Part 7

We have just been to see his gardens; they are poor things enough; and the device of representing Vulcan’s cave with the Cyclops, in _water_-works, was more worthy of Ireland than Rome! Monte Cavallo is however a palace of prodigious dignity; the pictures beyond measure excellent; his collection of china-ware valuable and tasteful, and there are two Mexican jars that can never be equalled.

Villa Albani is the most dazzling of any place yet however; and the caryatid pillars the finest things in it, though replete with wonders, and distracting with objects each worthy a whole day’s attention. Here is an antique list of Euripides’s plays in marble, as those tell me who can read the Greek inscriptions; I lose infinite pleasure every day, for want of deeper learning. Pillars not only of _giall’ antique_, but of _paglia_[18], which no house but this possesses, amaze and delight _indocti doctique_ though; the Vatican itself cannot shew such: a red marble mask here, three feet and a half in diameter, is unrivalled; they tell you it is worth its own weight in louis d’ors: a canopus in basalt too; and cameos by the thousand.

Mengs should have painted a more elegant Apollo for the centre of such a gallery; but his muses make amends; the Viaggiana says they are all portraits, but I could get nobody to tell me whose. The Abbé Winckelman, who if I recollect aright lost his life by his passion for _virtù_, arranged this stupendous collection, in conjunction with the cardinal, whose taste was by all his contemporaries acknowledged the best in Rome.

We were carried this morning to a cabinet of natural history belonging to another cardinal, but it did not answer the account given of it by our conductors.

What has most struck me here as a real improvement upon social and civil life, was the school of Abate Sylvester, who, upon the plan of Monsieur L’Epée at Paris, teaches the deaf and dumb people to speak, read, write, and cast accounts; he likewise teaches them the principles of logic, and instructs them in the sacred mysteries of our holy religion. I am not naturally credulous, nor apt to take payment in words for meanings; much of my _life_ has been spent, and all my _youth_, in the tuition of babies; I was of course less likely to be deceived; and I can safely say, that they did appear to have learned all he taught them: that appearance too, if it were no more, is so difficult to obtain, the patience required from the master is so very great, and the good he is doing to mankind so extensive, that I did not like offensively to detect the difference between _knowing_ a syllogism and _appearing_ to know it. With regard to morality, the pupils have certainly gained many præcognita. While the capital scholars were shewing off to another party, I addressed a girl who sat working in the window, and perceived that she could explain the meaning of the commandments competently well. To prove the truth, I pretended to pick a gentleman’s pocket who stood near me; _peccato!_ said the wench distinctly; she was about ten years old perhaps: but a little boy of seven was deservedly the master’s favourite; he really possessed the most intelligent and interesting countenance I ever saw, and when to explain the major, minor, and consequence, he put the two first together into his hat with an air of triumph, we were enchanted with him. Some one to teize him said he had red hair; he instantly led them to a picture of our Saviour which hung in the room, said it was the same colour of his, and ought to be respected.

Surely it is little to the credit of us English, that this worthy Abbé Sylvester should have a stipend from government; that Monsieur L’Epée de Paris should be encouraged in the same good work; that Mr. Braidwood’s Scotch pupils should justly engage every one’s notice--while _we sleep!_ A friend in company seeing me fret at this, asked me if I, or any one else, had ever seen or heard of a person really qualified for the common duties of society by any of these professors;--“That a deaf and dumb man should understand how to discourse about the hypostatic union,” added he, “I will not desire; but was there ever known in Paris, Edinburgh, or Rome, a deaf and dumb shoemaker, carpenter, or taylor? Or did ever any watchmaker, fishmonger, or wheelwright, ever keep and willingly employ a deaf and dumb journeyman?”--Nobody replied; and we went on our way to see what was easier decided upon and understood--the tomb of Raphael at the Pantheon.

Among the many tours that have been written, a musical tour, an astronomical tour, &c. I wonder we have never had a sepulchral tour, making the tombs of famous men its object of attention. That Raphael, Caracci, with many more people of eminence, sleep at the Pantheon, is however but a secondary consideration; few can think of the monuments in this church, till they have often contemplated its architecture, which is so finely proportioned that on first entering you think it smaller than it really is: the pillars are enormous, the shafts all of one piece, the composition Egyptian granite; these are the sixteen which support the portico built by Agrippa; whose car, adorned with trophies and drawn by brazen horses, once decorated the pediment, where the holes formed by the cramps which fastened it are still visible. Genseric changed the gate, and connoisseurs know not where he placed that which Agrippa made: the present gate is magnificent, but does not fit the place; much of the brass plating was removed by Urban the Eighth, and carried to St. Peter’s: he was the Barberini pope; and of him the people said--

Barbarini faciunt barbara, &c.

He was a poet however, and could make epigrams himself; there is a very fine edition of his poems printed at Paris under the title of _Maffei Barberini Poemata_; and such was his knowledge of Greek literature, that he was called the Attic bee. The drunken faun asleep at Palazzo Barberini, by some accounted the first statue in Rome, we owe wholly to his care in its preservation.

But the Pantheon must not be quitted till we have mentioned its pavement, where the precious stones are not disposed, as in many churches, without taste or care, apparently by chance; here all is inlaid, so as to enchant the eye with its elegance, while it dazzles one with its riches: the black porphyry, in small squares, disposed in compartments, and inscribed as one may call it in pavonazzino perhaps; the red, bounded by serpentine; the granites, in giall antique, have an undescribable effect; no Florence table was ever so beautiful: nor can we here regret the caryatid pillars said by Pliny to have graced this temple in his time; while the four prodigious columns, two of Egyptian granite, two of porphyry, still remain, and replace them so very well. Montiosius, who sought for the pillars said by Pliny to have been placed by Diogenes, an Athenian architect, as supporters of this temple, relates however, that in the year 1580 he saw four of them buried in the ground as high as their shoulders: but it does not seem a tale much attended to; though I confess my own desire of digging, as he points out the place so exactly, on the right hand side of the portico. The best modern caryatids are in the old Louvre at Paris, done by Goujon; but those of Villa Albani are true antiques, perfect in beauty, inestimable in value.

The church that now stands where a temple to Bacchus was built, _fuori delle mura_, engaged our attention this morning. Nothing can be fresher than the old decorations in honour of this jocund deity; the figures of men and women carrying grapes, oxen drawing barrels, &c. all the progress of a gay and plenteous vintage; a sacrifice at the end. I forget to whom the church is now dedicated, but _it is_ a church; and from under it has been dug up a sarcophagus, all of one piece of red porphyry, which represents on its sides a Bacchanalian triumph; the coffin is nine feet long, and the Pope intends removing it to the Vatican, as a companion to that of Scipio Æmilianus, found a few months ago; his name engraven on it, and his bones inside. Before the proper precautions could be taken however, _they_ were flung away by mistaken zeal and prejudice; but an Englishman, say they, who loves an unbeliever, got possession of a _tooth_: meantime the ashes of the emperor Adrian, who, as Eusebius tells us, set up the figure of a swine on the gates of Bethlehem, built a temple in honour of Venus, on Mount Calvary; another to Jupiter, upon the hill whence our Saviour ascended into heaven in sight of his disciples;--_his_ ashes are kept in a gilt pine-apple, brought from Castle St. Angelo, and preserved among other rarities in the Pope’s musæum. So poor Scipio’s remains needed not to have been treated worse than _his_, as we know not how good a Christian he might have made, had he lived but 150 years later: we are sure that he was a wise and a warlike man; that he fulfilled the scriptures unwittingly by burning Carthage; and that he protected Polybius, whom he would scarcely suffer out of his sight.

After looking often at the pictures of St. Sebastian, I have now seen his church founded by Constantine: he lies here in white marble, done by Bernini; and here are more marvellous columns.--I am tired of looking out words to express their various merits.

The catacombs attract me more strongly; here, and here alone, can one obtain a just idea of the melancholy lives, and dismal deaths, endured by those who first dared at Rome to profess a religion inoffensive and beneficial to all mankind. San Filippo Neri has his body somewhat distinguished from the rest of these old pious Christians, among whom he lived to a surprising age, making a cave his residence. Relics are now dug up every day from these retreats, and venerated as having once belonged to martyrs murdered for their early attachment to a belief now happily displayed over one quarter of the world, and making daily progress in another not discovered when those heroic mortals died to attest its truth. There is however great danger of deception in digging out the relics, these catacombs having been in Trajan’s time made a burial-place for slaves; and such it continued to be during the reign of those Roman emperors who despised rather than persecuted the new religion in its infancy. The consciousness of this fact should cure the passion many here shew for relics, the authenticity of which can never be ascertained. Those shewn to the people in St. Peter’s church one evening in the holy week, all came from here it seems; and loudly do our Protestant travellers exclaim at their idolatry who kneel during the exposure; though for my life I cannot see how the custom is _idolatrous_. He who at the moment a dead martyr’s robe is shewn him, begs grace of God to follow that great example, is certainly doing no harm, or in any wise contradicting the rules of our Anglican church, whose collects for every saint’s day express a like supplication for power to imitate that saint’s good example; if once they worship the relics indeed, it were better they were burned; and to say true, they should not be exposed without a sermon explaining their use, lest vulgar minds might be unhappily misled to mistake the real end of their exposure, and profanely substitute the creature for the Creator. Meanwhile no one has a right to ridicule the love of what once belonged to a favourite character, who has ever felt attachment to a dead friend’s snuff-box, or desire of possessing Scipio Æmilianus’s tooth.

But the best effort to excite temporary devotion, and commemorate sacred seasons, was the illuminated cross upon Good Friday night, depending from the high dome of St. Peter’s church; where its effect upon the architecture is strangely powerful, so large are the masses both of light and shade; whilst the sublime images raised in one’s mind by its noble simplicity and solitary light, hover before the fancy, and lead recollection round through a thousand gloomy and mysterious passages, with no unsteady pace however, while she follows the rays which beam from the Redeemer’s cross. Being obliged indeed to go with company to these solemnities, takes off from their effect, and turns imagination into another channel, disagreeably enough, but it must be so; where there is a thing to be seen every one will go to see it, and that which was intended to produce sensations of gladness, gratitude, or wonder, ends _in being a show_. The consciousness of this fact only kept me from wishing to see the Duomo di Milano, or the cathedral of Canterbury illuminated just so, with lamps placed in rows upon a plain wooden cross; which surely would have, upon those old Gothic structures, an unequalled effect as to the forming of light and shadow.

But let us wish for any thing now rather than a _fine sight_. I am tired with the very word _a sight_; while the Jesuits church here at Rome, with the figure of St. Ignatius all covered with precious stones, with bronze angels by Bernini, and every decoration that money can purchase and industry collect, rather dazzles than delights one, I think.

The Italians seem to find out, I know not why, that it is a good thing the Jesuits are gone; though they steadily endeavour to retain those principles of despotism which it was their peculiar province to inspire and confirm, and whilst all men must see that the work of education goes on worse in other hands. Indeed nothing can be wilder than committing youth to the tuition of monks and nuns, unless, like them, they were intended for the cloister. Young people are but too ready to find fault with their teachers, and these are given into the hands of those teachers who have a fault _ready found_. Every christian, every moral instruction driven into their tender minds, weakens with the experience that he or she who inculcated it was a recluse; and that they who are to live in the world forsooth, must have more enlarged notions: whereas, to a Jesuit tutor, no such objection could be made; they were themselves men of the world, their institution not only permitted but obliged them to mingle with mankind, to study characters, to attend to the various transactions passing round them, and take an active part. It was indeed this spirit pushed too far, which undid and destroyed their order, so useful to the church of Rome. Connections with various nations they found best obtained by commerce, and the sweets of commerce once tasted, what body of men has been yet able to relinquish? But the principles of trade are formed in direct opposition to that spirit of subordination by which alone _their_ existence could continue; and it is unjust to charge any single event or person with the dissolution of a body, incompatible with that state of openness and freedom to which Europe is hastening. Incorporated societies too carry, like individuals, the seeds of their own destruction in their bosoms;

As man perhaps the moment of his breath Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, which must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

Every warehouse opened in every part of Europe, every settlement obtained abroad, facilitated their undoing, by loosening the band which tied them close together. Extremes can never keep their distance from each other, while human affairs trot but in a circle; and surely no stronger proof of that position can be found, than the sight of Quakers in Pensylvania, and Jesuits in Paraguay, who lived with their converted Indian neighbours, alike in harmony, and peace, and love.

We have been led to reflections of this sort by a view of girls portioned here at Rome once a year, some for marriage and others for a nunnery; the last set were handsomest and fewest, and the people I converse with say that every day makes almost visible diminution in the number of monks and nuns. I know not, however, whether Italy will go on much the better for having so few convents; some should surely be left, nay some _must_ be left in a country where it is not possible for every man to obtain a decent livelihood by labour as in England: no army, no navy, very little commerce possible to the inland states, and very little need of it in any; little study of the law too, where the prince or baron’s lips pronounce on the decision of property; what must people do where so few professions are open? Can they _all_ be physicians, priests, or shopkeepers, where little physic is taken, and few goods bought? There are already more clergy than can live, and I saw an _abate_ with the _petit collet_ at Lucca, playing in the orchestra at the opera for eighteen pence pay. Let us be all contented with the benefits received from heaven, and let us learn better than to set up _self_, whether nation or individual, as a standard to which all others must be reduced; while imitation is at last but meanness, and each may in his own sphere serve God and love his neighbours, while variety renders life more pleasing. _Quod sis esse velis_[19], is an admirable maxim, and surely no self-denial is necessary to its practice; while God has kindly given to Italians a bright sky, a penetrating intellect, a genius for the polite and liberal arts, and a soil which produces literally, as well as figuratively, almost spontaneous fruits. He has bestowed on Englishmen a mild and wholesome climate, a spirit of application and improvement, a judicious manner of thinking to increase, and commerce to procure, those few comforts their own island fails to produce. The mind of an Italian is commonly like his country, extensive, warm, and beautiful from the irregular diversification of its ideas; an ardent character, a glowing landscape. That of an Englishman is cultivated, rich, and regularly disposed; a steady character, a delicious landscape.

I must not quit Rome however without a word of Angelica Kauffman, who, though neither English nor Italian, has contrived to charm both nations, and shew her superior talents both here and there. Beside her paintings, of which the world has been the judge, her conversation attracts all people of taste to her house, which none can bear to leave without difficulty and regret. But a sight of the Santa Croce palace, with its disgusting _Job_, and the man in armour so visibly horror-striken, puts all painters but Salvator Rosa for a while out of one’s head. This master’s works are not frequent, though he painted with facility. I suppose he is difficult to imitate or copy, so what we have of him is _original_. There are too many living objects here in Job’s condition, not to render walking in the streets extremely disagreeable; and though we are told there are seventeen markets in Rome, I can find none, the _forum boarium_ being kept alike in all parts of the city for ought I see; butchers standing at their shop doors, which are not shut nor the shop cleaned even on Sundays, while blood is suffered to run along the kennels in a manner very shocking to humanity. Mr. Greatheed made me remark that the knife they use now, is the same employed by the old Romans in cutting up the sacrificed victim; and there are in fact ancient figures in many bas-reliefs of this town, which represent the inferior officers, or _popæ_, with a priest’s albe reaching from their arms and tucked up tight, with the sacrificing knife fastened to it, exactly as the modern butcher wears his dress. The apron was called _limus_, and there was a purple welt sewed on it in such a manner as to represent a serpent:

Velati limo, et verbenâ tempora vincti[20];

which Servius explains at length, but gives no reason for the serpentine form, by some people exalted, particularly Mr. Hogarth, as nearly allied to the perfection of all possible grace. This looks hypothetical, but when the map of both hemispheres displayed before one, shews that the Sun’s path forms the same line, called by pre-eminence Ecliptic, we will pardon their predilection in its favour.

But it is time to take leave of this _Roma triumphans_, as she is represented in one statue with a weeping province at her foot, _so_ beautiful! it reminded me of Queen Eleanor and fair Rosamond. The Viaggiana sent me to look for many things I should not have found without that instructive guide, particularly the singular inscription on Gaudentius the actor’s tomb, importing that Vespasian rewarded him with death, but that _Kristus_, for so Christ is spelt, will reward him with a finer theatre in heaven. He was one of our early martyrs it appears, and an altar to _him_ would surely be now more judiciously placed at a play-house door than one to good St. Anthony, under whose protection the theatre at Naples is built; with no great propriety it must be confessed, when that Saint, disgusted by the levities of life, retired to finish his existence, far from the haunts of man, among the horrors of an unfrequented desert. So has it chanced however, that by many sects of Christians, the player and his profession have been severely reprobated; Calvinists forbid them their walls as destructive to morality, while Romanists, considering them as justly excommunicated, refuse them the common rites of sepulture. Scripture affords no ground for such severity. Dr. Johnson once told me that St. Paul quoted in his epistles a comedy of Menander; and I got the librarian at Venice to shew me the passage marked as a quotation in one of the old editions: it is then a fair inference enough that the apostle could never have prohibited to his followers the sight of plays, when he cited them himself; they were indeed more innocent than any other show of the days he lived in, and if well managed may be always made subservient to the great causes of religion and virtue. The passage cited was this:

Evil communication corrupts good manners.

And now with regard to the present state of morals at Rome, one must not judge from staring stories told one; it is like Heliogabalus’s method of computing the number of his citizens from the weight of their cobwebs. It is wonderful to me the people are no worse, where no methods are taken to keep them from being bad.

As to the society, I speak not from myself, for I saw nothing of it; some English liked it, but more complained. Wanting amusement, however, can be no complaint, even without society, in a city so pregnant with wonders, so productive of reflections; and if the Roman nobles are haughty, who can wonder; when one sees doors of agate, and chimney-pieces of amethyst, one can scarcely be surprised at the possessors pride, should they in contempt turn their backs upon a foreigner, whom they are early taught to consider as the Turks consider women, creatures formed for their _use_ only, or at best _amusement_, and devoted to certain destruction at the hour of death. With such principles, the hatred and scorn they naturally feel for a protestant will easily swell into superciliousness, or burst out into arrogance, the moment it is unrestrained by the necessity of forms among the rich, and the desire of pillage in the poor.