Rome dwarfs teachers. The greatest men
of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a
background. Perhaps Garibaldi -- possibly even Cavour -- could
have sat "in the close of the evening, among the ruins of the
Capitol," but one hardly saw Napoleon III there, or Palmerston or
Tennyson or Longfellow. One morning, Adams happened to be
chatting in the studio of Hamilton Wilde, when a middle-aged
Englishman came in, evidently excited, and told of the shock he
had just received, when riding near the Circus Maximus, at coming
unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put
to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite
overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till
time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new
form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of
two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation,
derived from history and statistics, that most citizens of Rome
seemed to be the better for guillotining. Only by slow degrees,
he grappled the conviction that the victim of the shock was
Robert Browning; and, on the background of the Circus Maximus,
the Christian martyrs flaming as torches, and the morning's
murderer on the block, Browning seemed rather in place, as a
middle-aged gentlemanly English Pippa Passes; while afterwards,
in the light of Belgravia dinner-tables, he never made part of
his background except by effacement.
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