He chiefly lodges in convents during his rambles through Sicily, the inns being so very bad that they drive travellers away. He and his companion sleep in different convents, and are very well treated; but that scarcely evokes a word of thanks. Poor monks! they have a bad name in Protestant nations, and what would be praiseworthy in others is only an equivocal quality in them. This is very sad; that men who have bid farewell to the world should, on that very account, be considered hardly entitled to the bare rights of human beings. Yet go on, poor souls, in your vocation; your Master before you received the same treatment from the world, and you are not greater than He. Spencer meets one or two monks whom he likes pretty well—one was the superior of the Carmelites at Grirgenti. The rest he calls "stupid friars," "lazy monks," and so forth, according to the tone of mind he happens to be in. In one monastery they shut the door of the room allowed them in the face of one of the brethren, because, forsooth, they were "bored by visits from the monks." His journey does not always lie through convents, and he meets others who are not monks; one of these was a wine-merchant at Marsala, a native of England. It seems the pair of tourists were received as handsomely by their countryman as they had been by the "stupid friars," for he is thus described in the journal: "He seems to think himself commissioned to keep up the English character in a strange land, for he is a John Bull in caricature in his manner." We are also told, a little lower down, that he is very hospitable to all English who pass by that way. They had the novelty of seeing an Italian Good Friday in Marsala; the impression is thus noted:
"Friday, Mar. 31.— This was Good Friday. The first, and I hope the last, I shall spend without going to church; not that I should not like to be abroad another year. We were reminded of the day by quantities of groups representing the Passion and Crucifixion, almost as large as life, carried about on men's shoulders, which, absurd as they are, seemed to make an impression on the populace. Men dressed in black accompanied them, with crowns of thorns and crosses. It strikes me as direct idolatry, nearly. The gentry were all in mourning, and the sentinels had their muskets with the muzzles inverted. We all three (Sir H. Willoughby accompanied Barrington and Spencer) took a walk up to the top of Monte di Trapani, the ancient Eryx, where is a town of the same name. We examined what was to be seen there, and came down again to dinner. We dined at 6½, and had some meat, which we have not been able to get for some days, it being Passion Week." He spent Easter Sunday in Palermo, and here are his comments on its observance:
"Sunday, April 2, Easter-day.— We set off from Ahamo about 7¼. I walked on for an hour, and then rode forward all the way to Monreale, where I stopped an hour till the others came up. We then proceeded together to Palermo. In the villages we passed, the people were all out in their best clothes, which was a very pretty sight. Bells were clattering everywhere, and feux de joie were fired in several villages as we passed, with a row of little tubes loaded with gunpowder, in the market-places, and processions went about of people in fancy dresses with flags and drums. This religion is most extraordinary. It strikes me as impious; but I suppose it takes possession of the common people sooner than a sensible one."
He completed the tour of the island by arriving in Messina, after a most successful attempt to see Mount Etna, on the 14th of April. They left Sicily for Reggio in a boat, and arrived there "with a good ducking." They both went to visit Scylla, which was guarded as a citadel by armed peasants. The sturdy yeomen refused to admit them, whereupon George, with true English curiosity, climbed up the wall to get a peep at the sea, and perhaps inside. Scarcely had he got half-way up when he was taken prisoner by the sentinel. He was accordingly invited to visit the interior of the castle, and had to gaze at the bleak walls of its keep for an hour, until Willoughby procured his release from the commandant. They travelled on, and George does not seem to be satisfied with the people of Salerno, whom he designates as "surly and gothic." He heard his companions had to get an escort of gendarmes, to save them from robbers, all along here. Returns to Naples, April 26, delighted at being safe in life and limb; he goes to the old lodgings to a party, and reflects thus on his return: "I came home about one, rather sad with seeing the representation of what I had enjoyed in the winter—but all the people changed. Gaiety after all does not pay." This last sentence is not underlined by Spencer himself. It is done to point a moral that may be necessary for a certain class of persons. It is often supposed that monks, and the like people, paint the world blacker than it is in reality, and that it is a kind of morose sourness of disposition that makes recluses cry down the enjoyments of those outside convent-walls. This line will perhaps defend F. Ignatius from such an imputation. He wrote that after the pure natural enjoyment of scenery had been compared with the excitement of a ball-room; if he thought, in his wildness, that gaiety did not pay, no wonder that his opinion was confirmed in the quiet tameness of his after-life. A passage from the autobiography, omitted above, comes in here opportunely. He was speaking of the absence of the fear of God from his miserable mind:—
"This was almost true concerning the entire period. One occasion I will mention when I was impressed with some shame at my wretched state. While I was making the tour of Sicily, my father and mother left Naples in the Revolutionnaire, a fine frigate which had been placed at their disposal, and by which they went to Marseilles, to shorten their land journey homewards. When I returned to Naples I found a long letter from my father, full of kindness and affection for me, in which he explained to me his wishes as to the course of my journey home. This letter I believe I have not kept, but I remember in it a passage nearly as follows: 'As to your conduct, my dear George, I need not tell you how important it is for your future happiness and character that you should keep yourself from all evil; especially considering the sacred profession for which you are intended. But, on this subject, I have no wish concerning you but to hear that you continue to be what you have hitherto been.' 'Ah!' thought I to myself, 'how horrible is the difference between what I am and what this sentence represents me.' But worldly shame was yet more powerful in me than godly shame, and this salutary impression did not produce one good resolution."
On May 3rd, 1820, he came to Rome a second time. His first visit this time also was to St. Peter's, which, he says, "looked more superb to me than ever." He attended Cardinal Litta's funeral from curiosity, and has no remark about it worth extracting. There are two passages in the journal relating to the ceremonies of Ascension Thursday and Corpus Christi, which may be interesting as being indicative of his notions of Catholic ritual:—
"Thursday, May 11.— Got up early, and wrote till breakfast. At 9½ went off with Barrington and Ford to St. John of Lateran, where there were great ceremonies to take place for the Ascension Day. The old Pope was there, and was carried round the church blessing, with other mummeries. It was a fine sight when he knelt down and prayed (or was supposed to do so) in the middle of the church, with all the Cardinals behind him. Now this goes for nothing in comparison to what it must have been when the Pope was really considered infallible (sic). We then all went out of the church to receive the blessing, from the principal window in the façade. The Pope came to this in his chair, and performed the spreading of his hands very becomingly. The whole thing was too protracted, perhaps, to be as striking as it should; but I was not as disappointed as I expected to be. The cannonry of St. Angelo and the band certainly gave effect; and the crowd of people on the space before the church was a scene to look at."
"Thursday, June 1.— To-day is the feast of Corpus Domini, one of the greatest in the Catholic Church; so at eight we went, having breakfasted funzioni, which are very grand on this occasion. There was a great procession round the cortile—first of the religious orders, about 450 monks only; and the boys of St. Michael's Hospital, of the Collegio Romano, &c. Then came curates, and priests temporal and secular, prelates, and monsignores, the ensigns or canopies of the seven basilicas with their chapters, and the priests belonging to them following; next came bishops, then cardinals, and then the Pope, carried on four men's shoulders. He was packed up on the top of the stand with his head out alone. He seemed more dead than alive, and worse than on May 11 at S. Giovanni's. The group of people about him, with their robes and splendid mitres, made a very brilliant sight. The former part of the procession rather showed the decadence of the Church from a great height, than its present glory. After the Pope came the guardia nobile, and other soldiers, in splendid uniforms. After the procession there were functions in the Church, and a benediction from the Altar, and which I did not see so well. St. Peter's never showed so well as with a crowd of people in it, when one may estimate its dimensions from the comparison of their littleness."
This is a fair specimen of how a candid, prejudiced Protestant stares at Catholic services. He puts down as undisputed that all is absurd before he goes, and if the Man of Sin himself, the poor Pope, is in the middle of it, it rises to the very highest pitch of abomination. A man who could consider holiday attire and exultation impious on Easter Sunday, and the mourning and fasting and processions of Good Friday something worse, cannot be very well qualified to comprehend the Ascension and Corpus Christi in Rome. Catholics do believe in the authority of the Pope and the power of the Keys, and also in the Real Presence; will it not follow, as a natural conclusion, that the four quarters of the globe should get its spiritual Father's blessing one day in the year, and that we should try to find out the best way of honouring our Incarnate God in the Blessed Sacrament? But consistency is not a gift one finds among Protestants, especially when they give their opinion on what they think too absurd to try to understand. They must admit the Catholic ceremonial is imposing; but then it is only to quarrel with it for being so. They can understand pageantry and pomp in honouring an earthly monarch; but does it occur to them that every best gift is from above, and that the King of kings should be honoured with every circumstance of splendour and oblation a creature can offer?
One or two of the salient points of his character come out in a few extracts we shall produce from the journal now. He says, on leaving Rome—"How delightful, and yet how melancholy, was my walk about those dear rooms at the Vatican; after next Thursday I believe I am never to see them again, so farewell to them now." This illustrates his better nature; he was very affectionate, and could love whatever was really worth loving; he was not very demonstrative of this feeling, but when it came to leave-taking, he had to give vent to it. A peculiar caste of his mind was to listen to every proposition, and weigh the reasons adduced to support it. If they were unanswerable, he at once admitted it, and, if possible, tested it by experience. This was the great key to his conversion and subsequent life. In conversation, perhaps, with a medical friend, he was told that it was far the best way, whilst on the move in travelling, neither to eat nor drink. This was supported by reasons drawn from the digestive principles, and so forth. He thought it was well proved, and could find no valid objection against it, so he determined to try it, and travelled from Rome to Sienna without tasting a morsel for forty-two hours, and says in his journal—"It is much the best way in travelling." In Florence we have other tokens of the regret with which he parts from his friends; and in the same page a very different feeling on parting with some Franciscans. These "entertained him uncommonly well for mendicants," and showed him all their treasures of art and piety with the greatest kindness; yet it did not prevent him calling them "lazy old monks" when they let him away at three o'clock in the morning.