nd Llama, they could not have fixed on a more efficient
candidate for the former post than the present Pope; but the crowds of
French soldiers which lined the streets to coerce the chosen people,
formed a strange comment on the value of pontifical piety. It is too
true that the better the Pope the worse the ruler. Probably the
thousands of Romans who thronged the Corso knew more about the blessings
of the Papal sway than the few score strangers, who volunteered to pay
the homage to the Sovereign of Rome which the Romans refuse to render.

To-day the demonstration was repeated on the Porta Pia; and the Vatican,
indignant at its powerlessness to suppress these symptoms of
disaffection, is anxious to stir up the crowd to some overt act of
insurrection, which may justify or, at any rate, palliate the employment
of violent measures. So in order to incense the crowd, the public
executioner was sent out in a cart guarded by gendarmes to excite some
active expression of anger on the part of the mob. It is hard for us to
understand the feeling with which the Italians, and especially the
Romans, regard the _carnefice_. He is always a condemned murderer, whose
life is spared on condition of his assuming the hated office, and, except
on duty, he is never allowed to leave the quarter of St Angelo, where he
dwells, as otherwise his life would be sacrificed to the indignation of
the crowd, who regard his presence as a contamination.

The poor fellow looked sheepish and frightened enough, as he patrolled
slowly with his escort up and down the crowded Porta Pia thoroughfare;
but even this insult failed to effect its object. The device was too
transparent for an Italian crowd not to detect it, and the ill-omened
_cortege_ of the "Pope's representative," as the Romans styled the
executioner, passed by without any comment.

MARCH 7.

The system of silent legal opposition which was carried on formerly at
Milan, and now at Venice, is being organised here against the Papal rule.
By one of those mystical compacts to which I have before alluded, it has
been resolved to suppress smoking and lottery-gambling. Our
anti-tobacconists, or our moral reformers, must not suppose that the
Romans have suddenly become alive to the iniquity of either of these
pursuits. I wish, indeed, with regard to the latter, I could
conscientiously assert that the Liberal faction had decreed its
extinction from any conviction of the degradation and corru