But Failing The Company
Of The Commendatore Boni, Which Is Without Price, There Are To Be Had
For A Very
Little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I
know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who lead people
About the ruins in Rome, and instruct them in the fable, and doubtless
in the moral, of the things they see. If I had profited by their
learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than any the average
American has about him, I should now be tiring the reader with knowledge
which I am so willingly leaving him to imagine in me. If he is like the
average American, he has really once had some nodding acquaintance with
the facts, but history is apt to forsake you on the scene of it, and to
come lagging back when it is too late. In this psychological experience
you feel the need of help which the peripatetic historian supplies to
the groups of perhaps rather oblivious than ignorant tourists of all
nations in all languages, but preferably English. We Anglo-Saxons seem
to be the most oblivious or most ignorant; but I would not slight our
occasionally available culture any more than I would imply that those
peripatetic historians are at all like the cicerones whom they have so
largely replaced. I believe they are instructed and scholarly men; I
offer them my respect; and I wish now that I had been one of their daily
disciples, for it is full sixty years since I read Goldsmith's _History
of Rome._ As I saw them, somewhat beyond earshot, they and their
disciples formed a spectacle which was always interesting, and, so far
as the human desire for information is affecting, was also affecting.
The listeners to the lecturers would carry back to their respective
villages and towns, or the yet simpler circles of our ordinary city
lift, vastly more association with the storied scene than I had brought
to it or should bring away.
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