Romany

“ I only give a sixpence to a beggar, but I stand a pash-korauna to any Romany who’s a pal and amāl.”
This pleasing discourse made us very good friends, and, as I kept my eyes sharply fixed on her viper orbs with an air of intense suspicion, everything like ill-feeling or distrust naturally vanished from her mind; for it is of the nature of the Romanys and all their kind to like those whom they respect, and respect those whom they cannot deceive, and to measure mankind exactly by their capacity of being taken in, especially by themselves. ”

“ By long and by last, if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so, my Romany ‘chal’.”
His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her father—“Hush!” she said maliciously, “he has come a long way for naught. It will be longer going back. Let him have his say. It is his capital. He has only breath and beauty.” ”

“ It is a good life which has many such memories.
I was walking a day or two after with an English friend, who was also a delegate to the International Literary Congress, in the Exhibition, when we approached the side gate, or rear entrance of the Hungarian café. Six or seven dark and strange-looking men stood about, dressed in the uniform of a military band. I caught their glances, and saw that they were Romany. ”

“ Even now, Hal, I sometimes o' nights feels the bite here of the Romany Sap,' pointing to her bosom, 'and it's all along o' you, Hal, it's all along o' you, because I seem to be breaking the promise about Gorgios I made to my poor mammy.'
[Footnote: The Romany serpent, Conscience.]
'The Romany Sap? You mean the Romany conscience, I suppose, Sinfi: you mean the trouble a Romany feels when he has broken the Romany laws, when he has done wrong according to the Romany notions of right and wrong. ”

“ Why, after all, should not the Romans of history be a branch of these Romans? There were several points of similarity between them; if Roman matrons were chaste, both men and women were thieves. Old Rome was the thief of the world; yet still there were difficulties to be removed before I could persuade myself that the old Romans and my Romans were identical; and in trying to remove these difficulties, I felt my brain once more beginning to turn, and in haste took up another subject of meditation, and that was the patteran, and what Ursula had told me about it. ”

“ Wherever there is an open pic-nic on the Thames, or a country fair, or a regatta at this season, there are Romanys. Sometimes they appear looking like petty farmers, with a bad, or even a good, horse or two for sale. ”

“ And this man was Romayne! I had last met with him among his delightful works of art; an enthusiast in literature; the hospitable master of a house filled with comforts and luxuries to its remotest corner. And now I had seen what Rome had made of him.
“Yes,” said my companion, “the Ancient Church not only finds out the men who can best serve it, but develops qualities in those men of which they have been themselves unconscious. The advance which Roman Catholic Christianity has been, and is still, making has its intelligible reason. ”

“ What happier being in the world than that Roman could nature, could Rome ever have produced, if, after leading round the train of captives amid all the circumstance of war, he had breathed out his soul in glory, when just stepping down from his Teutonic car? ”

“ The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in “us,” seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence, — that tramp and march, — which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language, — make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. ”

“ In time Prince Roman, making an effort, would join now and again the family circle. But it was as if his heart and his mind had been buried in the family vault with the wife he had lost. He took to wandering in the woods with a gun, watched over secretly by one of the keepers, who would report in the evening that 'His Serenity has never fired a shot all day.' Sometimes walking to the stables in the morning he would order in subdued tones a horse to be saddled, wait switching his boot till it was led up to him, then mount without a word and ride out of the gates at a walking pace. ”

“ CHAPTER II THE APPIAN WAY
It was the proud boast of the ancient Romans that all roads led to their city. Rome was the centre and mistress of the world; and as the loneliest rill that rises in the bosom of the far-off mountain leads, if followed, to the ocean, so every path in the remotest corner of the vast empire conducted to the great gilded column in the Roman Forum, upon which all distances without the walls were marked. To the Romans the world is indebted for opening up communications with different countries. They were the great engineers and road-makers of antiquity. ”

“ Though the Romans are no more but a fable and an ornament of rhetoric, we have here their New England Farmer, the very manual those Roman farmers read, speaking as if they were to hear it, its voice not silenced, as if Rome were still the mistress of the world,—as fresh as a dripping dish-cloth from a Roman kitchen. ”

“ Had there been nothing left as a memorial of the Romans but that one relic—their immeasurable toga, [9] —we should have known that they were born and bred to idleness. In fact, except in war, the Roman never did anything at all but sun himself. Ut se apricaret was the final cause of peace in his opinion; in literal truth, that he might make an apricot of himself. The public rations at all times supported the poorest inhabitant of Rome if he were a citizen. ”

“ Under the latter head we consider the Roman as a citizen, and we examine the several classes of citizens, their obligations and their privileges; we study the form of their government, its officers and machinery, its legislative, judicial, and executive procedure, its revenues and expenditures, etc. It is evident that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the two branches of the subject: they cross each other at every turn. One scarcely knows, for example, under which head to put the religion of the Romans or their games in the circus. ”

“ The rise of the Roman power upon gentile institutions was a remarkable event in human experience. It is not singular that the incidents that accompanied the movement should have come to us tinctured with romance, not to say enshrouded in fable. Rome came into existence through a happy conception, ascribed to Romulus, and adopted by his successors, of concentrating the largest possible number of gentes in a new city, under one government, and with their united military forces under one commander. ”

“ Such was the pomp of Marius, but so closed not the line of the procession, for every soul of Rome’s vast population swelled it for miles in length; old tottering grandsires, men in the prime of manhood, youths in the flush of spring-time, boys, children, infants at the breast, matrons and brides and maidens—all ranks, all classes, all conditions—the proud, luxurious patrician, the turbulent democracy, mechanics from the suburbs and farmers from the colonies, and slaves and freedmen, all thronged exultingly the via Sacra, all swelled the shout for Marius. ”

“ And the Romans—the true Romans—of the Regola and the Popolo, of the Monti district and the Trevi district, who add the adjective Roman to their name like a title of nobility, who eat dumplings on Thursdays, tripe on Sundays, and lamb at all times, who like white wine and the fireworks at Sant' Angelo, who are proud of their March water, and calmly allow the beetles to swarm in their old houses, the sceptical, clever, impassive, and industrious Romans, who are good husbands and kind lovers, they certainly are not asleep. ”

“ Being eclectic, it embraced all gods,—although this is not to say that every Roman worshipped all of these,—and those peoples whom she conquered were not ravished with violence from their creeds and forced to kneel at unlike altars. Each nation might find a parallel for its gods in Rome's pantheon, and so might be brought without shock into Rome's fold. For, take a man's gods from him, whatsoever they may be that he worships, and give him nothing in return to which he can hold, and at once you take from him all that anchors him to the rationalities of life. ”

“ The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons, fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more possession. ”

“ When that effort is made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and the fifth century have come. For Rome the drama of a thousand years is ended: Rome is moribund and has but strength to die greatly, tragically. Would you see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly? Over a dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a torch seeks to read on the still brow the secret of his own destiny. ”

“ There is something melancholy in this journey over ruins: the Romans are like the remains of their city; the world passes at their feet. I picture those persons going back to their families in the various countries of Europe, the young 'Misses' returning to the midst of their fogs. If, by chance, thirty years hence, one of them is brought back to Italy, who will remember to have seen her in the palaces whose masters shall be no more. ”

“ There are far too many Romans," he continued, "who have no family altar nor ancestral tomb. They have fought well for Rome, and are falsely called the masters of the world; but the results of [Pg 168] their fighting can only be seen in the luxury of the great, while not one of them has a clod of dirt to call his own." ”

“ The air of Rome inspires lassitude, and renders the inhabitants inert. The Romans who live in the healthy parts of the city are all inclined to grow fat; their language, unidiomatic, and, so to speak, long-winded in its expressions, is pronounced with a grace of accent, a slow and melodious emphasis, that renders it more agreeable than any other Italian to the ears of strangers, and is strangely in harmony with the dreamy contentment of their minds. ”

“ The germ of the old Roman race which civilized the world is still alive, and is quickly rising to a new life—lifting itself, after twenty centuries of burial, from the tomb of ignorance and oppression. Here is the centre of art and of the world's past recollections; here is spoken in its purity the most beautiful of languages; here are a fine climate and a fine country; and here are being strengthened the power and the splendour of united Italy.
THE WALLS OF ROME. FIRST WALL—ROMA QUADRATA.
The city of Romulus, upon the Palatine Hill, was called from its shape Roma Quadrata. ”

“ No tidings I have heard for a great while past sounded so good and fair as the news that presently we shall have strife with Rome. These Romans are a people whom I neither love with my heart, nor esteem in my mind, but hate because they are very orgulous and proud. Upright folk should avoid their fellowship, for they are an evil and a covetous race, caring for no other matter but to heap treasure together, and add to their store. The emperor of this people, by fraud and deceit, has fastened this quarrel upon us, sending you letters with an embassy. ”

“ A fouler brotherhood than they the lords of Heaven, Rome does not contain. Am I to be called upon to worship a set of wretches chargeable with all the crimes and vices to be found on earth? It is this accursed idolatry, O Romans, that has sunk you so low in sin! They are your lewd, and drunken, and savage deities, who have taught you all your refinement in wickedness ”

“ And Romulus, making a vow to Jupiter, if he should conquer, to carry, himself, and dedicate his adversary's armor to his honor, overcame him in combat, and, a battle ensuing, routed his army also, and then took his city; but did those he found in it no injury, only commanded them to demolish the place and attend him to Rome, there to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens. And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself. ”

“ It is by the aimless flânerie which leaves you free to follow capriciously every hint of entertainment that you get to know Rome. The greater part of the life about you goes on in the streets; and for an observer fresh from a country in which town scenery is at the least monotonous incident and character and picture seem to abound. I become conscious with compunction, let me hasten to add, that I have launched myself thus on the subject of Roman churches and Roman walks without so much as a preliminary allusion to St. Peter’s. ”

“ The Roman pride, however, is consistent with hearty ways and with great frankness and sincerity of nature. The Roman, indeed, is not only famous for his bad language, but for his out-spokenness in all directions: he tells you just what he thinks of you, and will by no means conceal his own humble origin when he becomes a great man; he will not insist that his ancestor was a count or at least a baron as an Italian from another province might do. ”