re
the children fly kites and the inconceivable skeleton horses graze, is
the site of the former Ghetto; and behind its remaining synagogue, the
little belfry, the houses of the Cencis, are down at heel carts and
ragged peasants round the little isolated Ghetto fountain; and on the
other side the Aventine, the bridge of--was it Cocles? a land of
ballad, of popular romance, of tragedy.

_March_ 30.

SPRING 1901.

I.

QUOMODO SEDET....

Appalling morning of wind and dust; I bicycled in agitation of spirit
to Domine quo Vadis. A wretched little church, no kind of beauty about
it, full of decayed, greasy pictures, and, far better than they, penny
coloured prints of the Saviour and Infant Baptist, and of the Life and
Death of the Religious and the Irreligious Person about 1850, both in
high hats and tail-coats. The old custodian crone tells me she is half
blind, and envies me my glasses. She points out a bit of fresco:
"Questo e Gesu Nazzareno"--as the housekeeper might say, "This is the
present Earl"--also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the
print of _i suoi santissimi piedi_, square little feet, of such a
squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as
the pattern on a pat of butter.

Turning my face, in that tornado of dust, towards Rome, its walls
stretch suddenly before me across the vineyards and fields, broken
walls, of any mediaeval city you please, and hiding, it would seem,
emptiness behind them. The desolation of this distant city, with its
foreground of squalid hovels, and ill-favoured wine shop and smithies
where the very inscriptions, "Vino di Marino," or "Ferracocchio," or
"Ova di Giornata," look as if a megalomaniac, escaped from an asylum,
had dipped a brush into a paint-pot and splashed all over; this
foreground of vague tombs, masonry heaven knows what, all flowered
with huge wild mignonette; this other moving background of ragged
peasants and unutterable galled horses; the desolation of this dead
city which I feel behind those mediaeval walls comes home to them,
like the sting of the dust whirlpools and roar of the wind. _Quomodo
sedet sola civitas_!

Meanwhile, close to one of those city gates, is a poster announcing
lectures "Sur le costume des Premiers Chretiens!"

But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us,
bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of
civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Pa