The Kindlier Mood Will Help You To A Truer
Appreciation Of That Peculiar Keeping Of The Churches Which The Stranger
Is Apt To Encounter In His Approach.
Be tender of the hapless mendicants
at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt
and old.
Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of
cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which,
though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving,
and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized
as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly
rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church
of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But
after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the
huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had
left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that
ever wrung the remorseful heart.
His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his
waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his
shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures,
reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the
forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three
days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his
shirt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry
for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated
demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would,
from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church;
but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted
into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look
it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and
believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery.
If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not
because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but
because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing
doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges,
emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses
they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard
their rich harmony would he like not having heard the echo in the
baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.
Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with
every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before
the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that,
but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the
Scala Santa.
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