The story I had related was that of the boy Mortara.

But I return to Rome and our travellers in the trumpery line.  Those we overheard before are already gone.  But their places have been quickly filled.  They follow one another, like vapours rising from the ocean, and they are as much like one another as one sea-wave is to its predecessor.  See them laying-in their stocks of Roman souvenirs at the shops in the Corso and the Via Condotti.  Their selections are principally from the cheap rosaries, coarse mosaics, and gilt jewellery, and generally those articles of which a lot may be had for a crown-piece.  They care little for what is really good in its way; all they want is something which can be bought nowhere but at Rome, and which will serve to their descendants as the evidence of their visit to the Eternal City.  They haggle as if they were at market, and yet, when they get back to the ‘Minerva,’ they wonder they have so little to show for their money.

If they took home nothing worse than their cheap rosaries, I should not find fault with them; but they carry opinions and impressions.  Don’t tell them of the abuses which swarm throughout the kingdom of the Pope.  They will bridle up, and answer that for their parts they never saw a single one.  As the surface of things is smooth, at least in the best quarter of the town—­the only quarter these good folks are likely to have seen—­they assume, as a matter of course, that all is well.  They have seen the Pope and the Cardinals in all their glory and all their innocence at the Sistine Chapel; and of course it is not on Easter Sunday, and in the eyes of the whole multitude, that Cardinal Antonelli occupies himself with his business or his pleasures.  When Monsignore B——­ dishonoured a young girl, who died of the outrage, and then sent her affianced bridegroom to the galleys, he did not select the Sistine Chapel as the theatre of his exploits.

You must not attempt to extract pity for the Italian nation from these foreign pilgrims of the Holy Week.  The honest souls have marked the uncultivated waste which extends from Civita Vecchia to Rome, and they have at once inferred that the people are idle.  They have been importuned for alms by miserable-looking objects in the streets, and they conclude that the lower class is a class of beggars.

The cicerone who took them about, whispered some significant words in their ears, and they are persuaded that every Italian is in the habit of offering his wife or his daughter to foreigners.  You would astonish these profound observers immeasurably, if you were to tell them that the Pope has three millions of subjects who in no way resemble the Roman rabble.

Thus it happens that the flying visitor, the superficial traveller, the communicant of the Holy Week, the guest of the ‘Minerva,’ is a ready-made foe to the nation, a natural defender of the clerical government.

As for the permanent foreign visitors, if they be men enervated by the climate or by pleasure, indifferent to the fate of nations, strangers to political chicane, they will, in the natural order of events, become converted to the ideas of the Roman aristocracy, between a quadrille and a cup of chocolate.