Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880.

Excerpt

THE PALACE OF THE LEATHERSTONEPAUGHS.

Every sentimental traveller to Rome must sometimes wonder if to come to the Eternal City is not, after all, more of a loss than a gain: Rome unvisited holds such a solitary place in one's imaginings. It is then a place around which sweeps a different atmosphere from that of any other city under the sun. One sees it through poetic mists that veil every prosaic reality. It is arched by an horizon against which the figures of its wonderful history are shadowed with scarcely less of grandeur and glory than those the old gods cast upon the Sacred Hill.

One who has never seen Rome is thus led to imagine that those of his country-people who have lived here for years have become in a manner purged of all natural commonplaceness. One thinks of them as refined—sublimated, so to speak—into beings worthy of reverence and to be spoken of with awed admiration. For have not their feet wandered where the Caesars' feet have trod, till that famous ground has become common earth to them? Have they not dwelt in the shadow of mountains that have trembled beneath the tramp of Goth, Visigoth and Ostrogoth, till those shadows have become every-day shadows to them? Have they not often watched beneath the same stars that shone upon knightly vigils, till the whiteness of those shining hosts has made pure their souls as it purified the heroic ones of old? Have they not listened to the singing and sighing of the selfsame winds that sung and sighed about the spot where kingly Numa wooed a nymph, till it must be that into the commoner natures has entered some of the sweetness and wisdom of that half-divine communion?

Thus the dreamer comes to Rome expecting to enter and become enfolded by those poetic mists, to live an ideal life amid the tender melancholy that broods over stately and storied ruin, and to forget for evermore, while within the wondrous precincts, that aught more prosaic exists than the heroes of history, the fairest visions of art and dreams of poesy.

So came the Leatherstonepaughs. And so have the Leatherstonepaughs sometimes wondered if, after all, to come to Rome is not more of a loss than a gain in the dimming of one of their fairest ideals. For is there another city in the world where certain of the vulgar verities of life press themselves more prominently into view than in the Eternal City? Can one anywhere have a more forcible conviction that greasy cookery is bile-provoking, and that it is because the sylvan bovine ruminates so long upon the melancholy Campagna that one's dinners become such a heavy and sorrowful matter in Rome? Is there any city in the universe where fleas dwarf more colossally and fiendishly Blake's famous "ghosts" of their kind? Does one anywhere come oftener in from wet streets, "a dem'd moist, unpleasant body," to more tomblike rooms? Is one anywhere so ceaselessly haunted by the disagreeable consciousness that one pays ten times as much for everything one buys as a native pays, and that the trousered descendant of the toga'd Roman regards the Western barbarian as quite as much his legitimate prey as the barbarian's barelegged ancestors were the prey of his forefathers before the tables of history were turned, Rome fallen and breeches supplied to all the world?...