s put
out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes. If the ceremony
were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a
dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the
same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance.
The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first
place, it comes when your patience is exhausted; and, in the second, it
lasts so long, that you begin to wonder whether it will ever end. The
slavery to conventional rules in England, which causes one to shrink from
the charge of not caring about music as zealously as one could, and from
pleading guilty to personal cowardice, makes Englishmen, and still more
Englishwomen, profess to be delighted with the Miserere; but, in their
heart of hearts, their feeling is much such as I have given utterance to.

The ceremonies in St Peter's itself are, as sights, much better; but yet
I often think that the very size and grandeur of the giant edifice
increases the _mesquin-ness_ (for want of an English word I must
manufacture a French one) of the whole ceremony. At the exposition of
the relics, for instance, you see in a very lofty gallery two small
figures, holding up something--what, you cannot tell--set up in a rich
framework of gold and jewels; it may be a piece of the cross, or a
martyr's finger-bone, or a horse's tooth--what it is neither you nor any
one else can guess at that distance. If the whole congregation knelt
down in adoration, the artistic effect would unquestionably be fine, but
then not one person in seven does kneel, and therefore the effect is
lost. So it is with the washing of the high altar. If one priest alone
went up and poured the wine and oil over the sacred stone, and then
cleansed the shrine from any spot or stain, the grandeur of the idea
would not be marred by the monotony of the performance; but when some
four hundred priests and choristers defile past, each armed with a chip
besom, like those of the buy-a-broom girls of our childhood, and each
gives a dab to the altar as he passes, the whole scene becomes tiresome,
if not absurd. The same fatal objection applies to the famous washing of
the feet at the Trinita dei Pellegrini. As a mere matter of simple fact,
there is nothing very interesting in seeing a number of old women's feet
washed, or in beholding a number of peasants who would be much better if
the washing extended above their