Our historians have learned to write their books with full as much reference to their being read abroad as at home. The problem with which they first have to deal, therefore, is, how to make the men and the incidents and the cardinal points of our annals look as large to foreigners as they do to us. Many of our town-histories are written in the tone and style of Mr. Poole's "Little Pedlington,"—the epithet Little being suppressed in the title, but obtruded on every page. The intensity and emphasis of our historic strain appear to foreigners to be disproportionate to the subject-matter of the story. Mr. Punch always represents a Yankee as larger than his garments. His trousers never cover his ankles; his cuffs stop far short of his wrists; his long neck extends beyond the reach of even his capacious collar; and the bone in him lacks amplitude of muscle. But Mr. Punch, with all his wisdom, does not fully understand the composition of a Yankee, as the greatest common multiple of a Teuton, Dane, Norman, Frank, Kelt, and Englishman. Dr. Palfrey's volume will largely conciliate our cousins beyond the water to our own conceit of our annals, because, more distinctly and cogently than any previous record in pamphlet or folio, it identifies the springs and purposes of our heroic age with an era and a type of men which English historians now exalt on their own noblest pages.

Dr. Palfrey has had precisely that natural endowment, training, experience, mental discipline, and intercourse with the world in public and private relations, to furnish him with the best qualifications for the work to which he has devoted the autumn of an eminently useful and honored life. The sinewy fibre of his theme is religion. And he is a religious man of the highest pattern, deeply skilled in its scholarly lore, erudite in its Scriptural and controversial elements, and practised in the sagacity which it imparts for understanding and interpreting human nature. Religion enters into the subject-matter of his narrative, not so much in its philosophical bearings as in its civico-ecclesiastical and institutional relations; where it becomes the spine of the social fabric, traversed and perforated with the nervous life-chords for all the members of the organism. His education has been that of the highest ideal of New England,—through books and men, through professional duties and public services, bringing him into relations with youth, with men and women, and with the forms and the routine work of civil and political administrations. He has at his command the language of devotion, the rhetoric and logic of philosophy, and the technicalities of jurisprudence. To his personal friends, and they are very many in every walk of life, it is a matter of grateful recognition that he escaped from a political arena whose conflicts were not congenial with his delicacy of taste or of conscience, in season to give the vigor of his best years to the composition of a work which will spread his fame to other lands and identify it forever with what is of most reverent and honored remembrance on his native soil.

The historian's work, when done after the best pattern, involves a duty to his readers and a privilege for himself. To them he is bound to present all the essential facts, authenticated, illustrated, and carefully disposed in their natural relations. For himself, having done this, he is at liberty to construct his own theory, to follow his own philosophy, and to pronounce judicial decisions. The highest exaction to be made of an historian, and the loftiest function which he could claim to exercise, are expressed in these two conditions. The noble privilege and opportunity secured in the latter condition are the only adequate reward for the drudgery of the labor required in the former. It would be foolish to raise a question whether it be more essential for an historian to be faithful in his narration or to be wise in his comments. Only the statement we have made will serve to remind us how essential the philosophy of human nature is to throw life into a record of old annals.

The two books in our hands, where their specific themes are identical, substantially accord in their relation of facts,—allowing for a few exceptional cases,—but they differ widely in their philosophy. Very much of the fresh interest which both of them will create in their respective subjects will be found in the collisions of their philosophy.

Dr. Palfrey had a favorable opportunity for undertaking to write anew the history of New England. Those who have yet to acquaint themselves with that history say there was no occasion for this reiterated labor. If such persons will merely read over his notes, without wasting any of their precious time upon his text, they will discover their mistake. There are in those notes matters new even to adepts. All the recent materials which have been lavishly contributed from public and private stores by public and private researches amount in sum and in importance to an actual necessity for their digest and incorporation into a new history. Dr. Palfrey has used these with a most patient fidelity, and his references to them and his extracts from them convey to his readers the results of an amount of labor which the most grateful of them will not be likely to overestimate. While he speaks to us in his text, he allows those whom we most wish to hear to speak to us in his rich and well-chosen excerpts from a mountain-heap of authorities.

The Dedication of the volume to Dr. Sparks has in it a rare felicity, which is to be referred to two facts: first, that the writer had some peculiarly touching and grateful things to say; and, second, that he knew how to say them in language fitted to the sentiment. In his Preface, he announces his purpose with its plan, refers us to his authorities and sources, and recognizes his obligations to individual friends. Some of the choicest matters in his Notes are the results of his own personal research in England.

The limit which he sets for himself will carry forward his History to the time of the English Revolution, thus embracing our annals during the vitality of our first Charter. That Charter, its origin, transfer, and subsequent service as the basis of government, the reiterated efforts to wrest it, and the persistent resolution to hold it, give to it a symbolic significance which warrants the dating of an epoch by it. Dr. Palfrey regards our local political existence as commencing from the hour in which that document, with its official representatives, reached these shores. We have seen criticisms disputing this position, but, as we think, not even plausible, still less effective to discredit it. We must have an incident, besides a punctum temporis, for our start in government; and where could we find a better one than that on which the whole subsequent course and character of the government depended? We go, then, for the old Charter, and for the setting up of a jurisdiction under it here. It was an admirable and every way convenient document; good for securing rights, impotent as impairing liberties. It comforted the "Magistrates" to have it to fall back upon, when its provisions harmonized with their purposes; nor did they allow themselves to be embarrassed by it, when it appeared that some of their purposes were not fully provided for in it. That Charter got wonderfully aired and invigorated on its ocean-passage. The salt water agreed with its constitution. In a single instance, at least, it falsified the old maxim,—Coeium, nun animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt. That was a marvellous piece of parchment. So far as Massachusetts was concerned, the Declaration of Independence was interlined upon it in sympathetic ink.

We hardly know of fifty octavo pages anywhere in which so much investigation and labor condense their results so intelligibly into such useful information as in each of the first two chapters of this volume. The first is devoted to the Physical Geography of the Peninsula of New England, its Natural History, and its Aborigines; the second is a summary sketch of the Early Voyages and Explorations. In this we find the most discriminating view which we have ever seen of the marvellous adventures of John Smith,—so happily and suggestively described as the "fugitive slave" who was "the founder of Virginia." The notes on the credibility and authenticity of the narrations connected with his name are admirable. In reading these two chapters, one must muse upon the wilderness trampings and the ocean perils of the keen-set and all-enduring men who furnished the material for these high-seasoned pages.

"Puritanism in England" is, of course, the author's starting-point. Here he finds his men and their principles. A partial reformation is the most mischievous influence that can work in society. It unsettles, but is not willing to rebuild, even when it can learn how to do so. Reaction and excess are the Scylla and Charybdis of its perils. Compromise is the very essence of a partial reformation; and compromise in matters of moral and religious concern, where it is not folly, is crime. Where any party has been in earnest in a strife, there is no honest end at which it can rest till it reaches the goal of righteousness. The active element of Puritanism was the persistency of a religious party in pursuing a purpose which was yielded up, at a point short of its full attainment, by another branch of the party, which up to that point had made common cause with them. To speak plainly, the English Puritans regarded their former prelatical and conformist associates as traitors to a holy cause. They had engaged together in good faith in the work of reformation. They had suffered together. When the time came for triumph, a schism divided them; and the more zealous smarted from wounds inflicted by the lukewarm. It appeared that the Prelatists had been looking to ends of state policy, while the Puritans kept religion in view. The Conformists thought their ends were reached when Roman prelacy was set aside, and certain local ecclesiastical changes had been effected; but the real Puritans wanted to get and to establish the essential Gospel.

Dr. Palfrey tells this story concisely, but emphatically. He takes two stages of the Puritan development in England, from which to deduce respectively the emigration to Plymouth and to Massachusetts Bay. Stopping at intervals to make intelligible the perplexities connected with the patents and charters, his narrative is thenceforward continuous, admitting new threads to be woven into it as the pattern and the fabric both become richer. For the first time we have the full connection presented in solid history between the Scrooby Church and Plymouth Colony. And the tracing is beautifully done. An artist may find his paintings in these pages. Our poets may here find themes which will be the more tempting and rewarding, the more closely they are held to severe historic verity. They will find, that, after all, the most promising materials for the imagination to deal with are facts. The residence of the exiles in Holland, their debates and arrangements with respect to a more distant remove, the ocean passage, the first forlorn experiences during two winters at Plymouth, are vividly presented. The paragraph, on page 182, beginning, "A visitor to Plymouth," gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. "Why could they not have been content to cling to the comforts of Old England, and to restrain their wilfulness of spirit?" The question is answered now differently from what it would have been then. We have used one wrong word about those exiles, in speaking of them as cowering under their woes. They did not cower, but breasted them.

After another most pregnant and exhaustive episode on Puritan politics in England, Dr. Palfrey brings in that thread of his story on which is strung the fortune of Massachusetts. It is here that Englishmen will find explained some of our vaunting views of the importance of our annals. Dr. Palfrey, in this and in other chapters, traces with skill and exactness the course of public measures and events in England, through kingly tyrannies and popular resistance, which ended by harmonizing the institutions of the mother country for a little while with those which had sprung up in this wilderness. He soon comes upon ticklish matters, but his touch and hold are firm, because he feels sure that he is dealing with men who understood themselves, and who were at least resolute and honest, to whatever degree they may have erred. Probably, like many of us who are aware that we could not possibly have lived comfortably with our ancestors, he feels all the more bound on that account to set their memory in the light of their noblest and least selfish ends. He is stout and unflinching in his championship of those ancestors: he sees in their experiment a lofty ideal; he vindicates their policy in the measures for realizing it; nor does he withhold apologetic or vindicatory words where "unmeet persons" among the whites or Indians stood in the way of it.

Henceforward Dr. Palfrey has to follow out each thread of his story by itself, as by-and-by he will have to gather them into one cord. He traces the developments of months and years in the original settlements, and pursues them as they lead him to new territory in the Northeast and the Southwest, into Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Another episode on the opening of the Civil War at home, which invited a large return of the exiles, and a record of the original confederacy of the New England Colonies, bring us to the present close of his labors. May they be speedily continued! and may we enjoy the reality, as we now do the promise of them!

We turn now to Mr. Arnold's book. The field which it traverses is narrower as regards space, but its spirit is large and generous, and its subject-matter is of the loftiest significance. If the writer does not indulge us with many disquisitions, it is not from lack of ability. Wherever, as in his moralizings upon King Philip's War, and in his incidental comments upon the peculiarities and temper of his prominent men, he allows us to meet his own mind, he is uniformly wise and interesting. He stands by Rhode Island as does Dr. Palfrey by Massachusetts; and seeing that for a far longer period than the two books run on together the two Colonies were at strife, we are glad to have before us both the ways in which the story may be told. There are various sharp judgments on Massachusetts men and principles in the Rhode Island book. The argument is in good hands on either side.

Mr. Arnold begins with the first occupation of Rhode Island by white men, and conducts his narrative to the close of the century. His research has been faithful. His style is chaste, forcible, and often picturesque. He has seen the world widely, and he knows human nature. He understands very well what a place of honor and what a well-proved assurance of safety distinctive Rhode Island principles have attained. The issue, having been found so triumphant, has dignified to the historian the early, humble, and bewildering steps and processes through which it was reached. The narrative on his pages is the most distracting one ever written in the annals of civilized men. Every conceivable element of strife, discord, agitation, alarm, dissension, and bitterness is to be found in it,—redeemed only by a prevailing integrity, right-mindedness, and right-heartedness in all the leading spirits. Each man in each of the towns composing the original elements of the Colony was a whole "democratie" in himself, and generally a "fierce" one. Disputed boundaries with both the other Colonies, and an especial and continuous feud with Massachusetts,—unruly spirits, bent upon working out all manner of impracticable theories,—the oddest and most original, as well as the most obstinate and indomitable dreamers and enthusiasts, furnished some daily nutriment to dissension with their neighbors or among themselves. Men of mark, like Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, Governor Arnold, and William Harris, appear equally competent for fomenting strife of a sort to threaten every essential element of civil society, and for averting all permanent harm while putting on trial the most revolutionary theories. On page 337, Mr. Arnold has a note most characteristic of a large portion of his whole theme, as covering both his men and their measures. Many of the documents, of an official character, written by citizens, towns, or rulers in Rhode Island, were of such a sort in language and matter, that the town of Warwick did not think them fit for the public records, and so enjoined that the clerk should keep them in a file by themselves. This was known as "the Impertinent File," and, more profanely, but not less appropriately, as "the Damned File." A certain "perditious letter," written by Roger Williams himself, serves as the nucleus of this deposit; and we read of another of the documents as being as "full of uncivil language as if it had been indited in hell."

Mr. Arnold picks his way through all these dissensions, and finds a full reward in the nobleness of the men and the principles with which he has in the main to deal. His only abatement of praise to Roger Williams is on account of his bitter feud with William Harris. He repels, as slanderous, the imputations founded on alleged interpolations restricting religious liberty in the code, and cast at Roger Williams for undue severity to Quakers and for favoring Indian slavery. Randolph's visit, Andros's administration, the suspension and resumption of the Charter, bring him out into broader matters, which he treats with frankness and skill.

The more histories we have from the pens of competent writers, even though they go over the same ground, the more lively and interesting will the pages be. We need not fear that like fidelity and ability in the use of the same materials by different writers will reduce our modern histories to a dead level of uniform narration. None but those well-skilled in our annals are aware what scope they afford, not only for special pleas, but also for honest diversity of judgment, in viewing and pronouncing upon many test-points vital to the theme. Indeed, when the historic vein shall have been exhausted, it will be found that there is more than a score of special and contested points, in each of our first two centuries, admirably suited for monographs. We have but to compare a few pages in each of the two excellent works now in our hands, to see how men of the highest ability, of rigid candor, and scrupulous fidelity in the use of the same materials, while spreading the same facts before their readers, may tell different tales, varying to the whole extent of the diversity in their respective judgments and moralizings. We can easily illustrate this assertion from the pages before us. Though Dr. Palfrey stops more than a half-century short of the date to which Mr. Arnold carries us, the former indicates exactly how and where he will be at issue with the latter, even to the end of the story common to both of them. So strong and clear is Dr. Palfrey's avowal of fealty to the honorable and unsullied fame of the founders of Massachusetts, that he will not be likely, on any later page, to qualify what he has already written. It happens, too, that the points in which any two of our historians would be most disposed to part in judgment lie within the space and the years common to both these writers. We can but indicate, in a very brief way, some of the more salient divergences between them, and we must preface the specification by acknowledging again the high integrity of both.

Dr. Palfrey writes, unmistakably, as a man proud of his Massachusetts lineage. He honors the men whose enterprise, constancy, persistency, and wise skill in laying foundations have, in his view, approved their methods and justified them, even where they are most exposed to a severe judgment. He wishes to tell their story as they would wish to have it told. They stand by his side as he reads their records, and supply him with a running comment as to meaning and intention. Thus he is helped to put their own construction on their own deeds,—to set their acts in the light of their motives, to give them credit for all the good that was in their purposes, and to ascribe their mistakes and errors to a limitation of their views, or to well-founded apprehensions of evil which they had reason to dread. Under such pilotage, the passengers, at least, would be safe, when their ship fell upon a place where two seas met. Now Massachusetts and Rhode Island were in stiff hostility during the period here chronicled. The founder of Rhode Island and nearly all of its leading spirits had been "spewed out of the Bay Colony,"—and the institutions which the Rhode Islanders set up, or rather, their seeming purpose to do without any institutions, constituted a standing grievance to the rigid disciplinarians of Massachusetts. Indeed, we have to look to the relations of annoyance, jealousy, and open strife, which arose between the two Colonies in the ten years following 1636, for the real explanation of the severity visited upon the Quakers in Massachusetts in the five years following 1656. These early Quakers, when not the veritable persons, were the ghosts of the old troublers of "the Lord's people in the Bay." Gorton, Randall Holden, Mrs. Dyer, and other "exorbitant persons," who had been found "unmeet to abide in this jurisdiction," could not be got rid of once for all.

Mr. Arnold glories in the early reproach of Rhode Island. He finds its title to honor above every other spot on earth in the phenomena which made it so hateful to Massachusetts. In every issue raised between it and the Bay Colony from the very first, and in every element of its strife, he stands stoutly forth as its champion, and casts scornful reflections, though not in a scornful spirit. Wherever our two historians have the same point under treatment, we discern this antagonism between them,—never in a single case manifesting itself in an offensive or bitter way, but tending greatly to give a brisk and quickening vigor to their pages. Arnold claims that a perfectly democratical government and entire religious freedom are "exclusively Rhode Island doctrines, and to her belongs the credit of them both." He might afford to give Massachusetts the appreciable honor of having been the indirect means of opening those large visions to the eyes of men who certainly were a most uncomfortable set of citizens while under pupilage. Mr. Bancroft had previously written thus:—"Had the territory of Rhode Island corresponded to the importance and singularity of the principles of its early existence, the world would have been filled with wonder at the phenomena of its history."[B] It was only because the State was no larger that it was a safe field for the first trial of such principles. And it has often proved, that, the larger the principle, the more circumscribed must needs be the field within which it is first tested. It was well that the first experiments on the capabilities of steam were tried by the nose of a tea-kettle. Seeing that most of the early settlers of Rhode Island had very little property, and scarce anything of what Christendom had previously been in the habit of regarding as religion, the territory was the most fitting place for the trial of revolutionary principles. Mr. Arnold says, very curtly, but very truly,—"No form of civil government then existing could tolerate her democracy, and even Christian charity denied her faith." (p. 280.) The wonder of the world, however, would have been more curiously engaged in watching what legislation for religion could possibly have devised for a community made up of all sorts of consciences. The little State deserves the honor claimed for her. But had she any alternative course?

[Footnote B: BANCROFT'S History of the United States. I. 380.]

Mr. Arnold, we think, defines with more sharp and guarded accuracy than does Dr. Palfrey the ruling aim and motive of the founders of Massachusetts. An historian of Massachusetts, knowing beforehand through what a course of unflinching and resolute consistency with their first principles he is to follow her early legislators, has reason to limit their aim and motive at the start, that he may not assume for them more than he can make good. Especially if he intend to palliate, and, still more, to justify, some of the severer and more oppressive elements of their policy, he will find it wise to qualify their purpose within the same limitations which they themselves set for it. Dr. Palfrey parts with an advantage of which he afterwards has need to avail himself, when he states the motive of the exiles too broadly, as a search for a place in which to exercise liberty of conscience. He speaks of these exiles as recognizing in "religious freedom a good of such vast worth as to be protected by the possessor, not only for himself, but for the myriads living and to be born, of whom he assumes to be the pioneer and the champion." (p. 301.) This large and unqualified claim might be advanced for the founders of Rhode Island, but it cannot be set up for the founders of Massachusetts. Whoever asserts it for the latter commits himself most unnecessarily to an awkward and ineffective defence of them in a long series of restrictive and severe measures against "religious freedom," beginning with the case of the Brownes at Salem, and including acts of general legislation as well as of continuous ecclesiastical and judicial proceeding. Winthrop tells us that the aim of his brotherhood was "to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity here." The General Court repeatedly signified its desire to have a draft of laws prepared which might be "agreeable to the word of God." Now either of these statements of the ruling purpose of the colonists, as then universally understood and interpreted, was inconsistent with what we now understand by "freedom in religion," or "liberty of conscience." What were regarded as "the pure ordinances of Christ" could not have been set up here, nor could such laws as were then considered as "agreeable to the word of God" have been enacted here, without impairing individual freedom in matters of religion. Indeed, it was the very attempt to realize these objects which occasioned every interference with perfect liberty of conscience. The fathers of Massachusetts avowed their purpose to be, not the opening of an asylum for all kinds of consciences, but the establishment of a Christian commonwealth. Their consistency can be vindicated by following out their own idea, but not by assigning to them a larger one.

Mr. Arnold, as we have said, is more sharply guarded in his statement of the aim of the founders of the Bay Colony in this respect; and it is all the more remarkable that he does not give them the benefit of the recognized limitation. He defines for them a restricted object, but he judges them by a standard before which they never measured themselves, and then condemns them for short-comings. He tells us distinctly that the motives of the exiles "were certainly not those assigned them by Charles I., 'the freedom of liberty of conscience'" (p. 10); that "they looked for a home in the New World where they might erect an establishment in accordance with their peculiar theological views. 'They sought a faith's pure shrine,' based on what they held to be a purer system of worship, and a discipline more in unison with their notions of a church. Here they proceeded to organize a state, whose civil code followed close on the track of the Mosaic Law, and whose ecclesiastical polity, like that of the Jews, and of all those [Christian governments?] then existing, was identified with the civil power. They thus secured, what was denied them in England, the right to pursue their own form of religion without molestation, and in this the object of their exile was attained." (p. 11.) And again, Mr. Arnold says,—"They founded a colony for their own faith, without any idea of tolerating others." (p. 44.) All this is admirably said. It is precisely what the exiles would wish might be said of them in all the histories of them; for it is what they said of themselves, in defining their own object; it was, further, what they felt in their hearts to be their object, more intensely than they could give it utterance. But the object is at once seen to be limited within the fearful license of religious freedom. The Scriptural and legislative fetters on such liberty were too repressive not to amount to an essential qualification of it. "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam," Ward of Ipswich, made a clean breast for himself and his contemporaries, when he numbered among the "foure things which my heart hath naturally detested: Tolerations of diverse Religions, or of one Religion in segregant shapes. He that willingly assents to this, if he examines his heart by daylight, his conscience will tell him he is either an Atheist, or an Heretigal, or an Hypocrite, or at best a captive to some lust. Poly-piety is the greatest impiety in the world." With such frank avowals on the part of those who had borne so much in the attempt to make themselves comfortable in their exile to these hard regions, that they might here try to work out their harder problem, it is a great deal too severe a standard for judging their acts which is set up for them in the fancied principle of religious liberty. We wonder that Mr. Arnold withholds from them the benefit of his and their own clear limitation of the principle,—a limitation so severe, as, in fact, to constitute quite another principle. Was it at all strange, then, that they should deal resolutely with Roger Williams, on account of "the firmness with which, upon every occasion, he maintained the doctrine, that the civil power has no control over the religious opinions of men."? (p. 41.) It was for no other purpose than to engage the civil power for a pure religion that they were dwelling in poor huts on these ocean headlands, and sustaining their lives upon muscles gathered on the shore after the receding of the tide.

Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Arnold hold and utter quite opposite judgments about the treatment of Roger Williams by Massachusetts. The latter, having stated more definitely than the former the limited aim of our colonists, which was utterly inconsistent with toleration in religion and with laxity in civil matters, nevertheless considers the men of Massachusetts unjustifiable in their course toward the founder of Rhode Island. Dr. Palfrey, on weaker grounds than those allowed by Mr. Arnold, thinks their most stringent proceedings perfectly defensible. He regards Mr. Williams as an intruder, whose opinions, behavior, and influence were perilous alike to the civil and the religious peace of the colonists; and he holds the colonists as not chargeable with any breach of the laws of justice or of mercy in sending out of their jurisdiction, into another patch of the same wilderness, a man all whose phenomena were of the most uncomfortable and irritating character. We confess that our reading and thinking identify our judgment on this matter with that of our own historian. There can be no question but that Roger Williams—whether he was thirty-two years old, as Mr. Arnold thinks, or, as Dr. Palfrey judges, in his twenty-fifth year, when he landed here—was, in what we must call his youth, seeing that he lived to an advanced age, a heady and contentious theorizer. Our fathers could not try more than one theory at a time; and the theory they were bent upon testing naturally preceded, in the series of the world's progressive experiments, the more generous, but, at the same time, more dangerous one which he advanced; and their theory had a right to an earlier and a full trial, as lying in the way of a safe advance towards his bolder Utopianism. The mild Bradford and the yet milder Brewster were glad when Plymouth was rid of him. His first manifestation of himself, on his arrival here, requires to be invested with the halo of a later admiration, before it can be made to consist with the heralding of an apostle of the generous principles of toleration and charity in religion. Winthrop had recorded for us his refusal "to join with the congregation at Boston." This had been understood as referring to an unwillingness on the part of Williams to enter into communion with the church. But from a letter of his which has come to light within the year, it seems that he had been invited, previously to the arrival of Cotton, to become teacher of the church. And on account of what constraint of soul-liberty did he decline the office? Because the members of that church "would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the churches of England, while they lived there"! The good man lived to grow milder and more tolerant of the whims and prejudices and convictions of his fellow-men, through a free indulgence of his own. And, what is more remarkable, he found it necessary to apply, in restraint of others, several of the measures against which he had protested when brought to bear upon himself. He came to discover that there was mischief in "such an infinite liberty of conscience" as was claimed by his own followers. The erratic Gorton was to him precisely what the legislators of Massachusetts had feared that he himself would prove to be to them. He publicly declared himself in favor of "a due and moderate restraint and punishing" of some of the oddities of the Quakers. In less than ten years after he had so frightened Massachusetts by questioning the validity of an English charter to jurisdiction here, he went to England on a successful errand to obtain just such a document for himself and his friends.

Our two historians, with all the facts before them, honestly stated too, but diversely interpreted, stand in open antagonism of judgment about the proceedings of Massachusetts against the Antinomians. That bitter strife—Dux foemina facti—was in continuation of the issue opened by Roger Williams, though it turned upon new elements. Here, again, Mr. Arnold stands stoutly for the partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, who moved towards the new home in the Narragensett country. He sees in the strife, mainly, a contest of a purely theological character, leading on to a development of democratical ideas, (p. 66.) Dr. Palfrey insists that it would be unjust to allege that the Antinomians were dealt with for holding "distasteful opinions on dark questions of theology," and affirms that they were put down as wild and alarming agents of an "immediate anarchy." (pp. 489, 491.) In this matter, also, our own judgment goes with our own historian. And the very best confirmation that it could have is found in the fact, that the prime movers in the most threatening stage of that dire conflict afterwards made ample confession of their heat, their folly, and their outrages,—approving the stern proceedings under which they had suffered. Wheelwright, especially, in whose advocacy the cause of his sister-in-law first assumed so threatening an aspect, most humbly avowed his sin and penitence.

One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our two new historians may be instanced. They have both written, as became them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity. But Mr. Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain. He reproduces and refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel. He exalts the Indian character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them capacity to fill it. The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by Mr. Arnold as "his seat at Mount Hope," (p. 23,)—and pungently, by Dr. Palfrey, as "his sty," in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had "a distressing experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality." (pp. 183, 184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians "were ignorant of Revelation, yet here was Plato's great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the West." (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary was writing, had already put into print this sentence:—"The New England savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain." (p. 49.)

Here are strange variances of judgment. But how much more of interest and activity lives in the mind, both of writers and readers, when history is written with such divergent philosophies and comments! Nobly, in both cases before us, have the writers done their work, and heartily do we render our tribute to them.



DRIFTING.

My soul to-day Is far away, Sailing the Vesuvian Bay; My winged boat, A bird afloat, Swims round the purple peaks remote:—

Round purple peaks It sails, and seeks Blue inlets and their crystal creeks, Where high rocks throw, Through deeps below, A duplicated golden glow.

Far, vague, and dim, The mountains swim; While on Vesuvius' misty brim, With outstretched hands, The gray smoke stands O'erlooking the volcanic lands.

Here Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles; And yonder, bluest of the isles, Calm Capri waits, Her sapphire gates Beguiling to her bright estates.

I heed not, if My rippling skiff Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff;— With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise.

Under the walls Where swells and falls The Bay's deep breast at intervals, At peace I lie, Blown softly by, A cloud upon this liquid sky.

The day, so mild, Is Heaven's own child, With Earth and Ocean reconciled;— The airs I feel Around me steal Are murmuring to the murmuring keel.

Over the rail My hand I trail Within the shadow of the sail, A joy intense, The cooling sense Glides down my drowsy indolence.

With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Where Summer sings and never dies,— O'erveiled with vines, She glows and shines Among her future oil and wines.

Her children, hid The cliffs amid, Are gambolling with the gambolling kid; Or down the walls, With tipsy calls, Laugh on the rocks like waterfalls.

The fisher's child, With tresses wild, Unto the smooth, bright sand beguiled, With glowing lips Sings as she skips, Or gazes at the far-off ships.

Yon deep bark goes Where Traffic blows, From lands of sun to lands of snows;— This happier one, Its course is run From lands of snow to lands of sun.

Oh, happy ship, To rise and dip, With the blue crystal at your lip! Oh, happy crew, My heart with you Sails, and sails, and sings anew!

No more, no more The worldly shore Upbraids me with its loud uproar! With dreamful eyes My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise!



ROBA DI ROMA.

ENTRANCE.

It was on the 6th of December, 1856, that I landed with my family at Civita Vecchia, on my return for the third time to Rome. Before we could make all our arrangements, it was too late to think of journeying that day towards the dear old city; but the following morning we set forth in a rumbling, yellow post-coach, with three horses, and a shabby, gaudy postilion,—the wheels clattering, the bells on the horses' necks jingling, the cock's-plumes on their heads nodding, and a half-dozen sturdy beggar-brats running at our side and singing a dismal chorus of "Dateci qualche cosa." Two or three half-baiocchi, however, bought them off, and we had the road to ourselves. The day was charming, the sky cloudless, the air tender and with that delicious odor of the South which so soothingly intoxicates the senses. The sea, accompanying us for half our way, gleamed and shook out its breaking surf along the shore; and the rolling slopes of the Campagna, flattered by sunlight, stretched all around us,—here desert and sparkling with tall skeleton grasses and the dry canes' tufted feathers, and here covered with low, shrubby trees, that, crowding darkly together, climbed the higher hills. On tongues of land, jutting out into the sea, stood at intervals lonely watch-towers, gray with age, and at their feet shallow and impotent waves gnashed into foam around the black, jagged teeth of half-sunken rocks along the shore. Here and there the broken arches of a Roman bridge, nearly buried in the lush growth of weeds, shrubs, and flowers, or the ruins of some old villa, the home of the owl, snake, and lizard, showed where Ancient Rome journeyed and lived. At intervals, heavy carts, drawn by the superb gray oxen of the Campagna, creaked slowly by, the contadino sitting athwart the tongue; or some light wine carrettino came ringing along, the driver fast asleep under its tall, triangular cover, with his fierce little dog beside him, and his horse adorned with bright rosettes and feathers. Sometimes long lines of mules or horses, tied one to another's tail, plodded on in dusty procession, laden with sacks;—sometimes droves of oxen, or poledri, conducted by a sturdy driver in heavy leathern leggings, and armed with a long, pointed pole, stopped our way for a moment. In the fields, the pecoraro, in shaggy sheep-skin breeches, the very type of the mythic Pan, leaned against his staff, half-asleep, and tended his woolly flock,—or the contadino drove through dark furrows the old plough of Virgil's time, that figures in the vignettes to the "Georgics," dragged tediously along by four white oxen, yoked abreast. There, too, were herds of long-haired goats, rearing mid the bushes and showing their beards over them, or following the shepherd to their fold, as the shadows began to lengthen,—or rude and screaming wains, tugged by uncouth buffaloes, with low heads and knotted knees, bred among the malaria-stricken marshes.

Half-way to Rome we changed horses at Palo,—a little grim settlement, composed of a post-house, inn, stables, a line of straggling fishermen's-huts, and a desolate old fortress, flanked by four towers. This fortress, which once belonged to the Odescalchi family, but is now the property of the Roman government, looks like the very spot for a tragedy, as it stands there rotting in the pestilential air, and garrisoned by a few stray old soldiers, whose dreary, broken-down appearance is quite in keeping with the place. Palo itself is the site of the city of Alsium, founded by the Pelasgi, in the dim gloom of antiquity, long before the Etruscans landed on this shore. It was subsequently occupied by the Etruscans, and afterwards became a favorite resort of the Roman nobility, who built there the splendid villas of Antoninus, Porcina, Pompeius, and others. Of the Pelasgic and Etruscan town not a vestige remains; but the ruined foundations of Roman villas are still to be seen along the shore. No longer are to be found there the feasts described by Fronto,[A] of "fatted oysters, savory apples, pastry, confectionery, and generous wines in faultless transparent goblets,"—nor would it now be called "a voluptuous seaside retreat"; but good lobsters are still abundant there, and one can get a greasy beefsteak, black bread, an ill-cooked chicken, and sour wine, at only about twice their market value. The situation is lovely, with the sea washing in along the rounded rim of the coast, close up to the door of the inn; and on a sunny day, when the white wings of feluccas may be seen gleaming far off on the blue Mediterranean, and the fishermen are drawing their nets close into shore, it seems as if it might really be made "a voluptuous seaside retreat," but for the desolating malaria which renders it dangerous to rest there for a single night.

[Footnote A: De Feriis Alsensibus, Epist. III. See Dennis's Etruscan Antiquities, Vol. I.]

Here, of course, we stopped as short a time as possible; and then, bidding adieu to the sea, struck inland over the Campagna to Rome. The country now grows wild, desolate, and lonely; but it has a special charm of its own, which they who are only hurrying on to Rome, and to whom it is an obstruction and a tediousness, cannot, of course, perceive. It is dreary, weird, ghostly,—the home of the winds; but its silence, sadness, and solitude are both soothing and impressive. After miles and miles up and down, at last, from the crest of a hill up which we slowly toiled with our lumbering carriage and reeking horses, we saw the dome of St. Peter's towering above the city, which as yet was buried out of sight. It was but a glimpse, and was soon lost. The postilion covered the worn-out lace of his shabby livery with a heavy cloak, which he flung over his shoulder to keep out the dampening air, gave a series of wild flourishes with his whip, broke into guttural explosions of voice to urge along his horses, and on we went full-gallop. The road grew more and more populated as we approached the city. Carriages were out for a drive, or to meet friends on their way from Civita Vecchia; and on foot was many a little company of Romans, laughing and talking. At the osterias were groups seated under frasche, or before the door, drinking fogliette of wine and watching the passers-by. At last, toward sundown, we stopped at the Porta Cavalleggieri, where, thanks to our lascia passare, we were detained but a minute,—and then we were in Rome. Over us hung the great bulging dome of St. Peter's, golden with the last rays of sunset. The pillars of the gigantic colonnade of Bernini, as we jolted along, "seemed to be marching by," in broad platoons. The fountains piled their flexile columns of spray and waved them to and fro. The great bell clanged from the belfry. Groups wandered forth in the great Piazza. The old Egyptian obelisk in the centre pointed its lean finger to the sky. We were in Rome! This one moment of surprised sensation is worth the journey from Civita Vecchia. Entered by no other gate, is Rome so suddenly and completely possessed. Nowhere is the contrast so instantaneous and vivid as here, between the silent, desolate Campagna and the splendor of St. Peter's, between the burrows of primitive Christianity and the gorgeousness of ecclesiastical Rome.

After leaving the Piazza, we get a glimpse of Hadrian's Mole, and of the rusty Tiber, as it hurries, "retortis littore Etrusco violenter undis" as of old, under the statued bridge of St. Angelo,—and then we plunge into long, damp, narrow, dirty streets. Yet—shall I confess it?—they had a charm for me. Twilight was deepening into dark as we passed through them. Confused cries and loud Italian voices sounded about me. Children were screaming,—men howling their wares for sale. Bells were ringing everywhere. Priests, soldiers, contadini, and beggars thronged along. The Trasteverini were going home, with their jackets hanging over one shoulder. Women, in their rough woollen gowns, stood in the doorways bare-headed, or looked out from windows and balconies, their black hair shining under the lanterns. Lights were twinkling in the little cavernous shops, and under the Madonna-shrines far within them. A funeral procession, with its black banners, gilt with a death's-head and cross-bones, was passing by, its wavering candles borne by the confraternita, who marched carelessly along, shrouded from head to foot in white, with only two holes for the eyes to glare through.

It was dirty, but it was Rome; and to any one who has long lived in Rome even its very dirt has a charm which the neatness of no other place ever had. All depends, of course, on what we call dirt. No one would defend the condition of some of the streets or some of the habits of the people. But the soil and stain which many call dirt I call color, and the cleanliness of Amsterdam would ruin Rome for the artist. Thrift and exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. Fancy for a moment the difference for the worse, if all the grim, browned, rotted walls of Rome, with their peeling mortar, their thousand daubs of varying grays and yellows, their jutting brickwork and patched stonework, from whose intervals the cement has crumbled off, their waving weeds and grasses and flowers, now sparsely fringing their top, now thickly protruding from their sides, or clinging and making a home in the clefts and crevices of decay, were to be smoothed to a complete level, and whitewashed over into one uniform and monotonous tint. What a gain in cleanliness! what a loss in beauty! One old wall like this I remember on the road from Grotta Ferrata to Frascati, which was to my eyes a constant delight. One day the owner took it into his head to whitewash it all over,—to clean it, as some would say. I look upon that man as little better than a Vandal in taste,—one from whom "knowledge at one entrance was quite shut out." Take another modern instance: substitute for the tiled roofs of Rome, now so gray, tumbled, and picturesque with their myriad lichens, the cold, clean slate of New York, or the glittering zinc of Paris,—should we gain or lose? The Rue de Rivoli is long, white, and uniform,—all new and all clean; but there is no more harmony and melody in it than in the "damnable iteration" of a single note; and even Time will be puzzled to make it picturesque, or half as interesting as those old houses displaced in the back streets for its building, which had sprouted up here and there, according to the various whims of the various builders. Those were taken down because they were dirty, narrow, unsightly. These are thought elegant and clean. Clean they certainly are; and they have one other merit,—that of being as monotonously regular as the military despotism they represent. But I prefer individuality, freedom, and variety, for my own part. The narrow, uneven, huddled Corso, with here a noble palace, and there a quaint passage, or archway, or shop,—the buildings now high, now low, but all barnacled over with balconies,—is far more interesting than the unmeaning uniformity of the Rue de Rivoli. So, too, there are those among us who have the bad taste to think it a desecration in Louis Napoleon to have scraped the stained and venerable old Notre Dame into cleanliness. The Romantic will not consort with the Monotonous,—Nature is not neat,—Poetry is not formal,—and Rome is not clean.

These thoughts, or ghosts of thoughts, flitted through my mind, as the carriage was passing along the narrow, dirty streets, and brought with them after-trains of reflection. There may be, I thought, among the thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy their notice, might be interesting. Every ruin has had its score of immortelles hung upon it. The soil has been almost overworked by antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but the antique brick a prize. Poets and sentimentalists have described to death what the antiquaries have left;—some have done their work so well that nothing remains to be done after them. Everybody has an herbarium of dried flowers from all the celebrated sites, and a table made from bits of marble collected in the ruined villas. Every Englishman carries a Murray for information and a Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step. Pictures and statues have been staled by copy and description, until everything is stereotyped, from the Dying Gladiator, with his "young barbarians all at play," and all that, down to the Beatrice Cenci, the Madame Tonson of the shops, that haunts one everywhere with her white turban and red eyes. All the public and private life and history of the ancient Romans, from Romulus to Constantine and Julian the Apostle, (as he is sometimes called,) is properly well known. But the common life of the modern Romans, the games, customs, habits of the people, the everyday of To-day, has been only touched upon here and there,—sometimes with spirit and accuracy, as by Charles McFarlane, sometimes with great grace, as by Hans Christian Andersen, and sometimes with great ignorance, as by Miss Waldie. This is the subject, however, which has specially interested me, and a life of several years in Rome has enabled me to observe many things which do not strike the hurried traveller, and to correct many false notions in regard to the people and place. To a stranger, a first impression is apt to be a false impression; and it constantly happens to me to hear my own countrymen work out the falsest conclusions from the slightest premises, and settle the character and deserts of the Italians, all of whom they mass together in a lump, after they have been just long enough on the soil to travel from Civita Vecchia to Rome under the charge of a courier, when they know just enough of the language to ask for a coachman when they want a spoon, and when they have made the respectable acquaintance, beside their courier, of a few porters, a few beggars, a few shopkeepers, and the padrone of the apartment they hire.

No one lives long in Rome without loving it; and I must, in the beginning, confess myself to be in the same category. Those who shall read these slender papers, without agreeing to the kindly opinions often expressed, must account for it by remembering that "Love lends a precious seeing to the eye." My aim is far from ambitious. I shall not be erudite, but I hope I shall not be dull. These little sketches may remind some of happy days spent under the Roman sky, and, by directing the attention of others to what they have overlooked, may open a door to a new pleasure. Chi sa? The plainest Ranz des Vaches may sometimes please when the fifth symphony of Beethoven would be a bore.

CHAPTER II.

STREET-MUSIC IN ROME.

Whoever has passed the month of December in Rome will remember to have been awakened from his morning-dreams by the gay notes of the pifferari playing in the streets below, before the shrines of the Madonna and Bambino,—and the strains of one set of performers will scarcely have ceased, before the distant notes of another set of pilgrims will be heard to continue the well-known novena. The pifferari are generally contadini of the Abruzzi Mountains, who, at the season of Advent, leave their home to make a pilgrimage to Rome,— stopping before all the wayside shrines, as they journey along, to pay their glad music of welcome to the Virgin, and the coming Messiah. Their song is called a novena, from its being sung for nine consecutive days,—first, for nine days previous to the Festa of the Madonna, which occurs on the 8th of December, and afterwards for the nine days preceding Christmas. The same words and music serve, however, for both celebrations. The pifferari always go in couples, one playing on the zampogna, or bagpipe, the bass and treble accompaniment, and the other on the piffero, or pastoral pipe, which carries the air; and for the month before Christmas the sound of their instruments resounds through the streets of Rome, wherever there is a shrine,—whether at the corners of the streets, in the depths of the shops, down little lanes, in the centre of the Corso, in the interior courts of the palaces, or on the stairways of private houses.

Their costume is extremely picturesque. On their heads they wear conical felt hats adorned with a frayed peacock's feather, or a faded band of red cords and tassels,—their bodies are clad in red waistcoats, blue jackets, and small-clothes of skin or yellowish homespun cloth,—skin sandals are bound to their feet with cords that interlace each other up the leg as far as the knee,—and over all is worn a long brown or blue cloak with a short cape, buckled closely round the neck. Sometimes, but rarely, this cloak is of a deep red with a scalloped cape. As they stand before the pictures of the Madonna, their hats placed on the ground before them, and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing their novena, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint. Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and, worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the shops and regular models offer a poor substitute. It is the old story again. The new and clean is not so paintable, not so picturesque, as the tarnished and soiled. The worn blue of the cloak is softened by the dull gray of the threads beneath,—patches of various colors are often let into the jacket or breeches,—the hat is lustreless from age, and rusty as an old wall,—and the first vivid red of the waistcoat is toned by constant use to a purely pictorial hue. Besides, the true pifferaro wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by him,—so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything. From the sandals and corded leggings, which, in the Neapolitan dialect, are termed cioce, the pifferari are often called ciociari.

Their Christmas pilgrimages are by no means prompted by purely religious motives, though, undoubtedly, such considerations have some weight with them, the common peasantry being a religiously inclined people, and often making pilgrimages simply from a sense of duty and propriety. But in these wanderings to Rome, their principal object is to earn a little money to support them during the winter months, when their "occupation is gone." As they are hired in Rome by the owners of the various houses adorned with a Madonna-shrine (of which there are over fifteen hundred in the city) to play before them at the rate of a paul or so for each full novena, and as they can easily play before thirty or forty a day, they often return, if their luck is good, with a tolerable little sum in their pockets. Besides this, they often stand as models, if they are good-looking fellows, and thus add to their store; and then again, the forestieri (for, as the ancient Romans called strangers barbari, so their descendants call them foresters, wood-men, wild-men) occasionally drop baiocchi and pauls into their hats, still further to increase it.

Sometimes it is a father and son who play together, but oftener two old friends who make the pilgrimage in pairs. This morning, as I was going out for a walk round the walls, two admirable specimens of the pifferari were performing the novena before a shrine at the corner of the street. The player of the zampogna was an old man, with a sad, but very amiable face, who droned out the bass and treble in a most earnest and deprecatory manner. He looked as if he had stood still, tending his sheep, nearly all his life, until the peace and quiet of Nature had sunk into his being, or, if you will, until he had become assimilated to the animals he tended. The other, who played the piffero, was a man of middle age, stout, vigorous, with a forest of tangled black hair, and dark quick eyes that were fixed steadily on the Virgin, while he blew and vexed the little brown pipe with rapid runs and nervous fioriture, until great drops of sweat dripped from its round open mouth. Sometimes, when he could not play fast enough to satisfy his eagerness, he ran his finger up and down the vents. Then, suddenly lowering his instrument, he would scream, in a strong peasant-voice, verse after verse of the novena, to the accompaniment of the zampogna. One was like a slow old Italian vettura all lumbered with luggage and held back by its drag; the other panting and nervous at his work as an American locomotive, and as constantly running off the rails. Both, however, were very earnest at their occupation. As they stood there playing, a little group gathered round. A scamp of a boy left his sport to come and beat time with a stick on the stone step before them; several children clustered near; and two or three women, with rosy infants in their arms, also paused to listen and sympathize. At last the playing ceased. The pifferari took up their hats and looked smilingly round at us.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

"Eh!" said the piffero, showing all his teeth, and shrugging his shoulders good-naturedly, while the other echoed the pantomime.

"Dal Regno"—for so the Abruzzi peasants call the kingdom of Naples.

"And do you come every year?"

"_Si, Signore. Lui_" (indicating his friend) "_ed io_" (pointing to himself) "_siam' compagni per trenta tre anni. E siam' venut' a Roma per far la noven' ogn' anno."[B]

[Footnote B: "He and I have been companions for thirty-three years, and every year we have come to Rome to play the novena."]

To this the old zampogna bent his head on one side, and said, assentingly,—"Eh! per trenta tre anni."—

And, "Ecco," continued the piffero, bursting in before the zampogna could go on, and pointing to two stalwart youths of about twenty-two or-three years of age, who at this moment came up the street with their instruments,—"These are our two sons. He is mine,"—indicating one with his reversed thumb; "and that other is his,"—jerking his head towards his companion. "And they, too, are going to play in company, as we do."

"For thirty-three years more, let us hope," said I.

"Eh! speriamo," (Let us hope so,) was the answer of the piffero, as he showed all his teeth in the broadest of smiles. Then, with a motion of his hand, he set both the young men going, he himself joining in, straining out his cheeks, blowing all the breath of his body into the little pipe, and running up and down the vents with a sliding finger, until finally he brought up against a high, shrill note, to which he gave the full force of his lungs, and, after holding it in loud blast for a moment, startled us by breaking off, without gradation, into a silence as sudden as if the music had snapped short off, like a pipe-stem.

On further conversation with my ciociari, I found that they came yearly from Sora, a town in the Abruzzi, about one hundred miles from Rome, making the journey on foot, and picking up by the way whatever trifle of copper they could. In this manner they travelled the whole distance in five days, living upon onions, lettuce, oil, and black bread. They were now singing the second novena for Natale, and, if one could judge from their manner and conversation, were quite content with what they had earned. I invited them up into my room, and there in the pleasantest way they stunned us with the noise of both their instruments, to the great delight of the children and the astonishment of the servants, for whom these common things had worn out their charm by constant repetition. At my request, they repeated the words of the novena they had been singing, and I took them down from their lips. After eliminating the wonderful m-ms of the Neapolitan dialect, in which all the words lay imbedded like shells in the sand, and supplying some of the curious elisions with which those Abruzzi Procrusteans recklessly cut away the polysyllables, so as to bring them within the rythmic compass, they ran thus:—

"Verginella figlia di Sant' Anna, Nella ventre portasti il buon Gesu. Si parturisti sotto la capanna, E dov' mangiav'no lo bue e 1' asinello.

"Quel Angelo gridava: 'Venite, Santi! 'Che andato Gesu dentro la capanna, Ma guardate Vergine beata, Che in ciel in terra sia nostr' avvocata!

"San Giuseppe andava in compagnia, Si trovo al partorir di Maria. La notte di natale e notte santa— Lo Padre e 1' Figliolo e lo Spirito Santo. 'Sta la ragione che abbiamo cantato; Sia a Gesu bambino rappresentata."

The sudden introduction of "Quel Angelo" in this song reminds us of a similar felicity in the romantic ballad of "Lord Bateman," where we are surprised to learn that "this Turk," to whom no allusion had been previously made, "has one lovely daughter."

The air to which this is sung is very simple and sweet, though monotonous. Between the verses and at the close, a curious little ritornello is played.

The wanderings of the pifferari are by no means confined to the Roman States. Sometimes they stray "as far away as Paris is," and, wandering about in that gay capital, like children at a fair, play in the streets for chance sous, or stand as models to artists, who, having once been to Rome, hear with a longing Rome-sickness the old characteristic sounds of the piffero and zampogna. Two of them I remember to have heard thus, as I was at work in my studio in Paris; and so vividly did they recall the old Roman time, that I called them in for a chat.

Wonderful was their speech. In the few months of their wandering, they had put into their Neapolitan dough various plums of French words, which, pronounced in their odd way, "suffered a change into something peculiarly rich and strange." One of them told me that his wife had just written to him by the hand of a scrivano, lamenting his absence, and praying him to send her his portrait. He had accordingly sent her a photograph in half-length. Some time afterwards she acknowledged the receipt of it, but indignantly remonstrated with him for sending her a picture "che pareva guardando per la fenestra" (which seemed to be looking out of the window,) as she oddly characterized a half-length, and praying to have his legs also in the next portrait. This same fellow, with his dull, amiable face, played the role of a ferocious wounded brigand dragged into concealment by his wife, in the studio of a friend next door; but, despite the savagery and danger of his counterfeited position, he was sure to be overpowered by sleep before he had been in it more than five minutes,—and if the artist's eye left him for a moment, he never failed to change his attitude for one more fitted to his own somnolent propensities than for the picture.

The pifferari are by no means the only street-musicians in Rome, though they take the city by storm at Christmas. Every day under my window comes a band of four or five, who play airs and concerted pieces from the operas,—and a precious work they make of it sometimes! Not only do the instruments go very badly together, but the parts they play are not arranged for them. A violone grunts out a low accompaniment to a vinegar-sharp violin which saws out the air, while a trumpet blares in at intervals to endeavor to unite the two, and a flute does what it can, but not what it would. Sometimes, instead of a violone, a hoarse trombone, with a violent cold in the head, snorts out the bass impatiently, gets ludicrously uncontrollable and boastful at times, and is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the cadenzas to finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its own noisy vociferation. The harmonic arrangements are very odd. Each instrument seems to consider itself ill-treated when reduced to an accompaniment or bass, and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted for it, to get possession of the air,—the melody being, for all Italians, the principal object. The violin, however, weak of voice as it is, always carries the day, and the other instruments steal discontentedly back to their secondary places, the snuffy old violone keeping up a constant growl at its ill luck, and the trombone now and then leaping out like a tiger on its prey.

Far better and more characteristic are the ballad-singers, who generally go in couples,—an old man, dim of sight, perhaps blind, who plays the violin, and his wife or daughter, who has a guitar, tamborello, or at times a mandolin. Sometimes a little girl accompanies them, sings with them, and carries round a tin box, or the tamborello, to collect baiocchi. They sing long ballads to popular melodies, some of which are very pretty and gay, and for a baiocco they sell a sheet containing the printed words of the song. Sometimes it is in the form of a dialogue,—either a love-making, a quarrel, a reconciliation, or a leave-taking,—each singer taking an alternate verse. Sometimes it is a story with a chorus, or a religious conversation-ballad, or a story of a saint, or from the Bible. Those drawn from the Bible are generally very curious paraphrases of the original simple text, turned into the simplest and commonest idioms of the people;—one of them may be found in the Appendix to Goethe's "Italienische Reise." These Roman ballads and popular songs, so far as I am able to learn, have never been collected. Many of them do not exist in print, and are only traditional and caught from mouth to mouth. This is particularly the case with those in the Romanesque dialect, which are replete with the peculiar wit and spirit of the country. But the memory of man is too perilous a repository for such interesting material; and it is greatly to be wished that some clever Italian, who is fitted for the task, would interest himself to collect them and give them a permanent place in the literature of his language.

But to return to our ballad-singers, whom we have left in the middle of their song, and who are now finishing. A crowd has gathered round them, as usual; out of the windows and from the balconies lean the occupants of the houses near by, and the baiocchi thrown by them ring on the pavement below. With rather Stentorian voices they have been singing a dialogue which is most elaborately entitled a "Canzonetta Nuova, sopra un marinaro che da l' addio alla sua promessa sposa mentre egli deve partire per la via di Levante. Sdegno, pace, e matrimonio dilli medesimi con intercalare sull' aria moderna. Rime di Francesco Calzaroni." I give my baiocco and receive in return a smiling "Grazie" and a copy of the song, which is adorned by a wood-cut of a ship in full sail.

Here is another, of a moral character, containing the sad history of Frederic the Gambler, who, to judge from the wood-cut accompanying the Canzonetta, must have been a ferocious fellow. He stands with his legs wide apart, in half-armor, a great sash tied over his shoulder and swinging round his legs, an immense sword at his side, and a great hat with two ostrich-feathers on his head, looking the very type of a "swashing blade."

The singers of longer ballads carry about with them sometimes a series of rudely-executed illustrations of different incidents in the story, painted in distemper and pasted on a large pasteboard frame, which is hung against a wall or on a stand planted behind the singer in the ground. These he pauses now and then in his song to explain to the audience, and they are sure to draw a crowd.

As summer comes on and the evenings grow warm, begin the street serenades,—sometimes like that of Lindoro in the opening of the "Barbiere di Sevilla," but generally with only one voice, accompanied by a guitar and a mandolin. These serenades are, for the most part, given by a lover or friend to his innamorata, and the words are expressive of the tender passion; but there are also serenate di gelosia, or satirical serenades, when the most impertinent and stinging verses are sung. Long before arriving, the serenaders may be heard marching up the street to the thrum of their instruments. They then place themselves before the windows of the fair one, and, surrounded by a group of men and boys, make proclamation of their love in loud and often violent tones. It seems sometimes as if they considered the best method of expressing the intensity of their passion was by the volume of their voice. Certainly, in these cases, the light of love is not hidden under a bushel. Among the Trasteverini, particularly, these serenades are common. Some of them are very clever in their improvisations and imitations of different dialects, particularly of the Neapolitan, in which there are so many charming songs. Their skill in improvisation, however, is not generally displayed in their serenades, but in the osterias, during the evenings of the festas in summer. There it is that their quickness and epigrammatic turn of expression are best seen. Two disputants will, when in good-humor and warmed with wine, string off verse after verse at each other's expense, full of point and fun,—the guitar burring along in the intervals, and a chorus of laughter saluting every good hit.

In many of the back streets and squares of the city, fountains jet out of lions' heads into great oblong stone cisterns, often sufficiently large to accommodate some thirty washerwomen at once. Here the common people resort to wash their clothes, and with great laughter and merriment amuse themselves while at their work by improvising verses, sometimes with rhyme, sometimes without, at the expense of each other, or perhaps of the passerby,—particularly if he happen to be a gaping forestiere, to whom their language is unintelligible. They stand on an elevated stone step, so as to bring the cistern about mid-height of their body, and on the rough inclined level of its rim they slash and roll the clothes, or, opening them, flaunt them into the water, or gather them together, lifting their arms high above their heads, and always treating them with a violence which nothing but the coarsest material can resist. The air to which they chant their couplets is almost always a Campagna melody. Sharp attacks are given and as sharp repliques received, in exceeding good-humor; and when there is little wit, there is sure to be much laughter. The salt is oftentimes pretty coarse, but it serves its purpose.

A remarkable trait among the Italians is the good-nature with which they take personal jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to is amazing to us of a more sensitive organization. I well remember the extreme difficulty I once had in breaking an Italian servant of the habit of announcing an acquaintance, whose foreign name he could not pronounce, and who had the misfortune to be humpbacked, as "quel gobbo" (that hunchback). He could not understand why he should not call him a gobbo, if he was a gobbo; and in spite of all I could do, he would often open the door and say, "Signore, quel gobbo desidera farle una visita," (that hunchback wishes to make you a visit,) when "quel gobbo" was right on his heels. The Italians are also singularly free from that intense self-consciousness which runs in our English blood, and is the root of shyness, awkwardness, and affectation. Unconsciousness is the secret of grace, freedom, and simplicity. We never forget ourselves. The Italians always forget themselves. They are sometimes proud, very seldom vain, and never affected. The converse peculiarity follows, of course. Having no self-consciousness, they are as little sensitive to their defects as vain of their charms. The models who come to the studios, and who have been selected for their beauty, despite the silent flattery incident to their very profession, and the lavish praise they constantly hear expressed, are always simple, natural, and unaffected. If you tell them they are very beautiful, they say, "Ma che?" deprecatorily, or perhaps admit the fact. But they are better pleased to have their dress admired than their faces. Of the former they are vain, of the latter they are not. For the most part, I think they rather wonder what it is we admire in them and think worthy of perpetuating in stone or color. The other day I was so much struck with the ear of a model, from whom I was working, that I said to her,—"You have, without exception, the most beautiful ear I ever saw." She laughed somewhat derisively, and said, "Ma che?"—"It does not seem to give you any pleasure," I continued, "to know that you have a very handsome ear."—"Che mi importa," answered she, "se sia bello o brutto? E sempre lo stesso, brutto o bello, bello o brutto. Ecco!"[C] —"You don't care, then, whether you are handsome or ugly?"—"Eh! cosa a me m'importa,—se sono brutto o bello non so,—a me e lo stesso." This was all I could get from her.

[Footnote C: "What do I care whether it is handsome or ugly? It's all the same to me,—ugly or handsome,—handsome or ugly. There!"]

But to return to our washerwomen. In every country-town a large washing-cistern is always provided by the authorities for public use, and, at all hours of the day, the picturesque figures of the peasants of every age, from the old hag, whose skin is like a brown and crumpled palimpsest, (where Anacreontic verses are overwritten by a dull, monkish sermon,) to the round, dark-eyed girl, with broad, straight back and shining hair, may be seen gathered around it,—their heads protected from the sun by their folded tovaglia, their skirts knotted up behind, and their waists embraced by stiff, red busti. Their work is always enlivened by song,—and when their clothes are all washed, the basket is lifted to the head, and home they march, stalwart and majestic, like Roman caryatides. The sharp Italian sun shining on their dark faces and vivid costumes, or flashing into the fountain, and basking on the gray, weed-covered walls, makes a picture which is often enchanting in its color. At the Emissary by Albano, where the waters from the lake are emptied into a huge cistern through the old conduit built by the ancient Romans to sink the level of the lake, I have watched by the hour together these strange pictorial groups, as they sang and thrashed the clothes they were engaged in washing; while over them, in the foreground, the great gray tower and granary, once a castle, lifted itself in strong light and shade against the peerless blue sky, while rolling hills beyond, covered with the pale green foliage of rounded olives, formed the characteristic background. Sometimes a contadino, mounted on the crupper of his donkey, would pause in the sun to chat awhile with the women. The children, meanwhile, sprawled and played upon the grass, and the song and chat at the fountain would not unfrequently be interrupted by a shrill scream from one of the mothers, to stop a quarrel, or to silence a cry which showed the stoutness of their little lungs.

The cobblers of Rome are also a gay and singing set. They do not imprison themselves in a dark cage of a shop, but sit "sub Jove" where they may enjoy the life of the street and all the "skyey influences." Their benches are generally placed near the portone of some palace, so that they may draw them under shelter when it rains. Here all day they sit and draw their waxed-ends and sing,—a row of battered-looking boots and shoes ranged along on the ground beside them, and waiting for their turn, being their only stock in trade.

They commonly have enough to do, and, as they pay nothing for shop-rent, every baiocco they get is nearly clear profit. They are generally as poor as Job's cat; but they are far happier than the proprietor of that interesting animal. Figaro is a high ideal of this class, and about as much like them as Raffaello's angels are like Jeames Yellowplush. What the cobblers and Figaro have in common is song and a love of scandal. One admirable specimen of this class sits at the corner of the Via Felice and Capo le Case, with his bench backed against the gray wall. He is an oldish man, with a long, gray beard and a quizzical face,—a sort of Hans Sachs, who turns all his life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse. So he sits all day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd bits of character which chance may show him into rhythmic forms, and chirps and sings as perpetually as the cricket. Friends he has without number, who stop before his bench, from which he administers poetical justice to all persons, to have a long chat, or sometimes to bring him a friendly token; and from the dark interior of his drawer he often brings forth an orange, or a bunch of grapes, or handful of chestnuts, supplied by them, as a dessert for the thick cabbage-soup which he eats at mezzo giorno.

In the busiest street of Rome, the pure Campagna song may often be heard from the throat of some contadino, as he slowly rumbles along in his loaded wine-cart,—the little dog at his side barking a sympathetic chorus. This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the Church chant. It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred chromatic. No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up again in the prestissimo time and "slowed" down to the same dismal conclusion. Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable. But when refined by distance, it has a sad and pleasant effect, and seems to belong to the place,—the long wail at the close being the very type of the melancholy stretches of the Campagna. In the same way I have frequently thought that the Jodeln of the Swiss was an imitation of the echo of the mountains, each note repeated first in octave, or fifth, and then in its third below. The Campagna song is to be heard not only in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country,—in the vineyards, in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working together, and from solitary contadini,—wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost. It was only the other day, at nightfall, that I was sauntering out on the desolate Campagna towards Civita Vecchia. The shadows were deepening and the mists beginning to creep whitely along the deep hollows. Everything was dreary and melancholy enough. As I paused to listen to the solitude, I heard the grind of a distant invisible cart, and the sound of a distant voice singing. Slowly the cart came up over the crest of the hill, a dark spot against the twilight sky, and mounted on the top of a load of brushwood sat a contadino, who was singing to himself these words,—not very consolatory, perhaps, but so completely in harmony with the scene and the time that they struck me forcibly:—