y were solidly and
heavily built wheels--very barbarous an English carriage-builder would
have considered them in their heavy and clumsy magnificence--but they
were very gorgeous. What could be the meaning of their appearance in
public under such circumstances? I was walking with an Italian friend
at the time, who saw my state of amazement at so strange a phenomenon,
and explained it all by a single remark.

"Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels. They are
sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner that is at once
dramatic and historical."

The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were. How was
it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any other in the
world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals had not yet suffered
the horrible eclipse which has overtaken them, one of the most notable
features of the Roman streets and suburban roads used to consist
of the carriages of the members of the Sacred College taking their
diurnal drive. It was not etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the
streets, or indeed anywhere else, without his carriage following him.
There was no mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were
all exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be
seen in the nineteenth century--heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and
gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded.
They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness
richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and
driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent,
was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that
used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago.
Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board
at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and
his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his
constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such
cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia,
or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four
o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the
Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner. The
world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. _Fuit
Ilium!_ I thought of the old lines on the "high--mettled racer," and
of "imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep