"On entering the Ghetto, we see Israel before its tents, in full restless labour and activity. The people sit in their doorways, or outside in the streets, which receive hardly more light than the damp and gloomy chambers, and grub amid their old trumpery, or patch and sew diligently. It is inexpressible what a chaos of shreds and patches (called _Cenci_ in Italian) is here accumulated. The whole world seems to be lying about in countless rags and scraps, as Jewish plunder. The fragments lie in heaps before the doors, they are of every kind and colour,--gold fringes, scraps of silk brocade, bits of velvet, red patches, blue patches, orange, yellow, black and white, torn, old, slashed and tattered pieces, large and small. I never saw such varied rubbish. The Jews might mend up all creation with it, and patch the whole world as gaily as harlequin's coat. There they sit and grub in their sea of rags, as though seeking for treasures, at least for a lost gold brocade. For they are as good antiquarians as any of those in Rome, who grovel amongst the ruins to bring to light the stump of a column, a fragment of a relief, an ancient inscription, a coin, or such matters. Each Hebrew Winckelmann in the Ghetto lays out his rags for sale with a certain pride, as does the dealer in marble fragments. The latter boasts a piece of giallo-antico, the Jew can match it with an excellent fragment of yellow silk; porphyry here is represented by a piece of dark red damask, verde-antico by a handsome patch of ancient green velvet. And there is neither jasper nor alabaster, black marble, or white, or parti-coloured, which the Ghetto antiquarian is not able to match. The history of every fashion from Herod the Great to the invention of paletôts, and of every mode of the highest as well as of the lower classes may be collected from these fragments, some of which are really historical, and may once have adorned the persons of Romulus, Scipio Africanus, Hannibal, Cornelia, Augustus, Charlemagne, Pericles, Cleopatra, Barbarossa, Gregory VII., Columbus, and so forth.