should I go if Rome were to be turned topsy-turvy?  Where should we establish our dethroned sovereigns?  Where would a home be found for Roman Catholic worship?  You have no doubt been told that some people are dissatisfied with the administration:  but what of that?  They are not of our world.  You never meet them in the good society you frequent.  If the demands of the middle class were to be complied with, everything would be overturned.  Have you any wish to see manufactories erected round St. Peter’s and turnip fields about the fountain of Egeria?  These native shopkeepers seem to imagine the country belongs to them because they happen to be born in it.  Can one conceive a more ridiculous pretension?  Let them know that Rome is the property in copartnership of people of birth, of people of taste, and of artists.  It is a museum confided to the guardianship of the Holy Father; a museum of old monuments, old pictures, and old institutions.  Let all the rest of the world change, but build me a Chinese wall round the Papal States, and never let the sound of the railway-whistle be heard within its sacred precincts!  Let us preserve for admiring posterity at least one magnificent specimen of absolute power, ancient art, and the Roman Catholic religion!”

This is the language of foreign inhabitants of Rome of the old stamp,—­estimable people, and sincere believers, who have gone on year after year witnessing the ceremonies of St. Peter’s, and the Fete des Oignons in the St. John Lateran, till they have acquired an ecclesiastical turn of thought and expression, a habit of seeing things through the spectacles of the Sacred College, and a faith which has no sympathy with the outer world.  I do not share their opinions, and I have never found their advice particularly useful; but they interest me, I like them, and I sincerely pity them.  Who can tell what events they are destined to witness in their time?  Who can foresee the spectacles which the future reserves for them, and the changes that their habits will be made to undergo by the Italian revolution?  Already their hearing is distracted by the locomotives that rush between Rome and Frascati; already the shriek of the steam-blast daily and nightly hisses insolently at the respectable comedy of the past between Rome and Civita Vecchia.  Steamboats, another engine of disorder, furnish the bi-weekly means of an invasion of the most dangerous character.  Those dozens of travellers who throng the streets and the squares are about as much like our good old foreign tourists, as the barbarians of Attila were like the worthy Spaniard who came to Rome on purpose to see Titus Livius.