The amusements of the people are much what might be expected from their occupations.  To do them justice, they drink but moderately; but whenever they can spare the time and money, they crowd out into the roadside “Osterias,” and spend hours, smoking and sipping the red wine lazily.  Walking is especially distasteful to them; and on a Sunday and festa-day you will see hundreds of carriages filled with working people, though the fares are by no means cheap.  Whole families will starve themselves for weeks before the Carnival, and leave themselves penniless at the end, to get costumes and carriages to drive down the “Corso” with on the gala days.  The Romans, too, are a nation of gamblers.  Their chief amusement, not to say their chief occupation, is gambling.  In the middle of the day, at street-corners and in sunny spots, you see groups of working-men playing at pitch halfpenny, or gesticulating wildly over the mysterious game of “Moro.”  Skittles and stone-throwing are the only popular amusements which require any bodily exertion; and both of these, as played here, are as much chance as skill.  The lottery, too, is the great national pastime.

This picture of the Roman people may not seem a very favourable or a very promising one.  I quite admit, that many persons, who have come much into contact with them, speak highly of their general good humour, their affectionate feelings and their sharpness of intellect.  At the same time, I have observed that these eulogists of the Roman populace are either Papal partizans who, believing that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” wish to prove also that “everything here is for the best,” or else they are vehement friends of Italy, who are afraid of damaging their beloved cause by an admission of the plain truth, that the Romans are not as a people either honest, truthful or industrious.  For my own part, my faith is different.  A bad government produces bad subjects, and I am not surprised to find in the debasement and degradation of a priest-ruled people the strongest condemnation of the Papal system.

CHAPTER V. TRIALS FOR MURDER.

The idler about the streets of Rome may, from time to time, catch sight, on blank walls and dead corners, of long white strips of paper, covered with close-printed lines of most uninviting looking type, and headed with the Papal arms—­the cross-keys and tiara.  If, being like myself afflicted with an inquisitive turn of mind, he takes the trouble of deciphering these hieroglyphic documents, his labour would not be altogether thrown away.  Those straggling strips, stuck up in out-of-the-way places, glanced at by a few idle passers-by, and torn down by the prowling vagabonds of the streets after a day or two for the sake of the paper, are the sole public records of justice issued, or allowed to be issued, under the Pontifical government.  Trials are carried on here with closed doors; no spectators are admitted; no reports of the proceedings are published.  In capital cases, however, after the execution of the criminal has taken place a sort of Proces verbal of the case and of the trial is placarded on the walls of the chief towns.