By the eye of your mind you see His Illuminated Excellency, the frosted Christmas card, as he bows low before His Eminence, the pink Easter egg; you see, half hidden behind the shadowed columns of the long portico, an illustrated Sunday supplement in six colors bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his best friend stabbed in the back before morning; you see giddy poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-painted valentines; you catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and scent the plotting; you are an eyewitness to a slice out of the life of the most sinister, the most artistic, and the most murderous period of Italian history.

But by day imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, stops a hole to keep the wind away; and the wild ass of the ninety-day tour stamps his heedless hoofs over the spot where sleeps the dust of departed grandeur.  By day the chug of the motor boat routs out old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins; the burnished golden frescoes of Saint Mark’s blare at you as with brazen trumpets; every third medieval church has been turned into a moving-picture place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large painful welt.  The emblem of Venice is the winged lion.  It should be the tapeworm.

In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated guide shall be a violent Socialist and therefore rampingly anticlerical in all his views.  We were in Rome during the season of pilgrimages.  From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary and Spain and Tyrol, and even from France, groups of peasants had come to Rome to worship in their mother church and be blessed by the supreme pontiff of their faith.  At all hours of the day they were passing through the streets, bound for Saint Peter’s or the Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their breasts.

At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frocked village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted.  A man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City, praying as they went.  Some of them had been saving up all their lives, I imagine, against the coming of this great day; but our guide—­and we tried three different ones—­never beheld this sight that he did not sneer at it; and not once did he fail to point out that most of the pilgrims were middle-aged or old, taking this as proof of his claim that the Church no longer kept its hold on the younger people, even among the peasant classes.  The still more frequent spectacle of a marching line of students of one of the holy colleges, with each group wearing the distinctive insignia of its own country—­purple robes or green sashes, or what not —­would excite him to the verge of a spasm.