A gentleman, as well dressed as I was at least, made up to
me when I had taken my seat in the _diligence_, and, after talking five
minutes on indifferent subjects, ended by demanding a paulo. "For what?"
I asked, with some little surprise. "For entertaining Signore," he
replied. Yet why blame these poor people? What can they do but beg?
Trade, husbandry, books,--all have fled from that doomed shore.

There are three conspicuous buildings in Civita Vecchia. Two of these
are hotels; the third and largest is a prison. This is one of the State
prisons of the Pope. Rising story above story, and meeting the traveller
on the very threshold of the country, it thrusts somewhat too
prominently upon his notice the Pope's peculiar method of propagating
Christianity,--namely, by building dungeons and hiring French bayonets.
But to do the Pope justice, he is most unwearied in Christianizing his
subjects after his own fashion. His prisons are well-nigh as numerous as
his churches; and if the latter are but thinly attended, the former are
crowded. He is a man "instant in season and out of season," as a good
shepherd ought to be: he watches while others sleep; for it is at night
that his sbirri are most active, running about in the darkness, and
carrying tenderly to a safe fold those lambs which are in danger of
being devoured by the Mazzinian wolves, or ensnared by Bible heretics.
But to be serious,--when one finds as many prisons as churches in a
territory ruled over by a minister of the Gospel, he begins to feel that
there is something frightfully wrong somewhere.

When I passed the fortress of Civita Vecchia, many a noble heart lay
pining within its walls. No fewer, I was assured, than two thousand
Romans were there shut up as galley-slaves, their only crime being, that
they had sought to substitute a lay for a sacerdotal Government,--the
regime of constitutionalism for that of infallibility. In this prison
the renowned brigand Gasperoni, the uncle of the prime minister of the
Pope, Antonelli, had been confined; but, being too much in the way of
English travellers, he was removed farther inland. This man was wont to
complain loudly to those who visited him, of the cruel injustice which
the world had done his fair fame. "I have been held up," he was used to
say, "as a person who has murdered hundreds. It is a foul calumny. I
never cut more than thirty throats in my life." He had had, moreover, to
carry on his profession at a large ou