rying in degrees of
narrowness, but for the most part like Field-lane in Holborn, with
little breathing-places like St. Martin's-court; and the widest only in
parts wide enough to enable a carriage and pair to turn. "Imagine
yourself looking down a street of Reform Clubs cramped after this odd
fashion, the lofty roofs almost seeming to meet in the perspective." In
the churches nothing struck him so much as the profusion of trash and
tinsel in them that contrasted with their real splendours of
embellishment. One only, that of the Cappucini friars, blazed every inch
of it with gold, precious stones, and paintings of priceless art; the
principal contrast to its radiance being the dirt of its masters, whose
bare legs, corded waists, and coarse brown serge never changed by night
or day, proclaimed amid their corporate wealth their personal vows of
poverty. He found them less pleasant to meet and look at than the
country people of their suburb on festa-days, with the Indulgences that
gave them the right to make merry stuck in their hats like
turnpike-tickets. He did not think the peasant girls in general
good-looking, though they carried themselves daintily and walked
remarkably well: but the ugliness of the old women, begotten of hard
work and a burning sun, with porters' knots of coarse grey hair grubbed
up over wrinkled and cadaverous faces, he thought quite stupendous. He
was never in a street a hundred yards long without getting up perfectly
the witch part of _Macbeth_.

With the theatres of course he soon became acquainted, and of that of
the puppets he wrote to me again and again with humorous rapture. "There
are other things," he added, after giving me the account which is
published in his book, "too solemnly surprising to dwell upon. They must
be seen. They must be seen. The enchanter carrying off the bride is not
greater than his men brandishing fiery torches and dropping their
lighted spirits of wine at every shake. Also the enchanter himself,
when, hunted down and overcome, he leaps into the rolling sea, and finds
a watery grave. Also the second comic man, aged about 55 and like
George the Third in the face, when he gives out the play for the next
night. They must all be seen. They can't be told about. Quite
impossible." The living performers he did not think so good, a disbelief
in Italian actors having been always a heresy with him, and the
deplorable length of dialogue to the small amount of action in their
pl