Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/295

 much of his life. It was of modest dimensions and modest appointments, and he was clothed in a robe of white woollen. His face was singularly sweet and beneficent, and his voice a marvellous organ for so aged a man. I had seen him before in public, and afterwards at the Paschal ceremonies, but I was more impressed by the simplicity and patience with which he pursued inquiries, when he thought I might tell him things he desired to know. To grant audiences is one of the duties of a sovereign, but how inexpressibly wearisome it must be. An imitation monk, an English Protestant clergyman calling himself Brother Ignatius (represented to be a great blockhead) was with him the other day. Some time after I saw his Holiness again, when the foundation stone of the church of the English College at Rome was laid. He held a drawing-room to which a limited number of persons, scarcely reaching a hundred, was admitted. Among them were the King and Queen of Naples, the heroic Queen whose courage at Gaeta had excited the admiration of Europe. An English lady, much in favour with the Queen, came to me and proposed to present me to her Majesty. I said I greatly admired her, and would feel honoured by such a presentation if it were becoming in me to accept it, but it would amount to political hypocrisy, for nearly every other person in that salon desired her restoration, and for my part I hoped never to see a Bourbon return to an Italian throne.

I met various persons of distinction in society, but twenty years has considerably diminished the interest of my diary on such topics. One story, however, I have often laughed at since. At the table of a cultivated and literary English member to whom Robert Browning introduced me, I met Lord Odo Russell. Our talk after dinner fell on the state of Rome at that time. There was a general feeling that the Pope would be deprived of his sovereignty. I suggested that such a proceeding would be a robbery, not only of the Pope but of Catholic Europe; whatever ancient monument was preserved, whatever modern edifice was erected, was sure to be inscribed with the name of some pope who spent the offerings of Catholic Europe in these good works, and the Vatican, which was worth a modern city, was created and preserved by the same agency. I did not at all desire to see