It was always in my mind to make a secret expedition, with my adventurous sister, to that old Aurelian wall, when no one should be about, and somehow or other reach the top, but we never carried out that plan, though we did some pretty risky climbing in other ruins, notably at the Baths of Caracalla, where we scaled the very highest point of the biggest arch and lay at full length—we dared not stand on a block of stone that rocked as we moved—looking down from the dizzy height on a world of tiny people and things below. Some glorious tufts of wallflower were our only companions and I remember how wonderful was that mass of fervid orange swaying in the sun, against the azure of the sky and the deep, dreamy blue of the distant hills. We went there many times—but at last there came a day when the authorities decreed that that particular bit of the ruin was so near falling that it constituted a menace to the remains below. It was removed, and some of the approaches to the other heights were walled up so that no one could risk life and limb upon them any more, and we never cared to go to the Baths again. Now, of course, there is no temptation to linger in any of the ruins, as the ignorant beauty-haters who took possession of our Rome in 1870 declared that the unique vegetation which adorned them was an agent of destruction and must be swept away. Every vestige of flower and shrub was rooted out, the poor old buildings became an eyesore instead of a delight, and the process of stripping off the kindly mantle which the ages had cast over their nakedness inflicted greater damage, the experts now tell us, than five hundred years more of age and weather could possibly have done. My dear brother Marion used to say that the world was peopled chiefly with fools and—blanked fools. What a charming world it would be if the blanked fools never got into power!
But to return to the porch of the Lateran and its devout beggars. On a certain day some eight hundred years ago, the Pope was walking on that green stretch just below it, followed by a silent group of Cardinals and Chamberlains, silent because the Holy Father was evidently thinking hard about some high and important problem. Innocent III was a great and good Pope, but he lived in a turbulent age. During fourteen years of his reign two rivals, Philip and Otto, were rending Europe with their struggles for the supreme honours of the Holy Roman Empire; the Albigensian heresy was holding a hideous carnival of sacrilege, carnage, and obscenity in some of its fairest lands; Rome itself was the scene of ever-recurring battles between the great nobles, who would ride forth in the morning followed by great companies of armed men, on the chance of meeting an enemy or an enemy’s retainer to kill. And with all this there were the vast affairs of the Church to govern, and many spiritual matters to regulate. No wonder that the Pontiff, walking in absorbed silence, and meditating on his course of action, should have been extremely irritated when a company of travel-stained, dusty beggars, disregarding the protestations of the horrified guard of officials, came straight towards him and cast themselves at his feet!