their trades much in the same way all the world over.  The peculiarity about Rome is, that all these trades seem stunted in their development.  The cobbler never emerges as the shoemaker, and the carpenter fails to rise into the upholstery line of business.  Bookselling too is a trade which does not thrive on Roman soil.  Altogether there is a wonderful sameness about the streets.  Time after time, turn after turn, the same scene is reproduced.  So having got used to the first strangeness of the sight you move on more quickly.

There is no lack of life about you now, at the shop-doors whole families sit working at their trades, or carrying on the most private occupations of domestic life; at every corner groups of men stand loitering about, with hungry looks and ragged garments, reminding one only too forcibly of the “Seven Dials” on a summer Sunday; French soldiers and beggars, women and children and priests swarm around you.  Indeed, there are priests everywhere.  There with their long black coats and broad-brimmed shovel hats, come a score of young priests, walking two and two together, with downcast eyes.  How, without looking up, they manage to wend their way among the crowd, is a constant miracle; the carriages, however, stop to let them pass, for a Roman driver would sooner run over a dozen children than knock down a priest.  A sturdy, bare-headed, bare-footed monk, not over clean, nor over savoury, hustles along with his brown robe fastened round his waist by the knotted scourge of cord; a ghastly-looking figure, covered in a grey shroud from head to foot, with slits for his mouth and 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,