But I'm afraid that Rome is
not a good place to rest in."

"I'm afraid not," I said, "if you insist on keeping on thinking. It is
not a good place in which to rest your mind."

II

I think Bagster is not the first person who has found intellectual
difficulty here. Rome exists for the confusion of the sentimental
traveler. Other cities deal tenderly with our preconceived ideas of
them. There is one simple impression made upon the mind. Once out of the
railway station and in a gondola, and we can dream our dream of Venice
undisturbed. There is no doge at present, but if there were one we
should know where to place him. The city still furnishes the proper
setting for his magnificence. And London with all its vastness has, at
first sight, a familiar seeming. The broad and simple outlines of
English history make it easy to reconceive the past.

But Rome is disconcerting. The actual refuses to make terms with the
ideal. It is a vast storehouse of historical material, but the
imagination is baffled in the attempt to put the material together.

When Scott was in Rome his friend "advised him to wait to see the
procession of Corpus Domini, and hear the Pope

Saying the high, high mass
All on St. Peter's day.

He smiled and said that these things were more poetical in the
description than in reality, and that it was all the better for him
not to have seen it before he wrote about it."

Sir Walter's instinct was a true one. Rome is not favorable to
historical romance. Its atmosphere is eminently realistic. The
historical romancer is flying through time as the air-men fly through
space. But the air-men complain that they sometimes come upon what
they call "air holes." The atmosphere seems suddenly to give way under
them. In Rome the element of Time on which the imagination has been
flying seems to lose its usual density. We drop through a Time-hole,
and find ourselves in an inglorious anachronism.

I am not sure that Bagster has had a more difficult time than his
predecessors, who have attempted to assort their historical material.
For in the days before historical criticism was invented, the history
of Rome was very luxuriant. "Seeing Rome" was a strenuous undertaking,
if one tried to be intelligent.

There was an admirable little guide-book published in the twelfth
century called "Mirabilia Urbis Romae." One can imagine the old-time
tourist with this mediaeval Baedeker in hand, issuing forth, resolved
to see Ro