thersoever he turns his eager steps he is
alternately delighted and disgusted: the majestic remains of a great
antiquity he wishes to examine with accuracy, but he stands in the midst
of inconceivable filth. He turns to the churches, sacred in the eyes of
Christians, but not safe from defilement in the City of Churches. He
notes on the map numerous piazze, which he imagines to be fine squares,
clean, if not splendid; and he observes, with few exceptions, that they
resemble waste ground reserved for the rubbish of a great city."

It is pleasant to turn to the long-deserted Eastern quarter of Rome,
where an entirely new city is being erected since the Italian
occupation. We may yet hope to see Rome worthy of her past greatness.

"His Holiness" Pope Leo XIII. has lately issued, from his small isolated
world within the walls of the Vatican, a most extraordinary letter,
addressed to Cardinal Antonius di Luca, John Baptiste Petra, and Joseph
Herzenroether, in which he shows the world at large that he has no eye
for anything but the claims of the Church, and would fain have mankind
believe that the temporal government of the Popes has been an
unappreciated blessing, and far superior to that of any other, and to
the present government of United Free Italy under the constitutional
sway of King Humbert, in particular. Since 1859 the Italians of what was
once known as the States of the Church, have been deprived of this great
blessing of the Pontifical rule, and with what dire results let us
examine.

During the period between the expulsion of King Bombina from the throne
of the two Sicilies by the Garibaldians, and the evacuation of the
Eternal City by the French in 1870, a brigand warfare was carried on, if
not under the immediate auspices of the Pope and his Cardinals, at least
with their secret support and connivance. Now, after little more than a
decade of constitutional rule, brigandage has almost disappeared from
the face of the land, and travellers are comparatively safe.

When Victor Emmanuel and the Italian troops entered Rome and took
possession of it as the Capital of Italy, free from the Alps to Taranto,
they found it a city of ruins, squalor, and hardly habitable in a
sanitary point of view. Interesting, of course, to the traveller from
its wealth of splendid relics of the past and vast treasures of art, but
as undesirable for residence as the Upas Valley. Now what does the
traveller see? A prosperous and happy po