dress-coat, and a black satin waistcoat,--and wasp-waisted French officers, with baggy trousers, a goat-beard, and a pretentious swagger. Nearer the altar are crowded together in pens a mass of women in black dresses and black veils, who are determined to see and hear all, treating the ceremony purely as a spectacle, and not as a religious rite. Meantime the music soars, the organ groans, the censer clicks, steams of incense float to and fro. The Pope and his attendants kneel and rise,--he lifts the Host, and the world prostrates itself. A great procession of dignitaries with torches bears a fragment of the original cradle of the Holy Bambino from its chapel to the high altar, through the swaying crowd that gape and gaze and stare and sneer and adore. And thus the evening passes. When the clock strikes midnight all the bells ring merrily, Mass commences at the principal churches, and at San Luigi dei Francesi and the Gesù there is a great illumination (what the French call _un joli spectacle_) and very good music. Thus Christmas is ushered in at Rome. The next day is a great _festa_. All classes are dressed in their best and go to Mass,--and when that is over, they throng the streets to chat and lounge and laugh and look at each other. The Corso is so crowded in the morning, that a carriage can scarcely pass. Everywhere one hears the pleasant greeting of "_Buona Festa,_" "_Buona Pasquà_." All the _basso popolo_, too, are out,--the women wearing their best jewelry, heavy gold ear-rings, three-rowed _collane_ of well-worn coral and gold, long silver and gold pins and arrows in their hair, and great worked brooches with pendants,--and the men of the Trastevere in their peaked hats, their short jackets swung over one shoulder in humble imitation of the Spanish cloak, and with rich scarfs tied round their waists. Most of the ordinary cries of the day are missed. But the constant song of "_Arancie! arancie dolci_!" is heard in the crowd; and everywhere are the _sigarari_, carrying round their wooden tray of tobacco, and shouting, "_Sigari! sigari dolci! sigari scelti_!" at the top of their lungs; the _nocellaro_ also cries sadly about his dry chestnuts and pumpkin-seeds. The shops are all closed, and the shopkeepers and clerks saunter up and down the streets, dressed better than the same class anywhere else in the world,--looking spick-and-span, as if they had just come out of a bandbox, and nearly all of them carrying a little cane. One cannot but be struck by the difference in this respect between the Romans on a _festa_-day in the Corso and the Parisians during _fête_ in the Champs Élysées,--the former are so much better dressed, and so much happier, gayer, and handsomer.