the east of it, the region between the Coliseum and the
Lateran, the 20 Settembre, Via Veneto, and the vicinity where were the
Ludovisi gardens, and now are long streets of ugly houses, with the
entirely new quarter of the Prati, were then expanses of vineyards and
gardens, and we used to cross the Tiber by a ferry to visit the farm
of Cincinnatus, now buried under twenty feet of rubbish, on which are
built the palaces of the Prati, huge, ugly barracks; and even the
Campagna has lost much of its desolate beauty. Down the Tiber, where
the ghastly embankment walls in the yellow stream, there was then a
picturesque riverbank, with a delightful foreground in every rood of
it. Where now is the Piazza delle Terme and the great railway station,
we used to go to get studies of the ruins of the baths of Diocletian,
one of the most picturesque objects of the region.

Political or social life there was none, and the foreign element,
whether the regular or the transitory, was divided by its
nationalities, and cut off absolutely from the Roman. Only the English
and American mingled to any extent, the foreign Catholics finding
their way, with such Protestants as gave hope of conversion, into the
clerical world, which, from all that I could see of it, offered little
attraction to the fugitive visitors. Wide-eyed, hurried Americans
came, saw, and bought a picture, and went away again; English
sightseers came for Christmas or Easter, and bought a few old masters;
but the mass of those who stayed for long were invalids, who settled
down and tried to keep as much in the sun as possible, for the
universal belief then was that to live out of the sunshine was to
contract mortal malaria. It was the most unreal world I have ever
lived in, whether we use the word unreal in the sense of shadowy or
poetical.

Rome was in fact at that time a spectacle never before or since
seen in the world. Ruled by an absolute government, theocratic and
therefore considering its authority beyond all human attack, but
besieged on all sides by an invading liberalism, which had already
captured all its outposts and undermined its position at the centre,
it, still defiant, refused to make a single concession to the spirit
of the epoch, and bade defiance to diplomacy and insurrection alike.
All its former allies from north and south were in refuge within the
walls of the city, the King of Naples and all his court offering the
daily spectacle of a parade of their do