His Clothes Had Put On Some Such
Effect Of Extreme Decay As Those Of Rip Van Winkle In The Third Act;
There Was Danger That He Would Fall On Top Of His Falling Horse, And
That Their Raiment Would Mingle In One Scandalous Ruin.
Via Sistina had
never been so full of people before; never before had it been so long to
that point where we were to turn out of it into the friendly obscurity
of the little cross street which would bring us to our hotel.
We could
not consent to arrive in that form; we made the driver stop, and we got
out and began overpaying him to release us. But the more generously we
overpaid him the more nobly he insisted upon serving us to our door. At
last, by such a lavish expenditure as ought richly to provide for the
few remaining years of himself and his horse, we prevailed with him to
let us go, and reached our hotel glad, almost proud, to arrive on foot.
Hare tells me, now it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa
Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of
the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many
postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in
1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the
exceptional dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of
its most noble nave is thickly plated with the first gold mined in South
America, which Ferdinand and Isabella gave that least estimable of the
popes, Alexander VI. Now I know that it is far richer than any gold
could make it in the treasures of history and legend, which fairly
encrust it in every part. Doubtless some portion of this wealth my
fellow-sightseers were striving to store up out of the guide-books which
they bore in their hands and from which they strained their eyes to the
memorable points as they slowly paced through the temple. Some were
reading one to another in bated voices, and I thought them ridiculous;
but perhaps they were wise, and rather he was ridiculous who marched by
them and contented himself with a general sense of the grandeur, the
splendor. More than any other church except that of San Paolo fuori le
Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore imparts this sense, for, as I have already
pretended, St. Peter's fails of it. Without as well as within the church
is spacious and impressive from its spaciousness; but it seems more
densely fringed than most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic
pins. On going in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out
you do not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in
spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the driver while
he made a last, a humorous appeal.
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