TITAN. A MISSING CHAPTER OF CARDINAL WISEMAN'S RECOLLECTIONS.'* In no city in the world is Byron's apostrophe more appropriate than in Rome : 'Stop! for thy tread is on an empire's dust.' The cinerary urns of that mother of dead empires contain more than the ashes of her human heroesthey include the ashes of defunct histories; the poor remains of successive greatnesses that have perished without a record. Who knows aught of the origines of Rome-the first Rome that sprang from chaos-Rome of the shepherd's hut or bandit's haunt-the solitary casa establishing itself on the Aventine above the malaria of the neighbouring marshes? For aught that appears, or trustworthy annals hand down, Rome is as old as Jerusalem, which city would almost seem never to have had a beginning. Livy is evidently a story-teller, of good faith, we may allow, but of obvious credulity. Romulus is a myth, and Numa (Rome's Melchisedek) not much more. Religion, civilisation, police, had unquestionably had a home on the banks of the Tiber for ages unnumbered before the year 1 U. C. Rome proper, the Rome of history, only records the gradual ascendency of a native western civilisation over a Grecian and Etruscan, remotely oriental, language and manners. Rome in its progress redeemed for Latium its supremacy on the Latin soil, and showed itself indeed as something new, but springing out of something incalculably older. All this, with all * Recollections of the Lust Four Popes. By his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman. 8vo, Hurst & Blackett. 1858. VOL. XXVII.-JULY 1858. that went before it, is buried in the soil of modern Rome; buried with no hope of resurrection; buried beyond recovery of historic lore or antiquarian skill. Neither burnt brick nor incised granite remains to tell its story-arrow-headed alphabet or hieroglyphic symbol to speak even mystically and darkly of the dead past. All this is as clean swept from the memory of the world as sandtraced characters by the advancing tide. Of Rome kingly, Rome consular, Rome triumviral, and Rome imperial, the sepulchre is indeed inscribed, but, nevertheless, it is a sepulchre; the Rome of these sundry conditions has been consigned 'earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' Traces remain of these in the chronicles of the world, and they have left their imprint in the records of the hardihood of their prowess, the extent of their victories, the influence of their legislation, and in the mighty works which still attest their constructive ability and wealth. 'While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand'and as long as that pile cumbers_the earth with its massiveness, so long will imperial Rome possess a worthy monument. Affection might prompt something less repulsive than a colossal ruin, and architecture is at no loss for models to imitate or elevations to project; but resigned mortality acquiesces in the full propriety of a wreck standing as the imperishable memorial of a wreck. Freedom with all its virtues, and despotism with all its faults, could find no more fitting mortuary type than the dead Coliseum which marks the grave of deceased Rome. But Rome is not all dead. Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! Sprung from the ashes of the defunct phoenix is a new Rome, as vivid, as enjoying, as ingenious as the old, but wanting its material power, and boasting of no conquests but intellectual or moral conquests, as befits a Christian sovereignty. We speak in general terms, and not specifically of Papal or any other government-but simply of the existing city and state. The ruins of old Rome add a touching interest to the new, but the new has an independent interest of its own. The same people that danced in the Floral games, and wantoned in the Saturnalia, now sport and masque amid the mummeries of the Carnival. The same people that carved Jupiters and worshipped Cybele and Minerva, now carve saints, and chant the Hail Mary!' The same people that once only asked panem et circenses for their delectation, are contented now with small alms, maccaroni, sunshine, and the marionettes. Easily satisfied, easily pleased, easily governed, if common sense and common justice were at the helm, the modern population of Rome bear all the resemblance of son to sire, to that ancient populace who dwelt unmurmuringly in sordid huts overshadowed by gorgeous palaces, and gave their rulers no trouble so long as the wolf was kept from the door. We are no admirers of Popes or Popery, as will be evident enough ere our paper is done, yet can we not withhold our tribute to the surpassing interest and household charm of modern Rome, of which it is so true, yet whence its magic is acquired it were hard to say, The very name Artistically, it has many attractions its churches and palazzi, its fountains, its squares, its statues, its paintings; but above all, its climate, its neighbourhood, its ecclesiastical Dilectæ urbis tenero Tecum crevit amor.' quiet, its associations, its history. No man has heard of it in youth, and seen it in adult years, who will not say of it, after experience of its manifold fascinations, conceptus ab ungue 'O Rome! my country! city of the soul ! What are our woes and sufferings? Come and see A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.' But Rome is not a melancholy or a dull place, as our quotation might imply; the reverse of all this-merry as a marriage-bell, where repulsive superstition does not muffle the joyclangors of the heart. The people are the sprightly, thoughtless, processionloving, carnival-frequenting, gaudy, sordid, dirty, miserly people which they ever were full of life, full of fun, full of form and stateliness, full of disregard for these. Nothing but contradictions will describe the habits and manners of modern Romans, wherein, nevertheless, the element of mirth and enjoyment largely predomi nates. They are very sharp and shrewd, simple and credulous; of exquisite taste in the arts, combined with a vulgar regard for tinsel, and a degenerate power of execution, all the best painters and sculptors in Rome being confessedly foreigners. A tenth part of the population are beggars-sturdy beggars, mendicant frati, and almsseekers on their own account; but they are 'Jolly beggars'-the professional whine being from the lips outward, while the sorrow it bespeaks has never touched the heart; and they are lucky dogs, those beggars who have got a good beat in Rome, where alms-giving is the chief of virtues, more lucky than a London crossing-sweeper, for the lame assailant of our sympathies at the top of the steps of the Piazza di Spagna is said to have bestowed upon one of his daughters 10,000 scudi as a marriage portion. A very witty people, moreover, are those self-same Romans; irreverent in their wit, as is the fashion of pontificials-the most sacred themes and personages seasoning a jest with its raciest ingredients. Those who think of the eternal city, with its thousand churches and its hundred convents, as a gloomy sepulchral monk-beridden spot, will quite mistake its character. It has much to make it all this; but nothing can keep down the jaunty spirit which is inborn in the natives, and which their bright suns, clear air, and easy creed foster, while Policinello cracks his jokes, and Pasquin and Don Pirlone publish their squibs, as sparkling and as fearless as Caricature and pun, epigram and biting satire, are as essential to a Roman cit's life, as the weekly Punch to our digestion of heavy politics, roast beef, and triple X. How severe they can be on their dignitaries, let the following speak : 'Se il papa è cacciatore Ed i sudditi animali.' The popes they are merciless hunters, ever. When Leo XII. died, no favourite conclave about to choose a successor with the men of progress, Don Pas- to the defunct : quillo ventured upon this other to the "Giacchè bestie tutti siete Una bestia sceglierete : 'One folly all past folly passes, To prove their talent for caricature we need only report, that when Pius the Ninth replied in an unfriendly or exacting tone to the Roman people from Gaeta, the place of his voluntary exile, they represented his holiness as a bird in a cage, and Ferdinand of Naples at his ear teaching him to sing. This volatile, grave, superstitious, irreligious, loyal, seditious kind of people, and their relations to their four most recent rulers, are what Cardinal Wiseman has undertaken to depict in his ponderous volume. The present occupant of the papal chair is omitted in the biographer's narrative, for obvious reasons, and the hiatus we may possibly supply ere we close; but our first business is with our collector of anecdotes, of whom it is no more than just to say, that while he has been sparing of facts in his book, he has been lavish of words. His work is no revelation-scarcely a contribution to history-the four papers it contains being probably the substance of four lectures addressed ad populum, and not designed originally for the closet. The style of the eminent writer does not improve as he grows older-rather becomes more ponderous and tedious in proportion to the scantiness of his matter; but that of his first sketch, Pius VII., is the worst, because more elaborate than those which follow. Of the Popes he has literally nothing to tell, except that they were in the main very respectable personages, all of them perpetually, and some of them seriously, valetudinarian, herpetic, epileptic, and Dr. Wiseman treats us to a few years of the life of Pius VII., after his restoration from captivity in France, beginning with his own journey to Rome in 1818. After this, the short pontificates of Leo XII. and Pius VIII. follow, with a marvellous lack of incident, but during which, and especially under Leo, the star of the English student began to appear above the horizon. As there is really much more interest in what relates to our English Cardinal himself, we shall cull from the volume first those portions which depict his own academic ecclesiastical career, and be guided by conditions of space in the further selections or comment that may prove expedient. The English College at Rome had been shut up, and untenanted for years, when young Wiseman and five other English youths arrived to occupy its deserted halls. 'No traveller since the beginning of the century, or even from an earlier period, had visited it or mentioned it. It had been sealed up as a tomb, for a generation; and not one of those who were descending from the unwieldy vehicle at its door had collected, from the few lingering patriarchs, once its inmates, who yet survived at home, any recollections by which a picture of the place might have been prepared in the imagination. 66 'Having come so far, somewhat in the spirit of sacrifice, in some expectation of having to rough it" as pioneers for less venturesome followers, it seemed incredible that we should have fallen upon such pleasant places as the seat of future life and occupation. Wide and lofty vaulted corridors; a noble staircase leading to vast and airy halls succeeding one another; a spacious garden, glowing with the lemon and orange, and presenting to one's first approach a perspective in fresco by Pozzi, one engraved by him in his celebrated work on perspective; a library airy, cheerful, and large, whose shelves, however, exhibited a specimen of what antiquarians call" opus tumultuarium" in the piled-up disorganized volumes, from folio to duodecimo, that crammed them; a refectory wainscoted in polished walnut, and above that, painted by the same hand, with St. George and the Dragon, ready to drop on to the floor from the groined ceiling; still better, a chapel, unfurnished indeed, but illuminated from floor to roof with the saints of England and celestial glories, leading to the altar that had to become the very hearthstone of new domestic attachments, and the centre of many yet untasted joys;-such were the first features of our future abode, as, alone and undirected,we wandered through the solemn building, and made it, after years of silence, re-echo to the sound of English voices, and give back the bounding tread of those who had returned to claim their own. And such, indeed, it might well look to them when, after months of being "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in a small vessel, and jammed in a still more tightly packed vettura, they found in the upper corridors, wide and airy as those below, just the right number of rooms for their party, clean and speckless, with every article of furniture, simple and collegiate though it was, yet spick-andspan new, and manifestly prepared for their expected arrival. One felt at once at home; it was nobody else's house; it was English ground, a part of fatherland, a restored inheritance. And though indeed, all was neat and trim, dazzling in its whiteness, relieved here and there by tinted architectural members, one could not but feel that we had been transported to the scenes of better men and greater things than were likely to arise in the new era that day opened. Just within the great entrance door, a small one to the right led into the old church of the Holy Trinity, which wanted but its roof to restore it to use. There it stood, nave and aisles, separated by pillars connected by arches, all in their places, with the lofty walls above them. The altars had been indeed removed; but we could trace their forms, and the painted walls marked the frame of the altar-pieces, especially of the noble painting by Durante Alberti, still preserved in the house, representing the patron-mystery, and St. Thomas of Canterbury, and St. Edward the martyr. This vision of the past lasted but a few years, for the walls were pronounced unsafe, and the old church was demolished, and the unsightly shell of a thoroughly modern church was substituted for the old basilica, under the direction of Valadice, a good architect, but one who knew nothing of the feelings which should have guided his mind and pencil in such a work. |