"They had good sides those people," I remarked. "Sfido! bonissimi,"
said the Franciscan; he was from Albi, but had got to speak with a
Roman accent.

While we were there, under the impression of that story, of the
deserted church, the ragged grey monk, and of that whole squalid,
imaginative Roman corner, a little cart drove up with a young man and
two little girls, who went round with us and gathered sprays of
hawthorn off the walls, leaving the pony to graze meanwhile. "No
Romans," said P. D.; and indeed they turned out to be Vicentines, the
young man a student of law taking out his young cousins for a
_scampagnata_. P. D. very characteristically made them write their
names for him in his pocket-book, and bowed to the little girls as if
they were duchesses. More characteristically still, my friend carried
off the old beggar's stick to keep in his study.

_April_ 26.

SPRING 1902.

I.

THE RUBBISH-HEAP.

Yesterday wandered in Trastevere and about Piazza Mattei and Montanara
and back by 'bus; again this morning tramm'd to Lateran in showers.
The squalor of this Rome and of its people! The absence of all trace
of any decent past, ancient barbarism as down at heel and unkempt as
any modern slum! The starved galled horses, broken harness, unmended
clothes and wide-mouthed sluttishness under the mound on which stand
the Cenci's houses, a foul mound of demolition and rag-pickers, only a
stone's-throw from the brand-new shop streets, the Lungo Tevere, the
magnificence of palaces like the Mattei, Caetani, &c. If Rome
undoubtedly gives the soul peace by its assurance that the present is
as nothing in the centuries, it also depresses one, in other moods,
with the feeling that all history is but a vast rubbish-heap and sink;
that nothing matters, nothing comes out of all the ages save rags and
brutishness. There is a great value for our souls in any place which
tells us, by however slight indications, of a past of self-respect,
activity and beauty; and I long for Tuscany.

_February_ 25.

II.

THE EXCAVATIONS.

In the Forum this morning with Css. B. and the excavator Boni. In the
Director's shed a "Campionario," literally pattern sheets of the
various strata of excavation: bits of crock, stone, tile, iron, little
earthenware spoons for putting sacrificial salt in the fire, even what
looked like a set of false teeth. Time represented thus in space. And
similarly with the excavations themselves: centur