Senza moccolo!'
went ringing up to the darkling sky. Long canes with cloths or damp
sponges or extinguishers fixed to them started up from nowhere, down
from everywhere, from window and balcony to the street below, and from
the street to the low balconies above. Put out at every instant, the
little candles were instantly relighted, till they were consumed down to
the hand; and as they burned low, another cry went up, 'Carnival is
dead! Carnival is dead!' But he was not really dead till midnight, when
the last play of the season had been acted in the playhouses, the last
dance danced, the last feast eaten amid song and laughter, and the
solemn Patarina of the Capitol tolled out the midnight warning like a
funeral knell. That was the end.

The riderless race was at least four hundred years old when it was given
up. The horses were always called Barberi, with the accent on the first
syllable, and there has been much discussion about the origin of the
name. Some say that it meant horses from Barbary, but then it should be
pronounced Barberi, accented on the penultimate. Others think it stood
for Barbari--barbarian, that is, unridden. The Romans never misplace an
accent, and rarely mistake the proper quantity of a syllable long or
short. For my own part, though no scholar has as yet suggested it, I
believe that the common people, always fond of easy witticisms and
catchwords, coined the appellation, with an eye to the meaning of both
the other derivations, out of Barbo, the family name of Pope Paul the
Second, who first instituted the Carnival races, and set the winning
post under the balcony of the huge Palazzo di Venezia, which he had
built beside the Church of Saint Mark, to the honour and glory of his
native city.

He made men run foot-races, too: men, youths and boys, of all ages; and
the poor Jews, in heavy cloth garments, were first fed and stuffed with
cakes and then made to run, too. The jests of the Middle Age were savage
compared with the roughest play of later times.

The pictures of old Rome are fading fast. I can remember, when a little
boy, seeing the great Carnival of 1859, when the Prince of Wales was in
Rome, and the masks which had been forbidden since the revolution were
allowed again in his honour; and before the flower throwing began, I saw
Liszt, the pianist, not yet in orders, but dressed in a close-fitting
and very fashionable grey frock-coat, with a grey high hat, young then,
tall, athletic and