usly enough, whether this move was
not all a horrible dream. He would have laughed at any one who had
told him he was seriously in danger. He charged with peculation! Out
upon it! Peculation meant the clandestine application by a public
officer of public funds to his private profit: whereas he had taken
nothing clandestinely, and was ruined root and branch. So he quietly
occupied himself in his prison by writing sonnets, and when an artist
came to pay him a visit, he gave him an order for a new work.

In spite of the eloquent defence made in his behalf by a young
advocate, the tribunal condemned him to twenty years' hard labour. At
this rate, the Minister who had allowed him to borrow the money should
certainly have been beheaded. But the lambs of the clergy don't eat
one another.

The advocate who had defended Campana was punished for having pleaded
too eloquently, by being forbidden to practise in Court for three
months.

You may imagine that this cruel sentence cast a stigma upon Campana.
Not a bit of it. The people, who have often experienced his
generosity, regard him as a martyr. The middle class despises him much
less than it does many a yet unpunished functionary. His old friends
of the nobility and of the Sacred College often shake him by the hand.
I have known Cardinal Tosti, at once his gaoler and his friend, let
him have the use of his private kitchen.

Condemnations are a dishonour only in countries where the judges are
honoured. All the world knows that the pontifical magistrates are not
instruments of justice, but tools of power.

CHAPTER XV.

TOLERANCE.

If crimes against Heaven are those which the Church forgives the
least, every man who is not even nominally a Catholic, is of course in
the eyes of the Pope a rogue and a half.

These criminals are very numerous: the geographer Balbi enumerates
some six hundred millions of them on the surface of the globe. The
Pope continues to damn them all conformably with the tradition of the
Church; but he has given up levying armies to make war upon them here
below.

Things are improved when we daily find the Head of the Roman Catholic
Church in friendly intercourse with the foes of his religion. He
partakes of the liberality of a Mussulman Prince; he receives a
schismatic Empress as a loving father; he converses familiarly with a
Queen who has abjured Catholicism to marry a Protestant; he receives
with distinction the aristocracy of the New Jer