ainly
not superior in this respect to other Italian cities; since the
introduction of the French soldiery probably the contrary. At the street
corners you constantly see exhortations against profane swearing, headed
"Bestemmiatore orrendo nome," but in spite of this, the amount of
blasphemies that any common Roman will pour forth on the slightest
provocation, is really appalling. Beggars too are universal. Everybody
begs; if you ask a common person your way along the street, the chances
are that he asks you for a "buono mano." Now, even if you doubt the
truth of Sheridan's dictum, that no man could be honest without being
rich, it is hard to believe in a virtuous beggar. The abundance, also,
of lotteries shakes one's faith in Roman morality. A population amongst
whom gambling and beggary are encouraged by their spiritual and temporal
rulers is not likely in other respects to be a virtuous or a moral one.
The frequency of violent crimes is in itself a startling fact.

To my eyes, indeed, the very look of the city and its inhabitants, is a
strong _prima facie_ ground of suspicion. There is vice on those worn,
wretched faces--vice in those dilapidated hovel-palaces--vice in those
streets, teeming with priests and dirt and misery. In fact, if you only
fancy to yourself a city, where there are no manufactures, no commerce,
no public life of any kind; where the rich are condemned to involuntary
idleness, and the poor to enforced misery; where there is a population of
some ten thousand ecclesiastics in the prime of life, without adequate
occupation for the most part, and all vowed to celibacy; where priests
and priest-rule are omnipotent, and where every outlet for the natural
desires and passions of men is carefully cut off--if you take in fully
all these conditions and their inevitable consequences, you will not be
surprised if to me, as to any one who knows the truth, the outward
morality of Rome seems but the saddest of its many mockeries.

CHAPTER IV. THE ROMAN PEOPLE.

"Senatus Populusque Romanus." The phrase sounds strangely, in my ears,
like the accents of an unknown language or the burden of a half-forgotten
melody. In those four initial letters there seems to me always to lie
embodied an epitome of the world's history--the rise and decline and fall
of Rome. On the escutcheons of the Roman nobles, the S.P.Q.R. are still
blazoned forth conspicuously, but where shall we look for the realities
expre