At the same time with this acrid contest of quicklime, which caused much effusion of tears from suffering eyes, a gentler warfare of flowers was carried on, principally between knights and ladies.  Originally, no doubt, when this pretty custom was first instituted, it may have had a sincere and modest import.  Each youth and damsel, gathering bouquets of field flowers, or the sweetest and fairest that grew in their own gardens, all fresh and virgin blossoms, flung them with true aim at the one, or few, whom they regarded with a sentiment of shy partiality at least, if not with love.  Often, the lover in the Corso may thus have received from his bright mistress, in her father’s princely balcony, the first sweet intimation that his passionate glances had not struck against a heart of marble.  What more appropriate mode of suggesting her tender secret could a maiden find than by the soft hit of a rosebud against a young man’s cheek?

This was the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier age.  Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands, chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso, at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth.  Buying a basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, too, having been fished up from the pavement, where a hundred feet have trampled on them.  You may see throngs of men and boys who thrust themselves beneath the horses’ hoofs to gather up bouquets that were aimed amiss from balcony and carriage; these they sell again, and yet once more, and ten times over, defiled as they all are with the wicked filth of Rome.

Such are the flowery favors—­the fragrant bunches of sentiment—­that fly between cavalier and dame, and back again, from one end of the Corso to the other.  Perhaps they may symbolize, more aptly than was intended, the poor, battered, wilted hearts of those who fling them; hearts which—­crumpled and crushed by former possessors, and stained with various mishap—­have been passed from hand to hand along the muddy street-way of life, instead of being treasured in one faithful bosom.

These venal and polluted flowers, therefore, and those deceptive bonbons, are types of the small reality that still subsists in the observance of the Carnival.  Yet the government seemed to imagine that there might be excitement enough,—­wild mirth, perchance, following its antics beyond law, and frisking from frolic into earnest,—­to render it expedient to guard the Corso with an imposing show of military power.  Besides the ordinary force of gendarmes, a strong patrol of papal dragoons, in steel helmets and white cloaks, were stationed at all the street corners.  Detachments of French infantry stood by their stacked muskets in the Piazza del Popolo, at one extremity of the course, and before the palace of the Austrian embassy, at the other, and by the column of Antoninus, midway between.  Had that chained tiger-cat, the Roman populace, shown only so much as the tip of his claws, the sabres would have been flashing and the bullets whistling, in right earnest, among the combatants who now pelted one another with mock sugar plums and wilted flowers.