In the wild days of the tenth century, when the world was boiling with faction, and trembling at the prospect of the Last Judgment, clearly predicted to overtake mankind in the thousandth year of the Christian era, the whole Roman people, without sanction of the Emperor and without precedent, chose John the Thirteenth to be their Pope. The Regions with their Captains had their way, and the new Pontiff was enthroned by their acclamation. Then came their disappointment, then their anger. Pope John, strong, high-handed, a man of order in days of chaos, ruled from the Lateran for one short year, with such wisdom as he possessed, such law as he chanced to have learnt, and all the strength he had. Neither Barons nor people wanted justice, much less learning. The Latin chronicle is brief: 'At that time, Count Roffredo and Peter the Prefect,'—he was the Prior of the Regions' Captains—'with certain other Romans, seized Pope John, and first threw him into the Castle of Sant' Angelo, but at last drove him into exile in Campania for more than ten months. But when the Count had been murdered by one of the Crescenzi,'—in whose house Rienzi afterwards lived—'the Pope was released and returned to his See.'
Back came Otto the Great, Saxon Emperor, at Christmas time, as he came more than once, to put down revolution with a strong hand and avenge the wrongs of Pope John by executing all but one of the Captains of the Regions. Twelve of them he hanged. Peter the Prefect, or Prior, was bound naked upon an ass with an earthen jar over his head, flogged through the city, and cruelly put to death; and at last his torn body was hung by the hair to the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator. And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that, and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, his rule was more gentle, and when he was dead he was spoken of as 'that most worthy Pontiff.' Who Count Roffredo was no one can tell surely, but his name belongs to the great house of Caetani.
BASILICA OF ST JOHN LATERAN
It is hard to see past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his frightened priests cower together within, expecting death. Down goes the oak with a crash like artillery, that booms along the empty corridors; a moment's pause, and silence, and then the rush, headed by the Knight and the leaders who mean no murder, but mean to have their way, once and for ever, and buffet back their furious followers when they have reached the Pope's room, lest he should be torn in pieces. Then, the subsidence of the din, and the old man and his priests bound and dragged out and forced to go on foot by all the long dark way through the city to the black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river.
SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO
It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces, and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and there was a smell of blood in the air.
But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week, towards evening at the Tenebræ, the divine tenor voice of Padre Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man.
Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air—one of those voices which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which, perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times. Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in Rome even such as they might condescend to the romantic for an hour, because in Rome such deeds have been dared, such loves have been loved, such deaths have been died, that any romance, no matter how wild, has larger probability in the light of what has actually been the lot of real men and women. So going alone through the winding moonlit ways about Tor de' Conti, Santa Maria dei Monti and San Pietro in Vincoli, a man need take no account of modern fashions in sensation; and if he will but let himself be charmed, the enchantment will take hold of him and lead him on through a city of dreams and visions, and memories strange and great, without end. Ever since Rome began there must have been just such silvery nights; just such a voice rang through the same air ages ago; just as now the velvet shadows fell pall-like and unrolled themselves along the grey pavement under the lofty columns of Mars the Avenger and beneath the wall of the Forum of Augustus.
PIAZZA COLONNA
Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each other—one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone, which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street, which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough, booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits; even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of