“But we can’t all expect to be Shelleys or even Gibbons,” I suggested.

“I know it,” said Bagster, ruefully.  “But if one has only a little vessel, he ought to fill it.  But somehow the historical associations crowd each other out.  When I left home I bought Hare’s ‘Walks in Rome.’  I thought I would take a walk a day as long as they lasted.  It seemed a pleasant way of combining physical and intellectual exercise.  But do you know, I could not keep up those walks.  They were too concentrated for my constitution.  I wasn’t equal to them.  Out in California they used to make wagers with the stranger that he couldn’t eat a broiled quail every day for ten days.  I don’t see why he couldn’t, but it seemed that the thought of to-morrow’s quail, and the feeling that it was compulsory, turned him against what otherwise might have been a pleasure.  It’s so with the ‘Walks.’  It’s appalling to think that every morning you have to start out for a constitutional, and be confronted with the events of the last twenty-five centuries.  The events are piled up one on another.  There they are, and here you are, and what are you going to do about them?”

“I suppose that there isn’t much that you can do about them,” I remarked.

“But we ought to do what we can,” said Bagster.  “When I do have an emotion, something immediately turns up to contradict it.  It’s like wandering through a big hotel, looking for your room, when you are on the wrong floor.  Here you are as likely as not to find yourself in the wrong century.  In Rome everything turns out, on inquiry, to be something else.  There’s something impressive about a relic if it’s the relic of one thing.  But if it’s the relic of a dozen different kinds of things it’s hard to pick out the appropriate emotion.  I find it hard to adjust my mind to these composite associations.”

“Now just look at this,” he said, opening his well-thumbed Baedeker:  “’Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Pl.  D. 4), erected on the ruins of Domitian’s temple of Minerva, the only mediaeval Gothic church in Rome.  Begun A.D., 1280; was restored and repainted in 1848-55.  It contains several admirable works of art, in particular Michelangelo’s Christ.’”

“It’s that sort of thing that gets on my nerves.  The Virgin and Minerva and Domitian and Michelangelo are all mixed together, and then everything is restored and repainted in 1848.  And just round the corner from Santa Maria Sopra Minerva is the Pantheon.  The inscription on the porch says that it was built by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus.  I try to take that in.  But when I have partially done that, I learn that the building was struck by lightning and entirely rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian.