,
and which will serve to their descendants as the evidence of their
visit to the Eternal City. They haggle as if they were at market, and
yet, when they get back to the 'Minerva,' they wonder they have so
little to show for their money.

If they took home nothing worse than their cheap rosaries, I should
not find fault with them; but they carry opinions and impressions.
Don't tell them of the abuses which swarm throughout the kingdom of
the Pope. They will bridle up, and answer that for their parts they
never saw a single one. As the surface of things is smooth, at least
in the best quarter of the town--the only quarter these good folks are
likely to have seen--they assume, as a matter of course, that all is
well. They have seen the Pope and the Cardinals in all their glory and
all their innocence at the Sistine Chapel; and of course it is not on
Easter Sunday, and in the eyes of the whole multitude, that Cardinal
Antonelli occupies himself with his business or his pleasures. When
Monsignore B---- dishonoured a young girl, who died of the outrage,
and then sent her affianced bridegroom to the galleys, he did not
select the Sistine Chapel as the theatre of his exploits.

You must not attempt to extract pity for the Italian nation from these
foreign pilgrims of the Holy Week. The honest souls have marked the
uncultivated waste which extends from Civita Vecchia to Rome, and they
have at once inferred that the people are idle. They have been
importuned for alms by miserable-looking objects in the streets, and
they conclude that the lower class is a class of beggars.

The cicerone who took them about, whispered some significant words in
their ears, and they are persuaded that every Italian is in the habit
of offering his wife or his daughter to foreigners. You would astonish
these profound observers immeasurably, if you were to tell them that
the Pope has three millions of subjects who in no way resemble the
Roman rabble.

Thus it happens that the flying visitor, the superficial traveller,
the communicant of the Holy Week, the guest of the 'Minerva,' is a
ready-made foe to the nation, a natural defender of the clerical
government.

As for the permanent foreign visitors, if they be men enervated by the
climate or by pleasure, indifferent to the fate of nations, strangers
to political chicane, they will, in the natural order of events,
become converted to the ideas of the Roman aristocracy, between a
quadrille and a cu