“Let me tell you about Christmas week, first premising that I go to church ceremonies here merely that I may see for myself that they are not worth seeing. Otherwise they are great bores and fitter for children. The chief quality of the music is its interminableness, made up of rises and falls, and of the ceremonies generally you may take a yard anywhere as of printed cotton, certain that in figure and quality it will be precisely like what has gone before, and what will follow after. On Christmas eve the _Presepio_, a piece of the manger in which the Saviour was cradled, was carried in procession at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Torches were stuck in the ground for nearly a quarter of a mile from the church, and ghostly dragoons in their long white cloaks (like Leonora’s lover) appeared and vanished at intervals in the uncertain light. The interior of the church is fine, but completely ruined by the trumpery hangings put up for the occasion. There were ambassadors’ boxes, as at the opera, and rows of raised seats on each side near the high altar, for such ladies as chose to come in black, with black veils upon their heads. I stood among the undistinguished faithful, and it being a fast, there was such a smell as if Wethersfield had been first deluged and then cooked by subterranean fires. I stood wedged between some very strong devotees (who must have squandered the savings of a year in a garlic debauch) in abject terror lest my head should be colonized from some of the overpopulated districts around me. “At the end of the church I could dimly see the Pope, with a mitre on and off at intervals. There was endless Gregorian chanting, then comparative silence, with sudden epidemics among the crowd of standing painfully on tiptoe to stare at nothing; then more endless Gregorian chantings, more epidemics, and a faint suspicion of frankincense among the garlic; then something incomprehensible performed in dumb show by what seemed automaton candles, then an exceedingly slim procession with the _Presepio_, which I could not see for the simple reason that it was inclosed in a silver case. At this point the Hallelujahs of the choir were fine. Having now fairly bagged my spectacle, I crowded my way out at the risk of my ribs (for stone doorways are not elastic), and went home to smoke a cigar preparatory to a midnight excursion to San Luigi dei Francesi, where, according to rumor, there was to be fine music. Here I found more sight-seeing Inglesi, more garlic, more populous neighbors, more endless Gregorian chanting, more automaton candles, and at midnight a clash of music from a French band, not so good as our Brigade Band at home.