nly the
beginning. There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church,
which divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion;
but here is a field so vast that Ave may not enter it without danger of
being promptly lost in it. There is the Rome of the visiting
nationalities, severally and collectively; there is especially the
Anglo-American Rome, which if not so populous as the German, for
instance, is more important to the Anglo-Saxons. It sees a great deal of
itself socially, but not to the exclusion of the sympathetic Southern
temperaments which seem to have a strange but not unnatural affinity
with it. So far as we might guess, it was a little more Clerical than
Liberal in its local politics; if you were very Liberal, it was well to
be careful, for Conversion lurked under many exteriors which gave no
outward sign of it; if the White of the monarchy and the Black of the
papacy divide the best Roman families, of course foreigners are more
intensely one or the other than the natives. But Anglo-Saxon life was
easy for one not self-obliged to be of either opinion or party; and it
was pleasant in most of its conditions. In Rome our internationalities
seemed to have certain quarters largely to themselves. In spite of our
abhorrence of the destruction and construction which have made modern
Rome so wholesome and delightful, most of us had our habitations in the
new quarters; but certain pleasanter of the older streets, like the Via
Sistina, Via del Babuino, Via Capo le Case, Via Gregoriana, were our
sojourn or our resort. Especially in the two first our language filled
the outer air to the exclusion of other conversation, and within doors
the shopmen spoke it at least as well as the English think the Americans
speak it. It was pleasant to meet the honest English faces, to recognize
the English fashions, to note the English walk; and if these were
oftener present than their American counterparts, it was not from our
habitual minority, but from our occasional sparsity through the panic
that had frightened us into a homekeeping foreign to our natures.

In like manner our hyphenated nationalities have the Piazza di Spagna
for their own. There are the two English book-stores and the circulating
libraries, in each of which the books are so torn and dirty that you
think they cannot be quite so bad in the other till you try it; there
seems nothing for it, then, but to wash and iron the different Tauchnitz
au