king in his popular novel
of the cousin of St. Carlo, Federigo Borromeo. The Pope came in state
to the church of St. Carlo, in the Corso. The show was magnificent;
the church is not very large, and was almost filled with Papal court
and guards, in all their splendid harmonies of color. An Italian child
was next me, a little girl of four or five years, whom her mother
had brought to see the Pope. As in the intervals of gazing the child
smiled and made signs to me, I nodded in return, and asked her name.
"Virginia," said she; "and how is the Signora named?" "Margherita,"
"My name," she rejoined, "is Virginia Gentili." I laughed, but did not
follow up the cunning, graceful lead,--still I chatted and played with
her now and then. At last, she said to her mother, "La Signora e molto
cara," ("The Signora is very dear," or, to use the English equivalent,
_a darling_,) "show her my two sisters." So the mother, herself a
fine-looking woman, introduced two handsome young ladies, and with the
family I was in a moment pleasantly intimate for the hour.

Before me sat three young English ladies, the pretty daughters of
a noble Earl; their manners were a strange contrast to this Italian
graciousness, best expressed by their constant use of the pronoun
_that_. "_See that man!_" (i.e. some high dignitary of the Church,)
"Look at that dress!" dropped constantly from their lips. Ah! without
being a Catholic, one may well wish Rome was not dependent on English
sight-seers, who violate her ceremonies with acts that bespeak their
thoughts full of wooden shoes and warming-pans. Can anything be
more sadly expressive of times out of joint than the fact that Mrs.
Trollope is a resident in Italy? Yes! she is fixed permanently in
Florence, as I am told, pensioned at the rate of two thousand pounds
a year to trail her slime over the fruit of Italy. She is here in Rome
this winter, and, after having violated the virgin beauty of America,
will have for many a year her chance to sully the imperial matron of
the civilized world. What must the English public be, if it wishes to
pay two thousand pounds a year to get Italy Trollopified?

But to turn to a pleasanter subject. When the Pope entered, borne in
his chair of state amid the pomp of his tiara and his white and gold
robes, he looked to me thin, or, as the Italians murmur anxiously
at times, _consumato_, or wasted. But during the ceremony he seemed
absorbed in his devotions, and at the end I think