good or evil since the beginning of history.

Those who have been to Carpineto have seen the dark old pile in which
the Pope was born, with its tower which tops the town, as the dwellings
of the small nobles always did in every hamlet and village throughout
the south of Europe. For the Pecci were good gentlefolk long ago, and
the portraits of Pope Leo's father and mother, in their dress of the
last century, still hang in their places in the mansion. His Holiness
strongly resembles both, for he has his father's brow and eyes, and his
mother's mouth and chin. In his youth he seems to have been a very dark
man, as clearly appears from the portrait of him painted when he was
Nuncio in Brussels at about the age of thirty-four years. The family
type is strong. One of the Pope's nieces might have sat for a portrait
of his mother. The extraordinarily clear, pale complexion is also a
family characteristic. Leo the Thirteenth's face seems cut of live
alabaster, and it is not a figure of speech to say that it appears to
emit a light of its own.

Born and bred in the keen air of the Volscian hills, he is a southern
Italian, but of the mountains, and there is still about him something of
the hill people. He has the long, lean, straight, broad-shouldered frame
of the true mountaineer, the marvellously bright eye, the eagle
features, the well-knit growth of strength, traceable even in extreme
old age; and in character there is in him the well-balanced combination
of a steady caution with an unerring, unhesitating decision, which
appears in those great moments when history will not wait for little
men's long phrases, when the pendulum world is swinging its full stroke,
and when it is either glory or death to lay strong hands upon its
weight. But when it stops for a time, and hangs motionless, the little
men gather about it, and touch it boldly, and make theories about its
next unrest.

In the matter of physique, there is, indeed, a resemblance between Leo
the Thirteenth, President Lincoln and Mr. Gladstone--long, sinewy men
all three, of a bony constitution and indomitable vitality, with large
skulls, high cheek-bones, and energetic jaws--all three men of great
physical strength, of profound capacity for study, of melancholic
disposition, and of unusual eloquence. It might almost be said that
these three men represent three distinct stages of one type--the real or
material, the intellectual and the spiritual. From earliest youth each