that it had never been erected.  It was left to Pope Pius IX., after all these centuries of neglect and obscurity, to find a use for it.  Crowning its capital by a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary, and disfiguring its shaft by a fantastic bronze network extending up two-fifths of its height, he erected it where it now stands in 1854, to commemorate the establishment by papal bull of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  It was during his exile at Gaeta, at a time when Italy was torn with civil dissensions, and his own dominions were afflicted with the most grievous calamities, which he could have easily averted or remedied if he wished, that this dogma engrossed the mind of the holy father and his ecclesiastical court.  The constitutionalists at Rome were anxiously expecting some conciliatory manifesto which should precede the Pope’s return and restore peace and prosperity; and they were mortified beyond measure by receiving only the letter in which this theological fiction was announced by his Holiness.  The people cried for the bread of constitutional liberty, and the holy father gave them the stone of a religious dogma to which they were wholly indifferent; thus demonstrating the incompatibility of the functions of a temporal and spiritual sovereign.

The pillar of the Immaculate Conception is embellished by statues of Moses, David, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, with texts from Scripture, and very inferior bronze bas-reliefs of the incidents connected with the publication of the dogma.  As a work of art, it is heavy and graceless, with hard mechanical lines; and the figure of the Virgin at the top is utterly destitute of merit.  The whole monument is a characteristic specimen of the modern Roman school of sculpture.  For ages Rome has been considered the foster mother of art, and residence in it essential to the education of the art-faculty.  But this is a delusion.  Its atmosphere has never been really favourable to the development of genius.  There is a moral malaria of the place as fatal to the versatile life of the imagination as the physical miasma is to health.  Roman Catholicism has petrified the heart and the fancy; and a petty round of ceremonies, feasts, and social parties dissipates energy and distracts the powers of those who are not under the influence of the Church.  The decadence of art has kept pace with the growing corruption of religion.  Descending from the purer spiritual conceptions of former times to grosser and more superstitious ideas, it has given outward expression to these in baser forms.  Even St. Peter’s, though extravagantly praised by so many visitors, is but the visible embodiment of the vulgar splendour of later Catholicism.  The pillar of the Immaculate Conception is not only a monument of religious superstition, but also of what must strike every thoughtful observer in Rome—­the decadence of art in modern times as compared with the glorious earlier days of a purer Church.  And the art of the sculptor is only in