We must therefore conclude that Strabo was mistaken. And why not? His accounts of many parts of the Roman world are surprisingly accurate, but, according to Professor Pais, "of Italy Strabo seems to have known merely the road which leads from Brindisi to Rome, the road between Rome and Naples and Pozzuoli, and the coast of Etruria between Rome and Populonia." If so, he probably saw no more of the district than can be seen from Naples. He attributes the foundation of this Athene temple to Odysseus: statements of such a kind make one wonder whether the earlier portions of his lost history were more critical than other old treatises which have survived.

So much for Strabo.

Seduced by a modern name, which means nothing more or less than "a temple"—strong evidence, surely—I was inclined to locate the Athene shrine at a spot called Ierate (marked also as Ieranto on some maps, and popularly pronounced Ghierate the Greek aspirate still surviving) which lies a mile or more eastwards of the Punta Campanella and faces south. "Hieron," I thought: that settles it. You may guess I was not a little proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient building actually did stand there—on the southern slope, namely, of the miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay. Here I found fragments of antique bricks, tegulae bipedales, amphoras, pottery of the lustrous Sorrentine ware—Surrentina bibis?—pavements of opus signinum, as well as one large Roman paving flag of the type that is found on the road between Termini and Punta Campanella. (How came this stone here? Did the old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No road could pass there now; deforestation has denuded the mountain-side of its soil, laying bare the grey rock—a condition at which its mediaeval name of Mons Canutarius already hints.) Well, a more careful examination of the site has convinced me that I was wrong. No temple of this magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa—one of the many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire.

So much for myself.

PEUTINGER'S CHART Showing ancient road rounding the headland and terminating at "Templum Minervae."

None the less—and this is a really curious point—an inspection of Peutinger's Tables seems to bear out my original theory of a temple at Ierate. For the structure is therein marked not at the Punta Campanella but, approximately, at Ierate itself, facing south, with the road from Stabiae over Surrentum rounding the promontory and terminating at the temple's threshold. Capri and the Punta Campanella are plainly drawn, though not designated by name. Much as I should like my first speculation to be proved correct on the evidence of this old chart of A.D. 226, I fear both of us are mistaken.

So much for Peutinger's Tables.

Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He says that the "three-peaked rock" which Eratosthenes describes as separating the gulfs of Cumae and Paestum (that is, of Naples and Salerno) is Mount San Costanzo. I do not understand Beloch falling into this error, for the old geographer uses the term skopelos, which is never applied to a mountain of this size, but to cliffs projecting upon the sea. Moreover, the landmark is there to this day. I have not the slightest doubt that Eratosthenes meant the pinnacle of Ierate, which is three-peaked in a remarkably, and even absurdly, conspicuous manner, both when viewed from the sea and from the land (from the chapel of S. M. della Neve, for instance).

Now this projecting cliff of three peaks—they are called, respectively, Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short—is not the actual boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from certain points it might well be mistaken for it. The ancients had no charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and, coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the turning-point into the gulf of Naples. So it looks when viewed from the S.E. of Capri; so also from the Siren islets—a veritable headland.

So much for Beloch and Eratosthenes.

To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary between the two gulfs.

The shrine of Athene lay doubtless at Campanella, whose crag is of sufficient altitude to justify Roman poets like Statius in their descriptions of its lofty site. So great a number of old writers concur in this opinion—Donnorso, Persico, Giannettasio, Mazzella, Anastasio, Capaccio—that their testimony would alone be overwhelming, had these men been a little more careful as to what they called a "temple." Capasso, the acutest modern scholar of these regions, places it "in the neighbourhood of the Punta Campanella." Professor Pais, in 1900, wrote a paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa (1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used it), and be applicable, therefore, to the Punta Campanella.



Rome

Here we are.

That mysterious nocturnal incident peculiar to Rome has already occurred—sure sign that the nights are growing sultry. It happens about six times in the course of every year, during the hot season. You may read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.; jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police, run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely adds, never learn the most elementary rules of decency?

If I have not had the curiosity to inquire at one of these establishments what has been the result of the medical examination, it is because I will wager my last shirt that the invalid's health leaves nothing to be desired. The genesis of the affair, I take it, is this. He is in bed, suffering from the heat. Sleep refuses to come. He has already passed half the night in agony, tossing on his couch during those leaden hours when not a breath of air is astir. In any other town he would submit to the torture, knowing it to be irremediable. But Rome is the city of fountains. It is they who are responsible for this sad lapse. Their sound is clear by day; after midnight, when the traffic has died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window—hears it perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. So he hearkens to the seductive melody, conjuring up the picture of that familiar fountain; he remembers its moistened rim and basin all alive with jolly turmoil; he sees the miniature cataracts tumbling down in streaks of glad confusion, till the longing grows too strong to be controlled.

The thing must be done.

Next day he finds a handful of old donkeys solemnly inquiring into his state of mind....

I can sympathise with that state of mind, having often undergone the same purgatory. My room at present happens to be fairly cool; it looks north, and the fountain down below, audible at this moment, has not yet tempted me to any breach of decorum. Night is quiet here, save for the squeakings of some strange animals in the upper regions of the neighbouring Pantheon; they squeak night and day, and one would take them to be bats, were it not that bats are supposed to be on the wing after sunset. There are no mosquitoes in Rome—none worth talking about. It is well. For mosquitoes have a deplorable habit of indulging in a second meal, an early breakfast, at about four a.m.—a habit more destructive to slumber than that regular and legitimate banquet of theirs. No mosquitoes, and few flies. It is well.

It is more than merely well. For the mosquito, after all, when properly fed, goes to bed like a gentleman and leaves you alone, whereas that insatiable and petty curiousness of the fly condemns you to a never-ending succession of anguished reflex movements. What a malediction are those flies; how repulsive in life and in death: not to be touched by human hands! Their every gesture is an obscenity, a calamity. Fascinated by the ultra-horrible, I have watched them for hours on end, and one of the most cherished projects of my life is to assemble, in a kind of anthology, all the invectives that have been hurled since the beginning of literature against this loathly dirt-born insect, this living carrion, this blot on the Creator's reputation—and thereto add a few of my own. Lucian, the pleasant joker, takes the fly under his protection. He says, among other things, that "like an honest man, it is not ashamed to do in public what others only do in private." I must say, if we all followed the fly's example in this aspect, life would at last be worth living....

Morning sleep is out of the question, owing to the tram-cars whose clangour, both here and in Florence, must be heard to be believed. They are fast rendering these towns uninhabitable. Can folks who cherish a nuisance of this magnitude compare themselves, in point of refinement, with those old Hellenic colonists who banished all noises from their city? Nevermore! Why this din, this blocking of the roadways and general unseemliness? In order that a few bourgeois may be saved the trouble of using their legs. And yet we actually pride ourselves on these detestable things, as if they were inventions to our credit. "We made them," we say. Did we? It is not we who make them. It is they who make us, who give us our habits of mind and body, our very thoughts; it is these mechanical monsters who control our fates and drive us along whither they mean us to go. We are caught in their cog-wheels—in a process as inevitable as the revolution of the planets. No use lamenting a cosmic phenomenon! Were it otherwise, I should certainly mope myself into a green melancholy over the fact, the most dismal fact on earth, that brachycephalism is a Mendelian dominant. [19] No use lamenting. True.

But the sage will reserve to himself the right of cursing. Those morning hours, therefore, when I would gladly sleep but for the tram-car shrieking below, are devoted to the malediction of all modern progress, wherein I include, with fine impartiality, every single advancement in culture which happens to lie between my present state and that comfortable cavern in whose shelter I soon see myself ensconced as of yore, peacefully sucking somebody's marrow while my women, round the corner, are collecting a handful of acorns for my dessert.... The telephone, that diabolic invention! It might vex a man if his neighbour possessed a telephone and he none; how would it be, if neither of them had it? We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the pre-telephone epoch. And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do. Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning paper and in it pours—the oracle of the press, that manufactory of synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column, after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the Press Club. He has been told what to say—yesterday, for instance, it was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena—he has been "doped" by the editor, who gets the tip—and out he goes! unless he take it—from the owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus, and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do. It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country. It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make my plans for loafing through the day.

Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans, the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of sunshine.

There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza sole"—Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome, which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question nowadays. You must do as the Romans do—walk slowly and use the tram whenever possible.

That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at the restaurant across the water. Its proprietor is something of a brigand; so am I, at a pinch. It is "honour among thieves," or "diamond cut diamond."

Already a few enthusiasts are gathered here, on the glowing sands. But the water is still cold; indeed, the Tiber is never too warm for me. If you like it yet more chill, you must walk up to where the Aniene discharges its waves whose temperature, at this season, is of a kind to tickle up a walrus.

Whether it be due to the medley of races or to some other cause, there is a singular variety of flesh-tints among the bathers here. I wish my old friend Dr. Bowles could have seen it; we used to be deeply immersed, both of us, in the question of the chromatophores, I observing their freakish behaviour in the epidermis of certain frogs, while he studied their action on the human skin and wrote an excellent little paper on sunburn—a darker problem than it seems to be. [20]

These men and boys do not grow uniformly sunburnt. They display so many different colour-shades on their bodies that an artist would be delighted with the effect. From that peculiar milky hue which, by reason of some pigment, contrives to resist the rays, the tints diverge; the reds, the scarcer group, traversing every gradation from pale rose to the ruddiest of copper—not excluding that strange marbled complexion concerning which I cannot make up my mind whether it be a beauty or a defect; while the xanthous tones, the yellows, pass through silvery gold and apricot and cafe au lait to a duskiness approaching that of the negro. At this season the skins are still white. Your artist must come later—not later, however, than the end of August, for on the first of September the bathing, be the weather never so warm, is officially, and quite suddenly, at an end. Tiber water is declared to be "unhealthy" after that date, and liable to give you fever; a relic of the days when the true origin of malaria was unknown.

A glance at the papers is sufficient to prove that bathing has not yet begun in earnest. No drowning accidents, up to the present. Later on they come thick and fast. For this river, with its rapid current and vindictive swirling eddies, is dangerous to young swimmers; it grips them in its tawny coils and holds them fast, often within a few yards of friend or parent who listens, powerless to help, to the victim's cries of anguish and sees his arm raised imploringly out of that serpent-like embrace. So it hurries him to destruction, only to be fished up later in a state, as the newspapers will be careful to inform us, of "incipient putrefaction."

A murderous flood....

That hoary, trickling structure—that fountain which has forgotten to be a fountain, so dreamily does the water ooze through obstructive mosses and emerald growths that dangle in drowsy pendants, like wet beards, from its venerable lips—that fountain un-trimmed, harmonious, overhung by ancient ilexes: where shall a more reposeful spot be found? Doubly delicious, after the turmoil and glistening sheen by the river-bank. For the foliage of the oaks and sycamores is such that it creates a kind of twilight, and all around lies the tranquillity of noon. Here, on the encircling stone bench, you may idle through the sultry hours conversing with some favourite disciple while the cows trample up to drink amid moist gurglings and tail-swishings. They gaze at you with gentle eyes, they blow their sweet breath upon your cheek, and move sedately onward. The Villa Borghese can be hushed, at such times, in a kind of enchantment.

"You never told me why you come to Italy."

"In order," I reply, "to enjoy places like this."

"But listen. Surely you have fountains in your own country?"

"None quite so golden-green."

"Ah, it wants cleaning, doesn't it?"

"Lord, no!" I say; but only to myself. One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.

Aloud I remark:—

"Let me try to set forth, however droll it may sound, the point of view of a certain class of people, supposing they exist, who might think that this particular fountain ought never to be cleaned"—and there ensued a discussion, lasting about half an hour, in the course of which I elaborated, artfully and progressively, my own thesis, and forged, in the teeth of some lively opposition, what struck me as a convincing argument in favour of leaving the fountain alone.

"Then that is why you come to Italy. On account of a certain fountain, which ought never to be cleaned."

"I said on account of places like this. And I ought to have added, on account of moments such as these."

"Are those your two reasons?"

"Those are my two reasons."

"Then you have thought about it before?"

"Often."

One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.

"But listen. Surely it is sometimes two o'clock in the afternoon, in your country?"

"I used that word moment in a pregnant sense," I reply. "Pregnant: when something is concealed or enclosed within. What is enclosed within this moment? Our friendly conversation."

"But listen. Surely folks can converse in your country?"

"They can talk."

"I begin to understand why you come here. It is that difference, which is new to me, between conversing and talking. Is the difference worth the long journey?"

"Not to everybody, I daresay."

"Why to you?"

"Why to me? I must think about it."

One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.

"What is there to think about? You said you had thought about it already.... Perhaps there are other reasons?"

"There may be."

"There may be?"

"There must be. Are you satisfied?"

"Ought I to be satisfied before I have learnt them?"

"I find you rather fatiguing this afternoon. Did you hear about that murder in Trastevere last night and how the police——"

"But listen. Surely you can answer a simple question. Why do you come to Italy...?"

Why does one come here?

A periodical visit to this country seems an ordinary and almost automatic proceeding—a part of one's regular routine, as natural as going to the barber or to church. Why seek for reasons? They are so hard to find. One tracks them to their lair and lo! there is another one lurking in the background, a reason for a reason.

The craving to be in contact with beauty and antiquity, the desire for self-expression, for physical well-being under that drenching sunshine, which while it lasts, one curses lustily; above all, the pleasure of memory and reconstruction at a distance. Yes; herein lies, methinks, the secret; the reason for the reason. Reconstruction at a distance.... For a haze of oblivion is formed by lapse of time and space; a kindly haze which obliterates the thousand fretting annoyances wherewith the traveller's path in every country is bestrewn. He forgets them; forgets that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic islets—those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember, to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go there as a tourist—only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among them.

What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu!

Rome is not only the most engaging capital in Europe, it is unusually heterogeneous in regard to population. The average Parisian will assure you that his family has lived in that town from time immemorial. It is different here. There are few Romans discoverable in Rome, save across the Tiber. Talk to whom you please, you will soon find that either he or his parents are immigrants. The place is filled with hordes of employees—many thousands of them, high and low, from every corner of the provinces; the commoner sort, too, the waiters, carpenters, plasterers, masons, painters, coachmen, all the railway folk—they are hardly ever natives. Your Roman of the lower classes does not relish labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula. There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris. And over all hovers a gentle weariness.

The city has undergone orgies of bloodshed and terror. Think only, without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago, moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria; that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to come. And the scorching Campagna beyond the walls, that forbidden land in whose embrace the city lies gasping, flame-encircled, like the scorpion in the tale....

A well-known scholar, surveying Rome with the mind's eye, is so impressed with its "eternal" character that he cannot imagine this site having ever been occupied otherwise than by a city. To him it seems inevitable that these walls must always have stood where now they stand—must have risen, he suggests, out of the earth, unaided by human hands. Yet somebody laid the foundation-stones, once upon a time; somebody who lived under conditions quite different from those that supervened. For who—not five thousand, but, say, five hundred years ago—who would have thought of building a town on a spot like this? None but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river—a dangerous river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place—every drawback, or nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and poison. Human ingenuity has obviated them so effectually, so triumphantly that, were green pastures not needful to me as light and air, I, for one, would nevermore stray beyond those ancient portals....

The country visits you here. It comes in the wake of that evening breeze which creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great void—a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; quite a local speciality, for the phenomenon could never occur if the surrounding regions were covered with suburbs or tilth or woodland—were aught save what they are: a desert whose vegetation of coarse herbage is in the act of withering. The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast is at an end.

I am glad never to have discovered anyone, native or foreign, who has been aware of the existence of this nocturnal emanation; glad because it corroborates a theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye—how atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. The French are civilised and, if we may judge by old engravings (what else are we to take as guide, seeing that the skull affords some criterion as to shape but not size of nose?) they certainly seem to accentuate this organ in proportion as they neglect its use. Parisians, it strikes me, are running to nose; they wax more rat-like every day. Here is a little problem for anthropologists. There may be something, after all, in the condition of Paris life which fosters the development of this peeky, rodential countenance. Perfumery, and what it implies? There are scent-shops galore in the fashionable boulevards, whereas I defy you to show me a single stationer. Maupassant knew them fairly well, and one thinks of that story of his:—

"Le parfum de Monsieur?"

"La verveine...." [22]

Speaking of the French, I climbed those ninety odd stairs the other day to announce my arrival in Italy to my friend Mrs. N., who, being vastly busy at that moment and on no account to be disturbed, least of all by a male, sent word to say that I might wait on the terrace or in that microscopic but well-equipped library of hers. I chose the latter, and there browsed upon "Emaux et Camees" and the "Fleurs du Mal" which happened, as was meet and proper, to lie beside each other.

Strange reading, at this distance of time. These, I thought—these are the things which used to give us something of a thrill.

If they no longer provide that sensation, it may well be that we have absorbed their spirit so thoroughly into our system that we forget whence we drew it. They have become part of ourselves. Even now, one cannot help admiring Gautier's precision of imagery, his gift of being quaint and yet lucid as a diamond; one pictures those crocodiles fainting in the heat, and notes, too, whence the author of the "Sphinx" drew his hard, glittering, mineralogical flavour. The verse is not so much easy as facile. And not all the grace of internals can atone for external monotony. That trick—that full stop at the end of nearly every fourth line—it impairs the charm of the music and renders its flow jerky; coming, as it does, like an ever-repeated blow, it grows wearisome to the ear, and finally abhorrent.

Baudelaire, in form, is more cunning and variegated. He can also delve down to deeps which the other never essayed to fathom. "Fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous"—a line which, in my friend's copy of the book, had been marked on the margin with a derisive exclamation-point. (It gave me food for thought, that exclamation-point.) But, as to substance, he contains too many nebulosities and abstractions for my taste; a veritable mist of them, out of which emerges—what? The figure of one woman. Reading these "Fleurs du Mal" we realise, not for the first time, that there is something to be said in favour of libertinage for a poet. We do not need Petrarca, much less the Love-Letters of a Violinist—no, we do not need those Love-Letters at all—to prove that a master can draw sweet strains from communion with one mistress, from a lute with one string; a formidable array of songsters, on the other hand, will demonstrate how much fuller and richer the melody grows when the instrument is provided with the requisite five, the desirable fifty. Monogamous habits have been many a bard's undoing.

Twenty years' devotion to that stupid and spiteful old cat of a semi-negress! They make one conscious of the gulf between the logic of the emotions and that other one—that logic of the intellect which ought to shape our actions. Here was Baudelaire, a man of ruthless self-analysis. Did he never see himself as others saw him? Did he never say: "You are making a fool of yourself"?

Be sure he did.

You are making a fool of yourself: are not those the words I ought to have uttered when, standing in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo—the sunny centre: so it had been inexorably arranged—I used to wait and wait, with eyes glued to the clock hard by, in the slender shadow of that obelisque which crawled reluctantly, like the finger of fate, over the burning stones?

And I crawled with it, more than content.

Days of infatuation!

I never pass that way now without thanking God for a misspent youth. Why not make a fool of yourself? It is good fun while it lasts; it yields mellow mirth for later years, and are not our fellow-creatures, those solemn buffoons, ten times more ridiculous? Where is the use of experience, if it does not make you laugh? The Logic of the Intellect—what next! If any one had treated me to such tomfoolery while standing there, petrified into a pillar of fidelity in that creeping shadow, I should have replied gravely:

"The Logic of the Intellect, my dear Sir, is incompatible with situations like mine. It was not invented for so stupendous a crisis. I am waiting for my negress—can't you understand?—and she is already seven minutes late...."

A flaming morning, forestaste of things to come.

I find myself, after an early visit to the hospital where things are doing well, glancing down, towards midday, into Trajan's Forum, as one looks into some torrid bear-pit.

Broken columns glitter in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on this classic soil; cats of every colour and every age—quite young ones among them; all, one would say, at the last gasp of life. This pit, this crater of flame, is their "Home for the Dying." Once down here, nothing matters any more. They are safe at last from their old enemies, from dogs and carriages and boys. Waiting for death, they move about in a stupid and dazed manner. Sunlight streams down upon their bodies. One would think they preferred to expire in the shade of some pillar or slab. Apparently not. Apparently it is all the same. It matters nothing where one dies.

There is one immediately below me, a moth-eaten desiccated tortoiseshell; its eyes are closed and a red tongue hangs out of the mouth. I drop a small pebble. It wakes up and regards me stoically for a moment. Nothing more.

These cats have lost their all—their self-respect. Grace and ardour, sleekness of coat and buoyancy of limbs are gone out of them. Tails are knotted with hunger and neglect; bones protrude through the skin. So they strew the ground in discomposed, un-catlike attitudes, while the sun burns through their parched anatomy. Do they remember their kittenish pranks, those moonlight ecstasies on housetops, that morsel snatched from a fishmonger's barrow and borne through the crowded traffic in a series of delirious leaps? Who can tell! They are not even bored with themselves. Their fur is in patches. They are alive when they ought to be dead. Nobody knows it better than they do. They are too ill, too far gone, to feel any sense of shame at their present degradation. Nothing matters! What would Baudelaire, that friend of cats, have said to this macabre exhibition?

Yonder is an old one, giving milk to the phantom of a kitten. The parent takes no interest in the proceedings; she lies prone, her head on the ground. Her eyes have a stony look. Is she dead? Possibly. Her own kitten? Who cares! Her neighbour, once white but now earth-coloured, rises stiffly as though dubious whether the joints are still in working order. What does she think of doing? It would seem she has formed no plan. She walks up to the mother, peers intently into her face, then sits apart on her haunches and begins gazing at the sun. Presently she rises anew and proceeds five or six paces for no imaginable reason—collapses; falls, quite abruptly, on her side. There she lies, flat, like a playing-card.

A sinister aimlessness pervades the actions of those that move at all. The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine. They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. One eye has been lost in some long-forgotten encounter. Now they walk over him, kittens and all, and tread about his head, as if he were a hillock of earth, while his claws twitch resentfully with rage or pain. Too ill to rise!

Most of them are thus stretched out blankly, in a faint. Are they suffering? Hungry or thirsty? [23] I believe they are past troubling about such things. It is time to die. They know it....

"L'albergo dei gatti," says a cheery voice at my side—some countryman, who has also discovered Trajan's Forum to be one of the sights of Rome. "The cats' hotel. But," he adds, "I see no restaurant attached to it."

That reminds me: luncheon-time.

Via Flaminia—what a place for luncheon! True; but this is one of the few restaurants in Rome where, nowadays, a man is not in danger of being simultaneously robbed, starved, and poisoned. Things have come to a pretty pass. This starvation-fare may suit a saint and turn his thoughts heavenwards. Mine it turns in the other direction. Here, at all events, the food is straightforward. Our hostess, a slow elderly woman, is omnipresent; one realises that every dish has been submitted to her personal inspection. A primeval creature; heaviness personified. She moves in fateful fashion, like the hand of a clock. The crack of doom will not avail to accelerate that relentless deliberation. She reminds me of a cousin of mine famous for his imperturbable calm who, when his long curls once caught fire from being too near a candle, sleepily remarked to a terrified wife: "I think you might try to blow it out."

But where shall a man still find those edible maccheroni—those that were made in the Golden Age out of pre-war-time flour?

Such things are called trifles.... Give me the trifles of life, and keep the rest. A man's health depends on trifles; and happiness on health. Moreover, I have been yearning for them for the last five months. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.... There are none in Rome. Can they be found anywhere else?

Mrs. Nichol: she might know. She has the gift of knowing about things one would never expect her to know. If only one could meet her by accident in the street! For at such times she is gay and altogether at your disposal. She is up to any sport, out of doors. To break upon her seclusion at home is an undertaking reserved for great occasions. The fact is, we are rather afraid of Mrs. Nichol. The incidents of what she describes as a tiresome life have taught her the value of masculine frankness—ultra-masculine, I call it. She is too frank for subterfuge of any kind. When at home, for instance, she is never "not at home." She will always see you. She will not detain you long, if you happen to be de trop.

This, I persuade myself, is a great occasion—my health and happiness.... Besides, I am her oldest friend in this part of the world; was I not on the spot when she elected, for reasons which nobody has yet fathomed, to make Rome her domicile? Have I not more than once been useful to her, nay, indispensable? I therefore climb, not without trepidation, those ninety-three stairs to the very summit of the old palace, and presently find myself ushered into the familiar twilight.

Nothing has changed since I was here some little time ago to announce my arrival in Italy (solemn occasion), when I had to amuse myself for an hour or so with Baudelaire in the library, Mrs. Nichol being engaged upon "house-accounts." This time, as I enter the studio, she is playing cards with a pretty handmaiden, amid peals of laughter. She often plays cards. She is puffing at a cigarette in a long mouthpiece which keeps the smoke out of her olive-complexioned face and which she holds firm-fixed between her teeth, in a corner of the mouth, after the perky fashion of a schoolboy. I have interrupted a game, and at once begin to feel de trop under a glance from those smouldering grey eyes.

"It is not a trifle. It is a matter of life and death. Will you please listen for half a minute? Then I will evaporate, and you can go on with your ridiculous cards. The fact is, I am being assassinated by inches. Do you know of a place where a man can get eatable macaroni nowadays? The old kind, I mean, made out of pre-war-time flour...."

She lays her hand on the cards as though to suspend the game, and asks the girl in Italian:

"What was the name of that place?"

"That place——"

"Oh, stupid! Where I stayed with Miranda last September. Where I tore my skirt on the rock. Where I said something nice about the white macaroni?"

"Soriano in Cimino."

"Soriano," echoes the mistress in a cloud of smoke. "There is a tram from here every morning. They can put you up."

A pause follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms, imbibing their strange Oriental spirit—not your vulgar Orient, but something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know, of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at self-realisation, spent a few years as the wife of a high French official, ere marrying, that is, the late lamented Nichol—another unsuccessful venture.

Now why did she marry all these people (for I fancy there was yet an earlier alliance of some kind)? A whim, a freak? Or did they plague her into it? If so, I suspect they lived and died to repent their manly persistence. She could grind any ordinary male to powder. And why has she now flitted here, building herself this aerial bower above the old roofs of Rome? Is she in search of happiness? I doubt whether she will find it. She possesses that fatal craving—the craving for disinterested affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and therefore desirable above all else—desirable, and how seldom attained!

The pause continues. I make a little movement, to attract notice. She looks up, but only her eyes reply.

"Now, my good fellow," they seem to say, "are you blind?"

That is the drawback of Mrs. Nichol. Phenomenally absent-minded, she always knows at a given moment exactly what she wants to do. And she never wants to do more than one thing at a time. It is most unwomanly of her. Any other person of her sex would have left a game of cards for the sake of an attractive visitor like myself. Or, for that matter, an ordinary lady would have played cards, given complicated orders to dressmakers and servants, and entertained half a dozen men at the same time. Mrs. Nichol cannot do these things. That hand, that rather sunburnt little hand without a single ring on it, has not moved from the table. No, I am not blind. It is quite evident that she wants to play cards; only that, and nothing more.

I withdraw, stealthily.

Not downstairs. I go to linger awhile on the broad terrace where jessamine grows in Gargantuan tubs; there I pace up and down, admiring the cupolas and towers of Rome that gleam orange-tawny against the blue background of distant hills. How much of its peculiar flavour a town will draw—not from artistic monuments but from the mere character of building materials! How many variations on one theme! This mellow Roman travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns, wood-towns—how they differ in mood from one another!... Here I pace up and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound. Harsh at close quarters, they weave themselves into a mirthful symphony up here.

From that studio, too, comes a lively din—the laughter has begun again. Mrs. Nichol is having a good time. It will be followed, I daresay, by a period of acute depression. I shall probably be consulted with masonic frankness about some little tragedy of the emotions which is no concern of mine. She can be wondrously engaging at such times—like a child that has got into trouble and takes you into its confidence.

One of these days I must write a character-sketch of Mrs. Nichol. She foreshadows a type—represents it, very possibly—a type which will grow commoner from day to day. She dreams of a Republic of women, vestals or otherwise, wherefrom all men are to be excluded unless they possess qualifications of a rather unusual nature. I think she would like to draft a set of rules and regulations for that community. She could be trusted, I fancy, to make them sufficiently stringent.

I think I understand, now, why a certain line in her copy of Baudelaire was marked with that derisive exclamation-point on the margin: "Fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous."

"Fuyez?" it seemed to say. "Why 'fuyez'?"

Fulfil it!



Soriano

Amid clouds of dust you are whirled to Soriano, through the desert Campagna and past Mount Soracte, in a business-like tramway—different from that miserable Olevano affair which, being narrow gauge, can go but slowly and even then has a frolicsome habit of jumping off the rails every few days. From afar you look back upon the city; it lies so low as to be invisible; over its site hovers the dome of Saint Peter, like an iridescent bubble suspended in the sky.

This region is unfamiliar to me. Soriano lies on the slope of an immense old volcano and conveys at first glance a somewhat ragged and sombre impression. It was an unpleasantly warm day, but those macaroni—they atoned for everything. So exquisite were they that I forthwith vowed to return to Soriano, for their sake alone, ere the year should end. (I kept my vow.) The right kind at last, of lily-like candour and unmistakably authentic, having been purchased in large quantities at the outbreak of hostilities by the provident hostess, who must have anticipated a rise in price, a deterioration in quality, or both, as the result of war.

How came Mrs. Nichol to discover their whereabouts? That is her affair. I know not how she has managed, in so brief a space of time, to collect such a variety of useful local information. I can only testify that on her arrival in Rome she knew no more about the language and place than the proverbial babe unborn, and that nowadays, when anybody is faced with a conundrum like mine, one always hears the words: "Try Mrs. Nichol." And how many women, by the way, would have made a note of the particular quality of those macaroni? One in a hundred? These are temperamental matters....

We also—for of course I took a friend with me, a well-preserved old gentleman of thirty-two, whose downward career from a brilliant youth into hopeless mediocrity has been watched, by both of us, with philosophic unconcern—we also consumed a tender chicken, a salad containing olive oil and not the usual motor-car lubricant, an omelette made with genuine butter, and various other items which we enjoyed prodigiously, eating, one would think, not only for the seven lean years just past but for seven—yea, seventy times seven—lean years to come. So great a success was this open-air meal that my companion, a case-hardened Roman, was obliged to confess:

"It seems one fares better in the province than at home. You could not get such bread in Rome, not if you offered fifty francs a pound."

As for myself, I had lost all interest in the bread by this time, but grown fairly intimate with the wine, a rosy muscatel, faintly sparkling—very young, but not altogether innocent.

There were flies, however, and dogs, and children. We ought to have remained indoors. Thither we retired for coffee and cigars and a liqueur, of the last of which my friend refused to partake. He fears and distrusts all liqueurs; it is one of his many senile traits. The stuff proved, to my surprise, to be orthodox Strega, likewise a rarity nowadays.

It is a real shame—what is happening to Strega at this moment. It has grown so popular that the country is flooded with imitations. There must be fifty firms manufacturing shams of various degrees of goodness and badness; I have met their travellers in the most unexpected places. They reproduce the colour of Strega, its minty flavour —everything, in short, except the essential: its peculiar strength of aroma and of alcohol. They can afford to sell this poison at half the price of the original, and your artful restaurateur keeps an old bottle or two of the real product which he fills up, when empty, out of some hidden but never-failing barrel of the fraudulent mixture round the corner, charging you, of course, the full price of true Strega. If you complain, he proudly points to the bottle, the cork, the label: all authentic! No wonder foreigners, on tasting these concoctions, vow they will never touch Strega again....

We had a prolonged argument, over the coffee, about this Strega adulteration, during which I tried to make my friend comprehend how I thought the grievance ought to be remedied. How? By an injunction. That was the way to redress these wrongs. You obtain an injunction, I said, such as the French Chartreuse people obtained against the manufacturers of the Italian "Certosa," which was thereafter obliged to change its name to "Val D'Emma." More than once I endeavoured to set forth, in language intelligible to his understanding, what an injunction signified; more than once I explained how well-advised the Strega Company would be to take this course.

In vain!

He always missed my point. He always brought in some personal element, whereas I, as usual, confined myself to general lines, to the principle of the thing. Italians are sometimes unfathomably obtuse.

"But what is an injunction?" he repeated.

"If you were a little younger, there might be some hope for you. I would then try to explain it again, for the fiftieth time. Instead of that, what do you say to taking a nap?"

"Ah! You have eaten too much."

"Not at all. But please to note that I am tired of explaining things to people who refuse to understand."

"No doubt, no doubt. Yes. A little sleep might freshen you up."

"And perhaps inspire you with another subject of conversation."

In the little hotel there were no rooms available just then wherein we might have slumbered, and another apartment higher up the street promising lively sport for which we were disinclined at that hour, we moved laboriously into the chestnut woods overhead. Fine old timber, part of that mysterious Ciminian forest which still covers a large tract, from within whose ample shade one looks downhill towards the distant Orte across a broiling stretch of country. There were golden orioles here, calling to each other from the tree-tops. My friend, having excavated himself a couch among the troublesome prickly seeds of this plant, was soon snoring—another senile trait—snoring in a rhythmical bass accompaniment to their song. I envied him. How some people can sleep! It is a thing worth watching. They shut their eyes, and forget to be awake. With a view to imitating his example, I wearied myself trying to count up the number of orioles I had shot in my bird-slaying days, and where it happened. Not more than half a dozen, all told. They are hard to stalk, and hard to see. But of other birds—how many! Forthwith an endless procession of massacred fowls began to pass before my mind. One would fain live those ornithological days over again, and taste the rapturous joy with which one killed that first nutcracker in the mountain gulley; the first wall-creeper which fluttered down from the precipice hung with icicles; the Temminck's stint—victim of a lucky shot, late in the evening, on the banks of the reservoir; the ruff, the grey-headed green woodpecker, the yellow-billed Alpine jackdaw, that lanius meridionalis——

And all those slaughtered beasts—those chamois, first and foremost, sedulously circumvented amid snowy crags. Where are now their horns, the trophies? The passion for such sport died out slowly and for no clearly ascertainable reason, as did, in its turn, the taste for art and theatres and other things. Sheer satiety, a grain of pity, new environments—they may all help to explain what was, in its essence, a molecular change in the brain, driving one to explore new departments of life.

And now latterly, for some reason equally obscure, the natural history fancy has revived after lying dormant so long. It may be those three months spent on the pavements of Florence which incline one's thoughts to the country and wild things. Social reasons too—a certain weariness of humanity, and more than weariness; a desire to avoid contact with creatures Who kill each other so gracelessly and in so doing—for the killing alone would pass—invoke specially manufactured systems of ethics and a benevolent God overhead. What has one in common with such folk?

That may be why I feel disposed to forget mankind and take rambles as of yore; minded to shoulder a gun and climb trees and collect birds, and begin, of course, a new series of "field notes." Those old jottings were conscientiously done and registered sundry things of import to the naturalist; were they accessible, I should be tempted to extract therefrom a volume of solid zoological memories in preference to these travel-pages that register nothing but the crosscurrents of a mind which tries to see things as they are. For the pursuit brought one into relations not only with interesting birds and beasts, but with men.

There was Mr. H. of the Linnean Society, whose waxed moustache curled round upon itself like an ammonite. A great writer of books was Mr. H., and a great collector of them. He collected, among other things, a rare monograph belonging to me and dealing with the former distribution of the beaver in Bavaria (we were both absorbed in beavers). Nothing I could do or say would induce him to disgorge it again; he had always lent it to a friend, who was just on the point of returning it, etc. etc. Bitterly grieved, I not only forgave him, but put him into communication with my friend Dr. Girtanner of St. Gallen, another beaver—and marmot—specialist. It stimulated his love of Swiss zoology to such an extent that he straightway borrowed a still rarer pamphlet of mine, J. J. Tschudi's "Schweizer Echsen," which I likewise never saw again. What an innocent one was! Where is now the man who will induce me to lend him such books?

In those days I held a student's ticket at the South Kensington Museum, an institution I enriched with specimens of rana graeca from near Lake Stymphalus, and lizards from the Filfla rock, and toads from a volcanic islet (toads, says Darwin, are not found on volcanic islets), and slugs from places as far apart as Santorin and the Shetlands and Orkneys, whither I went in search of Asterolepis and the Great Skua. The last gift was a seal from the fresh-water lake of Saima in Finland. Who ever heard of seals living in sweet land-locked waters? This was one of my happiest discoveries, though the delight of my friend the Curator was tempered by the fact that this particular specimen happened to be an immature one, and did not display any pronounced race-characters. I have early recollections of the rugged face and lovely Scotch accent of Tam Edwards, the Banffshire naturalist; and much later ones of J. Young, [24] who gave me a circumstantial account of how he found the first snow bunting's nest in Sutherlandshire; I recall the Rev. Mathew (? Mathews) of Gumley, an ardent Leicestershire ornithologist, whose friendship I gained at a tender age on discovering the nest of a red-legged partridge, from which I took every one of the thirteen eggs. "Surely six would have been enough," he said—a remark which struck me as rather unreasonable, seeing that French partridges were not exactly as common as linnets. He afterwards showed me his collection of birdskins, dwelling lovingly, for reasons which I cannot remember, upon that of a pin-tail duck.

He it was who told me that no collector was worth his salt until he had learnt to skin his own birds. Fired with enthusiasm, I took lessons in taxidermy at the earliest possible opportunity—from a grimy old naturalist in one of the grimiest streets of Manchester, a man who relieved birds of their jackets in dainty fashion with one hand, the other having been amputated and replaced by an iron hook. During that period of initiation into the gentle art, the billiard-room at "The Weaste," Manchester, was converted every morning, for purposes of study, into a dissecting-room, a chamber of horrors, a shambles, where headless trunks and brains and gouged-out eyes of lapwings and other "easy" birds (I had not yet reached the arduous owl-or-titmouse stage of the profession) lay about in sanguinary morsels, while the floor was ankle-deep in feathers, and tables strewn with tweezers, lancets, arsenical paste, corrosive sublimate and other paraphernalia of the trade. The butler had to be furiously tipped.

There were large grounds belonging to this estate, fields and woodlands once green, then blackened with soot, and now cut up into allotments and built over. Here, ever since men could remember—certainly since the place had come into the possession of the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Edward T.—a kingfisher had dwelt by a little streamlet of artificial origin which supported a few withered minnows and sticklebacks and dace. This kingfisher was one of the sights of the domain. Visitors were taken to see it. The bird, though sometimes coy, was generally on view. Nevertheless it was an extremely prudent old kingfisher; to my infinite annoyance, I never succeeded in destroying it. Nor did I even find its nest, an additional source of grief. Lancashire naturalists may be interested to know that this bird was still on the spot in the 'eighties (I have the exact date somewhere [25])—surely a noteworthy state of affairs, so near the heart of a smoky town like Manchester.

Later on I learnt to slay kingfishers—the first victim falling to my gun on a day of rain, as it darted across a field to avoid the windings of a brook. I also became a specialist at finding their nests. Birds are so conservative! They are at your mercy, if you care to study their habits. The golden-crested wren builds a nest which is almost invisible; once you have mastered the trick, no gold-crest is safe. I am sorry, now, for all those plundered gold-crests' eggs. And the rarer ones—the grey shrike, that buzzard of the cliff (the most perilous scramble of all my life), the crested titmouse, the serin finch on the apple tree, that first icterine warbler whose five eggs, blotched with purple and quite unfamiliar at the time, gave me such a thrill of joy that I nearly lost my foothold on the swerving alder branch——

At this point, my meditations were suddenly interrupted by a vigorous grunt or snort; a snort that would have done credit to an enraged tapir. My friend awoke, refreshed. He rubbed his eyes, and looked round.

"I remember!" he began, sitting up. "I remember everything. Are you feeling better? I hope so. Yes. Exactly. Where were we? An injunction—what did you say?"

At it again!

"I said it was the drawback of old people that they never know when they have had enough of an argument."

"But what is an injunction?"

"How many more times do you wish me to make that clear? Shall I begin all over again? Have it your way! When you go into Court and ask the judge to do something to prevent a man from doing something he wants to do when you do not want him to do it. Like that, more or less."

"So I gather. But I confess I do not see why a man should not do something he wants to do just because you want him not to do it. You might as well go into Court and ask the judge to do something to make a man do something he does not want to do just because you want him to do it."

"Ah, but he must not, in this case. Good Lord, have I not explained that a thousand times already? You always miss my point. It is illegal, don't you understand? Illegal, illegal."

"Anybody can say that. It would be a very natural thing to say, under the circumstances. I should say it myself! Now just take my advice. You go and tell your brother——"

"My brother? It is not my brother. You are quite beside the point. Why introduce this personal element? It is the Strega Company. Strega, a liqueur. I am talking about a commercial concern obtaining an injunction. Burroughs and Wellcome—they got injunctions on the same grounds. I know a great deal of such things, though I don't talk about them all day long as other people would, if they possessed half my knowledge. A company, don't you see? An injunction. A liqueur. Please to note that I am talking about a company, a company. Have I now made myself clear, or how many more times——"

"One would think he was at least your brother, from the way you take his part. Let us say he is a friend, then; some never-to-be-mentioned friend who is interested in a shady liqueur business and now wants to make a judge do something to make a man do something——"

"Wrong again! To prevent a man doing something——"

"—Wants to do something to make a judge do something to prevent a man doing something he wants to do because he does not want him to do it. Is that right? Very well. You tell your friend that no Italian judge is going to do dirty work of that kind for nothing."

"Dirty work. God Almighty! I don't want any judge to do dirty work——"

"No doubt, no doubt. I am quite convinced you don't. But your priceless friend does. Come now! Why not be open about it?"

"Open about what?"

"It is positively humiliating for me to be treated like this, after all the years we have known each other. I wish you would try to cultivate the virtue of frankness. You are far too secretive. Something will really have to be done about it."

"A company, a company."

"A company consists of a certain number of human beings. Why make mysteries about one of them? It may happen to the best of mankind to be mixed up——"

"Mixed up——"

"You are going to be disagreeable about my choice of words. Have it your way! We all know you think you can talk better Italian than the Pope. My own father, I was going to say, has been involved in some pretty dirty work in the course of his professional career——"

"No doubt, no doubt."

"And please to note that he is as good a man as any brother of yours."

"You always miss my point."

"Now try to be truthful, for once in your life. Out with it!"

"A liqueur."

"Is that all? Sleep does not seem to have sharpened your wits to any great extent."

"I was not asleep. I was thinking about eggs. A company."

"A company? You are waking up. Anything else?"

"An injunction...."

A distinguished writer some years ago started a crusade in favour of pure English. He wished to counteract those influences which are forever at work debasing the standard of language; whether, as he seemed to think, that standard should be inalterably fixed, is yet another question. For in literature as in conversation there is a "pure English" for every moment of history; that of our childhood is different from to-day's; and to adopt the tongue of the Bible or Shakespeare, because it happens to be pure, looks like setting back the hands of the clock. Men would surely be dull dogs if their phraseology, whether written or spoken, were to remain stagnant and unchangeable. We think well of Johnson's prose. Yet the respectable English of our own time will bear comparison with his; it is more agile and less infected with Latinisms; why go back to Johnson? Let us admire him as a landmark, and pass on! Some literary periods may deserve to be called good, others bad; so be it. Were there no bad ones, there would be no good ones, and I see no reason why men should desire to live in a Golden Age of literature, save in so far as that millennium might coincide with a Golden Age of living. I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their origin is academic laziness.

Certain it is that every language worthy of the name should be in a state of perennial flux, ready and avid to assimilate new elements and be battered about as we ourselves are—is there anything more charming than a thoroughly defective verb?—fresh particles creeping into its vocabulary from all quarters, while others are silently discarded. There is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel. Is the calamity worth risking when time, and time alone, can decide its worth? Why not capture novelties while we may, since others are dying all the year round; why not throw them into the crucible to take their chance with the rest of us? An English word is no fossil to be locked up in a cabinet, but a living thing, liable to the fate of all such things. Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or put on new faces!

I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.

What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back, with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad, or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.

My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....

Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.

Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion. Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect. Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of the skull—a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.

One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose civic acquirements amazed their conquerors? They have contrived to transform themselves into something quite unusual. Staring orbits and mouths agape, colour-patches here and there, morsels of muscle and hair attached to contorted limbs—they suggest a half-way house, a loathsome link, between a living man and his skeleton; and not only a link between them, but a grim caricature of both. Some have been coated with varnish. They glisten infamously. Picture a decrepit and rather gaunt relative of your own, writhing in a fit, stark naked, and varnished all over——

Different are these mummies from those of the tenaciously unimaginative and routine-bound Egyptians. Theirs are dead as a door-nail; torpid lumps, undistinguishable one from the other. Here we have a rare phenomenon—life, and individuality, after death. They are more noteworthy than the cowled and desiccated monks of Italy or Sicily, or at least differently so; undraped, for the most part, though some of them may be seen, mere skin-covered heads, peering with dismal coyness out of a brown sack. And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made flesh, one should come here. Had the excruciating operation of embalming been performed upon live men and women, their poses could hardly have been more multifariously agonised; and an aesthete may speculate as to how far such objects offend, in expression of blank misery and horror, against the canons of what is held to be artistically desirable. The nearest approach to them in human craftsmanship, and as regards Auffassung, are perhaps some little Japanese wood-carvings whose creators, labouring consciously, likewise overstepped the boundaries of the grotesque and indulged in nightmarish effects of line similar to those which the old Peruvians, all unconsciously, have achieved upon the bodies of their dear friends and relatives....

Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who, during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's fleeting outline—so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm. Here is the antidote to mummified Incas.



Alatri

What brought me to Alatri?

Memories of a conversation, by Tiber banks, with Fausto, who was born here and vaunted it to be the fairest city on earth. Rome was quite a passable place, but as to Alatri——

"You never saw such walls in all your life. They are not walls. They are precipices. And our water is colder than the Acqua Marcia."

"Walls and water say little to me. But if the town produces other citizens like yourself——"

"It does indeed! I am the least of the sons of Alatri."

"Then it must be worthy of a visit...."

In the hottest hour of the afternoon they deposited me outside the city gate at some new hotel—I forget its name—to which I promptly took an unreasoning dislike. There was a fine view upon the mountains from the window of the room assigned to me, but nothing could atone for that lack of individuality which seemed to exhale from the establishment and its proprietors. It looked as though I were to be a cypher here. Half an hour was as much as I could endure. Issuing forth despite the heat, I captured a young fellow and bade him carry my bags whithersoever he pleased. He took me to the Albergo della——

The Albergo della——is a shy and retiring hostelry, invisible as such to the naked eye, since it bears no sign of being a place of public entertainment at all. Here was individuality, and to spare. Mine host is an improvement even upon him of the Pergola at Valmontone; a man after my own heart, with merry eyes, drooping white moustache and a lordly nose—a nose of the right kind, a flame-tinted structure which must have cost years of patient labour to bring to its present state of blossoming. That nose! I felt as though I could dwell for ever beneath its shadow. The fare, however, is not up to the standard of the "Garibaldi" inn at Frosinone which I have just left.

Now Frosinone is no tourist resort. It is rather a dull little place; I am never likely to go there again, and have therefore no reason for keeping to myself its "Garibaldi" hotel which leaves little to be desired, even under these distressful war-conditions. It set me thinking—thinking that there are not many townlets of this size in rural England which can boast of inns comparable to the "Garibaldi" in point of cleanliness, polite attention, varied and good food, reasonable prices. Not many; perhaps very few. One remembers a fair number of the other kind, however; that kind where the fare is monotonous and badly cooked, the attendance supercilious or inefficient, and where you have to walk across a cold room at night—refinement of torture—in order to turn out the electric light ere going to bed. That infamy is alone enough to condemn these establishments, one and all.

Yes! And the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns, always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a kind of river-bed where you remain fixed fast, while that monstrous feather-abomination called a pillow, yielding to pressure, rises up on either side of your head and engulfs eyes and nose and everything else into its folds. No escape! You are strangled, smothered; you might as well have gone to bed with an octopus. In this horrid contrivance you lie for eight long hours, clapped down like a corpse in its coffin. Every single bed in rural England ought to be burnt. Not one of them is fit for a Christian to sleep in....

The days are growing hot.

A little tract of woodland surrounded by white walls and attached to the convent on the neighbouring hill is a pleasant spot to while away the afternoon hours. You can have it to yourself. I have all Alatri to myself; a state of affairs which is not without its disadvantages, for, being the only foreigner here, one is naturally watched and regarded with suspicion. And it would be even worse in less civilised places, where one could count for certain on trouble with some conscientious official. So one remains on the beaten track, although my reputation here as non-Austrian (nobody bothers about the Germans) is fairly well established since that memorable debate, in the local cafe, with a bootmaker who, having spent three years in America, testified publicly that I spoke English almost as well as he did. The little newsboy of the place, who is a universal favourite, seeing that his father, a lithographer, is serving a stiff sentence for forgery—he brings me every day with the morning's paper the latest gossip concerning myself.

"Mr. So-and-so still says you are a spy. It is sheer malice."

"I know. Did you tell him he might——?"

"I did. He was very angry. I also told him the remark you made about his mother."

"Tell him again, to-morrow."

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half rude.

In October—and we are now at midsummer—there occurred a little adventure which shows the risks one may run at a time like this.

I was in Rome, walking homewards at about eleven at night along the still crowded Corso and thinking, as I went along, of my impending journey northwards for which the passport was already vised, when there met me a florid individual accompanied by two military officers. We stared at one another. His face was familiar to me, though I knew not where I had seen it. Then he introduced himself. He was a director of the Banca d'ltalia. And was I not the gentleman who had recently been to Orvinio? I remembered.

"The last time I was there," I said, "was about a month ago. I fancy we had some conversation in the motor up from Mandela."

"That is so. And now, however disagreeable it may be, I feel myself obliged to perform a patriotic duty. This is war-time. I would ask you to be so good as to accompany us to the nearest police-station."

"Which is not far off," I replied. "There is one up the next street on our right."

We walked there, all four of us, without saying another word. "What have I been doing?" I wondered. Then we climbed upstairs.

Here, at a well-lighted table in a rather stuffy room, sat a delegato or commissario—I forget which—surrounded, despite the lateness of the hour, by one or two subordinates. He was of middle age, and not prepossessing. He looked as if he could make himself unpleasant, though his face was not of that actively vicious—or actively stupid: the terms are interconvertible—kind. While scanning his countenance, during those few moments, sundry thoughts flitted through my mind.

These then, I said to myself—these are the functionaries, whether executive or administrative, whether Italian or English or Chinese, whom a man is supposed to respect. Who are they? God knows. Nine-tenths of them are in a place where they have no business to be: so much is certain. And what are they doing, these swarms of parasites? Justifying their salaries by inventing fresh regulations and meddlesome bye-laws, and making themselves objectionable all round. Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty, even as the first military duty is said to be the reverse of it. We catch ourselves talking of the "lesson of history." Why not take that lesson to heart? Reverence of the mandarin destroyed the fair life of old China, which was overturned by the Tartars not because Chinamen were too weak or depraved, but because they were the opposite: too moral, too law-abiding, too strong in their sense of right. They paid for their virtue with the extinction of their wonderful culture. They ought to have known better; they ought to have rated morality at its true worth, since it was the profoundest Chinaman himself who said that virtue is merely etiquette—or something to that effect.

I found myself studying the delegato's physiognomy. What could one do with such a composite face? It is a question which often confronts me when I see such types. It confronted me then, in a flash. How make it more presentable, more imposing? By what alterations? Shaving that moustache? No; his countenance could not carry the loss; it would forfeit what little air of dignity it possessed. A small pointed beard, an eye-glass? Possibly. Another trimming of the hair might have improved him, but, on the whole, it was a face difficult to manipulate, on account of its inherent insipidity and self-contradictory features; one of those faces which give so much trouble to the barbers and valets of European royalties.

He took down the names and addresses of all four of us, and it was then that I missed my chance. I ought to have spoken first instead of allowing this luscious director to begin as follows:—

"The foreign gentleman here was at Orvinio about a month ago. He admits it himself and I can corroborate the fact, as I was there at the same time. Orvinio is a small country place in the corner of Umbria. There is a mountain in the neighbourhood, remote and very high—altissima! It is called Mount Muretta and occupies a commanding situation. For reasons which I will leave you, Signer Commissario, to investigate, this gentleman climbed up that mountain and was observed, on the very summit, making calculations and taking measurements with instruments."

Now why did I climb up that wretched Muretta? For an all-sufficient reason: it was a mountain. There is no eminence in the land, from Etna and the Gran Sasso downwards, whose appeal I can resist. A bare wall-like patch on the summit (whence presumably the name) visible from below and promising a lively scramble up the rock, was an additional inducement. Precipices are not so frequent at Orvinio that one can afford to pass them by, although this one, as a matter of fact, proved to be a mighty tame affair. There was yet another object to my trip. I desired to verify a legend connected with this mountain, the tradition of a vanished castle or hamlet in its upper regions to whose former existence the name of a certain old family, still surviving at Orvinio, bears witness. "We are not really from Orvinio," these people will tell you. "We are from the lost castle of the Muretta." (There is not a vestige of a castle left. But I found one brick in the jungle which covers, on the further side of the summit, a vast rock-slide dating, I should say, from early mediaeval days, under whose ruins the fastness may lie buried.) Reasons enough for visiting Muretta.

As to taking measurements—well, a man is naturally accused of a good many things in the course of half a century. Nobody has yet gone so far as to call me a mathematician. These "calculations and instruments" were a local mirage; as pretty an instance of the mythopoeic faculty as one could hope to find in our degenerate days, when gods no longer walk the earth. [27]

The official seemed to be impressed with the fact that my accuser was director of a bank. He inquired what I had to say.

This was a puzzle. They had sprung the thing on me rather suddenly. One likes to have notice of such questions. Tell the truth? I am often tempted to do so; it saves so much trouble! But truth-telling is a matter of longitude, and the further east one goes, the more one learns to hold in check that unnatural propensity. (Mankind has a natural love of the lie itself. Bacon.) Which means nothing more than that one will do well to take account of national psychology. An English functionary, athlete or mountaineer, might have glimpsed the state of affairs. But to climb in war-time, without any object save that of exercising one's limbs and verifying a questionable legend, a high and remote mountain—Muretta happens to be neither the one nor the other—would have seemed to an Italian an incredible proceeding. I thought it better to assume the role of accuser in my turn: an Oriental trick.

"This director," I said, "calls himself a patriot. What has he told us? That while at Orvinio he knew a foreigner who climbed a high mountain to make calculations with instruments. What does this admirable citizen do with regard to such a suspicious character? He does nothing. Is there not a barrack-full of carbineers at the entrance of the place ready to arrest such people? But our patriotic gentleman allows the spy to walk away, to climb fifty other mountains and take five thousand other measurements, all of which have by this time safely reached Berlin and Vienna. That, Signor Commissario, is not our English notion of patriotism. I shall certainly make it my business to write and congratulate the Banca d'Italia on possessing such a good Italian as director. I shall also suggest that his talents would be more worthily employed at the Banca—"(naming a notoriously pro-German establishment).

A poor speech; but it gave me the satisfaction of seeing the fellow grow purple with fury and so picturesquely indignant that he soon reached the spluttering stage. In fact, there was nothing to be done with him. The delegato suggested that inasmuch as he had said his say and deposited his address, he was at liberty to depart, whenever so disposed.

They went—he and his friends.

The other was looking serious—as serious as such a face could be made to look. He must not be allowed to think, I decided, for once an official begins to think he is liable to grow conscientious and then—why, any disaster might happen, the least of them being that I should remain in custody pending investigations. In how many more countries was I going to be arrested for one crime or another? This joke had lost its novelty a good many years ago.

"A pernicious person," I began, "—you have but to look at him. And now he has invited me here in order to make a patriotic impression on his friends, those poor little devils in uniform (a safe remark, since no love is lost hereabouts between police and military). Such silly talk about measurements! It should be nipped in the bud. Here you have an intelligent young subordinate, if I mistake not. Let him drive home with me at my expense; we will go through all papers and search for instruments and bring everything that savours of suspicion back to this office, together with my passport which I never carry on my person. This, meanwhile, is my carta di soggiorno."

The document was in order. Still he hesitated. I thought of those miserable three days' grace which were all that the French consulate had accorded me. If the man grew conscientious, I might remain stranded in Rome, and all that passport trouble must begin again. And to tell him of this dilemma would make him more distrustful than ever.

I went on hastily to admit that my request might not be regular, but how natural! Were we not allies? Was it not my duty to clear myself of such an imputation at the earliest moment and to spare no efforts to that end? I felt sure he could sympathise with the state of my mind, etc. etc.

Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable. The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military service.

We drove away and, on reaching our destination, I insisted, despite his polite remonstrances, on turning everything upside down. We made hay of the apartment, but discovered nothing more treasonable than some rather dry biscuits and a bottle of indifferent Marsala.

"And now I must really be going," he said. "Half-past one! He will be surprised at my long absence."

"I am coming with you. I promised him the passport."

"Don't dream of it. To-morrow, to-morrow. You will have no trouble with him. You can bring the passport, but he will not look at it. Yes; ten o'clock, or eleven, or midday."

So it happened. The passport was waived aside by the official, a little detail which, I must say, struck me as more remarkable than anything else. He did not even unfold it.

"E stato un' equivoco," was all he condescended to say, still without a smile. There had been a misunderstanding.

The incident was closed.

Things might have gone differently in the country. I would either have been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet—an inquiry without which no Latin dossier is complete.

POSTSCRIPT.—Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio? And how many of these myriad public guardians scattered all over the country ever come into contact with a criminal, or even have the luck to witness a street accident? And would the taxpayer not profit by a reduction in their numbers? And whether legal proceedings of every kind would not tend to diminish?

There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome; fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace. Seldom do they meddle with local concerns—far from it! They live in sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics on a judge of the high court—which calls for a different technique.

Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third man you meet—an official, of course, of some kind—with a revolver strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of common sense—of realising that local institutions often work with less friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation of which the carbineers are an example.

Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses five gateways—five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition, it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four gateways!

For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning, to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal, those blocks—what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad modern "Via Romana"—a goat-track, nowadays....

These Alatri remains are wonderful—more so than many of the sites which old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him "hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again says nothing whatever....

I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a philosophy of life.

And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes. Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but for the light they throw upon the living world of his day. Speaking of one of them he says: "It is when we come across names connected with men who have acted an illustrious part in the world's history, that the fatigues of such a journey as I have undertaken are felt to be completely repaid." That is the humanist's spirit.

His equipment in the interpretation of these stones and of all else he picked up in the way of lore and legend was of the proper kind. Boundless curiosity, first of all. And then, an adequate apparatus of learning. He knew his classics—knew them so well that he could always put his finger on those particular passages of theirs which bore upon a point of interest. We may doubtless be able to supply some apt quotation from Virgil or Martial. It is quite a different thing remembering, and collating, references in. Aelian or Pliny or Aristotle or Ptolemy. And wide awake, withal; not easily imposed upon. He is not of the kind to swallow the tales of the then fashionable cicerone's. He has critical dissertations on sites like Cannae and the Bandusian Fountain and Caudine Forks; and when, at Nola, they opened in his presence a sepulchre containing some of those painted Greek vases for which the place is famous, he promptly suspects it to be a "sepulchre prepared for strangers," and instead of buying the vases allows them to remain where they are "for more simple or less suspicious travellers." On the way to Cape Leuca he passes certain mounds whose origin he believes to be artificial and the work of a prehistoric race. I fancy his conjecture has proved correct. On page 258, speaking of an Oscan inscription, he mentions Mommsen, which shows that he kept himself up to date in such researches....