t
night, it is true, the theatres are open, but then in Roman Catholic
countries, Sunday evening is universally accounted a feast. To make up
for this, the theatres are closed on every Friday in the year, as they
are too throughout Lent and Advent; and once a week or more there is sure
to be a Saint's day as well, on which shops and all are closed, to the
great trial of a traveller's patience. All the amusements of the Papal
subjects are regulated with the strictest regard to their morals. Private
or public gambling of any kind, excepting always the Papal Lottery, is
strictly suppressed. There are no public dancing-places of any kind, no
casinos or "cafes chantants." No public masked balls are allowed, except
one or two on the last nights of the Carnival. The theatres themselves
are kept under the most rigid "surveillance." Every thing, from the
titles of the plays to the petticoats of the ballet-girls, undergoes
clerical inspection. The censorship is as unsparing of "double
entendres" as of political allusions, and "Palais Royal" farces are
'Bowdlerized' down till they emerge from the process innocuous and dull;
compared with one at the "Apollo," a ballet at the Princess's was a wild
and voluptuous orgy.

The same system of repression prevails in everything. In the print-shops
one never sees a picture which even verges on impropriety. The few
female portraits exhibited in their windows are robed with an amount of
drapery which would satisfy the most prudish "sensibilities." All books,
which have the slightest amorous tendency, are scrupulously interdicted
without reference to their political views. The number of wine-shops
seems to me small in proportion to the size of the city, and in none of
them, as far as I could learn, are spirits sold. There is another
subject, which will suggest itself at once to any one acquainted with the
life of towns, but on which it is obviously difficult to enter fully. It
is enough to say, that what the author of "Friends in Council" styles,
with more sentiment than truth, "the sin of great cities," does not
"apparently" exist in Rome. Not only is public vice kept out of sight,
as in some other Italian cities, but its private haunts and resorts are
absolutely and literally suppressed. In fact, if priest rule were
deposed, and our own Sabbatarians and total-abstinence men and societies
for the suppression of vice, reigned in its stead, I doubt if Rome could
be made more out