n hour more, and separated about
midnight, I having had eight hours of continuous practice in the use of
the second person singular of Italian verbs.

* * * * *

Next day I lunched with my friends the Marinis, at their charming Villa
on Monte Parioli, and in the afternoon Signor Marini offered to act as
my guide to places of interest. We took the tram to the Piazza del
Popolo, which was laid out in 1810 under the French Empire, perfectly
circular and symmetrical, thus differing from the more Italian of Roman
Piazzas, such as the elongated and quite unsymmetrical Piazza di Spagna.
We passed along the broad embankment beside the Tiber and through the
Square of St Peter's. Just outside the gates of the Vatican, my guide
pointed out to me the little shabby building occupied by the Giordano
Bruno Society, symbolic of the brave defiance thrown out, all down the
ages, by poverty and the spirit of freedom and intellectual honesty, in
the face of wealth and power and oppression, intellectual bondage and
the dead weight of tradition.

My guide thought that, out of the wreck of her material defeat and
disaster, Russia would perhaps give a new spiritual religion to the
western world, to take the place of old forms now dead, and historic
organisations which, having lacked the audacity and the wisdom to remain
poor when riches were within easy reach, had now become visibly and
irremediably detached from the life of the people. He did not fear, as
some did for France, a clerical revival in Italy after the war. For the
Italian branch of clerical power had shown itself in the hour of Italy's
deadly peril to be largely lacking in Italian patriotism, and to have
been scheming for the maintenance, if not the expansion, of Austrian
dominion, and, perhaps, for the re-establishment by the aid of Austrian
and German bayonets, or Turkish, if it had been necessary to solicit
them, of the Temporal Power of the Papacy over Italian citizens and
Italian soil. I saw one of the Swiss mercenaries of the Papacy gazing
forth a little contemptuously through a door of the Vatican upon the
secular outer world.

From St Peter's we drove up the Janiculum, stopping on the way at the
convent of S. Onofrio, where Tasso passed the last three weeks of his
life and where a Tasso Museum has been accumulated. Very admirable is
the equestrian statue of Garibaldi on the Janiculum, both as sculpture
and for its details of intention, su