ed was especially addicted during life. In this
manner the procession begins to move after sunset, preceded by a tall
silver cross, beadles, &c.; friars, priests, &c. chanting the De Profundis
through the principal streets to the church where it is intended it should
be interred.

The effect, with some abatements for boys following to pick up the
drippings of the torches, and the perfect indifference of the assistants,
for neither friends nor relatives attend, is certainly very solemn. The
deep hoarse recitative of the psalm, the strange phantom-like appearance
of the fraternities, the flash and glare of the torches which they carry,
on the face of the dead; the dead body itself, in all the appalling
nakedness of mortality, but still mocked with the tawdry images of this
world, in the flowers and tinsel and gilding which surround it; the quick
swinging motion with which it is hurried along, and with which it comes
trenching, when one least expects it, on all the gaieties and busy
interests of existence (for at this hour the Corso and the Caffes are most
crowded)--all this, without any reference to the intrinsic solemnity of
such a scene, is calculated, as mere stage effect, powerfully to stir up
the sympathies and imagination of a stranger. On the inhabitants, as might
be apprehended, such pageants have long since lost all their influence;
and I have seen a line extending down a whole street, without deranging a
single lounger from his seat, or interrupting for an instant the pleasures
of ice-eating and punch-drinking, which generally takes place in the open
air. Whether this passion for bringing into coarse contact, as is often
the case, both life and death, the gloomy and the gay, be constitutional
or traditional, I know not; but a traveller can scarcely fail of being
struck with the prevalence of the feeling and practice amongst southern
nations at all periods of their history, and finding in the modern
inhabitants of those favoured regions, frequent resemblances to that
strange spirit of melancholy voluptuousness, which travelled onward from
Egypt to Greece, and from Greece, together with the other refinements of
her philosophy, into the greater part of Italy. On reaching the church,
unless the wealth and situation of the departed can permit the consolation
or the vanity of a high mass, the body is immediately committed to the
tomb. Such at least is the practice at Rome; and there are few who have
not witnessed with