the shabbiest of coats and seediest of hats, while our ladies wear grey cloaks, and round, soup-plate bonnets.  However, if we are not ornamental, we are useful.  We pelt each other with a hearty vigour, and discharge volleys of confetti at every window where a fair English face appears.  The poor luckless nosegay or sugar-plum boys look upon us as their best friends, and follow our carriages with importunate pertinacity.  Fancy dresses of any kind are few.  There are one or two very young men—­English, I suspect,—­dressed as Turks, or Greeks, or pirates, after Highbury Barn traditions, looking cold and uncomfortable.  Half a dozen tumble-down carriages represent the Roman element.  They are filled with men disguised as peasant-women, and vice versa; but, whether justly or unjustly, they are supposed to be chartered for the show by the Government, and attract small comment or notice.  Amongst the foot-crowd, with the exception of a stray foreigner, there is not a well-dressed person to be seen.  The fun is of the most dismal character.  Boys with bladders whack each other on the back, and jump upon each other’s shoulders.  Harlequins and clowns—­shabby, spiritless, and unmasked—­grin inanely in your face, and seem to be hunting after a joke they can never find.  A quack doctor, or a man in crinoline, followed by a nigger holding an umbrella over his head, or a swell with pasteboard collars, and a chimney-pot on his head, pass from time to time and shout to the bystanders, but receive no answer.  Give them a wide berth, for they are spies, and bad company.  The one great amusement is pelting a black hat, the glossier the better.  After a short time even this pleasure palls, and, moreover, victims grow scarce, for the crowd, contrary to the run of Italian crowds, is an ill-bred, ill-conditioned one, and take to throw nosegays weighted with stones, which hurt and cut.  So the long three hours, from two to five, pass drearily.  Up and down the Corso, in a broken, straggling line, amidst feeble showers of chalk (not sugar) plums, and a drizzle of penny posies to the sound of one solitary band, the crowd sways to and fro.  At last the guns boom again.  Then the score of dragoons—­of whom one may truly say, in the words of Tennyson’s “Balaclava Charge,” that they are “all that are left of—­not the ‘twelve’ hundred”—­come trotting down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo.  With a quick shuffling march the French troops pass along the street, and form in file, pushing back the crowd to the pavements.  With drawn swords and at full gallop the dragoons ride back through the double line.  Then there is a shout, or rather a long murmur.  All faces are turned up the street, and half a dozen broken-kneed, riderless, terror-struck shaggy ponies with numbers chalked on them, and fluttering trappings of pins and paper stuck into their backs, run past in straggling order.  Where they started you see a crowd standing round one of the grooms who held them, and who is