Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome--the crowded Corso, the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, and to whom the everyday life of Italy is infinitely pleasanter than the stately ceremonial of Rome. At any rate the stranger who has fled from Northern winters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first months of exile have probably been months of a little disappointment. He is far from having found the perpetual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him to hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shivered at home, he has had his days of snowfall and his weeks of rain. If he is thoroughly British, he has growled and grumbled, and written to expose "the humbug of the sunny South" in the _Times_; if he is patient, he has jotted down day after day in his diary, and found a cold sort of statistical comfort in the discovery that the sunny days after all outnumbered the gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home, but still, after each concession to one's diary and common sense, there remains a latent feeling of disappointment and deception.
But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the coming of the spring. From the opening of February week follows week in a monotony of warm sunshine. Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue overhead, the same marvellous colour in the sea, the same blaze of roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets in every lazy breath of air that wanders down from the hills. Every almond-tree is a mass of white bloom. The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in the anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing to dispute the palm of supremacy with both. It is the time for picnics, for excursions, for donkey-rides, for dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is wonderful what a prodigious rush of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their _Times_. Mammas forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with the labourers in the olive-terraces. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at home, and passes without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the balcony, laughing and pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back again. And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and wonders what amusement people can find in peepshows and merry-go-rounds, finds himself surprised into a "Very jolly, indeed!"