George Cruikshank's Omnibus

by George Cruikshank

Of cooking up an almanack,"

we shall find that every seat was occupied. Where then, it may be asked, are the addenda to be placed at the end of each century? The question is by no means easy of solution.

There is, to be sure, leap-year, with its odd day in February; yet this would only do for a bit of a saint, and coming like a comet at stated intervals, I incline to think that when "the Devil a saint would be," he takes that odd day to himself, and walks the earth with all the glories of his tail, an appendage which no true saint would acknowledge. But, as the French found room for "St. Napoleon," even while alive, I can only suppose that the longest day will hold more than the shortest, and any day hold more than one saint. When St. Nap was elected, it is clear some smaller saint must have been put in the background, and thus he remained—as we should say of an ex-minister—"out of place and out of favour," until the Bourbons returned, and included the ex-saint in their own restoration.

Leaving, however, this knotty point to the Pope and his cardinals, I come at once to St. Peter's and the fact. It was in the merry month of May 1839 that I last entered that temple, alike unrivalled for its majesty and beauty—would that I had never seen it as I saw it then! The election was over, the chosen of one hundred years were decided upon, four new saints had been returned to earth; a fifth had been nominated, but after his claims had been duly canvassed, the votes were against him. An overwhelming majority declared that he had not performed sufficient miracles to be canonised, and his bones were doomed to rest in peace. Not so the successful candidates; their names were entered in the day-book of the Pope's elect, each saint and his miracle were put upon canvass, the likenesses were warranted, and the limner's art had done its best to show how saints in heaven were made by man on earth. There they were, only awaiting the ceremonies which were to confirm the intended honours, the chairing of themselves and deeds in effigy—(if thus we may speak of hanging those huge pictures on high)—the celebration of mass, the roaring of cannon from the Castle of St. Angelo—psalmody, such as Rome alone can boast—processions wherein grandeur, littleness, gorgeous wealth, torches, and tinsel, struggle for mastery, yet form in the whole a most striking and impressive inconsistency.

Be our creed what it may, whether we approve or whether we condemn, our feelings are carried away by the feelings of the many, the thousands upon thousands who, with one accord, bare the head and bend the knee, when their Prince of the whole Christian world, their Pope, "Nostra Papa," appears! Jews, Turks, and Infidels must "off with their hat"—if they have one—but with the most rigid there is also an involuntary inclination to bend the knee.

Who, unmoved, can watch a Roman procession wending its way towards the high altar, till it pauses beneath their Holy of Holies, the wondrous dome of St. Peter's! a strange anomaly, I grant—venerable priests of Christ, tottering beneath the weight of gold embroidered on their backs; cardinals, proud and stately, wearing their scarlet hats as knights who bore the helmet of the church; beautiful boys, with angel wings upon their shoulders; censers, waving clouds of incense, lending its perfume to the air, and, like a spirit loath to quit this lower world, wheeling, hovering, slowly rising in graceful circles of fantastic flight till it mingles with the sky, and is seen no more.

"'Tis gone!" and as it passed I caught the costume of the warlike Swiss; the guards of him, the Pope who preaches peace on earth. I saw their nodding plumes of raven black, with scarlet tuft—their glittering halberts of an age gone by—their ruffs, rosettes, their belts of buff (the perfection of a painter's picturesque), armed and covered in the House of God!—Yes, this, and much untold, of that which forms a Romish procession at Rome, strange and anomalous though it be, is most striking and impressive as a whole.

The mere recollection has carried me with it, and turned aside for the moment the malediction I contemplated on the dressing up of St. Peter's. Would, I repeat, that I had never seen it! to gild the virgin gold were a venial blunder in comparison—it would still be gold, and look like gold; but to veil the majesty, the stern uncompromising beauty of St. Peter's columns with flaunting silk, to ornament perfection with tinsel hangings and festoons, this was indeed a profanation in honour of the saints elect.

St. Peter's, with me, had been a passion from the moment I first looked upon its wondrous beauty: it was love, love at first sight, but growing with my growth—a passion, holy and enduring, such as can be only felt when we stand in the presence of fancied perfection. Judge, then, of my horror when I saw this desecration!—but there is no blank so dark that we may not find a ray of light. I bless the saints for one thing— they taught me how to build a brace of angels, and in so doing they taught me the stupendous proportions of that temple, which, though built by human hands, has in it a sublimity which awes and humbles the proud heart of little man. Nay, the very portraits of their very saints diverted my angry thoughts by teaching the self-same lesson. There was one—a monstrous ugly fellow—who, preparatory to his chairing, was left to lean against a column. The proportions of this miracle-worker were so gigantic, that I deemed it some mighty caricature, painted on the main-sail of a man-of-war, till, looking at his fellows raised to their proper elevation, they seemed in their oval frames but medallions stuck upon the walls!