hey have spent several
seasons in Rome and have made acquaintance with each other for the
purpose of criticising the Romans.

Immediately after the taking of the city in 1870, three distinct
parties declared themselves, to wit, the Clericals or Blacks, the
Monarchists or Whites, and the Republicans or Beds. All three had
doubtless existed for a considerable time, but the wine of revolution
favoured the expression of the truth, and society awoke one morning to
find itself divided into camps holding very different opinions.

At first the mass of the greater nobles stood together for the lost
temporal power of the Pope, while a great number of the less important
families followed two or three great houses in siding with the
Royalists. The Republican idea, as was natural, found but few
sympathisers in the highest class, and these were, I believe, in all
cases young men whose fathers were Blacks or Whites, and most of whom
have since thought fit to modify their opinions in one direction or the
other. Nevertheless the Red interest was, and still is, tolerably strong
and has been destined to play that powerful part in parliamentary life,
which generally falls to the lot of a compact third party, where a
fourth does not yet exist, or has no political influence, as is the case
in Rome.

For there is a fourth body in Rome, which has little political but much
social importance. It was not possible that people who had grown up
together in the intimacy of a close caste-life, calling each other
"thee" and "thou," and forming the hereditary elements of a still feudal
organisation, should suddenly break off all acquaintance and be
strangers one to another. The brother, a born and convinced clerical,
found that his own sister had followed her husband to the court of the
new King. The rigid adherent of the old order met his own son in the
street, arrayed in the garb of an Italian officer. The two friends who
had stood side by side in good and evil case for a score of years saw
themselves suddenly divided by the gulf which lies between a Roman
cardinal and a Senator of the Italian Kingdom. The breach was sudden and
great, but it was bridged for many by the invention of a fourth,
proportional. The points of contact between White and Black became Grey,
and a social power, politically neutral and constitutionally
indifferent, arose as a mediator between the Contents and the
Malcontents. There were families that had never loved the old ord