Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/41

 HOW TO SEE THE VATICAN uncumbered with masonry. The shady groves, where he walks, when the heat of the summer day is a burden, have, in the bright leafless days of Spring, a joyous carpet of violets and anemones, squills as blue as Roman skies, and crimson cyclamens which embalm the breeze.

But more than all these must he prize, as he stands on the towered wall, built a thousand years ago by the fourth Leo to guard the Holy Hill from the heathen Saracen, the view of the open road, of the spacious Campagna, and the distant sea, which is to him the world—the Vineyard where there is no cold shadow of Italian Monarchy falling, as the shadow of Elijah fell upon the sunshine of King Ahab.

Prosaic as may be the suggestions of the word coach-house in unlovely London, romance lurked till lately in the coach-house of the Popes, shadowed by the stately stone-pines of his Garden. For here were shown the trappings with which the successor of St. Peter rode on his white mule down the Sacred Way, climbed by the Scipios and Cæsars in their Triumphs, to take seisin of the Lateran, the chief Church of Christendom, the proto-palace of the Papacy. That great coach, all scarlet and gold, with the flying and trumpeting cherubs, carried Pius ., the last of the Pope-Kings, in his royal processions, surrounded by all the Papal Court on foot, on Rh