Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/293

 where can the early history of Christendom be better studied than in the Catacombs, the hiding-place of early popes and saints, and richer than the Colosseum itself in the blood of Christian martyrs? Of the early history of Ireland how much may we find in San Pietro in Montorio, where our martyrs lie buried. But nothing in the capital of the Christian world, not St. Peter's or the Sovereign Pontiff, was a sight fit to match in interest to Irishmen the exhibition of the Accademia Polyglotta, where students from Asia, Africa, Australasia, and America spoke, each of them, the language or chanted the music of his birthplace, and from three continents and their outlying islands the students bore names that marked them of our own indestructible people. The remote history of Europe, when the children of Conn gave missionaries to half the known world, seemed revived again in that spectacle. What a volume steeped in tears, but illuminated too with glorious incidents, might be written on the Irish monuments and institutions in Rome! His own San Clemente furnished my friend with a constant text, for its Irish friars were the hosts and often the trusted counsellors of princes from Charles and James Stuart, and Charles Edward in a later generation down to Albert Edward of Wales in our own day, who has knit a friendship with the good friars; and what is nobler and better, it was the constant guardian of Irish interests, when Ireland had a foreign policy and a diplomatic corps hid under the black or brown robes of monks and professors. And he did not forget that other Irish house founded by the great Franciscan, Luke Wadding, who was ambassador from the Confederation of Kilkenny to the Holy See, or the more modern college in whose humble church the heart of O'Connell is preserved. There is a granite obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo, in which my friend found a type of the Irish race. It is covered with hieroglyphics sculptured by Egyptian artists before Moses received the tables of the Law on Mount Sinai; it has seen cities grow and perish, generations and cycles come and go, the Goth and the Gaul in turn masters of Rome, the piratical soldier of fortune and the crowned Emperor holding the cradle of Christianity to pillage, but it still lifts its eternal face to the sun as fresh in the day of Bismarck as in the days of Cæsar.