cery and since legible
in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,--to begone, and
let us have no more to do with _it_ and its delusions and impious
deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since, it may depend upon
it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay exact damages yet for
every day it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do
by the law of veracity, was to give up its own foul galvanic life, an
offence to gods and men; honestly to die, and get itself buried.

Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to
it;--and yet, on the whole, it was essentially this too. "Reforming
Pope?" said one of our acquaintance, often in those weeks, "Was there
ever such a miracle? About to break up that huge imposthume too, by
'curing' it? Turgot and Necker were nothing to this. God is great; and
when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of
it in hope, not in despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple
persons;--to whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a
Popedom,--hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to bottom, and
consisting mainly now of foul _grime_ and _rust_: stop the holes of it,
as your antecessors have been doing, with temporary putty, it may hang
together yet a while; begin to hammer at it, solder at it, to what you
call mend and rectify it,--it will fall to sherds, as sure as rust is
rust; go all into nameless dissolution,--and the fat in the fire will be
a thing worth looking at, poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved. The
poor Pope, amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds, went on
joyfully for a season: but he had awakened, he as no other man could
do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations,
earthquakes. Questions not very soluble at present, were even sages
and heroes set to solve them, began everywhere with new emphasis to be
asked. Questions which all official men wished, and almost hoped,
to postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself _had_ come; that was the
terrible truth!

For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as the
rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of work for the
reformer; in very few places do human things adhere quite closely to
that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom proclaiming that such was
actually the case;--whereupon all over Christendom such results as we
have seen. The Sicilians, I think, were the first notabl