on, plans for a cathedral in New York or a convent in Syria,
for a new prison in the Patrimony or a new tax in the Marches,
architecture and law, finance and theology, sacred and profane all
jumbled together: and what wonder they should keep jumbled, from the
beginning to the end, from his coronation to his funeral, leaving him,
even with the best intentions and the most untiring industry, a helpless
prey to intrigues and cabals and all the artifices and deceptions which
beset a throne? Gioja and Romagnosi are under the ban, and he has no
wish to ask them for the clue to the labyrinth he is wandering in, even
if he had the time. He has no time to read the newspapers. His knowledge
of them is derived from abstracts prepared for him by a clerk in the
Governor's office,--containing, therefore, what the minister allows to
be put there, and nothing more; while their living pictures, those
columns of advertisements which bring before you day by day the wants
and hopes and pursuits of so many of your fellow-creatures, carrying
you, as it were, into hundreds of families, and laying open to your
scrutiny hundreds of human hearts, the different lights in which men and
things appear to the organs of different parties, and the proof which,
in the midst of their contradictions, they all concur in giving that
there is a spirit abroad which cannot be lulled to sleep, are lessons
all lost for him, and which, perhaps, would be equally lost, even if he
had the leisure and the knowledge to study them.

He dines alone,--for in the city, in the dearth of publicans and
sinners, no one can sit at table with the Vicar of Christ; and thus
dinner-hour, the open-hearted hour, puts him almost more absolutely in
the hands of his immediate attendants than any hour of the twenty-four.
If he walks, it is in the garden or library; if he rides, it is
surrounded by guards and followed by his household train. He took his
last walk in the streets when he was a prelate, and thenceforth knows no
more of the city than he can see through his carriage-windows; and now
even that imperfect view is more than half cut off by the officers of
the guard, who ride their great black horses close to the carriage-door.

But enough of the Pope, and much more than I had intended when I first
took up my pen. That, even when he has studied them most, the temporal
interests of his people must suffer in his hands, has been proved by the
sufferings of millions through centuries