“The passage of the Pope to the Sistine on his coronation anniversary was a very fine sight. Borne along in his golden chair, with the white peacock fans waving in front of him, and wearing his triple crown, Leo XIII. looked dying, but gave his benediction with the most serene majesty, sinking back between each effort upon his cushions, as if the end had indeed come. Only his eyes lived, and lived only in his office; otherwise his perfectly spiritualised countenance seemed utterly unconscious of the thundering evvivas with which he was greeted, and which rose into a perfect roar as he was carried into the Sala Regia. The potency of ‘Orders’ here is so great, that my Swedish decoration not only gave me the best place, but I took in two young men as my chaplain and equerry! After the Pope had entered the Sistine, we sat in great comfort in the Sala Regia till he returned, and then, as there was no one between us and the procession, we saw all the individual faces of the old cardinals—how few of them the same now as those I remember in the processions of Pius IX.
“There are no evvivas now for the comparatively young king with the white hair and the ever-tragic countenance: the taxes are too great. I believe that he can read, if no one else can, the handwriting on the wall which foretells the doom of his southern kingdom. And yet personally no one could be braver or more royal, and, where they detest the king, the people honour the man. ‘Your king is at that house which has fallen down, helping with his own hands to dig out that old man who is buried: he won’t leave till the old man is safe,’ said Mrs. Story to her Italian maid Margherita. ‘Si, Signora, casa di Savoia manca qualche volta di testa, mai di cuore;’ and it is quite true. All one hears of the King’s self-abnegation is so fine. He used to be quite devoted to smoking, but he was ill, and one day his physician told him that it was extremely deleterious to him. He instantly took his cigar out of his mouth, threw it into the back of the fire, and has never smoked again.
“The Pope’s secretary has just died of the influenza. Leo XIII. was much attached to him, and is greatly distressed by his death. There is something touching in the newspaper account of the Pope’s having refused to eat, and his attendants having had to use qualche dolce violenze to make him do it.
“We have had two months of rain, only four fine days last week, in which I went to the Crimera, to Fidenae, to Ostia, and to a touching and beautiful Mass in the heart of the Catacomb of S. Praetextatus, where the martyrs’ hymn was sung by a full choir upon their graves, its cadences swelling through the subterranean church and dying away down the endless rude passages, so long their refuge, and at last their place of death.
“And now I must stop. I am just come up from luncheon. ‘Wal, I guess I’m stuffed, but I’m not appeased,’ said my neighbour as we came out; and she was con rispetto parlando, as they say here—a lady.”
To Hugh Bryans.
“Rome, April 26, 1892.—How I wish you were here: how you would enjoy it, though there is little to admire now in this much-changed Rome beyond the extreme loveliness of the spring, with its Judas and May flowers, and the golden broom of the Campagna. I have just been, with my old friends Mrs. Ramsay and Miss Garden, to the Villa Doria to pick anemones. There were thousands of them, and the ladies gathered them in like a harvest. Their servant was told off to look after the violets. Their late man, Francesco, said his was usually a very light place—‘ma nella primavera, al tempo dei violette, e duro veramente.’
“I have seen little of the Easter ceremonies. On Holy Thursday I went to St. Peter’s, and watched in the immense crowd for the extinction of the last candle and beginning of the Miserere; but all the effect was lost and the music inaudible from the incessant moving and talking. Afterwards there was a fine scene at the blessing of the altar in the already dark church—the procession, with lights, moving up and down the altar-steps, and then kneeling all along the central aisle, whilst the relics were exhibited from the brilliantly lighted gallery.
“Fifty-eight artisans and schoolmasters from the Toynbee Hall Institute, with some of their wives, have been in Rome for the Easter holidays. On Thursday I took them all over the Palatine, finding them most delightful companions, and the most informed and interested audience I have ever known. So since that I have been with them to the Appian Way, and Miss Fleetwood Wilson kindly invited the whole party to tea at the old Palazzo Mattei, unaltered through three hundred years. I made friends with many of the party individually, and think that for really good, intelligent, high-minded society, one should frequent the East End.
“What struck me most of all was the absence amongst them of the scandal-talk which in our own society is so prevalent. ‘Consider how cheap a kindness it is not to speak ill: it only requires silence,’ is an exhortation of Bishop Tillotson. They remember this; we don’t.