ve to start at about one o'clock, or midday, in full evening costume,
dress-coat and black trowsers. Any man who has ever had to walk out in
evening attire in the broad daylight, will agree with me that the
sensation of the general shabbiness and duskiness of your whole
appearance is so strong as to overcome all other considerations, not to
mention your devotional feelings. In this attire you have to stand for a
couple of hours amongst a perspiring and ill-tempered crowd, composed of
tourists and priests, for the Italians are too wise to trouble themselves
for such an object. During these two mortal hours you are pushed forward
constantly by energetic ladies bent on being placed, and pushed back by
the Swedish guards, who defend the entrance. The conversation you hear
around you, and perforce engage in, is equally unedifying, both
religiously and intellectually, a sort of _rechauffe_ of Murray's
handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday's sermon. When you
are reduced to such a frame of mind and body as is the natural result of
time so employed, the doors of the chapel are opened, and you have
literally to fight your way in amidst a crowd of ladies hustling,
screaming, and fainting. If you are lucky, you get standing room in a
sort of open pen, whence, if you are tall, you can catch a sight of the
Pope's tiara in the distance; or, if you belong to the softer sex, you
get a place behind the screen, where you cannot see, but, what is much
better, can sit. The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is
overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim
light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned
backwards. For three long hours you have a succession of dreary
monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible,
broken at intervals by a passage of intonation. There is no organ or
instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly
compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for
female vocalists.

The music itself may be very fine,--competent critics declare it is, and
I have no doubt they are right; but I say, unhesitatingly, it is not
music that addresses itself to popular tastes, or produces any feeling
save that of weariness on nine-tenths of its hearers. You can mark
clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as
candle after candle of the stack of wax-lights before the altar i