reviewer. And this is not in the least because I despise reporting or reviewing as dull, but because I find too much that is interesting in them and possess too little of the most interesting qualities they require; the qualities of selection and concentration. I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay. I can honestly say, as a general impression of things, that I never find anything dull; but a book describing the discovery that nothing is dull might be very dull indeed. In the same way I am bound, in telling my traveller's tale, to say that I am a bad traveller, or at least a bad tourist. And here again, I mean nothing but respect for the tourist; for the same is true of the pilgrim. I am naturally the sort of pilgrim who never sees the Pope, because he stands too long staring at the Papal Guard. I speak here in a figure, for, as even these patchy pages will show, I did see the Pope; and my staring at the Papal Guard, which will be found described at intolerable length in a later chapter, did not occur till afterwards, But it is honestly quite true that I lack proportion, and my weakness as a traveller is that the world seems to me so amusing everywhere that it is hardly worth while to travel. When I start out for the ends of the earth, I am stopped on the road by an entertaining lamp-post or a wildly signalling window-blind; and have not even sufficient sense of the scale of difference between these passing questions and the Quest.

The same dramatic triviality troubles me when I actually reach a foreign land like Italy. If I honestly made a list of the things that do directly please my eye, it would seem crazy in exactly the fine old English sense of a crazy quilt or a crazy pavement. I do not know why it should please me that some of the broad black hats of the priests are all furry or hairy; but it does. I do not know why I should have the same sort of feeling for the squat palm-trees on which the porcupine fibres also look furry, as if they were animals instead of vegetables.

II

Perhaps Miss Edith Sitwell would kindly explain why the tree is like the hat; I feel somehow that it would be in her line, though she would probably refer to the hairy sun and the hairy moon in the course of explaining it. I do not know why certain hard bluish cactus-leaves with teeth make me feel (with great gratification) that I am walking at the bottom of the sea; or why I almost danced in the street to see a tree growing on the top of a house; or why among rows of better and more famous busts, I like the look of a Roman Emperor whose head is made of black marble and his robe of red marble, as if he were a negro with a tribal taste for gay and gorgeous garments. If I were left to myself, these are the sort of things that I should loiter about to look at; and such things may turn up anywhere, even at home. But this, it is truly said, is not seeing Rome. It is not, as will be remarked with increasing sternness, even writing about Rome.

Well, I shall now pull myself together and write about Rome. But, by way of completing the apology, I will mention first the first thing I really noticed in Rome, because it fixes exactly what I mean. I do not know whether anybody else ever noticed it; I do not suppose that most people would suppose it was worth noticing. I have no idea how old it is, and I imagine it is quite new. I do not know who did it or why, and I am not sure that I even want to know; certainly I have not yet, as a fact, taken the trouble to enquire. I am pretty sure it is in no guide-book; and, what is more to the point, in no book of more sensitive and individual impressions, like so many that have been written about Rome. Yet the thing was an event in my life; in that inner, infantile and fanciful life which begins with seeing the first Punch and Judy or owning the first air-gun. I merely walked across the road from my hotel, soon after my arrival, filled with no particular aspiration beyond a strong appetite for lunch; and just round the corner of the small street opposite I found a whole huge gateway carved like the face of a gigantic goblin with open jaws. It was rather like the Mouth of Hell in the mediaeval pictures and plays. The worthy householder, who lived behind this pleasing facade, had presumably grown accustomed to popping in and out of the monster in the most prim and respectable manner. Whenever he went into his house, he was devoured by a giant like the princesses in the fairy-tales. Whenever he came out of his house, he was vomited forth by a hideous leviathan like the prophet in the story of Nineveh. This seemed to me rather quaint; I have never seen it anywhere else;

I have never seen it mentioned here. Now of course I do know enough, in a smattering sort of way, to connect a thing of that sort with the antiquities or the novelties of Rome. Assuming my sternest air, as a guide to the tourist and the author of a serious hook of travel, I can say that this is a remarkable example, and even extreme among the late extravagances of the Baroque. I shall in an instant plunge into a general survey, in which there will be quite a lot of the Baroque. I merely wish to record that, while this little lane has a long name in Italian, which I forget, I call it in my own mind Ogre Street; and my adventures there are entirely my own.

E VERY town worth talking about has a shape; only the great organised townplanned modern city has grown shapeless. But then the great modern city is not worth talking about; and nobody as a matter of fact ever does talk about it, in the sense in which men will never leave off talking about the town of Rye as much as the town of Rome. Everybody knows that the precipitous terraces of Edinburgh are like the profile of a particular human face. Everybody who thinks of Bath thinks of the particular way in which particular grey crescents of houses lie on particular green crescents of hills. There are aspects in which Paris seems almost to stand in the Seine as much as Venice in the sea; it is really the Island of the City; and Notre Dame looks taller than the mere Eiffel Tower. On the only occasion when I had ever been in Rome, previous to the present visit, I found myself somehow in a position in which I missed this point; the pointed outline of a particular and memorable place. I was down on the lower level, where there is only a sensation of everything

TI-IE OUTLINE OF A CITY and everybody being canalised into rather narrow streets, which are nevertheless supposed to be the principal streets. There was a rather oppressive feeling of everything being blocked up by the Victor Emmanuel Monument, which, in comparison with smaller and more interesting things, seemed to present an Arctic wilderness of white marble, lit only with the cold flame of gold. The traveller had a sense of running and dodging round the bewildering bulk of this monument and of not knowing what it was, or where anything else was. Of course I saw the sights of Rome, but I never saw Rome, or discovered that Rome itself can be a sight. I could not find Rome anywhere; it seemed to have run away and hidden itself; probably behind one of the pillars of the Victor Emmanuel Monument. But on my second visit I found it quite suddenly and simply; by the simple accident of having a room in an hotel on the great hill of the Trinity, which falls in a wide cascade of steps down to the level of the Corso. The position commands a splendid view of St. Peter's and the sunsets that clothe it every day; but it commands also something more special and perhaps more indescribable. There is a certain sensation of looking down into the chasms into which the seven hills are cloven; and a sense more or less irrational or imaginative that these chasms are very deep, and that something secret and subterranean is always rising like a sealed spring or a volcanic vapour out of the very depths of Rome. And this unreasonable image, like many unreasonable images, does represent a reality. It is the reality that was even realistically expressed, when the investigators declared that they dared not excavate deeper under some of the Roman churches, lest the whole of Rome should cave in, and fall as if into an abyss. It is again what is very vividly suggested in the tradition, which is a true tradition, about the Lost Waters of the city; a mysterious buried river or shifting and vanishing fountain, which by its very name and nature hints once more at this haunting suggestion of profundity. Marion Crawford wrote a romance about that water; and, by a very true artistic instinct, called it The Heart of Rome.

There is indeed something in that downward plunge of the mind that makes a man fancy that the heart might be so hidden; as if that evanescent fountain might be its fitful pulse or that dark river the very blood of the deep-hearted town. Looking down from the surrounding heights, we seem to see something written like a fiery hieroglyphic in the very lights of the city; something only to be conveyed in the old melodramatic tag; " Treasure is buried here," Tt i c doubtless connected with the general fact of sunken antiquities and stratified foundations; and with more than one story of religions living like subterranean races. So the strange rites of the Persian sun-god were seldom practised in the sun, but always in caves even if they were artificial caves; as when there flowed in the very foundations of St. Clement’s that other dark river of the boiling blood of the Sacred Bull, that was the purple sacrament of Mithras. So also another strange sect, sometimes confounded with that one, the men whose symbol was the Fish, lived a life that must have seemed like the blind life of fishes; except that in the eyes of their persecutors they were rather like poisonous rats living in the drains and sewers. It is that feeling, at least, winch still gives its thrill of paradox to the story of the Catacombs. In the Catacombs at least there was truly a story of buried treasure.

Thus Rome looked to me like The City of the Seven Valleys. But to behold the mystery of the valleys it is necessary to stand on the hill. The whole effect, which I despair of describing, is somehow rather of depth than of height. It is the Gothic cities of the North that give the impression of height; the very lines of the architecture, as everyone has noted, leading the eye upward to pointed roofs or tapering spires. It is not a question of actual but of

B*> relative height; though even in point of fact the spire of Old St. Paul’s shot immeasurably far above the present classical building on Ludgate Hill. I am not ignorant of the fact that this impression could be contradicted in a material sense. My intelligence is equal to perceiving that the Colosseum is rather large; 1 know that St. Peter’s is very high, and I have not commonly felt the need of the services of several kind Americans, who have told me exactly how high. I know that, even in the more real world of imagination or impression, the place of the Gothic spires is to some extent taken by the straight converging lines of the great obelisks; and that a superb effect of height is sometimes reached by the great isolated columns, especially that one (to which I send all salutations and homage short of latria) on which the Mother of God rides triumphant, upon the horns of the moon. But the general impression on my own memory remains what I say; the impression of not looking up but down. Truth is not at the top of a tower, but really at the bottom of a well.

Rome is very notably, to the eye, a city of fountains. I do not know whether there are really any more fountains here than in other places; and once more I courteously wave away the assistance of the American gentleman, eager to tell me that there are 331 more fountains in Tarentum, Neb. and 253, already planned for Pinkerton, Texas, when it shall have expanded to an appropriate size. But the whole point of these things is proportion and prominence; and there is a strong effect in the streets of Rome of great fountains being at every other corner; wreathed by the nymphs and ridden by the tritons of the most rampant moment of the Renaissance. And as I looked at them, there came vaguely across my mind the idea that these also were the perfect expression of something, and that if the Lost Waters were the heart, these fountains were the lungs of Rome. And then I remembered that a fountain is itself a paradox. It is a sort of topsy-turvy prodigy designed to show that water can fall upwards or flow uphill. Water, which was bowed and humble, for all its brightness, amid the rocks where St. Francis could stroke it like a living thing, is here flung aloft like a flying thing; as if the well could become a volcano. Water also was in a state of rebellion, or at least of resurrection. And when I found that word again, I knew the comparison that was haunting me; I realised that Rome is Rome of the Fountains because there is, in all of it, this sense of secret things thrust upwards from below. The tritons might ride aloft as if they were gods of the sky rather than the sea; they might blow their shelly horns tossed up from the deep as if they were the trumpets of the dome; but their exultation was in having dragged up drowned things into the daylight and fished up sunken treasure to glitter in the strong sun of Italy.

That, I take it, is why the sevenfold city of hills does not strike us first as a city of heights. A dim imagination tells us that the buried pagoda of epochs is taller than any earthly tower. Or it is like some leviathan with protuberant eyes and nostrils standing out like mountains, but the rest of its immeasurable vastness veiled under the dark waters; a very prehistoric leviathan that did at last put out its nose to the hook of Peter the Fisherman. The City is unexhausted. The City is inexhaustible. But it is earthwards that it is an eternal city; and we find it by searching the chasm or looking downward to the dust. That, at least, is how it affected me and I do not instinctively think of this city as scaling the sky, half so much as many a narrow village church in Normandy or Northumbria. But I feel the sense of an inexhaustible store of superimposed cultures and closely packed secrets of the past; the sense of a place being mined for all the gold of human and divine glories; brought up for ever out of an abyss of abundance, the depth and the richness of Rome.

That is the sort of summary that has come to

THE OUTLINE OE A CITY

2x stand in my mind as corresponding to the outlines of the cities; the steepness of Edinburgh or the great mirror of Venice. And it is chiefly the effect produced, rightly or wrongly, by standing on that hill called the Trinita di Monti and looking across the valley to where the dome of St. Peter’s rises like a distant world. And indeed that impression is perhaps increased, now that it is in a new sense a distant world in being in very truth a different nation. Beyond the Tiber lies a land that is not Italy; at least that is not merely Italy; and something mysterious in that new creation, which corresponds to an old conception, increases the sense of standing on the edge of a chasm and looking out beyond the world. But anyhow, I never had any such hint of the heart of the situation when I was merely in the middle of the city. I owe it, not to myself, but to the high place on which I happened to stand, like the goat in the fable; and if I were but one shade more brazen and cynical a journalist than I am, I could have written a whole book about Rome merely by looking out of my window.

And as I looked down into these gorges or gullies of the city sunken below me, glowing with lamps and alive with crawling crowds and yet seeming in some dim way like the lighted corridors of the Catacombs, there came into my mind the shadow of a meaning which has followed me in my wanderings ever since, and must serve weakly as a sort of guide, not only for my wandering feet, but for my much more wandering pen. It was the general sense of something continually rising from below; but especially of the continual rising of newer and newer things, which are yet continually older and older. It would be quite misleadingly depressing to talk of a town of tombs. It would not perhaps be much more cheery or cosy to talk of a town full of the special activities and agonies of premature burial. And yet there is something of those two tragic elements in the effect; but the effect is the very reverse of tragic. It is rather as if all these valleys were open graves, and the graves were open because the dead had never died. It seemed like a place in which nothing was too old to be young. It was as if the men of the Stone Age might stand up again like the stone statues in the market; or the cave-men come out painted and fantastic from their painted caves below. It is a place where everything is buried and nothing is lost. Therefore this mortuary imagery, that I have been obliged to use, does not carry with it a mere savour of mortality; but rather of immortality. I once amused myself by some fancy or fairy-tale about a sort of goblin war in the church-yard, between the tomb-stones carved with a skull and the tombstones carved with a cherub; as representing the hopeless and the hopeful philosophies of death. If Rome is a tomb or a place of tombs, it is emphatically of the sort carved with a cherub; indeed we can easily imagine it carved in the rather florid and tumid sort of Baroque that lends itself to the treatment of rather puffy cherubim. If I were to use the slang expression about a " dead alive ” place, it would sound like the exact opposite of what I mean, and yet the words would mean, literally, exactly what I am trying to say. It is not a place where life is dull or dead or deadly; it is a place where the dead are alive.

I do not mean that it is a place where the mind can dreamily return to the past. I mean it is a place where the past can actually return to the present. I do not mean that it amuses me to imagine certain conditions that were there a few thousand years ago. I mean that I can quite well imagine some such conditions there a few thousand years hence. I mean that it has a sort of access to its own origins, and a power upon its own vanished youth, which is what is really meant by calling it The Eternal City. Those who used that term understood well enough that, in one sense, it is as vain as talking of the Immortal Suburb or the Everlasting Shop. They realised, much more vividly than do the modems, that nothing earthly is eternal. But they expressed a real though relative truth; which is this unique capacity for renewal or the return of forgotten things. My own unfortunate religious prejudices would not indeed be gratified to see the Roman priests foretelling the future by examining the entrails of dogs and cats; or even watching whether the birds of the Campagna took the first to the right or the second to the left. But I should not be the least surprised if the Italians did it, if once they had overcome those prejudices which they and I at present happen to share. Foretelling the future is a silly business anyhow, but it is quite as sensible to find it in the face of nature, or even the flight of birds, as in an arbitrary romance about a Utopia; and " a little bird told me ” is as good an answer as any, when we are asked for the authority of News from Nowhere. It would not please me personally to see anybody (with one or two doubtful exceptions) hurled from the Tarpcian Rock; but I should think it was quite possible that people might be again hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, if modern moral evolution and the emancipation of our ideals continues. In the same way, we may yet see an Imperator murdered in the Capitol or a Pope martyred in the Arena; but though they may be killed quite frequently, they will never be dead. In short, what I mean about Rome is that all of it was alive, even when half of it was asleep. Which part of its past actually wakes up and walks about, is more or less a question of circumstances; but almost any part of it could. And, just about the time of the Rome of which I write here, several parts of it did.

In a word; what I saw written across Rome was Resurgam; and I have taken that note or notion to be the nearest approximation to the theme of this book. As I looked across the ridges of the city, ranked like wave behind wave or wall within wall, there came more clearly into my mind the successive occasions in history on which this sunken wave has risen again like a wall. I remembered how Rome had fallen many times, and had been nearly destroyed by Hannibal before it destroyed Carthage, and was sacked by Alaric before its unarmed priest struck terror into Attila; how it had alternately won and lost in its wars with the Eastern and the Western Emperors; how it had defied extinction, how it had survived exile, how it had revived its ancient arts and was even now appealing to its ancient arms. And I fancied that, in attempting to explain some of the truth about modern Rome, I might take this general historical truth as a framework or an introduction; and arrange my explanation in a series of examples of such Roman revivals. I profess no special knowledge about Rome, and I shall not mention here even a hundredth part of the little that I do know. I am, as I have explained, a bad sightseer and possibly a blind traveller, and I shall not describe here even a hundredth part of the things that I did see. But I do still think that it is a question of something to be explained; and that there are many who have seen much more and understand much less. I do not think it is easy for Englishmen or northerners in general to understand Rome. I do not think it is at all easy for them to like Rome. I think there is a real, primary and perfectly honest difficulty staring them in the face at the start; and, after some little thought and doubt, I decided to attack it at the start.

The shortest way of putting the problem is that the Rome we see is truly and even obtrusively a Papal town. You may add fire to the phrase, if you will, by calling it a Papist town; but I do not in the least mean merely a Roman Catholic town. Multitudes of sympathetic and enlightened northerners can recognise that Oberammergau or Assisi is a Roman Catholic town, without in the least losing their sympathy for it. But Rome is Papal; it strikes the eye first of all as a town built of triumphal arches to welcome Popes or towering tombs to commemorate Popes; and those chiefly the Popes who have the worst name outside their own communion; the Popes of the Renaissance. Of course any Protestants can, and some Protestants do, proudly demonstrate their Protestantism by looking only at the remains of Paganism. Any Englishmen who choose may rush through Rome, looking neither to the left nor to the right, till they have hidden their heads in the Well of Vesta or washed themselves clean of all Christian contacts in the Baths of Cara-calla. Similarly any Italians can, if they like, fly northward in a completely closed aeroplane and take no notice of England until they can alight for half an hour’s inspection of Stonehenge. If they were careful to avert their eyes so as not even to catch a glimpse of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, they would be behaving very much as some Anglo-Saxons have behaved towards the superstitions of the Holy City they have come hundreds of miles to see. But the students of Stonehenge could hardly be said to have seen England, let alone London; and the students of Roman antiquities have not really been in Rome. I do not imagine, however, that there are many of these purely Paganising Protestants among my readers, or indeed anywhere else; and for sensible and reasonably friendly Protestants the real problem does remain. How are they really to like something that looks like an enormous marble monument to glorify what they don’t like? It is not only that Rome is Papal, but that it is so obviously proud of being Papal. True, this is not because the Pope is proud, but because of the mysterious circumstance that a large number of people are proud of the Pope. But why arc they proud of the Pope? How could anybody be proud of a Pope? Such murmurs, now largely subconscious, seemed yet audible. And, after brooding darkly for days, I decided to attempt to answer the first question first. I would attempt it by way of historical example.

I resolved to begin frankly with St. Peter’s; the eternal rock of offence; to the Puritans a stumbling-block and to the aesthetes foolishness. I gravely doubt if my brethren really like all those shiny marbles and showy statues; but X might begin to explain why the Romans liked them. And then it occurred to me that the decision of an ancient Pope was really responsible for the existence of these statues; perhaps of any statues. It seemed an excellent text for explaining the part that Papal Rome played in history; I therefore concluded the first chapter by telling the forgotten story of the Pope and the Iconoclasts.

Then there burst on me, I confess, the huge and impossible task I had taken on. I had begun naturally with one example; because he who broke the Iconoclasts sowed the seed of the Renaissance. But, by that example, I seemed committed to write a whole history of

Christendom, with all the Church’s decisions, in order to explain a few fluted columns or coiling cornucopias. Then it struck me that St, John Latcran, which naturally comes second to St. Peter’s, does by a curious accident, telescope the mediaeval and the modern. It contains the tomb of a Pope who pronounced on the greatest popular movement of the thirteenth century; and also of one who pronounced on the popular movements of to-day. I therefore used this chapter as a sort of bridge or summary. But indeed the modern and the mediaeval lie very close. The modem world is largely divided into two sorts of medievalists; the silly aesthetes who think it very modern to be mediaeval and the good craftsmen who have realised that it is very mediaeval to be modern.

This, I thought, will bring us to the Renaissance; the popular and obvious example of the Resurrection. And it will bring us back to the direct consideration of the outstanding monuments of Rome. The interlude of mediaevalism had to be abstract; for Rome has hardly anything mediaeval in the concrete. But the Renaissance is more concrete than some refined persons can endure without being seriously unwell. There is no point in connecting one Roman church with the Renaissance; for practically all the Roman churches are Renaissance churches. But I attempt to reconcile my brethren of the north, the readers of Ruslcin, the fleers from Rubens, to something more heroic and not altogether so heathen in the whole conception of the Renaissance itself. It was, after all, one of the supreme examples of Roman civilisation possessing this power of resurrection; and resurrection is not material, but mystical; not a result of doubt but rather of faith; not a mere contempt of the past, but rather an invocation; a sort of wild veneration for the dead.

From this we pass to the Baroque, the last and most theatrical phase of the Renaissance; and here again I note that it is parallel to another historical phase of the Church. There was a reason in the theology of the seventeenth century for cherubs being allowed to kick and saints to caper quite so much as all that; just as there was a reason in the theology of the Dark Ages for their being allowed to appear at all. In short, it is my general aim throughout to show that all these artistic manifestations spring from deep spiritual energies in the religious centre itself; and that is why they seem, at first sight, to be almost insolently proud of that centre as a centre of civilisation. As types and tastes stand to-day, we must begin with the reason for the exuberance, or it will seem to us merely exuberant. Many men must understand why Rome was wonderful, before they can see that it is beautiful

Finally, I have devoted the last two sections to the last two modern manifestations of this principle of old things reappearing as new things. They have both occurred quite recently; and one very recently. The first, which I have called " The Return of the Romans " is concerned with Fascism; and especially with that aspect of Fascism that is really symbolised by the Fasces. I mean the impulse to recall what, up to that moment seemed most remote from all modern thought, the old Roman ideas of dignity and authority and the re-erection of the far-off imperial ensigns and salutes. Here again, without at all approving of everything in the reaction, I have tried to explain to those who disapprove, why, as I think, it did so sharply and violently react. Anyhow, whatever else it is, it is an exact example of what I mean; the sudden appearance of something so old as to be almost forgotten and so new as to be entirely unexpected. And I have given the last chapter to the last example; the reappearance in Europe of a Papal State, of the Pope as a secular prince in the council of kings; a typical example of something which, forty years ago, men would have been certain could return no more. Having begun with the attempt to explain to the fair-minded outsider something of the intelligible case for a Papal town, I shall at the end dwell somewhat more fully on the ideas that justify a

Papal State. This book, which I fear will seem very sprawling and shapeless in any case, will be quite unintelligible unless it is understood that I am throughout addressing that sort of fair-minded outsider, only hoping to persuade him that the tiling is great even from the outside, by telling him some things he may not have realised, about the greatness to be found in the inside. I am not asking him to come inside. Whatever he may think, I am not now trying to make him a convert; I am only trying to make him a happy and successful tourist. But 1 have come to the conclusion that no tourist will be happy and successful in Rome, if he is merely shown gilded wreaths and twisted trumpets. They will generally repel him unless he understands what sort of triumph of truth, truly or falsely, the Popes imagined they were adorning when they modelled it so boldly upon the triumphs of the Caesars. Nobody can understand the triumphs and the trophies when he has never heard of the battles; and the battles were nearly all intellectual and won by the Sword of the Spirit. That is why I have begun this book with the Emperor who denounced the Idols and ended it with the Dictator who enthroned the Pope.

That is the general direction in which my mind has here moved, or perhaps wandered; and yet I feel that it misses the point. It is rather what I shall have written than what I intend to write. For something much larger and more luminous was with me, as I looked under that large and luminous evening sky across the main valley of Rome; and my sense was not of a series but rather of one thing terribly instantaneous. Even with that word Resurrection, it seemed as if the very landscape altered; in a manner beyond all the normal changes of day and night. The pale and quiet daylight of that day took on for a moment the light of something catastrophic, and I saw a high place of the world that something had stricken immortal, and yet for ever in the throes of gestation and the pride of procreative death. It seemed as if that moment would never end; as if the chasms were like cracks in a world rigid with the crack of doom; with the rending of the mountains and the rising of the dead.

To put it better, and more briefly, I suddenly saw lie open before me a book that I cannot write. This book is the printed proof that I cannot write it. I could, I suppose, if I liked, go back and write another book, full of the details of Rome and the hundred accidents of travel; I might describe, not quite so well as others have done it, the great road that goes forth from Rome lined with the long series of ancient Roman ruins as with the deployment o of a crippled Roman army. I might recall the mighty circle of distances to be seen from the height of Rocca di Papa, where it hangs like a city built for eagles; or the Hill of Tusculum or the skeleton of Ostia against the sea. I might labour through the thousand exhausting excitements with which the city itself is honeycombed; or go mad counting the churches in Rome. Or I might begin again and write a better book about all the human contacts of the place, and the curious and interesting persons to be found there. I might tell the story of the intensely interesting Frenchman, who began by being a Huguenot horribly shocked at the High Churchmen in England, and ultimately went over to Rome by the unusual route of an admiration for Mr. Gladstone. Or I might describe the delightful Irish abbot, hidden in an almost subterranean Italian church, with whom I discussed all my Dublin friends in a dark crypt before an altar of Mithras; and in whom I proved again the mysterious truth that every Irishman is silently laughing at every other Irishman; I never can imagine why, when they have the English to laugh at. Or I might speak of the English lady who assumed that I believed in Reincarnation because I was an Englishman; or the lady journalist, also an ornament of my country, who had never heard that Parliamentary politics are corrupt. A greater obligation, and an even greater pleasure, would lie in acknowledging all the forms of hospitality and courtesy which I received, if they were not too numerous to be acknowledged; to offer my thanks to those of my countrymen who introduced me to so delightful an English circle in Rome; and especially to the diplomatist whose children made such resounding speeches to the Bambino; to the generous American student who would have assisted me to enter, I might almost say to burgle, the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, and whom I afterwards ill-repaid by making a speech at him, and all his brethren of the American College, people who certainly contradicted the slander that a man cannot be a real Catholic and a real American; to the repeated hospitalities of the English College and the Beda; to the Rector of the Scotch College, whose good offices are acknowledged elsewhere, and all his critical but genial congregation; and to the delightful Irish Franciscans who almost persuaded me that St. Francis must have been an Irishman. Perhaps the most impressive incident, which would require a book to itself, was the experience of visiting the College of Propaganda, with its friendly crowd of every race and colour under heaven; a real League of Nations — which did not quarrel. On some, and possibly many, of these incidents or aspects I shall touch in their turn; but I am conscious that I could have written a much more amusing book if I had confined myself entirely to these many-coloured experiences. And yet something moves me to attempt to complete somehow, or rather to deal with incompletely, the general historical or philosophical notion I had in mind, as I looked on that luminous evening from the obelisk of the Trinity across to the dome of St. Peter's. Only the complete thing I had seen broke as I saw it; and all that follows here is but a litter of the fragments.