ow do you
know, that the particular abuse which most offends you is
not absolutely necessary to the very existence of Rome? Good
and evil mixed together form a cement more durable than the
elaborately selected materials of which modern utopias are
made. I who tell you this have been here many years, and am
quite comfortable and contented. Whither should I go if Rome
were to be turned topsy-turvy? Where should we establish our
dethroned sovereigns? Where would a home be found for Roman
Catholic worship? You have no doubt been told that some
people are dissatisfied with the administration: but what of
that? They are not of _our_ world. You never meet them in
the good society you frequent. If the demands of the middle
class were to be complied with, everything would be
overturned. Have you any wish to see manufactories erected
round St. Peter's and turnip fields about the fountain of
Egeria? These native shopkeepers seem to imagine the country
belongs to them because they happen to be born in it. Can
one conceive a more ridiculous pretension? Let them know
that Rome is the property in copartnership of people of
birth, of people of taste, and of artists. It is a museum
confided to the guardianship of the Holy Father; a museum of
old monuments, old pictures, and old institutions. Let all
the rest of the world change, but build me a Chinese wall
round the Papal States, and never let the sound of the
railway-whistle be heard within its sacred precincts! Let us
preserve for admiring posterity at least one magnificent
specimen of absolute power, ancient art, and the Roman
Catholic religion!"

This is the language of foreign inhabitants of Rome of the old
stamp,--estimable people, and sincere believers, who have gone on year
after year witnessing the ceremonies of St. Peter's, and the _Fete des
Oignons_ in the St. John Lateran, till they have acquired an
ecclesiastical turn of thought and expression, a habit of seeing
things through the spectacles of the Sacred College, and a faith which
has no sympathy with the outer world. I do not share their opinions,
and I have never found their advice particularly useful; but they
interest me, I like them, and I sincerely pity them. Who can tell what
events they are destined to witness in their time? Who can foresee the
spectacles which the future re