Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/298

 Jerusalem of the Christian Church. And you could put so forcibly that argument, which has never yet been properly stated, from the Sacrilege, of handing over the See of the Vicar of Christ, with its numberless shrines of God and His Saints and its relics gathered for eighteen hundred years, into the sooty paws of that dog-faced centaur Victor Emmanuel, to stable his harlots in the midst of them. Irrespective of all personal regard or even acquaintance, I would give a trifle for an article—even of only one sheet of sixteen pages—on this matter from your pen. For God's sake write the article!"

I did not write the review, not because the complaint was not a just one, but before leaving London I had visited Mr. John Murray with John Forster to talk over my intended Australian book, and Mr. Murray, knowing I was going to Rome, had presented me with a copy of his Guide. I felt that to review it unfavourably would be an ungenerous return for his courtesy. The other point my friend urged related to my intended book.

"Mind," he wrote, "put no politics of any kind into your book. Every word in that direction will be a blot, a sootdrop. Of course I do not mean politics as a science or a philosophy, but what is commonly meant by the word—i.e., party politics, e.g., Whig or Tory. Narrate, describe, &c., and you will produce the most charming work that any Irish Catholic has ever written."

For five months we employed every day in seeing the wonders of Rome, and when Easter was over, drank of the Fountain of Trevi to guarantee our return some day. On our journey back we stopped at Genoa, at the hotel where O'Connell died; some pious hand has placed a bas-relief of his head in front of the apartment where he died. I asked the head waiter and afterwards the landlord the name and story of the illustrious dead, but neither of them had the slightest idea on the subject. So the Irish soldiers and scholars of the Middle Ages are ignored. A people who have not a national existence cannot fix the attention of other nations.

When I arrived in London I determined not to publish the Australian book, of which I had written some chapters, as it