Within a few years the government seemed to become conscious of the great number of beggars in Rome, and of the reproach they offered to the wise and paternal regulations of the priestcraft. Accordingly, for a short time, they carried on a move in the right direction, which had been begun by the Triumvirate of 1849, during their short career. Some hundreds of the beggars were hired at the rate of a few _baiocchi_ a day to carry on excavations in the Forum and in the Baths of Caracalla. The selection was most appropriate. Only the old, decrepit, and broken-down were taken,--the younger and sturdier were left. Ruined men were in harmony with the ruined temples. Such a set of laborers was never before seen. Falstaff's ragged regiment was a joke to them. Each had a wheelbarrow, a spade, or pick, and a cloak; but the last was the most important part of their equipment. Some of them picked at the earth with a gravity that was equalled only by the feebleness of the effort and the poverty of the result. Three strokes so wearied them that they were forced to pause and gather strength, while others carried away the ant-hills which the first dug up. It seemed an endless task to fill the wheelbarrows. Fill, did I say? They were never filled. After a bucketful of earth had been slowly shovelled in, the laborer paused, laid down his spade carefully on the little heap, sighed profoundly, looked as if to receive congratulations on his enormous success, then, flinging, with a grand sweep, the tattered old cloak over his left shoulder, lifted his wheelbarrow-shafts with dignity, and marched slowly and measuredly forward towards the heap of deposit, as Belisarius might have moved at a funeral in the intervals of asking for _oboli_. But reduced gentlemen, who have been accustomed to carry round the hat as an occupation, always have a certain air of condescension when they work for pay, and, by their dignity of deportment, make you sensible of their former superior state. Occasionally, in case a _forestiere_ was near, the older, idler, and more gentlemanlike profession would be resumed for a moment, (as by parenthesis,) and if without success, a sadder dignity would be seen in the subsequent march. Very properly for persons who had been reduced from beggary to work, they seemed to be anxious both for their health and their appearance in public, and accordingly a vast deal more time was spent in the arrangement of the cloak than in any other part of the business. It was grand in effect, to see these figures, incumbered in their heavy draperies, guiding their wheelbarrows through the great arches of Caracalla's Baths or along the Via Sacra. It often reminded me of modern _bassi-rilievi_ and portrait statues, in which gentlemen looking sideways with very modern faces, and both hands full of swords, pens, or books, stand impotently swaddled up in ancient togas or the folds of similar enormous cloaks. The antique treatment with the modern subject was evident in both.