The Old Rome and the New

THERE is something in the fascination of Rome that escapes my power of analysis. A generation has passed, and a second is on its way, since I first came under its witchery ; everything is changed in it that can be changed in a city; what can be done to break the antique charm has been done, as if in malice, — mutilation, renovation, desecration : and still it keeps the charm, like a masterpiece of Greek sculpture which has gone through the hands of barbarians, and come out shattered, maimed, and so defaced that only the eye of an artist can see what the artist meant by it. It is not its history nor its topography, neither its architecture nor its art, that makes it what it is : something of all these, perhaps, but beyond these something that defies definition, — a kind of spiritual polarity which made it from the beginning the point to which whatever there was of aspiration in the Old World turned, and, long before the first wall was built on either Aventine or Palatine, determined its history fatally; and that, time after time when an enemy had broken its strength and subjected its people, brought the remnant back to renew the struggle against time, and make the declaration of eternity, Urbs Eterna.” It is not by many the oldest imperial site, and it has absorbed cities centuries older than itself, and which were probably such when the Ager Romanus was being formed by the eruptions of the Alban volcanoes. For Rome is built on some of the newest land on the earth, and Father Tiber once found the sea at the northern edge of the plain. The wandering tribes of Latin shepherds who built their huts on the Aventine probably came down from their Sabine hills as soon as the cinders turned to soil, and goats found browsing and sheep grazing; and ever since men have obeyed this unique attraction.

In Hellas humanity found the expression of the virtues and qualities, weak and strong, of its youth : art, poetry, the perception of the beautiful, the first maturing of philosophic intuition, the harmony and the inspiration of a happy, healthy intellectual life, over which no shadow of oppression, spiritual or political, had come, — the perfect perception of the beautiful and the ideal which is the visible form of the spiritually true ; and with these the defects of youth, this precocious humanity which was never to know a manhood, but which would never again be rivaled as youth. In Rome humanity “ came of age,” as we say of the youth of twenty-one ; judgment and power and common sense, the strong hand of empery, the fixed determination of him who has found his vocation, — namely, to rule the world, — came to it. Here the civic virtues set up their school ; heroism of the sterner vein, law, which brought the sacrifice of the impulse to principle and the individual to the state, and so evolved civilization and empire. What the Greek was in his bloom-time he remains, less the virtues which belong to youth, plus the vices of decay. So the Roman ran through the flush of manhood to its decline ; youth he never had, and a serene and sublime old age he did not reach, but the manhood was long and tenacious, dying finally by the vices of manhood as the Greek by the vices of youth, yet dying hard and late. It was as if the Roman character were exhaled from the soil, and inhaled from birth a dogged vitality like that of some of the lower organisms, foreign to all ideality but that of the Civis Romanus ; producing at no epoch the finer fruits of the human nature ; borrowing its religion from Etruria, Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem, or Constantinople, its art from Athens or Tuscany ; no great artist or poet ever to this day coming to the surface from the depths of that state-incrusted existence. All that was finest the Roman had to borrow, but he borrowed it as he learned to use it. Only one thing Rome created for humanity as Greece had created art, — the organization of the res publica and law, which is its logarithm.

But why Rome should have fallen where it did is to me inexplicable. Climb the Capitol tower, and you see below you a group of insignificant elevations in the midst of a wide plain, bounded on two sides by ranges of limestone hills, the nurseries of the Volscian, Hernican, Sabine, Umbrian, and Etruscan powers; and on the other two the plain melts into the sea, some fifteen miles away. It is neither a sea site nor a hill site, this group of little hillocks, which the ancients called their seven montes and we call the “ seven hills.” Nor, puzzling my brains for years, have I ever been able to understand why, from physical causes, Rome should have been Rome, and Athens only Athens. I used to think, when reading the Æneid at school, that Æneas was a fiction of Roman vanity, envious of the demigod founders of other states; but, divested of some of the purely mythological elements, the Trojan migration to Latumi is shown, by the most recent archæological discoveries, to have some possible foundation in fact. To get at it, however, we must first understand that the Trojans were a race of the same stock as the Greeks, and that the feud which ended in a struggle that is known, or symbolized, as the siege of Troy was really the first recorded of the rivalries by which the Greeks committed racial suicide, not a war between Asia and Europe. The more I study the evidences of authenticity in the ancient traditions, even those which are so mingled with theistic mythology that we have generally considered them as inexplicable fable, the more I am convinced that usually these traditions contain a solid basis of historical fact. Through the series relating to the Greek and Italian civilizations there runs a thread indicating an extremely early community, and that the movement began in Italy and went eastward to Asia Minor, returning later through Greece to Italy. Of this movement, known in all the early traditions as Pelasgic, the Greek and Trojan agglomerations were coeval results. Amongst the traditions bearing directly on the Pelasgic origin of Troy is one recorded by Virgil, who says that Dardanus came from Italy. He is supposed to have gone from Cortona, which was the stronghold and latest refuge of the Pelasgi, so far as we know, and we have the tradition of the building of the first walls of Troy by Hercules and Neptune, who were distinctly Pelasgic gods, of the stock of Saturn, whose realm was Italy. The worship of Athena, the patroness of Troy, and the protection offered by Juno, the patroness of the Argives, the heirs and descendants of the wall-building Pelasgi in the Peloponnesus, a protection so warm as to cool her friendship for the Argives themselves, are further arguments for the identity of the races ; and the subsequent migrations of Trojans and Greeks together to Italy and Sicily bring us almost to historical tradition. Segestæ was settled by a band of Greeks with a Trojan leader, and the earliest traditions of lrojan movements mention the presence of Greeks. Virgil represents the settlement in the Tiber region of Æneas and his clan, while we have the corresponding tradition that Falerii was founded by a colony from Argos, who built there a copy of the great temple of Hera in the Argolid. The recent excavations on the site of that city show that though for centuries considered Etruscan, and really included in the Etruscan league against Rome, Falerii was never Etruscan, but for centuries preserved its Greek character, becoming Italicized only about the period of the great Roman movement northward, not far from the time when Veii came under the rule of Rome.

The systematic excavations now making in the country about Rome have had for one Surprising result, besides showing that the Greek individuality of Falerii was preserved till the Roman conquest, the indication that the influence of the Greek colonization of that city, or something accompanying it. extended over the entire region, traces of the same arts being found at Antemnæ, Lanuvium, Alatri, and Veii. This does not apply to the ordinary art of Etruria, which was derived from the Greek, but took on a color of Etruscan temperament in its development; for this Faliscan art is quite distinct in all its forms from anything Etruscan, and it maintains the type of the period just prior to the Roman dominion. The Faliscan finds, now in the new Roman museum of the Villa Julia, give us the history of that city from the earliest period of Italic civilization to the destruction by the Romans. The first pages of this record tell the universal story of all the Italic tribes from the southern shores to the Apennines, —a common civilization extending back to an epoch of immense antiquity, which the students of it think they can carry back beyond fifteen centuries B. C. The distinctive Greek contributions in the stratification of the deposits begin not later than the eighth century B. C., Attic pottery being found in the tombs, but of an extremely archaic type ; and the evidence grows stronger till the sixth century, when the pottery is very largely of well-known Attic types, and, though always accompanied by home-made ware of a rude character, finally reaches the highest attainment of Greek ceramics. The tombs also give evidence of great riches and intimate commerce with Greece, the vases found bearing names of Attic painters. During the sixth and fifth centuries the Attic influence is supreme ; with the fourth a change takes place, and the imported work appears no longer, but in its place a Faliscan art, which is in some cases of extreme beauty, though it is the beauty of the decay of art, which continues till the time of the destruction. The fragments of the statuary found in the temples are of a pure Greek art, and though of terra cotta as fine as anything of the fourth and third centuries discovered in Greece. The inscriptions which appear in the fourth century are in Latin, archaic but distinctly Latin, and one vase, which is an excellent copy of Greek work, bears the names of the Olympian deities in the Greek characters of the time, but in Latin, — “ Minerva ” for Athena,” “ Cupido ” for “ Eros,” and “ Zeus Pater ” for “ Zeus.” The Italicization has become complete. The beginning of this change, and the severance from Greece and the loss of Greek commerce must have taken place about the time of the capture of Veii by the Romans.

The slight researches in the Ager Veientinus have given similar objects; and as we know that the patroness of Veii was Juno, shown by the legend of the taking of the city and the removal of the image of that goddess to the Aventine, we may expect that in the future systematic excavations we shall find the same evidences of the affinity of that city with Falerii which we find both nearer and farther away. Thus, the revelations of archæology confirm the Virgilian tradition, and that other which states that before Rome there was an Hellenic influence imposed on the development of the Tiber valley, and that, under the hypothesis that the Trojan and Greek were of the same stock, it may literally be true that a Trojan chief led a band of emigrants to the Latin shores ; but the tradition of the foundation of Alba Longa, like that of every other foundation by the Greek migrations, must be taken as meaning that the emigrants occupied a city already in existence, and apparently united with the former population. When the same kind of researches which have been so productive at Falerii shall have been carried out at Ardea, Lavinium, and Laurentum, localities particularly identified with the traditions of the Æneid, and at which no excavations have been made, we shall know more about the general character and local variations of the so-called Trojan migration ; but we know already there is the highest probability that they were all under the same influences, and that the line of demarkation of the region so influenced was somewhat to the north of Falerii, beyond which the immigration imposing itself on the original Italic element was Etruscan, no evidence of which is found in Falerii or in the Latin towns ; and as on both sides of this line appears the evidence of the earlier uniform Italic civilization, we have the right to assume that the Hellenic and Etruscan immigrations were so nearly coincident that the one excluded the other, and that they were both superposed on an uniform Italic population, which here we call Latin. Of this mingled stock, on the south the central point of gathering became Rome, and on the north Clusium.

From that time forward Rome has been the most powerful centre of attraction on the surface of the earth, first to the Old World, and later to the New. Even to-day, wreck as it is of its old glory, it is more peculiarly the “ city of the soul than any other that we visit. Account for it as we will, each in his own way, it is to me unaccounted for by any evident reason; neither the republic, nor the empire, nor the church can explain it, but rather this mysterious attraction explains them. When I first came to Rome there was a curious phenomenon which struck me. — the gathering together of peasants from the outlying villages, on festal days, at certain localities where there was no visible attraction, neither wine shop nor lottery office, and not even an open place for the gathering, but a narrow street and a narrower sidewalk. One of these spots, which I was in the habit of passing, I found, by reference to the map of the ancient city, to be in the old forum of Nerva; and the only solution of the problem that appears to me is that, in a remote epoch, this had been the marketing place of the ancestors of these peasants, who, by the unintelligent, hereditary habit, always gathered there to hear the news and meet their gossips or clients. Rome was then full of such survivals of ancient customs, some of which continue, as may be seen in the Piazza Montanara, where the agricultural laborers still go in their picturesque costumes to make their engagements with the padroni.

In those days the Pope was king; life was cast in the mediæval mould; all progress was an offense, not only to the custom of the place, but to the fitness of it, and the new-comer had hardly ceased to be new when he became conservative and citizen of this imperial Lotophagitis. Existence was a dream, and almost as cheap as one ; there was no daily paper to harry our serenity, or thrust the daily disaster of a distant and indifferent community on our tranquillity ; we learned of most events when they had ceased to be startling. After the church, art was the theme of most thought, and the artist was the most important being after the priest. Roman life had its tides, — springtide at Christmas and Easter, and dead ebb at midsummer, — but there was never any bustle or fever of business; there was no growth; there were no new houses; there were no blocking the streets with building material, no laying of drains or disturbance of the soil, no enterprise, and no new trades. The head of the great hospital of S. Spirito was one of my friends, and in conjunction with him and two or three capitalists I organized a syndicate to supply the hospitals and city with American ice at the price, delivered at Civita Vecchia, of the snow, which was otherwise the only resource, delivered at the pits on the Alban hills, where it was stored for summer use. But the offer was refused ; it would have disturbed the vested rights of the snowharvesters. The sick in the hospitals had been so served for hundreds of years, and might be still. Every innovation was resisted as of the devil and the possible horse of Troy for stealthy invasion. Rome had so maintained its position for the centuries of the papal rule; why change?

Outside this compact, gray, silent city, in which the picturesqueness of the en-

semble was so in contradiction to the stiffness and general ugliness of the details, was a cordon of gardens and vineyards overlying ancient villa sites, abounding in the most interesting material ; ruins in an almost infinite variety in their pathetic abandon to the dissolving influences of nature, — baths, tombs, temples, theatres, palaces, aqueducts; and outside them, and the most picturesque of all, the old Aurelian wall, which meandered across highway and through villa grounds, a simulacrum of defense, but a most eloquent record of dead empire, marking the recession of its inhabited region ; then, beyond the debatable ground between occupation and desolation, came the Campagna. The Campagna of Rome has become the commonplace of poet and orator when they have to deal with fallen grandeur, but no poet or orator, unless he were a painter, ever saw more than a fraction of its beauty ; few even of the landscape painters have seen it all. There were, in those years, some who passed day after day in the hunt for subjects ; painting till the twilight came on; hurrying in to pass the gates before they closed for the night, reckless of the chill and the night-mists which even in midsummer follow the day, content to run the risks of malaria if so they might catch the intoxicating impressions of that unique and supreme nightfall, with its tremulous purple sky behind the purpler Alban hills at the east, and its mellow gold at the west; blinding the eyes more by the expanse of its glow than its brilliancy, more by the deep intensity of its light than by glare, by that luminous depth which is more the quality of the Italian atmosphere than the intensity of its blue, or the variety of intense color on the clouds. He who lived amidst this in the young enthusiasm of art and beautiful nature will remember the Campagna as he will remember no other landscape on earth ; it is like a phrase of the noblest poetry, ineffaceable from its unapproachable simplicity. In those days, the joyous fraternity of the brush were to be seen on every road that led into the Campagna, at almost every season of the year. Down the Tiber, even within the city walls, pictures made to hand met the eye at every turn of the river; one found Claude and Turner wherever one went.

That phase of Rome is gone forever, — gone as surely as the simplicity and stern morality of the republic, the splendor of the empire, or the moral authority of the papal rule. Rome can no more be the home of art again than it can be the seat of universal empire or the patrimony of S. Peter. What has come is not so clear. The Romans of to-day have none of the distinctive virtues of either preceding epoch, except military courage, which the Italians have never lacked, though they have not always been fortunate in the employment of it. Taste was never a characteristic of Rome at any age, but in the great days the Romans built well. This cannot be said now, and all that is most modern is most execrable; all that is oldest is most execrated and profaned. The new barbarians who, in the present dispensation, swoop down from cisalpine Gaul, reared in the civic ideals of Genoa and Turin, have no sympathy with the monumental records of Rome, and no conception of anything to replace them. The Rome of 1870 was dirty, but dignified ; inconvenient for people with modern tastes, but most comfortable for those who had adapted themselves to its mediæval ways. The Rome of 1890 is comfortable for nobody; the acres of new palaces that were to be are mainly huge, ugly tenement houses, stuccoed flimsies, abhorrent without and inhospitable within, — a tasteless waste, where the highest virtue is fragility and the noblest destiny demolition. Of the delightful gardens which used to exist within the circuit of the wall of Aurelianus, the only considerable fragment remaining is that of the English Embassy ; and that too had been marked out in building lots, and has been saved only by the protest of her Majesty’s government backed by the Times and the Italian archæological authorities. The famous Ludovisi gardens, the pride of papal Rome, and amongst the most beautiful in Europe, have been built over, and the vengeful lover of Old Rome sees with a malignant satisfaction the long rows of untenanted windows of the huge apartment houses of the quarter, over whose portals, newest in stucco and whitewash, he reads the last remnant of the language of the Romans, “ Est locanda.“ The Ludovisi gardens were offered to the municipality for $600,000, and refused, while it spent $740,000 in the purchase and demolition of a single palace on the Corso, to make a vacant space less than the hundredth part of the gardens. The transformation of Rome during the past twenty years is unique in the history of civilization for barbarism, extravagance, and corruption ; never since the world began was so much money spent to do so much evil.

But Rome survives it, as it has survived the wrecking of the Goths, the Vandals, the Constable de Bourbon; survives even the Barbari and the Barberini. The Campagna still undulates into distance, if somewhat encroached on near the walls, and the arches of the Claudian aqueduct still measure off the space with their gigantic stride ; the Appian Way is not made a modern cemetery, and there is left material for the artist who has the courage to return ; Aricia, Nemi, Tivoli, and the far-off Olevano remain unchanged. The papal city has been comparatively little altered by the expropriations except along the Tiber, and nobody need go to the new quarter who does not choose so to do. Life is dear, too dear for the cosmopolitan artist folk who used to make one of the principal attractions of the city to westerners, and with very few notable exceptions they are succeeded by modern Italians, of whose art little is to be said. There is old Giovanni Costa, like Titian, outliving the school of poetic landscape, and generously teaching its traditions to such as will learn them ; the Academy of France is still presided over by the veteran Hébert, the last of the school of healthy religious thought in painting, — that to which services were not enough, and who were more troubled as to what they should paint than how they should paint it: but neither the one nor the other has much influence on the younger men. There is still the Café Greco where it was in the day of Salvator Rosa, but men go to it only as to a reliquary, to see the place where once all the artists of Rome used to meet along with poets and the minor brood of the Muses, and it is hardly known to the general visitor. Details disappear, and the eternal city looms above them like Mont Blanc over the little intervening hills when seen from a distance, or like S. Peter’s from the Campagna, and will do so when the present system is in ruins and ivy grows over the new quarter. All these crudities will disappear ; this pinchbeck Paris is only another illusion which time will dissipate, and Rome will be again what it has always been from its republican days, even though the new republic comes and the papacy departs, a centre of attraction to a spiritual cosmopolitan population, never a centre of trade or business ; and the people who know it are not those who are born in it, but those who are born to it and its liberties of thought.

In the cosmopolitan sense, it was a great misfortune that Rome became the capital of Italy, but it was fated. The same attraction that drew the Greek, the Sabine, the Gaul and the Carlovingian, the Etruscan Pontifex Maximus and S. Paul, has brought the Garibaldian and the house of Savoy. But, after all, the interference with the true enjoyment of Rome by the real citizen is not great or material. It will be a place of pilgrimage to the Catholic when the Pope has gone, if he ever goes ; the historian, the archæologist, the poet, and the artist will always be its citizens, though holding no allegiance to pope or king, subject neither to taxation nor conscription, and though disinterested in its real estate. He owns it who feels its spiritual (not ecclesiastical) attraction. To him there is no city on the earth which can content him after it. He may live in New York or London, Venice or Naples, but will always be more or less a stranger there, and be ready to go back to Rome. The new civilization, while it has done much to disfigure and degrade the city, has also done much to improve it: made it cleaner and healthier, expelled the highway robbers from the streets and the brigands from the Campagna, — matters of less importance to the true Roman than to the prosperous man of business, but to none indifferent. Life is dearer than it used to be, but the rate of insurance on it is lower and the ratio of the doctor’s bill less, and the cost is not prohibitory to the man of small means. He who lives in his own house in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue is content in Rome with a small apartment in a crooked street, and on the third or fourth story, and does not so stand on state but that he has his dinner in from the nearest cook-shop and his wine by the flask ; has one servant instead of three where he used to be on his social dignity ; uses cabs, and thinks it no derogation not to keep a carriage, and so lives on the rent of his house in Mayfair. There are still quarters to be found in the old palaces in the papal city, but for people accustomed to fires there is sometimes a difficulty in keeping warm ; for the Italians have a superstition about fires, and so it happens that instead of the cheerful grate one has to be content with a stove, whose pipe may go out at the window in one or two of the chambers, and be dependent on the rarely absent sun for the rest. The fuel is dear, but then little is wanted, and there are few days when one cannot enjoy the outdoors and the sunshine.

Society there is none. The Romans are not a hospitable people, but one does not come to be with them. They are much divided into cliques and classes, and the great families content themselves in general with one great ball each year; very exclusive, and, if I may judge by hearsay of the foreigners who now and then attend, very dull. With two or three exceptions, the high nobility of Rome are as much of the Middle Ages as the old churches, and to the spiritual Roman they are mere shadows ; we walk through and past them, and know not they are there. As a general thing, foreign society is organized apart. The old Roman aristocracy is divided into Blacks and Whites, Pope or King, and the two sections never mingle; the embassies from the same government to the Vatican and the Quirinal have no relations with each other, and the Blacks are not in the books of the embassies to the King, or the Whites invited to the receptions of those to the Pope. If the newcomer will see the world and can, he must choose under which color he will take it, but in any case he will not find what in western lands is known as hospitality.

One of the most prominent English statesmen said to me one day, in Rome, that the life of public men was getting to be so laborious in the new political conditions in England that it would soon be a necessity to take refuge abroad from the constant demands of one’s constituents, and that Italy, as the only available place of rest and refuge, would be more and more resorted to by them. Switzerland was useful only for a portion of the year ; France was not far enough or restful enough; and so it must happen that Italy would become, to an increasing extent, the refuge of overworked statesmen. And of Italian cities, there is no question of the greater availability of Rome over all others. Florence is more interesting in the art of the Middle Ages; Venice holds the palm lor its picturesqueness in the spring and early summer, but its winters are bleak and cheerless ; Naples draws more from its surroundings, Sorrento and Capri, than it offers in itself; but Rome contains all that is most interesting in Italy. The superstition as to its sanitary condition is the bugbear which most militates against it. This runs back into the dark ages, but is unjustified by any statistics to which I can get access. In a residence of nearly a dozen years in the aggregate, and extending over a period of nearly thirty, I have never had in my family a single serious illness or a case of typhoid or malaria, and in my personal acquaintance I have never known half a dozen cases of intermittent or malarial fever, and not one of any gravity ; while in a residence of five years in Florence we had eight cases of typhoid amongst six persons. I have repeatedly stayed in Rome through the entire summer without any discomfort or inconvenience, and the late English ambassador, Lord Saville, was accustomed to spend his summers at the Embassy, saying that he found no place so comfortable as Rome. I have never met with a case of the so-called pernicious fever, and the physicians whom I know, and who attend foreigners mostly, bear a like testimony. Dr. Drummond, who has practiced here for years, says that he never saw a case. The instances of malarial fever I have known were similar to the intermittents of our own country, — annoying, but not dangerous. The statistics of the Italian sanitary department are drawn up with the greatest care and exactitude, and for the purpose of improving the sanitary condition of the country, therefore with no reference to publication or to foreign opinion ; and I have before me those of the deaths by malarial fevers for the commune of Rome, including the Campagna and the outlying towns and villages, Ostia and its marshes, to the sea. with all the malarial districts in the Ager Romanes; the division of the city from these being impracticable, as the peasants all come to the Roman hospitals for treatment. In these returns, out of a population of over 500,000, the total of deaths by malarial fevers was, in 1890, 308. Ihe amelioration of the condition of public health under the Italian government can be judged from the diminution in the deaths, which has been from 650 in 1881. gradually and regularly, to 308 in the past year. With a system of thermal establishments such as the ancient Romans had, the deaths by malarial fevers would be still less ; for there is no agency more effective in extirpating malaria than the vapor bath, yet there is not a tolerable hot hath in Rome.

I am in continual receipt of letters asking if it is safe to come to Rome as early as October, or if it is safe to stay as late as May; and not unfrequently I meet people who think that the visit at any season is dangerous to life ! Nothing is so invincible as superstition. If we leave Rome at all for the summer, it is only about the first of August, and we return by the end of September ; not one tenth of the population leaves, and the death-rate is lower in summer than in winter. From the first of November till the August rains begin to fall, the worst parts of the Campagna may safely be visited, if the sunset hours are avoided, and even in the intervening months the midday is free from danger; but from the first rains of August to the time of the setting in of frost, it is not wise to be in most parts of the Campagna toward sunset, though there are sections in which it is not safe to go to sleep at night in any season. The whole question of malaria in Italy is one of exaggerated importance. I have traveled in the worst parts of the Maremme, which are regarded as deadly and the most malarial of Italy, as late as the latter half of June, and have found the harvesters at work in gangs, and very few cases of fever anywhere ; while at Grosseto, the capital of the Maremme, which the guidebooks tell us is abandoned by the inhabitants on the first of May, I found the entire population on the ramparts listening to the band till late into the evening, and none had as yet gone to the hills, which they do only to a limited extent the first of July. I had an introduction to one family, the mother of which, at the age of sixty, whose life had always been passed in Grosseto, had never known what intermittent fever was. I know of no district of Italy in which it is not practicable to travel ten months out of the twelve, if one takes the precautions not to sleep in a malarial locality, or drink water that is not known to be pure.

Typhoids are common in all great cities, but in Rome less so than in most cities of its size; and the returns to the sanitary authorities are a proof that their frequency is diminishing in proportion as the rigorous regulations are effective and evasion is prevented. The water supply of Rome is probably the best as to purity and the most abundant in quantity of any furnished to great cities. Typhoid very rarely occurs among the inhabitants of the better class except from drinking water at some wayside or temporarily infected spring. The main supply by the Acqua Marcia is secure against corruption, and is everywhere accessible, so that no house need be without it. In the month of November, 1890, not a single case of typhoid was reported in all Rome. The sanitary laws are inflexible, and the tenant of a neglected house has always the remedy in his own hands. I have no hesitation in saying that a person in moderate circumstances, able to choose his quarters, can pass the months between September and July in Rome under as favorable conditions of health and comfort as in any city in Europe; and with less precautions against the heat than in Boston one must take against the cold, he may pass the entire year.

In summer, too, we have excellent seaside resorts, — Anzio and Palo, and our hill country at Albano, Aricia, Nemi, Frascati, and the other castelli; and if there were a little enterprise in Italy, we should have summer resorts in the Abruzzi delightful in their sanitary and picturesque features, but this remains for future generations. Now a civilized man can hardly pass a day in any of the mountain villages or towns; filthy they are beyond exaggeration. It is enough to insist on the advantages of Rome as a winter station, and as the fittest city of winter refuge for the exhausted and disabled, hors de combat, in the battle of life, to whom political affinities are immaterial ; for the refugees from the nervous pressure of America, the social, political, and business burdens of England ; from the immitigable boredom of German life, as well as the glittering superficiality of Parisian : all such may meet here on the neutral ground of traditions, memories, and associations that antedate all our national divisions, and even all existing nationalities. Quod est in votis.

W. J. Stillman.