A Roman Holiday

It is certainly sweet to be merry at the right moment; but the
right moment hardly seems to me the ten days of the Roman
Carnival. It was my rather cynical suspicion perhaps that they
wouldn't keep to my imagination the brilliant promise of legend;
but I have been justified by the event and have been decidedly
less conscious of the festal influences of the season than of the
inalienable gravity of the place. There was a time when the
Carnival was a serious matter--that is a heartily joyous one;
but, thanks to the seven-league boots the kingdom of Italy has
lately donned for the march of progress in quite other
directions, the fashion of public revelry has fallen woefully out
of step. The state of mind and manners under which the Carnival
was kept in generous good faith I doubt if an American can
exactly conceive: he can only say to himself that for a month in
the year there must have been things--things considerably of
humiliation--it was comfortable to forget. But now that Italy is
made the Carnival is unmade; and we are not especially tempted to
envy the attitude of a population who have lost their relish for
play and not yet acquired to any striking extent an enthusiasm
for work. The spectacle on the Corso has seemed to me, on the
whole, an illustration of that great breach with the past of
which Catholic Christendom felt the somewhat muffled shock in
September, 1870. A traveller acquainted with the fully papal
Rome, coming back any time during the past winter, must have
immediately noticed that something momentous had happened--
something hostile to the elements of picture and colour and
"style." My first warning was that ten minutes after my arrival I
found myself face to face with a newspaper stand. The
impossibility in the other days of having anything in the
journalistic line but the Osservatore Romano and the
Voce della Verità used to seem to me much connected with
the extraordinary leisure of thought and stillness of mind to
which the place admitted you. But now the slender piping of the
Voice of Truth is stifled by the raucous note of eventide vendors
of the Capitale, the Libertà and the
Fanfulla; and Rome reading unexpurgated news is another
Rome indeed. For every subscriber to the Libertà there may
well be an antique masker and reveller less. As striking a sign
of the new régime is the extraordinary increase of population.
The Corso was always a well-filled street, but now it's a
perpetual crush. I never cease to wonder where the new-comers are
lodged, and how such spotless flowers of fashion as the gentlemen
who stare at the carriages can bloom in the atmosphere of those
camere mobiliate of which I have had glimpses. This,
however, is