lity, serene and ironical.
Besides, these demolitions have disclosed many things hitherto hidden,
and soon destroyed: here in Rione Monti, for instance, above the
tram-lines, great green walls, boulders from Antiquity, and quiet
convent gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the
illustrated hoardings of a street to be. In the midst of it, in a
filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch,
dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but
it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to
remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking
the way, with a crowd of sluttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual
Roman church stifling dirty smell. These Roman churches, all save the
basilicas, are inconceivably ill kept, frowsy, musty, tawdry,
sluttish: they belong not to God, but to Rome--the same barbarous Rome
of the tumble-down houses, the tattered begging people, the whole
untidy squalor of its really Roman parts. Nothing swept and garnished;
nothing evincing one grain of past or present reverence--a
down-at-heel indifferent idolatry. At last the crowd streamed out,
Mass being over, and I entered--and, oh wonder! found myself in a
place of all Byzantine splendour: that little chapel, tapestried with
crimson silk, lit with hanging lamps, its vaults a marvellous glory of
golden--infinite tinted golden--mosaics with great white angels. A bit
of Venice, of S. Mark's in this sluttish Rome.

Poets really make places. I cannot pass the Consolazione Hospital
without thinking of Pompilia's death there; and the imaginary bishop,
of whom there is no visible trace, haunts Sta. Prassede.

VI.

AMPHORAE.

In the afternoon we went to the Via Appia, and in the excavations of
Villa Lugari, among sprouting corn and under the song of larks, saw
those amphorae Pascarella had told us of, which, after holding pagan
wine, were used to bury Christian children. To me there is nothing
repulsive in the thought of this burial in the earth's best product.

VII.

MASS AT THE LATERAN.

To-day, on the way to Porta Furba (the country, where one sees it near
the gate, is beginning to be powdered over with peach blossom), I went
into the Lateran, and heard and saw a beautiful canonical Mass. Here
was the swept and garnished (but it was behind glass doors!)
sanctuary, the canons dainty in minever, a splendid monsignore,
grey-haired, in