A Roman Holiday - Page 2

their own question, and bravely enough they meet it.
They proclaimed somehow, to the first freshness of my wonder, as
I say, that by force of numbers Rome had been secularised. An
Italian dandy is a figure visually to reckon with, but these
goodly throngs of them scarce offered compensation for the absent
monsignori, treading the streets in their purple stockings and
followed by the solemn servants who returned on their behalf the
bows of the meaner sort; for the mourning gear of the cardinals'
coaches that formerly glittered with scarlet and swung with the
weight of the footmen clinging behind; for the certainty that
you'll not, by the best of traveller's luck, meet the Pope
sitting deep in the shadow of his great chariot with uplifted
fingers like some inaccessible idol in his shrine. You may meet
the King indeed, who is as ugly, as imposingly ugly, as some
idols, though not so inaccessible. The other day as I passed the
Quirinal he drove up in a low carriage with a single attendant;
and a group of men and women who had been waiting near the gate
rushed at him with a number of folded papers. The carriage
slackened pace and he pocketed their offerings with a business-
like air--hat of a good-natured man accepting handbills at a
street-corner. Here was a monarch at his palace gate receiving
petitions from his subjects--being adjured to right their wrongs.
The scene ought to have thrilled me, but somehow it had no more
intensity than a woodcut in an illustrated newspaper. Homely I
should call it at most; admirably so, certainly, for there were
lately few sovereigns standing, I believe, with whom their people
enjoyed these filial hand-to-hand relations. The King this year,
however, has had as little to do with the Carnival as the Pope,
and the innkeepers and Americans have marked it for their own.

It was advertised to begin at half-past two o'clock of a certain
Saturday, and punctually at the stroke of the hour, from my room
across a wide court, I heard a sudden multiplication of sounds
and confusion of tongues in the Corso. I was writing to a friend
for whom I cared more than for any mere romp; but as the minutes
elapsed and the hubbub deepened curiosity got the better of
affection, and I remembered that I was really within eye-shot of
an affair the fame of which had ministered to the daydreams of my
infancy. I used to have a scrap-book with a coloured print of the
starting of the bedizened wild horses, and the use of a library
rich in keepsakes and annuals with a frontispiece commonly of a
masked lady in a balcony, the heroine of a delightful tale
further on. Agitated by these tender memories I descended into
the street; but I confess I looked in vain for a masked lady who
might serve as a