Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures, reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the forlorn gentility of his hat.  His beard had not been shaved for three days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his shirt had not been washed for seven.  It was with something like a cry for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would, from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church; but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four.  Let him look it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery.  If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges, emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths.  Not to have heard their rich harmony would he like not having heard the echo in the baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.

Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before the Vatican was the home of the popes.  We begged off from this and that, but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the Scala Santa.  That was another of the things which I distinctly remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908.  Now, as then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations, but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that it was good exercise.  Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of that most noble fagade of the church, with its lofty balustraded entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out forever to the Alban hills.

XIV

TIVOLI AND FRASCATI

One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out.  This was my notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter passed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad,