The great aqueducts, by which these fountains are supplied, are marvels of ingenuity and engineering skill, sometimes bringing the pure crystal stream from lakes and hills thirty and forty miles away. Dyer, the old eighteenth-century poet, has a graceful mention of them in his "Ruins of Rome":
"From yon blue hills Dim in the clouds, the radiant aqueducts Turn their innumerable arches o'er The spacious desert, brightening in the sun, Proud and more proud in their august approach; High o'er irriguous vales and woods and towns, Glide the soft whispering waters in the wind, And more united pour their silver streams Among the figur'd rocks in murmuring falls, Musical ever."
These noble aqueducts were the chief source of Rome's health and luxury, and were in charge of Curators or Prefects, who formed a kind of "water board." It is a system which might with great advantage be adopted by our own large cities, which are lamentably wanting in a good and liberal supply of fresh water--greedy monopolists charging what they choose, and giving us the precious fluid clean or unclean, when or how they like. The Government might do much to improve this state of things by constructing aqueducts after the ancient Roman style.
Another marked feature in Roman life we are _not_ so anxious to see imitated in our own country, is the abnormal quantity of beggars one meets everywhere. They are of every sort and description, and swarm round you wherever you go. Some of them a most pitiful and distressing sight, only half clothed and seemingly starving. Their number is only equalled by the legion of priests, who come upon you at every turn, in all grades, from cardinals to novices. Of course, this is by no means to be wondered at, Rome being the one great focus and clerical seminary of the Roman Catholic world. But the contrast between the starving squalid poor and the legions of well-fed priests is very painful.
Papal Rome--Narrow streets--St. Angelo--Benvenuto Cellini--St. Peter's --Pietà Chapel--The Dead Christ--Tomb of the Stuarts--Anniversary of St. Peter's--Grand ceremonial--Cardinal Howard--The Vatican--Pictures-- Pauline and Sistine Chapels--"The Last Judgment"--Pinacoteca--Raphael's "Transfiguration"--The Madonna--Christian Martyrs--Sculptures--Tapestries --Leo XIII.--Italian Priesthood--St. John Lateran--Marvellous legends and relics--Native irreverence to sacred edifices.