gives you But it is a city of beggars as well as beauty, and you are never more forcibly reminded of it than when you unfold your napkin and glance at the bill of fare. One after another they enter, and lay their case before you with outstretched palms. Some are deformed, others are wrecked by accidents, and yet others, one is prone to imagine, have been skilfully treated by specialists who can dress up a mendicant to compel compassion as an ordinary little girl attires her doll. But you will mark or, at least, you may that however ghastly their disfigurement, these beggars of Florence still keep their spirits sprightly _within them. If you condole with them, no doubt they will whine plaintively, not to run counter to your humor and their own interests. But they would rather crack a small volatile joke with you; and if you give them a copper smiling, they will show much more gratitude than if you offer it with the ends of your mouth lowered to signify your heart's sympathy. many labored movements run you into a corner between a white marble tomb and the wall. Once trapped thus, there is no escape consistent with honor. The poor little cripple is sure to have a sweet, voluble tongue, and his appeals in the name of the Virgin are not to be hearkened to with a deaf ear. So, too, if you wander away into the sunny open space of the Cascine, where the fashionable world rides and drives in the fag-end of the afternoon. You may flatter yourself that you shall have your retreat to yourself at a time when the beau monde is still at home. So you sit in the shade and peep from some green arbor at the glittering river and the sus pension bridge which spans it. There is a tennis court hard by, riservato; in fact, a patch of English life imported into Florence. The players are English too; and you mildly marvel how it would be taken in London if we allowed a certain number of square yards of Hyde Park to be appropriated thus, by say a score of Frenchmen, for a national game or exercise of theirs. All is peace indeed, and the thrush in the tree above seems likely to go sweetly mad in the energy of its melodious chanting. Here too, however, the gentle words, "For charity's sake, signore," somehow soon got whispered through the bushes; and here, too, a thin, brown hand appears as a commentary upon the words. It is the smoke of your pipe which has this time betrayed you into the hands of your untiring pursuer. Not that one minds this sort of thing, in Florence, in spring. In summer, with the gay exhilaration gone from the hot air, it would be different. Then it is quite enough effort to walk a quarter of a mile to the well-known library of Vieusseux, at the corner of the street, or to crawl to one There's no getting out of their jurisdic- or other of the fashionable clubs or cafés tion in Florence. Though you betake in the Via Tornabuoni. Only at night yourself to the secluded cloisters of Santa does Florence then put on some of its old Croce, and there, amid the tombs and the charms. With the star-spangled sky above daisies of the dark green grass, stroll up-reflected in the gliding river and the and down with the pleasant blue dome of the heavens overhead, and as you imagine far from distracting influences, you shall not long be left to your solitude. Some poor little cripple will espy you through the chinks of the church door, and after air rid of the furnace heat from the sun, one might, after dark, fancy it was spring - for the fascination's sake. To tell the truth, indeed, the summer night may even be pleasanter than the spring night. For with a strong breeze from the snow of the mountains, in April or May the evenings in Florence are sometimes a thought icy. In one sense, to visit Florence in spring is not so much of a change as it might be to the travelling Briton. Wherever one turns one hears the English tongue -or he American, which is not quite the same thing. There's no need to practise that little stock of Italian which has been accumulated with such difficulty, and yet has a tendency to diminish so fast upon the least encouragement. Why, the beggars themselves prattle their words of English picked up in the restaurants or at the porches of the hotels. Of course every waiter and tradesman who knows his business is eager to spare you the travail of talking in his own language-and to advance his knowledge of your language by forcing it upon you. Besides, one is perpetually dropping upon people as familiar as the New Law Courts of Temple Bar. It is either among the flowers stacked by the pavement, or in Vieusseux's library, or in one's own hotel, or at a friend's house, a café, a picture gallery, or a theatre. The "who would have thought of seeing you here?" becomes a commonplace phrase for use in Florence in spring. This is especially so with our American cousins, who appear to have a surprising acquaintance with each other. It is nothing in objection that when at home they live as far apart as is San Francisco from Boston. They all seem to know each other, and to be on the most intimate terms with a multitude of mutual friends. Yet one is disposed to suspect that if they were to return to their own little continent by the same ship, most of them would have nothing more to say to each other until they met again in Florence in spring. This bustle and brightness is very agreeable for a few weeks; but towards the end of May, if not sooner, one is apt to yearn for a retreat of a different kind. Tourists are picturesque enough objects, especially some of those who come to Florence in spring, with extraordinarily cheap tour tickets from Germany, as members of a pilgrimage bound for the Vatican, or for the pleasures of honeymoon; yet even tourists become a weariness to the soul at length. In particular, one grows to loathe the set terms in which the ciceroni explain to the ignorant the "sights" they have come to see. the rest of the world along with them in their smart, business-like survey of the pictures in, say, an hour and a half. There is then no sentimental dallying before the gems of the Tribuna Chamber of the gallery. Most people spend their hours here; but with the "personally conducted "it is an affair of five minutes at the outside; and in their ardor to see in the five minutes all the various masterpieces of the great artists here collected, they dislodge from their vantage positions student after student without much pretence of apology. The guide, meanwhile, is fiendishly laconic: "The Madonna del Cardinello,' by Raphael; Titian,' messieurs; this is by Guido Reni; the statue is the 'Venus de Medici.' And now, gentlemen, if you please, move on to the next room!"The more fortunate, because less preoccupied, visitors to Florence look after these bustling, perspiring tourists with an expression in which contempt and pity have a very decided part. There's no end to the social attractions of Florence at this time of the year. By day the blue sky smiles serenely upon the city, its domes, and towers, and gardens, and at night Lung' Arno sees not a little cheerful revelry. There are balls in the pensioni devoted to visitors, and balls in the palazzi which still bear great names. If you do not care for such superlative excitement as this, are there not convenient stone balconies to the windows of all the drawing-rooms which look upon the gliding river? The curtains to the windows are civilly thick, and you may be left undisturbed while you whisper tender words in the ear of the girl who has ensnared your heart, while you glance from each other to the long highway jewelled with lamps, the bridges also resplendent with many lights, and the bright stars above. Against, one Florentine habit, however, at such a time one has the right to protest in all earnestness. There are wandering bands of minstrels then abroad in the roads professionals and titled amateurs. If they espy you in your balcony, 'tis ten to one they will form a square beneath the window and twang their mandolines loudly in your honor and that of the fair lady who is with you. To the unexperienced this is apt to be trying, and, moreover, it brings interruption in its train; for straightway there is a rush from within to the balcony, and then your sweet solitude is destroyed. This is especially so in the picture-galleries of the Pitti and the Uffizi. There The spring months introduce the senare days when the influx of the "person- sation-loving Florentines to divers relially conducted "is so great that they carrygious festivals which tend to enliven their lives. One after the other the churches celebrate the anniversaries of their patron saints. The masses in the morning are remarkable for the lavishness of the can dles, and, perhaps, for the chorister or two borrowed for the occasion from the papal choir, and in the evening the exterior of the church is hung with lamps from the base of its façade to the lofty point of its campanile-a spectacle much to the taste of the Florentines, who come to it in crowds with the unvarying adjective, bella! upon their eager lips. One gets used to this word in Florence. Everything in the city is bella, from the heavens to the flower-girl who is so very positive that the one thing needful to make your own attractiveness complete is the pale pink rosebud she insists on pinning to your coat. The speech of the Florentines is notoriously bella. It is classic Italian, if classic Italian can be said nowadays to exist in the face of the demoralizing influence of newspaper Ital ian. Some say that outside the Santa Croce gate is the only spot in the peninsula where you may still hear the Italian of Boccaccio. At any rate, Italian scholars may make much of the peasants who here live by the city walls. Raineri, for example, during a ten years' residence in Florence, used to talk with them every day as regularly as he ate his dinner. Unfortunately for the foreigner who desires in like manner to improve his attainments, though the speech of these peasants may be delightfully pure and archaic, their pronunciation is not quite as clear as it might be. The lingua Toscana is there; but the bocca Romana by no means. Bella, too, in the judgment of the generous Florentines is the conduct of the many crowned and discrowned heads that come here in the spring of the year. Florence annually has a debauch of sovereignty. The people ask each other, when they see a magnificent equipage in the streets with an imposing personage within the carriage, "What king," or, "What queen is that?" And they are as ready to lift their hats and bow smilingly as if the monarch in question were their own dearly beloved Humbert or Queen Margarita. Their photograph shops are full of the pictures of kings and queens. When Queen Victoria was at the Villa Palmieri, they gave her an ovation whenever they caught her in the streets; and at the railway station their vivas would have been reckoned loud in British throats. The titled world of Europe do well for Florence in visiting the city as they do and spending their money so freely. Nowhere outside England does one hear so much entertaining gossip about our British celebrities as in Florence - in spring. It seems as if they all came to the fair city at one time or another. Some, as we know, make it a home. Their names are as familiar in Florentine houses as with us. People point at them from the cafés and clubs as they pass on foot or in their carriages, and tell the latest news about them. Some of this news is sad, scandalous stuff. It could hardly be otherwise in a city that teems, like Florence, with gilded idle youths and unmarried ladies-middle-aged and morewho find it vastly cheaper and more agreeable as a residence than any British watering-place. One must not be too credulous in Florence. Unfortunately the spring does not last forever, even in Florence. By and by, when May has well advanced, the words comincia far caldo (it begins to grow warm) are in every one's mouth. It serves as a sort of expanded morning salu. tation, and the rosy, heated faces of the interlocutors sufficiently suggest that there is truth in the words. The flower feste are over, and the last rose-leaf from the slaughter of so many innocent blossoms has been swept from the street-way by the energetic municipality. There is talk of green figs to supersede the dessert of tiny strawberries, which have for the past fortnight told of the coming summer. Ice comes to table now, as regularly as the mosquito, who has somehow got domi. ciled in your bedroom, begins to buzz just when you are falling asleep. 'Tis time to pack up and go. If the homeland is too far away, at least one may speed to Vallombrosa, or the coast. Anon, when the torrid days of July and August have died of inflammation, it may not be so very injudicious to think of returning to the heated city. But you would do more wisely to stay away until the winter, or until the first week of April brings spring into full fair birth again. From The Spectator. THE NUMIDIAN POMPEII. TILL I went to Algeria last winter, I had no idea of the number and importance of the remains of Roman civilization still existing in north Africa. For instance, I had read of Thamugas as "a city of Nu 66 midia, near the Aures Mountains," but had never heard of the interesting discoveries lately made there under the direction of the French Ministry of Education, in consequence of which the title of the "Numidian Pompeii " is not unjustly claimed for this remote border settlement of the empire of Trajan. I visited the place on March 7th; perhaps a short account of what I then saw may interest your readers. Algeria is now traversed by excellent roads in every direction. We left the railway, to Biskra from Constantine, at Batna Station, and about twentytwo miles from thence, noticed a number of short white pillars standing out against the dark side of a not very high hill, with somewhat the effect of a cemetery. An inscription on what looked like a milestone by the wayside, intimated that here was a Historical Monument, the Roman city of Thamugas," so we turned off by a rough lane across the desolate pastureland, descended into the deep bed of a brook, which we forded, and climbing out on the other side, presently found ourselves surrounded by a multitude of hewn stones scattered among the rank herbage. Some massive foundations and pavements, on which rested large Corinthian capitals, denoted the position of one of the city gates; and further on, we came to the row of pillars already mentioned. Here was the "street called Straight," the principal thoroughfare, wonderfully well preserved, considering that twelve hundred years have elapsed since it was deserted by its inhabitants. This African Pompeii was not overwhelmed by a volcano, but gradually desolated by war, and at last burned by the barbarians of the Aures, to restrain whose inroads it was originally founded. Quantities of charred timber were discovered among the rubbish which covered it; but when this was removed, the great stones of the ancient pavement appeared, neatly joined together, and showing by the tracks of wheels what busy traffic had once passed over it. There was a little ridge raised in the middle, difficult to explain-no marks of horses' hoofs, and none of the steppingstones at corners so remarkable at Pompeii. A colonnade of monoliths bordered this street on each side. Their bases, raised on steps, are entire, but the tops are all broken off, though some are still twenty feet high. Behind the pillars were low shops, like those in the bazaars of Tunis, lined with marble slabs, and roofed over with earthenware jars made for the purpose, without bottoms, and turned to fit a vault. Many are lying where they fell. The street runs east and west; we turned to the right, or west, to visit the principal monument of the city. This is a triumphal arch, erected by the Decurions of the colony in honor of Trajan, who is called its founder. The principal arch crosses the street, and there are smaller openings at each side for foot passengers. It is strange to see such beautiful architecture in this wild and lonely region, where there are now no dwellings but the tents of Arab herdsmen. However, we have examples of Gothic architecture in England among the Yorkshire valleys equal to anything in our grandest cathe drals. It was the solitary situation of Thamugas that saved it from the fate of Carthage, which served as a quarry to build Tunis and Cairwan. The Corinthian pillars and capitals of Trajan's Arch are of singular elegance, and the varied color of the marbles of different kinds, softened by the exposure of centuries to African suns and showers, adds greatly to its charm. Nothing of the kind that I have seen in Rome itself has given me more pleasure. A statue of white marble has been replaced in one of the niches above. There are several tolerably perfect figures remaining at Thamugas, where, in their ancient drapery costume, they seem to represent the vanished population of this splendidissima civitas, as it was termed. Antique statues have always more effect among their original surroundings than in modern museums. Near the arch is the macellum, or market, a square surrounded by an arcade on columns. The pillars are all fallen, but the stone tables remain in the shops between them. On a hill behind, surrounded by a sort of cloister (some of the pillars are still erect), is the Temple of Jupiter, the only one in the city. It had been damaged by an earthquake in the reign of Valens and Valentinian, when the magistrates repaired it. But it must have been finally overthrown by another shock, as the enormous fluted drums of its columns, and their elaborately carved Corinthian capitals of great size, lie as they fell. It, one would imagine, might be easily restored. One of the four city churches stood a little below this noble temple. They were all small, and of inferior architecture. It is only at Carthage that traces remain of a great basilica like those of Rome. Returning through the Arch of Triumph, we notice a marble fountain, its edges chipped by the frequent dipping into it of bronze and earthenware pitchers. There is no water in the place now, but the Romans had a neighboring stream conducted to it, and when the hills, now so bare, were covered with forests, the two rivulets not far off were better filled than now. rich and luxurious little commonwealth; even the latrinæ, near the Forum, are handsomely finished and ornamented. A small square is surrounded by stone seats like the stalls in a church, divided from each other by neat little marble dolphins with their tails in the air, and these fish had plenty of water running round them. Unlike the military Lambessa, Thamugas had no amphitheatre. The main street has been cleared to near the east end of the little city, where we can study how the chief civil buildings of a Roman town were arranged. A handsome portico, already referred to, led to the right, into the Forum, a small square The baths are in the quarter of the city with a pulpit for orators at one side; off not yet excavated. What has been unthis were the Basilica and the Senate covered is carefully preserved, very clean, House, adorned with curious, twisted col- and not disfigured by names scribbled on umns, ending in little darts. The theatre the walls, as is too common. There are was behind; its seats, excavated in the no Europeans in the neighborhood; an hillside, are quite perfect, and all the ar- Arab peasant is the keeper in charge. We rangements of the stage, though the pil- are accustomed to think of the Byzantine lars of the scena have been broken off. reconquest of Africa under Belisarius as The magistrates' chairs, the mosaic pave- a mere brief period of transition; but it ments, are all in their places, and I could has left many monuments in the country, even read a sportive inscription, traced on from rude watch-towers to large castles. the floor of the Forum with some sharp There is a huge Byzantine fortress near instrument: "To hunt, to bathe, to play, Thamugas, to construct which the public to laugh; this is to live." A lazy fellow buildings of the city and the tombs of the had added "to rest;" and another wag citizens were ruthlessly despoiled. It was "the life of a duck." As the "h" in hoc run up in haste in the last agony of Roman is omitted, there is a precedent here for rule in Numidia. But the tide of barbarthe English custom of dropping the aspi- ism was too strong, and Kahinna, the Berrate. A table, with little holes for some ber priestess, as her name signifies, came game, is also carved in a corner of this down with her wild followers from the pavement. May not the Donatist fanati-snow-clad mountains near and burned cism to which the first ruin of Thamugas Thamugas to save it, it is said, from those is attributed, have been partly an ascetic yet more savage conquerors, the Saracens, reaction against this easy-going, pagan then in the first fury of conversion to view of life? I suspect, too, that it was a Numidian revolt of the fierce African temper against the rather servile loyalty of the Roman colonists, devoted to the distant Cæsar. The ruins of Thamugas are full of inscriptions, mostly the pompous titles of the reigning emperors. I noticed, both here and at Lambessa, how Geta's name had been erased by deep cutting into the IN 1603, King James I. was thus aposmarble after his murder. M. Moliner trophized in the Poor Man's Petition: Violle, of Batna, has published a useful "Good king, cut off their paltry licenses little book giving all these inscriptions in and all monopolies! Fie upon close biting full. They illustrate the life of a Roman knaveries!" It was a wasted prayer. city, and show that ambition and vanity Oppressive as the grievance had grown to were as powerful motives then as now. Some give the cursus honorum, a list of the successive promotions of a great man; others his pollicitatio, the promises of gifts to the city by which he gained his rank, or "bought a living," as we say. For priestly dignities among the pagan hierarchy were eagerly coveted, and might be obtained by judicious liberality to the public. One very long inscription records the names of sixty-eight members of the Corporation of the "Republic," as it is called, in the reign of Valens. It was a Islam. N. G. BATT. From Chambers' Journal. OF OLD LICENSES. be, the practice of granting royal licenses conferring exclusive manufacturing and trading privileges to individuals, either out of court favoritism, as a reward for services rendered to the crown, or in return for a monetary consideration, was too convenient and profitable to the royal grantors to be readily abandoned out of regard for the general good. We do not purpose, however, to dilate upon the mischief caused by the ordinary run of such abuses of the royal prerogative, but simply to note some of the more curious and in |
