92 TRAVEL, ADVENTUllE, AND SPORT. 



upon the new and alien world; and a careful anti- 

 quarian might follow out, if he would, to some ex- 

 tent the plan of the guilty palace, in which were 

 once enacted wickednesses past thinking of. There 

 is even a bit of pavement extant, perfect and clear 

 mosaic, the floor apparently of a passage once leading 

 to the sea, upon which unhappy paramours or trem- 

 bling victims might have fluttered yesterday, for any- 

 thing the obdurate perfection of the path can say 

 against it. The topmost height has been consecrated 

 by a little chapel to the glory of Our Lady of Succour 

 Santa Maria del Soccorso which in its way, if 

 one were disposed to take the world in a mythical 

 aspect, and treat the religions and the vices of 

 humanity as equally accidental, would look a very fit 

 poetic justice and revenge of time. Here, where the 

 weak were once ground to powder, to set up over 

 the dead force of pagan Rome that meek image of 

 the suffering woman, the mother pitiful and tender, 

 marks a touching and wonderful revolution. One 

 might even imagine, to carry fancy a little farther, 

 that the Madonna-worship throughout Italy was in- 

 tended as a kind of compensation to the ideal type 

 of woman for all the hardship inflicted on her kind. 

 The soft Italian is scarcely more chivalrous than was 

 the hard-hearted Roman. It does not strike him as 

 anomalous that his wife should fetch and carry up 

 and down these flinty stairs like a beast of burden, 

 while he walks unencumbered, or rides the patient 



