his lodgings in the Via Sistina, was of a
prodigious accumulation of architectural effects, a crowding of century
on century, all fused in the crucible of the Roman sun, so that each
style seemed linked to the other by some subtle affinity of colour.
Nowhere else, surely, is the traveller's first sight so crowded with
surprises, with conflicting challenges to eye and brain. Here, as he
passed, was a fragment of the ancient Servian wall, there a new stucco
shrine embedded in the bricks of a medieval palace; on one hand a lofty
terrace crowned by a row of mouldering busts, on the other a tower with
machicolated parapet, its flanks encrusted with bits of Roman sculpture
and the escutcheons of seventeenth-century Popes. Opposite, perhaps, one
of Fuga's golden-brown churches, with windy saints blowing out of their
niches, overlooked the nereids of a barocco fountain, or an old house
propped itself like a palsied beggar against a row of Corinthian
columns; while everywhere flights of steps led up and down to hanging
gardens or under archways, and each turn revealed some distant glimpse
of convent-walls on the slope of a vineyard or of red-brown ruins
profiled against the dim sea-like reaches of the Campagna.

Afterward, as order was born out of chaos, and he began to thread his
way among the centuries, this first vision lost something of its
intensity; yet it was always, to the last, through the eye that Rome
possessed him. Her life, indeed, as though in obedience to such a
setting, was an external, a spectacular business, from the wild
animation of the cattle-market in the Forum or the hucksters' traffic
among the fountains of the Piazza Navona, to the pompous entertainments
in the cardinals' palaces and the ever-recurring religious ceremonies
and processions. Pius VI., in the reaction from Ganganelli's democratic
ways, had restored the pomp and ceremonial of the Vatican with the
religious discipline of the Holy Office; and never perhaps had Rome been
more splendid on the surface or more silent and empty within. Odo, at
times, as he moved through some assemblage of cardinals and nobles, had
the sensation of walking through a huge reverberating palace, decked out
with all the splendours of art but long since abandoned of men. The
superficial animation, the taste for music and antiquities, all the
dilettantisms of an idle and irresponsible society, seemed to him to
shrivel to dust in the glare of that great past that lit up eve