pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in
the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not
been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the
high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.

But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a
feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his
piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his
three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their
simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street
opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a
Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in
him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him
in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection
and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.

Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which
even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The
tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of
family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference
of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in
the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists
and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and
Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help
hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions
part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly
noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled
by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning
family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not
as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to
meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them
openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I
cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of
priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance
than mine.

One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is
built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or
below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, media