eyes, shakes a money-box in your face, with scowling importunity; a fat
sleek abbe comes sauntering along, peeping into the open shops or (so
scandal whispers) at the faces of the shop-girls. If you look right or
left, behind or in front, you see priests on every side,--Franciscan
friars and Dominicans, Carmelites and Capuchins, priests in brown cloth
and priests in serge, priests in red and white and grey, priests in
purple and priests in rags, standing on the church-steps, stopping at the
doorways, coming down the bye-streets, looking out of the windows--you
see priests everywhere and always. Their faces are, as a rule, not
pleasant to look upon; and I think, at first, with something of the "old
bogey" belief of childhood, you feel more comfortable when they are not
too close to you; but, ere long, this feeling wears away, and you gaze at
the priests and at the beggars with the same stolid indifference.

You are getting, by this time, into the heart of the city, ever and anon
the streets pass through some square or piazza, each like the other. In
the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the
water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some
grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before
its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to ruin. Grass
grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier, quieter, and
cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter the first
church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and bare
outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have seen one,
you have seen all. A crippled beggar crouching at the door, a few common
people kneeling before the candle-lighted shrines, a priest or two
mumbling at a side-altar, half-a-dozen indifferent pictures and a great
deal of gilt and marble everywhere, an odour of stale incense and mouldy
cloth, and, over all, a dim dust-discoloured light. Fancy all this, and
you will have before you a Roman church. On your way you pass no fine