this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had a
sincere and modest import. Each youth and damsel, gathering bouquets
of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that grew in their own
gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them with true aim at the
one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality at
least, if not with love. Often, the lover in the Corso may thus have
received from his bright mistress, in her father's princely balcony,
the first sweet intimation that his passionate glances had not struck
against a heart of marble. What more appropriate mode of suggesting
her tender secret could a maiden find than by the soft hit of a rosebud
against a young man's cheek?

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier
age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands,
chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso,
at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a
basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither
and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too,
having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have
trampled on them. You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust
themselves beneath the horses' hoofs to gather up bouquets that were
aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet
once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked
filth of Rome.

Such are the flowery favors--the fragrant bunches of sentiment--that fly
between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the Corso to
the other. Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended,
the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them; hearts
which--crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained with
various mishap--have been passed from hand to hand along the muddy
street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive
bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the
observance of the Carnival. Yet the government seemed to imagine that
there might be excitement enough,--wild mirth, perchance, following its
antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,--to render it
expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of military power.
Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong patrol of papal
drago