the Capuchin garden where it found it. But possibly,
since the temporal power was overthrown, the seasons
are neglected and indifferent. Certainly man
seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent.
Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice look
vacant, and the high wall which encloses it is plastered
and painted with huge advertisements of clothiers
and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races
and other events out of keeping with its character
and tradition.
The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the
Northern lands will tell you that this is of a piece
with all the Newer Rome which has sprung into existence
since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with
the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I,
who am a sentimentalist too, though of another make,
do not share them. No doubt the Newer Rome has
made mistakes, but, without defending her indiscriminately,
I am a Newer-Roman to the core, perhaps because I knew
the Older Rome and what it was like; and not all my
brother and sister sentimentalists can say as much.
A PRAISE OF NEW ROME
Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her
last, but she seemed not to show so much as I the
forty-three years that had passed. Naturally
a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age
(and no one knows how much more) would not betray
the lapse of time since 1864 as a man must who was
then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact,
I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger
at our second meeting, in 1908, or, at any rate, newer;
and I am so warm a friend of youth (in others) that
I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new,
in so many good things. At the same time I must
own that I heard no other foreigner praising her for
her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian, who had
seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well
that the Ghetto should have been cleared away, though
some visitors, who had perhaps never lived in a Ghetto,
thought it a pity if not a shame, and an incalculable
loss to the picturesque. These also thought the
Tiber Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace,
though the mud-banks of other days invited the torrent
to an easy overflow of whole quarters of the town,
which were left reeking with the filth of the flood
that overlay the filth of the streets, and combined
with it to an effect of disease and of discomfort
not always personally unknown to the lover of the
picturesque. There used to be a particular type
of typhoid known as Roman fever, but now quite unknown,
thanks to the Tiber Embankments and to the light and
air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for
which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect
municipal housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest
and narrowest lane or alley unswept; every morning
the shovel and broom go over the surfaces formerly
almost impassable to the foot and quite impossible
to the nose.
