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 whole world seemed to be gathered together within her walls. Her streets were filled with crowned heads and Princes of the Church, great ladies and great theologians, artists and friars, diplomats and newspaper reporters. Seven hundred bishops were there, from all the corners of Christendom, and in all the varieties of ecclesiastical magnificence—in falling lace and sweeping purple and flowing violet veils. Zouaves stood in the colonnade of St. Peter's, and Papal troops were on the Quirinal. Cardinals passed, hatted and robed, in their enormous carriages of state, like mysterious painted idols. Then there was a sudden hush: the crowd grew thicker and expectation filled the air. Yes! it was he! He was coming! The Holy Father! But first there appeared, mounted on a white mule and clothed in a magenta mantle, a grave dignitary bearing aloft a silver cross. The golden coach followed, drawn by six horses gorgeously caparisoned, and within the smiling white-haired Pio Nono, scattering his benedictions, while the multitude fell upon its knees as one man. Such were the daily spectacles of coloured pomp and of antique solemnity, which—so long as the sun was shining, at any rate—dazzled the onlooker into a happy forgetfulness of the reverse side of the Papal dispensation—the nauseating filth of the highways, the cattle stabled in the palaces of the great, and the fever flitting through the ghastly tenements of the poor.

In St. Peter's, the North Transept had been screened off; rows of wooden seats had been erected, covered with Brussels carpet; and upon these seats sat, each crowned with a white mitre, the seven hundred Bishops in Council. Here all day long rolled forth, in sonorous Latin, the interminable periods of episcopal oratory; but it was not here that the issue of the Council was determined. The assembled Fathers might talk till the marbles of St. Peter's themselves grew weary of the reverberations; the fate of the Church was decided in a very different