any other carriages to be seen in the nineteenth century—­heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded.  They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent, was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago.  Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his constitutional.  Ichabod!  Ichabod!  The glory has departed!  Such cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia, or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four o’clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner.  The world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. Fuit Ilium! I thought of the old lines on the “high—­mettled racer,” and of “imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep the wind away.”  To see such splendor reduced to the service of such vile uses!  Yes, as my Italian friend said, “There go the cardinal’s wheels,” and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself.  When an institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted for use rather than for show.  The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger’s purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long.  Their fate is a type of that of their once master.  That ornamental individual, shorn of his ornamental character, is useless.  His raison d’etre is gone as entirely as Othello’s occupation was.  And it will probably not be long before the fate of the cardinal’s wheels overtakes the cardinal himself.

The second little bit of street incident which recently occurred to me was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to symbolize changes of yet higher moment and wider significance.  This time what I saw was in the Ghetto.  Many of my readers probably know what the Ghetto at Rome is, but untraveled stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard of it.  The Ghetto is the Jews’ quarter in Rome—­the district in which they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be locked in by night, and where from habit the greater part, especially of the poorer members of the Jewish community, still live.  As will be easily believed, it is the worst and most wretched quarter of the city—­the lowest