into it. Carriages, mostly open,
drove up and down it for two or three hours; and the contents were shot
at with handfuls of comfits from the windows,--in the hope of making
them as non-content as possible,--while they returned the fire to the
best of their inferior ability. The populace, among whom was I, walked
about; perhaps one in fifty were masked in character; but there was
little in the masquerade either of splendor of costume or liveliness of
mimicry. However, the whole scene was very gay; there were a good many
troops about, and some of them heavy dragoons, who flourished
their swords with the magnanimity of our Life-Guards, to repel the
encroachments of too ambitious little boys. Most of the windows
and balconies were hung with colored drapery; and there were flags,
trumpets, nosegays and flirtations of all shapes and sizes. The best of
all was, that there was laughter enough to have frightened Cassius out
of his thin carcass, could the lean old homicide have been present,
otherwise than as a fleshless ghost;--in which capacity I thought I had
a glimpse of him looking over the shoulder of a particolored clown, in
a carriage full of London Cockneys driving towards the Capitol. This
good-humored foolery will go on for several days to come, ending always
with the celebrated Horse-race, of horses without riders. The long
street is cleared in the centre by troops, and half a dozen quadrupeds,
ornamented like Grimaldi in a London pantomime, scamper away, with the
mob closing and roaring at their heels."

"_February_ 9th, 1839.--The usual state of Rome is quiet and sober. One
could almost fancy the actual generation held their breath, and stole by
on tiptoe, in presence of so memorable a past. But during the Carnival
all mankind, womankind and childkind think it unbecoming not to play
the fool. The modern donkey pokes its head out of the lion's skin of old
Rome, and brays out the absurdest of asinine roundelays. Conceive twenty
thousand grown people in a long street, at the windows, on the footways,
and in carriages, amused day after day for several hours in pelting and
being pelted with handfuls of mock or real sugar-plums; and this no name
or presence, but real downright showers of plaster comfits, from which
people guard their eyes with meshes of wire. As sure as a carriage
passes under a window or balcony where are acquaintances of theirs, down
comes a shower of hail, ineffectually returned from below. The partie