Edward Dicey

“ I doubt whether a permanent business is often made by advertising; or, at least, I cannot recall any great house of business which owes its position to a name acquired by puffing, and which is now able to dispense with the ladder by which it rose to fortune. This much, at any rate, I am convinced of, that if it were possible to strike a balance between the sums expended annually on puffing, and the profits made by the puffers, it would be found very much the wrong way. However, it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good. The advertisers, not the subscribers, support the press ”

“ In the centre stands a broken fountain, moss-grown and weedy, whence the water spouts languidly; on the one side is a church, on the other some grim old palace, which from its general aspect, and the iron bars before its windows, bears a striking resemblance to Newgate gone to ruin. Grass grows between the flag-stones, and the piazza is emptier, quieter, and cleaner than the street, but that is all. You stop and enter the first church or two, but your curiosity is soon satisfied. Dull and bare outside, the churches are gaudy and dull within. When you have seen one, you have seen all. ”

“ There is no playing upon credit, no winning (at least directly) the money of men you know cannot afford to lose it. If you do win, your stake is paid down on the moment; and the mere fact of having drawn money from the proprietors of a gaming-table appears, by a mental sophistry, to be rather a meritorious act than otherwise. Moreover, the fact of your gambling in this fashion does not bring you into contact with all the blackguardism and rascality that you must perforce come into companionship with, if you wish to make money by gambling on the Turf or the Stock Exchange. ”

“ It is hard indeed for any one at any time to judge of Rome fairly. Whatever may be the object of our pilgrimage, we Roman travellers are all under some guise or other pilgrims to the Eternal City, and gaze around us with something of a pilgrim’s reverence for the shrine of his worship. The ground we tread on is enchanted ground, we breathe a charmed air, and are spellbound with a strange witchery. A kind of glamour steals over us, a thousand memories rise up and chase each other. ”

“ I confess that the poky little room at Wolverton lives in my recollection as a vast and spacious saloon; that the greasy, oilcloth-coloured counter, appears to me in other days to have been surmounted with slabs of dazzling white marble, and that the rather dowdy damsels who now administer at the station to the wants of the hungry public, have succeeded to the place of enchanting Hebes—nearly as charming in boyish eyes as the buns they handed to you. ”

“ In the dead Rome of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see only too plainly the permanent condition of the country. As to the present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain ”

“ It may be so, but my informants have always been the owners or agents of advertising mediums. The traders who have been most fortunate as advertisers, cannot tell themselves to what their success is due. All they know is, that if they leave off thrusting their goods under the eyes, and up to the mouths, and into the pockets of the public, their sales fall off at once. But whether one form of advertisement attracts more than another, they cannot discover. ”

“ I have chosen this out of the dozen entrances as recalling fewest of past memories and leading most directly to the heart of the living, working city. You stand then within Rome, and look round in vain for the signs of a city. Hard by a knot of dark cypress-trees waves above the lonely burial-ground where Shelley lies at rest. A long, straight, pollard-lined road stretches before you between high walls far away; low hills or mounds rise on either side, covered by stunted, straggling vineyards. You pass on. A beggar, squatting by the roadside, calls on you for charity ”

“ The swaying to and fro of the carriage produces that feeling of heaviness which, as every seafaring traveller knows, is the first step in the downward path towards nausea. Thus the mind is apt to brood over the discomforts of one’s position. During a long series of such after-dark journeyings, when I was too tired to read and too wide awake to sleep, I have pondered sadly over the short-comings of our railroad management and some few results of these ponderings I wish now to convey to others. ”

“ The old streets of Bologna, with their endless rows of colonnades, are filled with people. The dead Papal city is alive again. The priests have disappeared; friars, monks, Jesuits, and nuns have vanished from their old haunts. St Patrick did not clear the land of Erin more thoroughly and more suddenly of the genus reptile than the presence of Victor Emmanuel has cleared Bologna of the genus priest. It is whispered that out of top windows, and from behind blinds and shutters, priests are peeping out at the strange sight of a glad and a free people, with glances the reverse of friendly ”

“ Happily, by the law of compensation, advertisers lose their money, just as anglers lose their time. The process of puffing does not create new consumers, or supply them with any additional cash to spend. It simply offers them a bait more tempting than those already at their disposal. One vendor succeeds by driving another out of public favour. Advertising always reminds me of a roulette-table. ”

“ There is a kind of silliness, I know of no better word to use, about the whole Papal policy at the present day, which is really aggravating. It is silly to rave about the martyr’s crown and the cruel stake, when nobody has the slightest intention of hurting a hair of your head; silly to talk of your paternal love when your provinces are in arms against your “cruel mercies;” silly to boast of your independence when you are guarded in your own capital against your own subjects by foreign troops; silly, in fact, to bark when you cannot bite, to lie when you cannot deceive. ”

“ Flower-sellers, vendors of confetti, hawkers of papers, letters-out of chairs and benches, itinerant minstrels, perambulating cigar-merchants, pedlars, beggars, errand-boys, and a hundred other obscure traders, pick up, heaven knows how! enough in Carnival time to tide them over the dead summer-season. So both necessity and pleasure, want and luxury, will combine to swell the crowd; and the pageant will be gay enough for the Vatican to say that its faithful subjects are loyal and satisfied. ”

“ The National Government exists by sufferance of popular opinion, and is powerful only so long as it acts in consistence with that opinion. Now public sentiment will indorse heartily the assassination of a spy or a traitor; but it will not sanction the infliction of the punishment of death on persons whose only crime is their defencelessness. On various occasions the National Government has endeavoured to forbid petty tradesmen and mechanics from rendering compulsory service to the Russians. ”

“ If any English traveller can say the same about a journey from London to Aberdeen, he has been much more fortunate in his experiences than it has fallen to my lot to be. On many, if not all, of the French lines there is a system in vogue which very nearly ensures punctuality. Whenever a train is exact to its time between station and station, the drivers receive an additional gratuity of a centime for every kilometre run over. To the companies the extra cost is unimportant compared with the saving gained in many respects by the additional regularity thus acquired. ”

“ Subject to these slight restraints, the wild revel and the joyous licence of the Carnival was to rule unbridled. In the words of a Papal writer in the government gazette of Venice: “The festival is to be celebrated in full vigour, except that no masks are allowed, as the fashion for them has lately gone out. There will be, however, disguises and fancy dresses, confetti, bouquets, races, moccoletti, public and private balls, and, in short, every amusement of the Carnival time.” What more could be required by a happy and contented people? ”

“ Now, the guests of an American hotel in the far West would be ashamed to devour a dinner in the time that our railway passengers are expected to consume theirs in. Any man who can eat several slices of under-done meat, a lump of heavy pudding, and a pound of bread and cheese, in five minutes, without feeling the worse for it afterwards, must be possessed of more than mortal powers of digestion. The consequence of this state of things is, that people eat less and less at our English refreshment rooms. ”

“ Around and about me there is a great crowd. Every niche and cornice where foot can stand is occupied. A deep gloom hangs around the darkened church, and from out the lofty vaulted roof thousands of lamps hang glimmering like stars upon a moonless sky. Ever and anon the organ peals forth triumphantly, and the clouds of incense rise fitfully; and as the bell rings, and the host is raised on high, you see above the bowed heads of the swaying crowd the figure of the excommunicated King, kneeling on the altar-steps. ”