"But when he does work, it is the best work in Rome, and lasts! Why, a mended shoe of Crispin's has triple the wear of a brand-new one from any other stall. And he is honest." | | 36 So said Lillo, the melon-seller, who is a good soul, and partial to me.

"Yes, he is honest," most of them sighed, as though sadly owning a defect.

"Yes," said old Meluccio, who sells old books a few yards off. "The other day he bought a book of me, an old rotten thing, but something that delighted him. I never know the titles: I buy them by the weight. And back he comes at nightfall to bring me a paper note he had found between the pages, a note good for twenty florins! What do you say to that?"

"I always thought his pate was cracked, for my part," said Bimbo, the tinker, whose own head I had cracked some years before with a hardy bit of wood, for ill treating a poor pony.

"He is as good as gold. I often think he is the precious St. Crispin himself come back on earth. Look what he is when any one of us has the fever, or cannot pay up to time with rent!" said poor hard-working Serafina, the washerwoman, giving kisses to her big brown boy, whose two-year-old feet were dancing on the top of a wine-barrel.

I, of whom my good neighbors talked so kindly, am a Roman born. I was son of old Beredino Quintilio, the king of the beggars, who reigned on the Spanish Steps, in good old times, when the whole city agreed with you that you would be a fool to bend your back and stick a spade in the ground, when you could get plenty by merely stretching your hand out where you lay at your ease in the sunshine.

Of course the world is of the same opinion still, in point of fact; but it only allows the practice of this philosophy to beggars in good broadcloth and purple phylacteries. The beggar in rags goes to prison now, in Rome, as elsewhere.

We lived very snugly in Trastevere; that is, we always had good wine, and fries of all fashions, and in Carnival time never missed money to prank forth with the gayest of them; for Beredino had a noble head, fit for Abraham or Agamemnon, and a really withered leg, that, rightly managed, was a fortune in itself.

We came of the gens Quintilii, according to our traditions,--and, indeed, why not?--and of course my father, being so noble and of such ancient lineage, never could work. "Beg too, little wretch," said he to me, when I was big enough to | | 37 trot across the river to the Spanish Square; and I begged accordingly; till I was seven. I never made very much: I was ugly; and I could never bring myself to whine.

When I got to be seven years old, I asked a little girl, not much older, for a coin. She was a very pretty little foreign thing, just coming down the steps of the Trinità de' Monti. She looked like a little angel, for she had a cloud of light hair, and some roses in her hands. She gave me the roses.

"You can sell them," she said to me. "But why do you beg?--only thieves and cowards do that."

And then she ran away to her people.

That night Beredino beat me with a stout ash stick, because I brought home nothing. My body was sore for three days; but I did not care. I kept the roses. When the stripes were healed, I went to an old fellow I knew, who cobbled boots and shoes in Trastevere.

"Will you teach me to do that?" I asked him. "I am tired of the Spanish Steps, and I will not beg any more."

The old fellow shoved his spectacles on to the crown of his head in amazement.

"Little Rufo, you are mad! What are you thinking of? I do not make so much in a week as you do in an hour."

I hung my head.

"But I am ugly; and I get nothing by begging," I said to him; for I was ashamed, as young things are, of being ashamed of wrong-doing.

"That is another affair, then," said the cobbler. "If you cannot make fraud succeed, it is just as well to be honest. If you cannot get this world, you may as well have a try for the next. Here and there are a few people who cannot get a lie out of their mouths,--just as there are folks color-blind, who cannot see the red in an apple. When one is deficient like that, one must tell the truth, and cobble leather or break stones, for one will never make a figure among men. It is a misfortune,--like being born dumb or a cripple; but there is no help for it. I was one of them. Your father drinks wine every night, and has his stomachful of broad beans and good goat's meat. I taste flesh once a year, on Fat Thursday, and never know what a kid tastes like. If you want to work for your living, I will teach you; but I warn you what it will cost."

| | 38

"Teach me," said I; and I squatted behind his board, and pierced and bored and sewed the old leather day after day, at the old street-corner, where one could see the angel on Hadrian's tomb, and the people coming and going over the St. Angelo bridge, and the Tiber tumbling away, bilious-looking and sullen, as though angry always because the days of Sallust were done, and the gardens and the villas and the pleasure-places of Horace's hymning had passed away into dullness and darkness and only left to its desolate banks the sough of the wind in the sedges and the rustle of the fox in the thickets.

I hunted often for the fair-haired rose-child; but I never saw her any more.

Only I used to say to myself, "Cowards beg," when sometimes in the drouth of the dusty day I was tempted to drop tool and leather and sit stitching there no more, but run out into the broad bright sunshine and get bed and bread by just stretching out a dirty hand and whining for alms.

"Cowards beg," I said to myself, and stayed by the cobbler's stall, seeing day come and go behind the angel with the sword, there upon Hadrian's tomb. Little words strike deep sometimes,--acorns, which grow to timbers, and bear safe to shore, or wreck for instant death, a thousand souls.

Whenever my father met me in the streets he struck at me with his crutch and cursed me for letting down the family greatness and shaming the gens Quintilii. Italo--who was beautiful as a cherub, and knew how to look starved and woebegone after eating half a kid stuffed with prunes,--Italo was, a son after his own heart, and made a dozen crowns a day by weeping, in the sweetest fashion, in the sunshine.

Italo would run to me of a night, having put off his rags and dirt and sorrowful wounds and dressed himself in gay shirt and silken sash to go and dance the tarantella all night with girls at a wine-shop. Italo, who loved me all the same though I disgraced them so, would plead with all his might, and beg me to go back to the Spanish Steps and the old ways of living, and jest at me with all a Roman's wit for sitting stitching there at gaping boots, and gnawing leather with my teeth, and earning scarcely, all the while, enough to keep body and soul together. But neither Italo's kisses nor Beredino's blows got me back to begging. I learned the cobbler's trade and stuck to it, only running off from the stall every saint's day and | | 39 holyday, to caper, and dance, and sing, and eat melons, outside the walls, as every Roman will, be he six or sixty.

So Crispin the cobbler I am,--nothing more whatever.

I am a fool, too, of course. Rome always says so. But I was never a dullard. A good old monk taught me reading, and the like. He was a mendicant friar, but knew more than most of them, and was, in a humble, rambling fashion, a scholar, mooning his days away with a Latin book on the green hillocks that tumble, like waves, about the leagues of ruins beyond the Lateran Gate.

From him I got the little that I know, and a liking for queer reading, and a passion for our Rome. Of course I was an ignorant youth always; my scraps of learning were jumbled piecemeal in my brain, like the scraps of cloth in a tailor's bag, which will only, at best, make a suit of motley; but they served to beguile me as I sat and tinkered a boot, and I learned to pick my way in my city by the lights of Dion Cassius and Livy.

So I grew up in Rome; a cobbler, when I wanted to pay for bed and board; a jumble of merrymaker and masker and student and improvisatore and antiquary and fool when I could make holyday about the place,--which, thanks to the Church calendar, was a hundred and fifty days out of the year always.

And all the time, by dint of dreaming over dead Rome and getting my head full of republics and their glories, I used to talk in high-flown strains, sometimes, atop of a barrel in the wine-shops and fair-booths, and by the time I was twenty years old the Papal Guard had their eyes on me as perilous matter: indeed, I should have fared worse, had it not been that I haunted the churches often from a real love of them, and had good friends in two or three jovial monks, who loved me, and for whom I did willing work without payment, any day that the hot stones of Rome scorched their sandals into holes.

But one year, when I was still a youth, there came a breath of fire upon Rome. Revolution thundered at the gates like Attila. The old cobbler was dead, and my father too. I threw my leather apron to the winds, kicked my stall into the gutter, shouldered a musket, and rushed into the fray. As all the world knows, it came to nothing. There were dead men in the streets,--that was all. The Pope reigned still, and free Rome was a dream.

I had to run for my life, by night, under the thickets, along | | 40 the course of the Anio, and over the old Nomentana bridge. I had a bullet in my shoulder; my feet were blistered. I had two copper pieces in my pocket,--that was all. I looked up at the Mons Sacer, and tried to tell myself that it was great and glorious to suffer thus; but I fell into a ditch, and a herd of. buffaloes trampled me where I lay, and patriotism. seemed a dreary thing, even in Mons Sacer's shadow. A peasant of the Campagna, whose hut stood where Hannibal had encamped, dragged me in-doors, and tended me through months of sickness and exhaustion. He was a poor creature himself, a mass of disease and weakness, and he only scraped a bare subsistence by tending cattle; but he was very good to me, a poor lad, wounded, and friendless, who would have been shot down for a rebel without his succor and shelter.

The world is bad, you know; human nature is a vile thing,--half ape, half fox most often; but here and there one finds these golden gleams; and they look the brighter for the darkness round, as lamps do in the catacombs.

Well, when I rose upon my feet again, I knew the gates of Rome were closed against me. To go back there, then, was to be shot or thrown into the casemates of St. Angelo. So there was nothing for it but to set the Anio between myself and Rome, and creep across the plains to the seashore, and there hide away on a fishing-sloop and cross to other lands. For the rest, I was not unhandy at other things as well as leather, and, being strong and well again, and young, had not much fear,--only a great unending sorrow, because the hills hid Rome.

For, wander where one will, you know, one's heart is sick for Rome,--for the fall of the fountains, for the width of the plains, for the vast silent courts, for the grass-grown palaces, for the moonlight falling on the ruined altars, for the nightingales singing in the empty temples.

I got out of my country by the way that Dante did, looking back, ever and ever, through blind eyes of pain, as he did, and so traveled on foot, as poor men do, across into the Tyrolean and the German lands.

At first I settled down in Nuremberg, where I fell sick, and found friends, and was not ill content. I was a very young man even then, and, as I sewed leather at my little leafy window, on the street that was Albrecht Dürer's birthplace, I got friends with the students and philosophers, and read many a | | 41 deep old volume that they lent to me, and so picked up such scraps of knowledge as best I could, as a magpie picks up shreds and straws and silver spoons and shoves them all away together.

Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains. But I think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain which is the curse of my countrymen,--a sort of devilish quickness at doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets and keeps them dunces before the alphabet.

All that beautiful Teutonic world could not console me for the loss of Italy. It is beautiful, that wide, green, cool, silent country, with its endless realms of forest and its perpetual melody of river-waters.

The vast seas of tossing foliage; the broad plains, with their great streams winding through them in the sun; the intense silence of the aisles of pine; the blue-black woods that stretched, seemingly limitless, away on every side; the hill-sides, dusky with the thickness of the leaves, and thrilled with the whisper of a thousand legends; the little burghs, vine-hidden, clustered round their chapel-belfries, and nestled at the foot of towering oak-clad mountains, or rent red rocks all fragrant with the larch and fir and bay tree; the old gray bridges, with the yellow current flowing underneath; the round watch-towers, set in the middle of the swirling streams; the black and white houses, gabled and peaked and carved till they were like so many poems of the Minnesingers; the quaint, peaceful, antique homes, where the people dwelt from birth to death, spinning their flax and shaping their ivory and wooden toys, in green nests under gray hills, that the world knew not, and that knew not the world: they were all beautiful, these quiet, noble, shadowy things that made up the old Teutonic kingdoms; and I knew them well to be so. But amidst them I was in exile always.

Who can once have laughed in the light of the sun of Italy and not feel the world dark elsewhere ever afterwards? And it is only in Italy that the eyes of the people always, though they know it not, speak to men of God.

But ere very long the spirit of unrest possessed me, and I went hither and thither, trying all manner of trades, and even some | | 42 arts, daubing on pottery,--not ill, they told me; only I could not stand the confined life of any factory-room,--and playing, some seasons, with traveling actors,--with no bad success, since I could always make the people laugh or cry, according as my own mood was: indeed, I might have remained in that career, perhaps, only I never could constrain myself from altering the part with my own imagination and improvisation, which put out the others, so they said; and then, again, though I am a very peaceable man, I stuck a knife into my chief, about a woman, and had some trouble that way, though it was all honest jealousy and fair fight, and the mere rights of man, let them say whatever they will to the contrary.

Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be merry with the young folk and sorrowful with the old, and can take the fair weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot, treading with it on no man's toe and no dog's tail,--why, if one be of this sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune, and the very little that one needs one can usually obtain.

Many years I strayed about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being no saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.

I wandered so, I say, for a great many years, and was happy enough,--the gods or the saints be praised (one never knows which to say in Rome),--and should never have wished my lot bettered or changed, only--I was in exile. There were times when only to hear the twang of a lute, and see a red melon gape, under a lamp, at a street-corner shrine in old dark Trastevere, I would have given my soul away. We are made so,--the fools of our fancies; and yet these our foolishnesses are so much the best part of us.

One day, in a little old dull French village, gray and white with summer dust, in the midst of champagne-vineyards, I met a Roman image-seller, a boy of ten or twelve, with his tray full of plaster casts.

I saw scores of such lads, of course, and always spoke to them, and gave them a crust or a coin, for sake of the common country. But this little fellow happened to thrust straight up in my eyes, smiling, a cast of that fairest Madonna of old Mino's, which I had always loved the best; she who stands | | 43 in the chapter-room of Santa Maria in Trastevere, with folded and trailing robes, snow-white, and seeming to walk forth to one from out her golden tabernacle.

Do you not know her? I dare say not: hardly anybody ever comes into the sacristy. Go, make a pilgrimage for her sake alone.

By so much as sculpture is above all color, so is she far above in purity and dignity any virgin that was ever painted, even by our Raffaelle himself. For, somehow, on his high, wind-swept, olive-wooded slope, Mino of Fiesole did reach an imagination of the Mother of Christ that for innocence, chastity, womanhood, and sweet, dreaming thoughtfulness has never an equal anywhere. Clothed in purity, seems no metaphor, but simplest fact, before those snow-white and exquisite forms that live after him in so many silent baptisteries and sun-pierced, dusky, jeweled chapels of the dead.

And at the sight of her a very torture of home-sickness came upon me,--all suddenly, as it will do, you know, with the strongest men at the note of a bird, or the sight of a little flower, or the song of a child going down the hedgerows to meet its mother.

That little white image of the Madonna which I had loved so well smote me with a very anguish of longing for Rome.

I seemed to hear the fountains falling through the radiant air, and the ten thousand voices of the swinging bells giving them answer, as the sun sank down behind the blue peaks of Soracte.

I saw the bridge I stood on, and the green straight lines of poplars on the bank, and the face of the little wandering boy, through a rush of tears: things come on one sometimes like that.

That very night I turned my face to Rome, taking the boy with me, for he was ill treated and unhappy.

"If they remember, and I die for it," thought I, "it will be better to die there than to live elsewhere."

But so many years had gone by, and I had been so young then, and was still so poor and lowly, I managed to escape all recognition, and by a little cunning and a little care I got into Rome unpersecuted; and, calling myself as I had been called in Germany and France, no one recognized me. I was an ugly, homely, brown-faced man, forty years old then, and al- | | 44 ready a little gray. My father was dead; my brother had been stabbed long, long before, in a brawl, so they said; and the old cobbler, as I said, had been found dead one noonday at his stall.

Of conspiracy and combat I had had enough. I loved the sound of the fountains, and I set my board up within earshot of this one which gushes from the gray monsters' mouths there by old Ponte Sisto.

The people found me at my stall one daybreak, as they came over the bridge with their mules from the Janiculan farms and gardens, with their poultry and goats and wines and fruits; and I had not forgotten how to play with the Roman humor, and how to hold my own between a rough jest and a ready steel. I kept a still tongue in my head as to whence I came, and the folk of the Rione had a throng of odd fancies concerning me. So best: it amused them; and many liked to bring their shoes to me to mend, that they might say they had a chatter with that droll chatterbox at the corner.

Maryx, then a student at the Villa Medici, made for me my lovely Apollo Sandaliarius; and another student--now a great man, too--gave me the old stained glass with SS. Crispin and Crispian, so that one might please all tastes and conciliate the good nuns and monks who went to and fro in such numbers and wore out so many shoes upon their stone and mosaic floors.

I never told anybody, except some churchmen, that I was that Rufo Quintilio who had first disgraced the gens by working for my living. I re-baptized myself Crispino, after the patron saint of all shoemakers, whose church was close by; and the people had that vague idea of some mystery connected with me which is to the public as sugared wine to flies.

That there was really none was all the better, because where there is no foundation whatever in fact there is nothing to stop the fancy from wandering as far, and digging as deep, as ever it may like to do.

I had a friend at court, too.

It had chanced to me in my wanderings to be once of signal service to a monsignore traveling on mystic missions of the Church. I happened to be near at hand when he fell into a deep, rapid, unpleasant little river of Transylvania; and I pulled him out of it, whilst his attendants screamed and his | | 45 horses floundered and sank. And in return he had bidden me claim his aid, if ever I wanted it, in our native city. Years had passed; I found him powerful, and he was not ungrateful; and he procured for me condonation of my youthful riots, and leave to prosecute my simple calling at the corner of the bridge of Sextus, where the fountain is made in the wall, opposite to the Via Giulia; and there I became peaceful and happy enough, for I had some little money laid by (we are a frugal people), and I could sew leather three days out of the week, and all the rest of the time read old books, and peer about old places, and dream old dreams, and saunter in and out of the studios. The artists, great and small, were all fond of me, and liked to hear my opinions,--of course, only as Apelles liked to hear my fellow-craftsman's; but still it made life pleasant, for Art is, after Nature, the only consolation that one has at all for living.

They used to tell me that I had some little judgment, and that I might make a fortune if I would take to collecting and to selling ancient and artistic things. But that I would never do. To me, whoever can buy a work of true art to sell it again (save from some sudden pressure of poverty and honor) can have no love of art in him, or, thinking of it with any thought soever of barter, can have no true feeling for it, but is a huckster at soul, and deserves no better God than the base Mercurius of the mart and change, whom the Romans prayed to when they wished to pilfer.

Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to know the charm of quiet cloisters, the delight of a strange, rare volume, the interest of a quaint bit of pottery, the unutterable loveliness of some perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten church; and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right, where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage-garden or a coppersmith's shreds of metal may gleam on a signet-ring of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile Tullia for drink.

Of course I was an ignorant man always,--beside scholars; but what I did know shed a light upon my path, and made me cease to envy rich men; for was not all Rome mine?

There are worse things than to sit under Apollo Sandaliarius | | 46 and Crispin and Crispian and hear the merry Roman tongues wag round you all day long; for the epigrams of Pasquin and Marforio are but a few ripples out of many of the ever-running current of the Roman wit. And who is it that has said so wisely, "If you have nothing left in life, come to Rome"?

Here at least you shall learn your own littleness, and that of gods and men; here in Rome, which has seen Zeus and Aïdoneus pass away, and come to be words upon the mouths of men; Rome, which has beheld Olympus fade like a dream of the night, and the glory depart from Ida; Rome, which killed the Nazarene, and set Borgia and Aldobrandini up in his likeness to reign over earth and heaven; Rome, which has seen nations perish leaving no sign, and deities die like moths, yet lives herself, and still conjures the world with the sorcery of an irresistible and imperishable name!