l of tadpoles. Low mass was going on at a side altar, and the
canon's mass in the beautiful marble choir, behind the ambones, behind
those delicate marble railings and seats, which, with their inclusion,
makes the fine aristocratic, swept and garnished quality of that
Byzantine architecture more delicate and dainty still. The church was
finished restoring two years ago, but the population of that low part
of Rome, the Piazza Montanara St. Giles, has already given it the
squalor of ages. I cannot say how deeply, though vaguely, I felt the
meaningless tragic triviality of these successive generations of
reality, in the face of that solemn, meaningful abstraction which we
call history, which we call humanity, the centuries, Rome.

The great holes through which, as through earthquake rents, the
innermost life of Rome has become visible in the last thirty years,
are beginning to close up. In that sort of rag-fair, witch-burning
ground limited only by the island and the belfries of Trastevere which
I used to look down upon from Palazzo Orsini, the Jews are building a
colossal synagogue. One does not grudge it them, after their Holy
Cross Days! But that strange simultaneous vision of the centuries
(like that of their life which drowning folk are said to have) is
ending with the death agony of old Rome.

_April_ 4.

III.

MONDRAGONE.

The white peacocks apparently all gone; but two superb green ones,
their tails outspread, glittering on the grass under the olives just
below the villa terrace. Near the terrace, where a lot of olive wood
was being chopped on a stump of fine fluted column, a bay-tree of the
girth of a good-sized oak, bearing pale yellow leaves and blossom, as
of beaten metal, the golden bough of the Sibyl. Hard by another
bay-tree, a ramping python, rearing up a head of bright green leaves.
The loveliness of the chestnut woods on the hill behind, not yet in
leaf, but rosy with rising sap; big round olives also, dark silver in
front. The same colours and same wonderful rounded dimpled volcanic
lie of the land as round Villa Lante at Viterbo. We walked, the Carlo
R.'s little governess and I, along round above Mondragone and down by
Villa Falconieri; the three children on donkeys in front, Gabriella's
boys and their cousins. The pleasantness of the children's voices, of
their bear-fighting in the train coming back. A splendid day of sun,
wind, of dove's-wing distant Campagna view.

_April_ 14.