_ 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. In fact, there is nothing more impressive in
the floating foreign society of Rome than its zeal for self-improvement.
No one classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to
be a traveller he is really one of them; and it is with difficulty I
keep myself from the appearance of patronizing them in these praises,
which are for the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to
be without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of their
application reached to all the historical and actual interests, to the
religious as well as the social, the political as well as the financial;
but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially turned to the study of
antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer past.
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