All the offices which confer power or profit belong first to the Pope, then to the Secretary of State, then to the Cardinals, and lastly to the Prelates.  Everybody takes his share according to the hierarchical order; and when all are satisfied, the crumbs of power are thrown to the nation at large; in other words, the 14,596 places which no ecclesiastic chooses to take, particularly the distinguished office of Guardia Campestre, a sort of rural police.  Nobody need wonder at such a distribution of places.  In the government of Rome, the Pope is everything, the Secretary of State is almost everything, the Cardinals are something, and the priests on the road to become something.  The lay nation, which marries and gives in marriage, and peoples the State, is nothing—­never will be anything.

The word prelate has fallen from my pen; I will pause a moment to explain its precise meaning.  Among us it is a title sufficiently respected:  at Rome it is far less so.  We have no prelates but our Archbishops and Bishops.  When we see one of these venerable men driving slowly out of his palace in an old-fashioned carriage drawn by a single pair of horses, we know, without being told it, that he has spent three-fourths of his existence in the exercise of the most meritorious works.  He said Mass in some small village before he was made the cure of a canton.  He has preached, confessed, distributed alms to the poor, borne the viaticum to the sick, committed the dead to their last narrow home.

The Roman prelate is often a great hulking fellow who has just left college, with the tonsure for his only sacrament.  He is a Doctor of something or other, he owns some property, more or less, and he enters the Church as an amateur, to see if he can make something out of it.  The Pope gives him leave to style himself Monsignore, instead of Signore, and to wear violet-coloured stockings.  Clad in these he starts on his road, hoping it may lead him to a Cardinal’s hat.  He passes through the courts of law, or the administration, or the domestic service of the Vatican, as the case may be.  All these paths lead in the right direction, provided the traveller pursuing them has zeal, and professes a pious scorn for liberal ideas.  The ecclesiastical calling is by no means indispensable, but nothing can be achieved without a good stock of retrograde ideas.  The prelate who should take the Emperor’s letter to M. Edgar Ney seriously, would be, in vulgar parlance, done for; the only course open to him would be—­to marry.  At Paris, a man disappointed in ambition takes prussic acid; at Rome, he takes a wife.

Sometimes the prelate is a cadet of a noble house, one in which the right to a red hat is traditional.  Knowing this he feels that the moment he puts on his violet stockings, he may order his scarlet ones.  In the meanwhile he takes his degrees, and profits by the occasion to sow his wild oats.  The Cardinals shut their eyes to his conduct, so he does but profess wholesome ideas.  Do what you please, child of princes, so your heart be but clerical!