Chapter II: Street-Music in Rome (1)

Whoever has passed the month of December in Rome will remember to have been awakened from his morning-dreams by the gay notes of the _pifferari_ playing in the streets below, before the shrines of the Madonna and Bambino,--and the strains of one set of performers will scarcely have ceased, before the distant notes of another set of pilgrims will be heard to continue the well-known _novena_. The _pifferari_ are generally _contadini_ of the Abruzzi Mountains, who, at the season of Advent, leave their home to make a pilgrimage to Rome,-- stopping before all the wayside shrines, as they journey along, to pay their glad music of welcome to the Virgin, and the coming Messiah. Their song is called a _novena_, from its being sung for nine consecutive days,--first, for nine days previous to the Festa of the Madonna, which occurs on the 8th of December, and afterwards for the nine days preceding Christmas. The same words and music serve, however, for both celebrations. The _pifferari_ always go in couples, one playing on the _zampogna_, or bagpipe, the bass and treble accompaniment, and the other on the _piffero_, or pastoral pipe, which carries the air; and for the month before Christmas the sound of their instruments resounds through the streets of Rome, wherever there is a shrine,--whether at the corners of the streets, in the depths of the shops, down little lanes, in the centre of the Corso, in the interior courts of the palaces, or on the stairways of private houses.

Their costume is extremely picturesque. On their heads they wear conical felt hats adorned with a frayed peacock's feather, or a faded band of red cords and tassels,--their bodies are clad in red waistcoats, blue jackets, and small-clothes of skin or yellowish homespun cloth,--skin sandals are bound to their feet with cords that interlace each other up the leg as far as the knee,--and over all is worn a long brown or blue cloak with a short cape, buckled closely round the neck. Sometimes, but rarely, this cloak is of a deep red with a scalloped cape. As they stand before the pictures of the Madonna, their hats placed on the ground before them, and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing their _novena_, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint. Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and, worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the shops and regular models offer a poor substitute. It is the old story again. The new and clean is not so paintable, not so picturesque, as the tarnished and soiled. The worn blue of the cloak is softened by the dull gray of the threads beneath,--patches of various colors are often let into the jacket or breeches,--the hat is lustreless from age, and rusty as an old wall,--and the first vivid red of the waistcoat is toned by constant use to a purely pictorial hue. Besides, the true _pifferaro_ wears his costume as if it belonged to him and had always been worn by him,--so that it has none of that got-up look which spoils everything. From the sandals and corded leggings, which, in the Neapolitan dialect, are termed _cioce_, the _pifferari_ are often called _ciociari_.

Their Christmas pilgrimages are by no means prompted by purely religious motives, though, undoubtedly, such considerations have some weight with them, the common peasantry being a religiously inclined people, and often making pilgrimages simply from a sense of duty and propriety. But in these wanderings to Rome, their principal object is to earn a little money to support them during the winter months, when their "occupation is gone." As they are hired in Rome by the owners of the various houses adorned with a Madonna-shrine (of which there are over fifteen hundred in the city) to play before them at the rate of a paul or so for each full _novena_, and as they can easily play before thirty or forty a day, they often return, if their luck is good, with a tolerable little sum in their pockets. Besides this, they often stand as models, if they are good-looking fellows, and thus add to their store; and then again, the _forestieri_ (for, as the ancient Romans called strangers _barbari_, so their descendants call them _foresters_, wood-men, wild-men) occasionally drop _baiocchi_ and pauls into their hats, still further to increase it.

Sometimes it is a father and son who play together, but oftener two old friends who make the pilgrimage in pairs. This morning, as I was going out for a walk round the walls, two admirable specimens of the _pifferari_ were performing the _novena_ before a shrine at the corner of the street. The player of the _zampogna_ was an old man, with a sad, but very amiable face, who droned out the bass and treble in a most earnest and deprecatory manner. He looked as if he had stood still, tending his sheep, nearly all his life, until the peace and quiet of Nature had sunk into his being, or, if you will, until he had become assimilated to the animals he tended. The other, who played the _piffero_, was a man of middle age, stout, vigorous, with a forest of tangled black hair, and dark quick eyes that were fixed steadily on the Virgin, while he blew and vexed the little brown pipe with rapid runs and nervous _fioriture_, until great drops of sweat dripped from its round open mouth. Sometimes, when he could not play fast enough to satisfy his eagerness, he ran his finger up and down the vents. Then, suddenly lowering his instrument, he would scream, in a strong peasant-voice, verse after verse of the _novena_, to the accompaniment of the _zampogna_. One was like a slow old Italian _vettura_ all lumbered with luggage and held back by its drag; the other panting and nervous at his work as an American locomotive, and as constantly running off the rails. Both, however, were very earnest at their occupation. As they stood there playing, a little group gathered round. A scamp of a boy left his sport to come and beat time with a stick on the stone step before them; several children clustered near; and two or three women, with rosy infants in their arms, also paused to listen and sympathize. At last the playing ceased. The _pifferari_ took up their hats and looked smilingly round at us.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

"_Eh!_" said the _piffero_, showing all his teeth, and shrugging his shoulders good-naturedly, while the other echoed the pantomime.

"_Dal Regno_"--for so the Abruzzi peasants call the kingdom of Naples.

"And do you come every year?"

"_Sì, Signore. Lui_" (indicating his friend) "_ed io_" (pointing to himself) "_siam' compagni per trenta tre anni. E siam' venut' a Roma per far la noven' ogn' anno."[B]

[Footnote B: "He and I have been companions for thirty-three years, and every year we have come to Rome to play the _novena_."]

To this the old _zampogna_ bent his head on one side, and said, assentingly,--"_Eh! per trenta tre anni._"--

And, "_Ecco_," continued the _piffero_, bursting in before the _zampogna_ could go on, and pointing to two stalwart youths of about twenty-two or-three years of age, who at this moment came up the street with their instruments,--"These are our two sons. He is mine,"--indicating one with his reversed thumb; "and that other is his,"--jerking his head towards his companion. "And they, too, are going to play in company, as we do."

"For thirty-three years more, let us hope," said I.

"_Eh! speriamo_," (Let us hope so,) was the answer of the _piffero_, as he showed all his teeth in the broadest of smiles. Then, with a motion of his hand, he set both the young men going, he himself joining in, straining out his cheeks, blowing all the breath of his body into the little pipe, and running up and down the vents with a sliding finger, until finally he brought up against a high, shrill note, to which he gave the full force of his lungs, and, after holding it in loud blast for a moment, startled us by breaking off, without gradation, into a silence as sudden as if the music had snapped short off, like a pipe-stem.

On further conversation with my _ciociari_, I found that they came yearly from Sora, a town in the Abruzzi, about one hundred miles from Rome, making the journey on foot, and picking up by the way whatever trifle of copper they could. In this manner they travelled the whole distance in five days, living upon onions, lettuce, oil, and black bread. They were now singing the second _novena_ for _Natale_, and, if one could judge from their manner and conversation, were quite content with what they had earned. I invited them up into my room, and there in the pleasantest way they stunned us with the noise of both their instruments, to the great delight of the children and the astonishment of the servants, for whom these common things had worn out their charm by constant repetition. At my request, they repeated the words of the _novena_ they had been singing, and I took them down from their lips. After eliminating the wonderful _m-ms_ of the Neapolitan dialect, in which all the words lay imbedded like shells in the sand, and supplying some of the curious elisions with which those Abruzzi Procrusteans recklessly cut away the polysyllables, so as to bring them within the rythmic compass, they ran thus:--

"Verginella figlia di Sant' Anna,
Nella ventre portasti il buon Gesù.
Si parturisti sotto la capanna,
E dov' mangiav'no lo bue e 1' asinello.

"Quel Angelo gridava: 'Venite, Santi!
'Chè andato Gesù dentro la capanna,
Ma guardate Vergine beata,
Che in ciel in terra sia nostr' avvocata!

"San Giuseppe andava in compagnia,
Si trovò al partorir di Maria.
La notte di natale è notte santa--
Lo Padre e 1' Figliolo e lo Spirito Santo.
'Sta la ragione che abbiamo cantato;
Sia a Gesù bambino rappresentata."

The sudden introduction of "_Quel Angelo_" in this song reminds us of a similar felicity in the romantic ballad of "Lord Bateman," where we are surprised to learn that "_this Turk_," to whom no allusion had been previously made, "has one lovely daughter."

The air to which this is sung is very simple and sweet, though monotonous. Between the verses and at the close, a curious little _ritornello_ is played.

The wanderings of the _pifferari_ are by no means confined to the Roman States. Sometimes they stray "as far away as Paris is," and, wandering about in that gay capital, like children at a fair, play in the streets for chance _sous_, or stand as models to artists, who, having once been to Rome, hear with a longing Rome-sickness the old characteristic sounds of the _piffero_ and _zampogna_. Two of them I remember to have heard thus, as I was at work in my studio in Paris; and so vividly did they recall the old Roman time, that I called them in for a chat.

Wonderful was their speech. In the few months of their wandering, they had put into their Neapolitan dough various plums of French words, which, pronounced in their odd way, "suffered a change into something peculiarly rich and strange." One of them told me that his wife had just written to him by the hand of a _scrivano_, lamenting his absence, and praying him to send her his portrait. He had accordingly sent her a photograph in half-length. Some time afterwards she acknowledged the receipt of it, but indignantly remonstrated with him for sending her a picture "_che pareva guardando per la fenestra_" (which seemed to be looking out of the window,) as she oddly characterized a half-length, and praying to have his legs also in the next portrait. This same fellow, with his dull, amiable face, played the role of a ferocious wounded brigand dragged into concealment by his wife, in the studio of a friend next door; but, despite the savagery and danger of his counterfeited position, he was sure to be overpowered by sleep before he had been in it more than five minutes,--and if the artist's eye left him for a moment, he never failed to change his attitude for one more fitted to his own somnolent propensities than for the picture.

The _pifferari_ are by no means the only street-musicians in Rome, though they take the city by storm at Christmas. Every day under my window comes a band of four or five, who play airs and concerted pieces from the operas,--and a precious work they make of it sometimes! Not only do the instruments go very badly together, but the parts they play are not arranged for them. A violone grunts out a low accompaniment to a vinegar-sharp violin which saws out the air, while a trumpet blares in at intervals to endeavor to unite the two, and a flute does what it can, but not what it would. Sometimes, instead of a violone, a hoarse trombone, with a violent cold in the head, snorts out the bass impatiently, gets ludicrously uncontrollable and boastful at times, and is always so choleric, that, instead of waiting for the _cadenzas_ to finish, it bursts in, knocks them over as by a blow on the head, roars away on false intervals, and overwhelms every other voice with its own noisy vociferation. The harmonic arrangements are very odd. Each instrument seems to consider itself ill-treated when reduced to an accompaniment or bass, and is constantly endeavoring, however unfitted for it, to get possession of the air,--the melody being, for all Italians, the principal object. The violin, however, weak of voice as it is, always carries the day, and the other instruments steal discontentedly back to their secondary places, the snuffy old violone keeping up a constant growl at its ill luck, and the trombone now and then leaping out like a tiger on its prey.

Far better and more characteristic are the ballad-singers, who generally go in couples,--an old man, dim of sight, perhaps blind, who plays the violin, and his wife or daughter, who has a guitar, tamborello, or at times a mandolin. Sometimes a little girl accompanies them, sings with them, and carries round a tin box, or the tamborello, to collect _baiocchi_. They sing long ballads to popular melodies, some of which are very pretty and gay, and for a _baiocco_ they sell a sheet containing the printed words of the song. Sometimes it is in the form of a dialogue,--either a love-making, a quarrel, a reconciliation, or a leave-taking,--each singer taking an alternate verse. Sometimes it is a story with a chorus, or a religious conversation-ballad, or a story of a saint, or from the Bible. Those drawn from the Bible are generally very curious paraphrases of the original simple text, turned into the simplest and commonest idioms of the people;--one of them may be found in the Appendix to Goethe's "Italienische Reise." These Roman ballads and popular songs, so far as I am able to learn, have never been collected. Many of them do not exist in print, and are only traditional and caught from mouth to mouth. This is particularly the case with those in the Romanesque dialect, which are replete with the peculiar wit and spirit of the country. But the memory of man is too perilous a repository for such interesting material; and it is greatly to be wished that some clever Italian, who is fitted for the task, would interest himself to collect them and give them a permanent place in the literature of his language.

But to return to our ballad-singers, whom we have left in the middle of their song, and who are now finishing. A crowd has gathered round them, as usual; out of the windows and from the balconies lean the occupants of the houses near by, and the _baiocchi_ thrown by them ring on the pavement below. With rather Stentorian voices they have been singing a dialogue which is most elaborately entitled a "Canzonetta Nuova, sopra un marinaro che da l' addio alla sua promessa sposa mentre egli deve partire per la via di Levante. Sdegno, pace, e matrimonio dilli medesimi con intercalare sull' aria moderna. Rime di Francesco Calzaroni." I give my _baiocco_ and receive in return a smiling "Grazie" and a copy of the song, which is adorned by a wood-cut of a ship in full sail.

Here is another, of a moral character, containing the sad history of Frederic the Gambler, who, to judge from the wood-cut accompanying the Canzonetta, must have been a ferocious fellow. He stands with his legs wide apart, in half-armor, a great sash tied over his shoulder and swinging round his legs, an immense sword at his side, and a great hat with two ostrich-feathers on his head, looking the very type of a "swashing blade."

The singers of longer ballads carry about with them sometimes a series of rudely-executed illustrations of different incidents in the story, painted in distemper and pasted on a large pasteboard frame, which is hung against a wall or on a stand planted behind the singer in the ground. These he pauses now and then in his song to explain to the audience, and they are sure to draw a crowd.

As summer comes on and the evenings grow warm, begin the street serenades,--sometimes like that of Lindoro in the opening of the "Barbiere di Sevilla," but generally with only one voice, accompanied by a guitar and a mandolin. These serenades are, for the most part, given by a lover or friend to his _innamorata_, and the words are expressive of the tender passion; but there are also _serenate di gelosia_, or satirical serenades, when the most impertinent and stinging verses are sung. Long before arriving, the serenaders may be heard marching up the street to the thrum of their instruments. They then place themselves before the windows of the fair one, and, surrounded by a group of men and boys, make proclamation of their love in loud and often violent tones. It seems sometimes as if they considered the best method of expressing the intensity of their passion was by the volume of their voice. Certainly, in these cases, the light of love is not hidden under a bushel. Among the Trasteverini, particularly, these serenades are common. Some of them are very clever in their improvisations and imitations of different dialects, particularly of the Neapolitan, in which there are so many charming songs. Their skill in improvisation, however, is not generally displayed in their serenades, but in the _osterias_, during the evenings of the _festas_ in summer. There it is that their quickness and epigrammatic turn of expression are best seen. Two disputants will, when in good-humor and warmed with wine, string off verse after verse at each other's expense, full of point and fun,--the guitar burring along in the intervals, and a chorus of laughter saluting every good hit.

In many of the back streets and squares of the city, fountains jet out of lions' heads into great oblong stone cisterns, often sufficiently large to accommodate some thirty washerwomen at once. Here the common people resort to wash their clothes, and with great laughter and merriment amuse themselves while at their work by improvising verses, sometimes with rhyme, sometimes without, at the expense of each other, or perhaps of the passerby,--particularly if he happen to be a gaping _forestiere_, to whom their language is unintelligible. They stand on an elevated stone step, so as to bring the cistern about mid-height of their body, and on the rough inclined level of its rim they slash and roll the clothes, or, opening them, flaunt them into the water, or gather them together, lifting their arms high above their heads, and always treating them with a violence which nothing but the coarsest material can resist. The air to which they chant their couplets is almost always a Campagna melody. Sharp attacks are given and as sharp _répliques_ received, in exceeding good-humor; and when there is little wit, there is sure to be much laughter. The salt is oftentimes pretty coarse, but it serves its purpose.

A remarkable trait among the Italians is the good-nature with which they take personal jokes, and their callousness to ridicule of personal defects. Jests which would provoke a blow from an Anglo-Saxon, or wound and rankle in the memory for life, are here taken in good part. A cripple often joins in the laugh at his own deformity; and the rough carelessness with which such personal misfortunes are alluded to is amazing to us of a more sensitive organization. I well remember the extreme difficulty I once had in breaking an Italian servant of the habit of announcing an acquaintance, whose foreign name he could not pronounce, and who had the misfortune to be humpbacked, as "_quel gobbo_" (that hunchback). He could not understand why he should not call him a _gobbo_, if he was a _gobbo_; and in spite of all I could do, he would often open the door and say, "_Signore, quel gobbo desidera farle una visita_," (that hunchback wishes to make you a visit,) when "_quel gobbo_" was right on his heels. The Italians are also singularly free from that intense self-consciousness which runs in our English blood, and is the root of shyness, awkwardness, and affectation. Unconsciousness is the secret of grace, freedom, and simplicity. We never forget ourselves. The Italians always forget themselves. They are sometimes proud, very seldom vain, and never affected. The converse peculiarity follows, of course. Having no self-consciousness, they are as little sensitive to their defects as vain of their charms. The models who come to the studios, and who have been selected for their beauty, despite the silent flattery incident to their very profession, and the lavish praise they constantly hear expressed, are always simple, natural, and unaffected. If you tell them they are very beautiful, they say, _"Ma che?"_ deprecatorily, or perhaps admit the fact. But they are better pleased to have their dress admired than their faces. Of the former they are vain, of the latter they are not. For the most part, I think they rather wonder what it is we admire in them and think worthy of perpetuating in stone or color. The other day I was so much struck with the ear of a model, from whom I was working, that I said to her,--"You have, without exception, the most beautiful ear I ever saw." She laughed somewhat derisively, and said, _"Ma che?"_--"It does not seem to give you any pleasure," I continued, "to know that you have a very handsome ear."--_"Che mi importa,"_ answered she, _"se sia bello o brutto? È sempre lo stesso, brutto o bello, bello o brutto. Ecco!"_[C] --"You don't care, then, whether you are handsome or ugly?"--_"Eh! cosa a me m'importa,--se sono brutto o bello non so,--a me è lo stesso."_ This was all I could get from her.

[Footnote C: "What do I care whether it is handsome or ugly? It's all the same to me,--ugly or handsome,--handsome or ugly. There!"]

But to return to our washerwomen. In every country-town a large washing-cistern is always provided by the authorities for public use, and, at all hours of the day, the picturesque figures of the peasants of every age, from the old hag, whose skin is like a brown and crumpled palimpsest, (where Anacreontic verses are overwritten by a dull, monkish sermon,) to the round, dark-eyed girl, with broad, straight back and shining hair, may be seen gathered around it,--their heads protected from the sun by their folded _tovaglia_, their skirts knotted up behind, and their waists embraced by stiff, red _busti_. Their work is always enlivened by song,--and when their clothes are all washed, the basket is lifted to the head, and home they march, stalwart and majestic, like Roman caryatides. The sharp Italian sun shining on their dark faces and vivid costumes, or flashing into the fountain, and basking on the gray, weed-covered walls, makes a picture which is often enchanting in its color. At the Emissary by Albano, where the waters from the lake are emptied into a huge cistern through the old conduit built by the ancient Romans to sink the level of the lake, I have watched by the hour together these strange pictorial groups, as they sang and thrashed the clothes they were engaged in washing; while over them, in the foreground, the great gray tower and granary, once a castle, lifted itself in strong light and shade against the peerless blue sky, while rolling hills beyond, covered with the pale green foliage of rounded olives, formed the characteristic background. Sometimes a _contadino_, mounted on the crupper of his donkey, would pause in the sun to chat awhile with the women. The children, meanwhile, sprawled and played upon the grass, and the song and chat at the fountain would not unfrequently be interrupted by a shrill scream from one of the mothers, to stop a quarrel, or to silence a cry which showed the stoutness of their little lungs.

The cobblers of Rome are also a gay and singing set. They do not imprison themselves in a dark cage of a shop, but sit _"sub Jove"_ where they may enjoy the life of the street and all the "skyey influences." Their benches are generally placed near the _portone_ of some palace, so that they may draw them under shelter when it rains. Here all day they sit and draw their waxed-ends and sing,--a row of battered-looking boots and shoes ranged along on the ground beside them, and waiting for their turn, being their only stock in trade.

They commonly have enough to do, and, as they pay nothing for shop-rent, every _baiocco_ they get is nearly clear profit. They are generally as poor as Job's cat; but they are far happier than the proprietor of that interesting animal. Figaro is a high ideal of this class, and about as much like them as Raffaello's angels are like Jeames Yellowplush. What the cobblers and Figaro have in common is song and a love of scandal. One admirable specimen of this class sits at the corner of the Via Felice and Capo le Case, with his bench backed against the gray wall. He is an oldish man, with a long, gray beard and a quizzical face,--a sort of Hans Sachs, who turns all his life into verse and song. When he comes out in the morning, he chants a domestic idyl, in which he narrates in verse the events of his household, and the differences and agreements of himself and his wife, whom I take to be a pure invention. This over, he changes into song everything and every person that passes before him. Nothing that is odd, fantastic, or absurd escapes him, or fails to be chronicled and sarcastically commented on in his verse. So he sits all day long, his mind like a kaleidoscope, changing all the odd bits of character which chance may show him into rhythmic forms, and chirps and sings as perpetually as the cricket. Friends he has without number, who stop before his bench, from which he administers poetical justice to all persons, to have a long chat, or sometimes to bring him a friendly token; and from the dark interior of his drawer he often brings forth an orange, or a bunch of grapes, or handful of chestnuts, supplied by them, as a dessert for the thick cabbage-soup which he eats at _mezzo giorno_.

In the busiest street of Rome, the pure Campagna song may often be heard from the throat of some _contadino_, as he slowly rumbles along in his loaded wine-cart,--the little dog at his side barking a sympathetic chorus. This song is rude enough, and seems in measure founded upon the Church chant. It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred chromatic. No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up again in the _prestissimo_ time and "slowed" down to the same dismal conclusion. Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable. But when refined by distance, it has a sad and pleasant effect, and seems to belong to the place,--the long wail at the close being the very type of the melancholy stretches of the Campagna. In the same way I have frequently thought that the _Jodeln_ of the Swiss was an imitation of the echo of the mountains, each note repeated first in octave, or fifth, and then in its third below. The Campagna song is to be heard not only in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country,--in the vineyards, in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working together, and from solitary _contadini_,--wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost. It was only the other day, at nightfall, that I was sauntering out on the desolate Campagna towards Civita Vecchia. The shadows were deepening and the mists beginning to creep whitely along the deep hollows. Everything was dreary and melancholy enough. As I paused to listen to the solitude, I heard the grind of a distant invisible cart, and the sound of a distant voice singing. Slowly the cart came up over the crest of the hill, a dark spot against the twilight sky, and mounted on the top of a load of brushwood sat a _contadino_, who was singing to himself these words,--not very consolatory, perhaps, but so completely in harmony with the scene and the time that they struck me forcibly:--

"E, bella, tu non piangera-a-a-i,
Sul giorno ch'io saro mor-or-or-to-o-o-o-o-o."[D]

[Footnote D:

"And, dearest, you will never weep for me-e-e-e,
The day when I shall be no mo-o-o-ore."]

Whether this constant habit of song among the Southern people, while at their work, indicates happiness and content, I will not undertake to say; but it is pleasanter in effect than the sad silence in which we Anglo-Saxons perform our tasks,--and it seems to show a less harassed and anxious spirit. But I feel quite sure that these people are more easily pleased, contented with less, less morose, and less envious of the ranks above them, than we are. They give little thought to the differences of caste, have little ambition to make fortunes or rise out of their condition, and are satisfied with the commonest fare, if they can get enough of it. The demon of dissatisfaction never harries them. When you speak to them, they answer with a smile which is nowhere else to be found. The nation is old, but the people are children in disposition. Their character is like their climate, generally sunny,--subject to violent occasional storms, but never growling life away in an uncomfortable drizzle of discontent. They live upon Nature, --sympathize with it and love it,--are susceptible to the least touch of beauty,--are ardent, if not enduring, in their affectations,--and, unless provoked and irritated, are very peaceful and amiable. The flaw in their nature is jealousy, and it is a great flaw. Their want of truth is the result of their education. We who are of the more active and busy nations despise them for not having that irritated discontent which urges us forward to change our condition; and we think our ambition better than their supineness. But there is good in both. We do more,--they enjoy more; we make violent efforts to be happy,--invent, create, labor, to arrive at that quiet enjoyment which they own without struggle, and which our anxious strife unfits us to enjoy when the means for it are obtained. The general, popular idea, that an Italian is quarrelsome, and ill-tempered, and that the best are only bandits in disguise, is quite a mistake; and when studied as they exist out of the track of travel, where they are often debased and denaturalized, they will be found to be simple, kind-hearted, and generous.

A LETTER TO A DYSPEPTIC.

Yes, my dear Dolorosus, I commiserate you. I regard your case, perhaps, with even sadder emotions than that excellent family-physician who has been sounding its depths these four years with a golden plummet, and has never yet touched bottom. From those generous confidences which, in common with most of your personal acquaintances, I daily share, I am satisfied that no description can do justice to your physical disintegration, unless it be the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds with which Mr. Addison winds up Cato's Soliloquy. So far as I can ascertain, there is not an organ of your internal structure which is in its right place, at present, or which could perform any particular service, if it were there. In the extensive library of medical almanacs and circulars which I find daily deposited by travelling agents at my front door, among all the agonizing vignettes of diseases which adorn their covers, and which Irish Bridget daily studies with inexperienced enjoyment in the front entry, there is no case which seems to afford a parallel to yours. I found it stated in one of these works, the other day, that there is iron enough in the blood of twenty-four men to make a broadsword; but I am satisfied that it would be impossible to extract enough from the veins of yourself and your whole family to construct a crochet-needle for your eldest daughter. And I am quite confident, that, if all the four hundred muscles of your present body were twisted together by a rope-maker, they would not furnish that patient young laborer with a needleful of thread.

You are undoubtedly, as you claim, a martyr to Dyspepsia; or if you prefer any other technical name for your disease or diseases, I will acquiesce in any, except, perhaps, the word "Neurology," which I must regard as foreign to etymological science, if not to medical. Your case, you think, is hard. I should think it would be. Yet I am impressed by it, I must admit, as was our adopted fellow-citizen by the contemplation of Niagara. He, you remember, when pressed to admire the eternal plunge of the falling water, could only inquire, with serene acquiescence in natural laws, "And what's to hinder?" I confess myself moved to similar reflections by your disease and its history. My dear Dolorosus, can you acquaint me with any reason, in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, why you should _not_ have dyspepsia?

My thoughts involuntarily wander back to that golden period, five years ago, when I spent one night and day beneath your hospitable roof. I arrived, I remember, late in the evening. The bed-room to which you kindly conducted me, after a light but wholesome supper of doughnuts and cheese, was pleasing in respect to furniture, but questionable in regard to physiology. The house was not more than twenty years old, and the chamber must therefore have been aired within that distance of time, but not, I should have judged, more recently. Perhaps its close, oppressive atmosphere could not have been analyzed into as many separate odors as Coleridge distinguished in Cologne,--but I could easily identify aromatic vinegar, damp straw, lemons, and dyed silk gowns. And, as each of the windows was carefully nailed down, there were no obvious means of obtaining fresh air, save that ventilator said to be used by an eminent lady in railway-cars,--the human elbow. The lower bed was of straw, the upper of feathers, whose extreme heat kept me awake for a portion of the night, and whose abundant fluffy exhalations suggested incipient asthma during another portion. On rising from these rather unrefreshing slumbers, I performed my morning ablutions with the aid of some three teacupsful of dusty water,--for the pitcher probably held that quantity,--availing myself, also, of something which hung over an elegant towel-horse, and which, though I at first took it for a child's handkerchief, proved on inspection to be "Chamber Towel, No. 1."

I remember, as I entered the breakfast-room, a vague steam as of frying sausages, which, creeping in from the neighboring kitchen, obscured in some degree the six white faces of your wife and children. The breakfast-table was amply covered, for you were always what is termed by judicious housewives "a good provider." I remember how the beefsteak (for the sausages were especially destined for your two youngest Dolorosi, who were just recovering from the measles, and needed something light and palatable) vanished in large rectangular masses within your throat, drawn downward in a maelstrom of coffee;--only that the original whirlpool is, I believe, now proved to have been imaginary;--"that cup was a fiction, but this is reality." The resources of the house also afforded certain very hot biscuits or breadcakes, in a high state of saleratus;--indeed, it must have been from association with these, that certain yellow streaks in Mr. Ruskin's drawing of the rock, at the Athenaeum, awakened in me such an immediate sense of indigestion;--also fried potatoes, baked beans, mince-pie, and pickles. The children partook of these dainties largely, but without undue waste of time. They lingered at table precisely eight minutes, before setting out for school; though we, absorbed in conversation, remained at least ten;--after which we instantly hastened to your counting-room, where you, without a moment's delay, absorbed yourself in your ledger, while I flirted languidly with the "Daily Advertiser."

You bent over your desk the whole morning, occasionally having anxious consultations with certain sickly men whom I supposed to be superannuated bookkeepers, in impoverished circumstances, and rather pallid from the want of nutritious food. One of them, dressed in rusty black, with a flabby white neckcloth, I took for an ex-clergyman; he was absorbed in the last number of the "Independent," though I observed, at length, that he was only studying the list of failures, a department to which, as it struck me, he himself peculiarly appertained. All of these, I afterwards ascertained from your office-boy, were eminent capitalists; something had gone wrong in the market,--not in the meat-market, as I should have supposed from their appearance, but in the money-market. I believe that there was some sudden fall in the price of indigo. I know you looked exceedingly blue as we walked home to dinner.

Dinner was ready the instant we opened the front door. I expected as much; I knew the pale, speechless woman who sat at the head of your table would make sure of punctuality, if she died for it. We took our seats without a word. The party was smaller than at breakfast. Two of the children had staid at school, having their luncheon-baskets well filled from the cold remains of breakfast. Your eldest girl, Angelina, aged ten, one of those premature little grown women who have learned from the cradle that man is born to eat pastry and woman to make it, postponed her small repast till an indefinite future, and sat meekly ready to attend upon our wants. Nathaniel, a thin boy of eight, also partook but slightly, having impaired his appetite, his mother suspected, by a copious luncheon of cold baked beans and vinegar, on his return from school. The two youngest (twins) had relapsed to their couches soon after breakfast, in consequence of excess of sausage.

You were quite agreeable in conversation, I remember, after the first onset of appetite was checked. You gave me your whole theory of the indigo crisis, with minute details, statistical and geographical, of the financial condition and supposed present location of your principal absconding debtors. This served for what is called, at public dinners, the intellectual feast; while the carnal appetite was satisfied with fried pork, ditto roasted, strong coffee, turnips, potatoes, and a good deal of gravy. For dessert, (at which point Nathaniel regained his appetite,) we had mince-pie, apple-pie, and lemon-pie, the latter being a structure of a two-story description, an additional staging of crust being somehow inserted between upper and under. We lingered long at that noon meal,--fifteen minutes, at the very least; for you hospitably said that you did not have these little social festivals very often,--owing to frequent illness in the family, and other causes,--and mast make the most of it.

I did not see much of you during that afternoon; it was a magnificent day, and I said, that, being a visitor, I would look about and see the new buildings. The truth was, I felt a sneaking desire to witness the match-game on the Common, between the Union Base-Ball Club, No. 1, of Ward Eleven, and the Excelsiors of Smithville. I remember that you looked a little dissatisfied, when I came into the counting-room, and rather shook your head over my narrative (perhaps too impassioned) of the events of the game. "Those young fellows," said you, "may not _all_ be shiftless, dissipated characters, _yet_,--but see what it comes to! They a'n't content with wasting their time,--they kill it, Sir, actually kill it!" When I thought of the manly figures and handsome, eager faces of my friends of the "Union" and the "Excelsior,"--the Excelsiors won by ten tallies, I should say, the return match to come off at Smithville the next month,--and then looked at the meagre form and wan countenance of their critic, I thought to myself, "Dolorosus, my boy, you are killing something besides Time, if you only knew it."

However, indigo had risen again, and your spirits also. As we walked home, you gave me a precise exhibit of your income and expenditures for the last five years, and a prospective sketch of the same for the next ten; winding up with an incidental delineation of the importance, to a man of business, of a good pew in some respectable place of worship. We found Mrs. D., as usual, ready at the table; we partook of pound-cake (or pound-and-a-half, I should say) and sundry hot cups of a very Cisatlantic beverage, called by the Chinese epithet of tea,--and went, immediately after, to a prayer-meeting. The church or chapel was much crowded, and there was a certain something in the atmosphere which seemed to disqualify my faculties from comprehending a single word that was spoken. It certainly was not that the ventilators were closed, for there were none. The minister occasionally requested that the windows might be let down a little, and the deacons invariably closed them again when he looked the other way. At intervals, females were carried out, in a motionless condition,--not, as it appeared, from conviction of sin, but from faintness. You sat, absorbed in thought, with your eyes closed, and seemed not to observe them. I remember that you were very much shocked when I suggested that the breath of an average sinner exhausted atmospheric air at the rate of a hogshead an hour, and asked you how much allowance the laws of the universe made for the lungs of church-members? I do not recall your precise words, but I remember that I finally found it expedient, as I was to leave for home in the early train, to spend that night at the neighboring hotel, where I indulged, on an excellent mattress, in a slumber so profound, that it seemed next morning as if I ought, as Dick Swiveller suggested to the single gentleman, to pay for a double-bedded room.

Well, that is all over now. You have given up business, from ill health, and exhibit a ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five. Your dreams of the forthcoming ten years have not been exactly fulfilled; you have not precisely retired on a competency, because the competency retired from you. Indeed, the suddenness with which your physician compelled you to close up your business left it closed rather imperfectly, so that most of the profits are found to have leaked out. You are economizing rather strictly, just now, in respect to everything but doctors' bills. The maternal Dolorosa is boarding somewhere in the country, where the children certainly will not have more indigestible food than they had at home, and may get less of it in quantity,--to say nothing of more air and exercise to aid digestion. They are not, however, in perfect condition. The twins are just getting up from scarlet fever; Nathaniel has been advised to leave school for a time; and something is thought to be the matter with Angelina's back. Meanwhile, you are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas.

You are learning, through all this, the sagest maxims of resignation, and trying to apply them. "Life is hard, but short," you say; "Providence is inscrutable; we must submit to its mysterious decrees." Would it not be better, my dear Dolorosus, to say instead, "Life is noble and immortal; God is good; we must obey his plain laws, or accept the beneficent penalties"? The rise and fall of health are no more accidental than the rise and fall of indigo; and it is the duty of those concerned in either commodity to keep their eyes open, and learn the business intelligently. Of the three proverbial _desiderata_, it is as easy to be healthy as to be wealthy, and much easier than to be wise, except so far as health and wisdom mean the same thing. After health, indeed, the other necessaries of life are very simple, and easily obtained;--with moderate desires, regular employment, a loving home, correct theology, the right politics, and a year's subscription to the "Atlantic Monthly," I have no doubt that life, in this planet, may be as happy as in any other of the solar system, not excepting Neptune and the fifty-five asteroids.

You are possibly aware, my dear Dolorosus,--for I remember that you were destined by your parents for the physician of your native seaside village, until you found a more congenial avocation in curing mackerel,--that the ancient medals represented the goddess Hygeia with a serpent three times as large as that carried by Aesculapius, to denote the superiority of hygiene to medicine, prevention to cure. To seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora, and carried hope at the bottom of his medicine-chest, is really rather unpromising. This perpetual self-inspection of yours, registering your pulse thrice a day, as if it were a thermometer and you an observer for the Smithsonian,--these long consultations with the other patients in the dreary parlor of the infirmary, the morning devoted to debates on the nervous system, the afternoon to meditations on the stomach, and the evening to soliloquies on the spine,--will do you no good. The more you know, under these circumstances, the worse it will be for you. You will become like Boerhaave's hypochondriacal student, who, after every lecture, believed himself to be the victim of the particular disease just expounded. We may even think too much about _health_,--and certainly too much about _illness_. I solemnly believe that the very best thing that could be done for you at this moment, you unfortunate individual, would be to buy you a saddle-horse and a revolver, and start you tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains, with distinct instructions to treat any man as a Border Ruffian who should venture to allude to the subject of disease in your presence.

But I cannot venture to hope that you will do anything so reasonable. The fascinations of your present life are too overwhelming; when an invalid once begins to enjoy the contemplation of his own woes, as you appear to do, it is all over with him. Besides, you urge, and perhaps justly, that your case has already gone too far, for so rough a tonic. What, then, can I do for you? Medicine I cannot offer; for even your respectable family-physician occasionally hints that you need something different from that. I suspect that all rational advice for you may be summed up in one prescription: Reverse instantly all the habits of your previous physical existence, and there may be some chance for you. But, perhaps, I had better enter more into detail.

Do not think that I am going to recur to the painful themes of doughnuts and diet. I fear my hints, already given, on those subjects, may wound the sensitive nature of Mrs. D., who suffers now such utter martyrdom from your condition that I cannot bring myself to heap further coals of fire on her head, even though the coals be taken from her own very ineffectual cooking-stove. Let me dwell rather on points where you have exclusive jurisdiction, and can live wisely or foolishly, at your pleasure.

It does not depend on you, perhaps, whether you shall eat bread or saleratus, meat or sole-leather; but it certainly does depend upon yourself whether you shall wash yourself daily. I do not wish to be personal, but I verily believe, O companion of my childhood! that, until you began to dabble in Hydropathy, you had not bestowed a sincere ablution upon your entire person since the epoch when, twenty years ago, we took our last plunge together, off Titcomb's wharf, in our native village. That in your well-furnished house there are no hydraulic privileges beyond pint water-pitchers, I know from anxious personal inspection. I know that you have spent an occasional week at the sea-shore during the summer, and that many people prefer to do up their cleanliness for the year during these excursions; indeed, you yourself have mentioned to me, at such times, with some enthusiasm, your daily sea-bath. But I have been privately assured, by the other boarders, that the bath in question always consisted of putting on a neat bathing-dress and sitting awhile on a rock among the sea-weed, like an insane merman, with the highest waves submerging only your knees, while the younger Dolorosi splashed and gambolled in safe shallows behind you. Even that is better than nothing, but--Soul of Mohammed!--is that called bathing? Verily, we are, as the Turks declare, a nation of "dirty Franks," if this be the accepted definition.

Can it be possible that you really hold with the once-celebrated Mr. Walker, "The Original," as he was deservedly called, who maintained, that, by a correct diet, the system became self-purifying, through an active exhalation which repelled impurity,--so that, while walking on dusty roads, his feet, and even his stockings, remained free from dust? "By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week; nor did any one see, nor I feel, the difference." My deluded friend, it is a fatal error. Mr. Walker, the Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a sage, but it is impossible that his familiar society could have been desirable, even to fools or sinners. Rather recall, from your early explorations in Lemprière's Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him; whereon my Lord Bacon justly remarks, that "there may be some boiling required in the matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful." If you find that the water-cure agrees with your constitution, I rejoice in it; I should think it would; but, I implore you, do not leave it all behind you when you leave the institution. When you return to your family, use your very first dollars for buying a sponge and a tin-hat, for each member of the household; and bring up the five children to lead decent lives.