alone after
dusk, and no man dared to walk home unattended after nine or ten; where,
driving about in her gilded state-coach of an afternoon, the Pretender's
bride must often have met a knot of people conveying a stabbed man (the
average gave more than one assassination per day) to the nearest barber
or apothecary, the blood of the murdered man mingling, in the black ooze
about the rough cobble-stones over which the coaches jolted, with the
blood trickling from the disembowelled sheep hanging, ghastly in their
fleeces, from the hooks outside the butchers' and cheesemongers' shops;
or returning home at night from the opera, amid the flare of the
footmen's torches, must have heard the distant cries of some imprudent
person struggling in the hands of marauders; or, again, on Sundays and
holidays have been stopped by the crowd gathered round the pillory where
some too easy-going husband sat crowned with a paper-cap in a hail-storm
of mud and egg-shells and fruit-peelings, round the scaffold where some
petty offender was being flogged by the hangman, until the fortunate
appearance of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sympathising mob put
a stop to the proceedings. Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the
Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more barbarous, more
squalid, picturesque, filthy, and unsafe if we would know what it was a
hundred years ago.

But in this barbarous Rome there were things more beautiful and
wonderful to a young Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than they
could possibly be to us, indifferent and much-cultured creatures of the
nineteenth century, who know that most art is corrupt and most music
trashy. The private galleries of Rome were then in process of formation;
pictures which had hung in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in those
beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, with their out-look on to the
cloisters of a court, or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden,
filled with the faint splash of the fountains outside, the spectral
silvery chiming of musical clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of
beings who would crowd in there armed with guide-books and opera-glasses
in the days to come, only stray foreigners were to be met, foreigners
who most likely were daintily embroidered and powdered aristocrats from
England or Germany, if they were not men like Winckelmann, or Goethe, or
Beckford. It was the great day, also, for excavations; the vast majority
of antiques whic