physically as well as morally—­and inundated with tolerable certainty every year by the rising of the Tiber.  The dilapidated and filthy streets of the other parts of old papal Rome used to look clean and spruce by comparison with the lurid and darksome dens of the Ghetto.  There are Ghettos in London—­streets where the children of Israel congregate, not in obedience to any law old or new, but drawn together by mutual attraction and similarity of occupation.  And the occupations there are very much of the same nature as those pursued in the Ghetto of Rome—­the buying and selling of old clothes and second-hand property of all sorts, the preparation and distribution of fried fish, and here and there a little usury.  But the genius loci here impresses on the trade in discarded odds and ends a peculiar character of its own.  A much larger number of old pictures figure among the hoards of useless “property” than would be the case elsewhere.  The constant decay of noble and once wealthy families furnishes to the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of the remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their day—­old damask hangings torn from walls that have witnessed the princely revelry of many a generation; rich brocades and stuffs that have made part of the moving pageant in the same saloons; lace of the finest and rarest from the vestments of deceased prelates, whose heirs, as regards such property, have probably been their serving-men; purple and scarlet articles from the wardrobes of cardinals and princes of the Church; and odds and ends of various sorts widely different in kind from aught that could be found in similar repositories in other cities.  And another specialty of the Roman Ghetto is that it is not altogether easy to obtain a sight of the miscellaneous treasures of this rag-fair.  Partly because the low-lying and narrow lanes of the Ghetto are too murky and filthy to permit of the advantageous exposure of the merchandise in question; partly, probably, from an habitual consciousness on the part of the dealers that the details of their traffic in all its particulars are not of a nature to be safely submitted to the public eye; partly from that secretiveness which is the natural result of living for many generations from father to son under the tyranny of an alien race, whose bitterly hostile prejudices were but little restrained by law or justice; and partly also, no doubt, from the genuine Roman laziness, which in its perfection is capable of overriding even Jewish keenness of trade,—­the Jew brokers of the Ghetto are often unwilling to show their hidden stores to the first comer.  Some amount of diplomacy and some show of the probability of effecting an advantageous deal must be had recourse to in order to attain the purpose of the explorer.