serves for them, and the changes that
their habits will be made to undergo by the Italian revolution?
Already their hearing is distracted by the locomotives that rush
between Rome and Frascati; already the shriek of the steam-blast daily
and nightly hisses insolently at the respectable comedy of the past
between Rome and Civita Vecchia. Steamboats, another engine of
disorder, furnish the bi-weekly means of an invasion of the most
dangerous character. Those dozens of travellers who throng the streets
and the squares are about as much like our good old foreign tourists,
as the barbarians of Attila were like the worthy Spaniard who came to
Rome on purpose to see Titus Livius.

Examine them carefully; they are of every possible condition; for now
that travelling costs next to nothing, everybody is able to afford
himself a sight of Rome. Briefless barristers, physicians without
practice, office-clerks, poor students, apprentices, and shop-boys
drop down like hail on the Eternal City, for the sake of saying that
they have taken the Communion in it. The Holy Week brings every year a
swarm of these locusts. Their entire _impedimenta_ consist of a
carpet-bag and an umbrella, and of course they put up at a hotel. In
fact hotels have been built on purpose to receive them. When everybody
hired houses, there was no need of hotels. The 'Minerva' is the type
of the modern Roman caravansary. Your bed is charged half-a-crown per
night; you dine in a refectory with a traveller at each elbow. The
character of the travelling class which invades Rome about Easter is
illustrated by the conversation which you hear going on around you at
the _table d'hote_ of the 'Minerva.' The following is a specimen:--

One says triumphantly, "I have _done_ two museums, three galleries,
and four ruins, to-day."

"I stuck to the churches," says another, "I had floored seventeen by
one o'clock."

"The deuce you had! You keep the game alive."

"Yes, I want to have a whole day left for the suburbs."

"Oh, burn the suburbs! I've got no time to see them."

If I have a day to spare, I must devote it to _buying chaplets_."[5]

"I suppose you've seen the Villa Borghese?"

"Oh yes, I consider that in the city, although it is in fact outside
the walls."

"How much did they charge you for going over it?"

"A paul."

"I paid two--I've been robbed."

"As for that, they're all robbers."

"You're right, but the sight of Rome is worth all it costs."

Shad