retty poetical gift which
he was suspected of employing in the composition of anonymous satires on
the court, the government and the Church. At that period every Italian
town was as full of lampoons as a marsh of mosquitoes, and it was as
difficult in the one case as the other for the sufferer to detect the
specific cause of his sting. The moment in Italy was a strange one. The
tide of reform had been turned back by the very act devised to hasten
it: the suppression of the Society of Jesus. The shout of liberation
that rose over the downfall of the order had sunk to a guarded whisper.
The dark legend already forming around Ganganelli's death, the hint of
that secret liquor distilled for the order's use in a certain convent of
Perugia, hung like a menace on the political horizon; and the disbanded
Society seemed to have tightened its hold on the public conscience as a
dying man's clutch closes on his victorious enemy.

So profoundly had the Jesuits impressed the world with the sense of
their mysterious power that they were felt to be like one of those
animal organisms which, when torn apart, carry on a separate existence
in every fragment. Ganganelli's bull had provided against their exerting
any political influence, or controlling opinion as confessors or as
public educators; but they were known to be everywhere in Italy, either
hidden in other orders, or acting as lay agents of foreign powers, as
tutors in private families, or simply as secular priests. Even the
confiscation of their wealth did not seem to diminish the popular sense
of their strength. Perhaps because that strength had never been
completely explained, even by their immense temporal advantages, it was
felt to be latent in themselves, and somehow capable of withstanding
every kind of external assault. They had moreover benefited by the
reaction which always follows on the breaking up of any great
organisation. Their detractors were already beginning to forget their
faults and remember their merits. The people had been taught to hate the
Society as the possessor of wealth and privileges which should have been
theirs; but when the Society fell its possessions were absorbed by the
other powers, and in many cases the people suffered from abuses and
maladministration which they had not known under their Jesuit landlords.
The aristocracy had always been in sympathy with the order, and in many
states the Jesuits had been banished simply as a measure of political