lliancy of the _coup d'oeil_.
Our gentlemen are in the shabbiest of coats and seediest of hats, while
our ladies wear grey cloaks, and round, soup-plate bonnets. However, if
we are not ornamental, we are useful. We pelt each other with a hearty
vigour, and discharge volleys of _confetti_ at every window where a fair
English face appears. The poor luckless nosegay or sugar-plum boys look
upon us as their best friends, and follow our carriages with importunate
pertinacity. Fancy dresses of any kind are few. There are one or two
very young men--English, I suspect,--dressed as Turks, or Greeks, or
pirates, after Highbury Barn traditions, looking cold and uncomfortable.
Half a dozen tumble-down carriages represent the Roman element. They are
filled with men disguised as peasant-women, and _vice versa_; but,
whether justly or unjustly, they are supposed to be chartered for the
show by the Government, and attract small comment or notice. Amongst the
foot-crowd, with the exception of a stray foreigner, there is not a well-
dressed person to be seen. The fun is of the most dismal character. Boys
with bladders whack each other on the back, and jump upon each other's
shoulders. Harlequins and clowns--shabby, spiritless, and unmasked--grin
inanely in your face, and seem to be hunting after a joke they can never
find. A quack doctor, or a man in crinoline, followed by a nigger
holding an umbrella over his head, or a swell with pasteboard collars,
and a chimney-pot on his head, pass from time to time and shout to the
bystanders, but receive no answer. Give them a wide berth, for they are
spies, and bad company. The one great amusement is pelting a black hat,
the glossier the better. After a short time even this pleasure palls,
and, moreover, victims grow scarce, for the crowd, contrary to the run of
Italian crowds, is an ill-bred, ill-conditioned one, and take to throw
nosegays weighted with stones, which hurt and cut. So the long three
hours, from two to five, pass drearily. Up and down the Corso, in a
broken, straggling line, amidst feeble showers of chalk (not sugar)
plums, and a drizzle of penny posies to the sound of one solitary band,
the crowd sways to and fro. At last the guns boom again. Then the score
of dragoons--of whom one may truly say, in the words of Tennyson's
"Balaclava Charge," that they are "all that are left of--not the 'twelve'
hundred"--come trotting down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo. Wi