II. ROME 271

remembered without ever looking where they were on a map; Juvenal, a page or two of Tacitus, and in Virgil the burning of Troy, the story of Dido, the episode of Euryalus, and the last battle. Of course, I had nominally read the whole Æneid, but thought most of it nonsense. Of later Roman history, I had read English abstracts of the imperial vices, and supposed the malaria in the Campagna to be the consequence of the Papacy. I had never heard of a good Roman emperor, or a good pope; was not quite sure whether Trajan lived before Christ or after, and would have thanked, with a sense of relieved satisfaction, anybody who might have told me that Marcus Antoninus was a Roman philosopher contemporary with Socrates.

32. The first sight of St. Peter’s dome, twenty miles away, was little more to any of us than the apparition of a grey milestone, announcing twenty miles yet of stony road before rest. The first sluggish reach of Tiber, with its mud shore and ochreous water, was a quite vile and saddening sight to me,-as compared with breezy tide of Thames, seen from Nanny Clowsley’s.¹ The Piazza del Popolo was as familiar to me, from paintings, as Cheapside, and much less interesting. We went, of course, to some hotel in the Piazza di Spagna, and I went to bed tired and sulky at finding myself in a big street of a big modern town, with nothing to draw, and no end of things to be bothered with. Next day, waking refreshed, of course I said, “I am in Rome,” after Mr. Rogers;² and accompanied papa and mamma, with a tinge of curiosity, to St. Peter’s.

Most people and books had told me I should be disappointed in its appearance of size. But I have not vainly boasted my habit and faculty of measuring magnitudes,³ and there was no question to me how big it was. The characters I was not prepared for were the clumsy dulness

¹ [See i. § 122; above, p. 106.]

² [Rogers’s Italy, p. 137.]

³ [See i. § 136; above, p. 117.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]