Page:How to See the Vatican, Sladen, 1914.djvu/42

 Rh the four great days of the year. Six huge white horses drew it, and one of their postilions lived to tell the tale among the relics of the former grandeur.

In these days, when the Pope never drives from the Vatican Gates, the coach-house has surrendered its unneeded chambers to the Pope's pictures and the swelling Archives of the Vatican, many of which made the lorn pilgrimage to Avignon, in the years of the First Captivity; and have only come back in these latter days. From the archive rooms you step into the noble Leonine Library, which Leo. established to receive all the printed books of the Biblioteca Vaticana.

There is a pathos haunting the Leonine Library, like that which stalks in the deserted halls of Holyrood, for here the first of the Popes to wear no earthly crown strove to carry on with undiminished dignity the more than royal ambition of the immortal Nicholas ., to make the Vatican the light of the world, to maintain on its hill a city that could not be hid.

He laid the foundation of not one new hall, he added few books that were not printed in his own Papal presses, but he turned the famous and immemorial Library from a stagnant pool into a stream of living waters, which should flow to the ends of the earth. For he made the springs of 4