the wind away." To see such splendor reduced to the service of such
vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said, "There go the cardinal's
wheels," and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon
is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself. When an
institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown
to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has
come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn
of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted
for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and
ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's
purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is
a type of that of their once master. That ornamental individual, shorn
of his ornamental character, is useless. His _raison d'etre_ is gone
as entirely as Othello's occupation was. And it will probably not be
long before the fate of the cardinal's wheels overtakes the cardinal
himself.

The second little bit of street incident which recently occurred to me
was in itself less striking, but seemed to me to symbolize changes of
yet higher moment and wider significance. This time what I saw was in
the Ghetto. Many of my readers probably know what the Ghetto at Rome
is, but untraveled stayers-at-home may very excusably never have heard
of it. The Ghetto is the Jews' quarter in Rome--the district in which
they were for many generations compelled to reside and to be locked
in by night, and where from habit the greater part, especially of the
poorer members of the Jewish community, still live. As will be easily
believed, it is the worst and most wretched quarter of the city--the
lowest physically as well as morally--and inundated with tolerable
certainty every year by the rising of the Tiber. The dilapidated and
filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to look
clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome dens of
the Ghetto. There are Ghettos in London--streets where the children of
Israel congregate, not in obedience to any law old or new, but drawn
together by mutual attraction and similarity of occupation. And the
occupations there are very much of the same nature as those pursued
in the Ghetto of Rome--the buying and selling of old clothes and
second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and distribution of
fried fish, and here and there a little usury.