"
Byron has given us the rule with the most orthodox accuracy. Whether
the second portion of the prescription is observed as heartily,
punctually, and universally as the first, may be doubted. But in all
outward form and ceremony the violence of the contrast between the
two seasons is acted out to the letter; is, or was, as may be
perhaps more correctly said now-a-days; for both Carnival jollity
and licence, and Lent strictness, are from year to year less
observed than used to be the case. At Rome, Mother Church exhorts
her subjects to feast and laugh in Carnival, in nowise less
earnestly or imperatively than she enjoins on them fasting and
penances for having laughed in Lent. But her subjects will do
neither the one nor the other. And when one hears reiterated
complaints in Roman pulpits of pipings to which no dancers have
responded, and the vain exhortations of the ecclesiastical
authorities to the people to Carnival frolic and festivity, one is
reminded of our own Archbishop's "Book of Sports," and led to make
comparisons, by which hangs a very long tale.
Great Pan died once upon a time. And Carnival, as it used to be, is
with much else dying now in Italy. But in the days to which the
incidents here narrated belong, the difference between Carnival and
Lent was as marked as that between day and night.
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