therhood of the Misericordia, draped
to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers
were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the
house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing
spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out
of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor
spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest
through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and
acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.

In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the
worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women,
but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well
dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church,
whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza
below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died,
my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the
final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen
coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.

The performance of ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and
the wonder is that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical
than it actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I
cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded;
sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without offence,
in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an
eloquent sermon on the saint's life and character, exhausted himself
before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads
of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint's day, which
seemed more generally observed than any other saint's day in Rome, and
his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly
poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the
preacher's shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many
children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl
in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and
blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and
flaunting feathers. The worshippers came and went, and while the monk
preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a
tap