sort of rechauffe of Murray’s handbook, flavoured with discussions on last Sunday’s sermon.  When you are reduced to such a frame of mind and body as is the natural result of time so employed, the doors of the chapel are opened, and you have literally to fight your way in amidst a crowd of ladies hustling, screaming, and fainting.  If you are lucky, you get standing room in a sort of open pen, whence, if you are tall, you can catch a sight of the Pope’s tiara in the distance; or, if you belong to the softer sex, you get a place behind the screen, where you cannot see, but, what is much better, can sit.  The atmosphere of the candle-lighted, crammed chapel is overpowering, and occupation you have none, except trying in the dim light to decipher the frescoes on the roof, with your head turned backwards.  For three long hours you have a succession of dreary monotonous strains, forming portions of a chant, to you unintelligible, broken at intervals by a passage of intonation.  There is no organ or instrumental music, and the absence of contralto voices is poorly compensated for by the unnatural accents of the Papal substitutes for female vocalists.

The music itself may be very fine,—­competent critics declare it is, and I have no doubt they are right; but I say, unhesitatingly, it is not music that addresses itself to popular tastes, or produces any feeling save that of weariness on nine-tenths of its hearers.  You can mark clearly the expression of satisfaction which steals over every face as candle after candle of the stack of wax-lights before the altar is put out successively, at intervals of some twenty minutes.  If the ceremony were reduced to one-tenth of its length, it might be impressive, but a dirge which goes on for three hours, and a chandelier which takes the same time to have its lights snuffed out, become an intolerable nuisance.  The dying cadence of the Miserere is undoubtedly grand; but, in the first place, it comes when your patience is exhausted; and, in the second, it lasts so long, that you begin to wonder whether it will ever end.  The slavery to conventional rules in England, which causes one to shrink from the charge of not caring about music as zealously as one could, and from pleading guilty to personal cowardice, makes Englishmen, and still more Englishwomen, profess to be delighted with the Miserere; but, in their heart of hearts, their feeling is much such as I have given utterance to.

The ceremonies in St Peter’s itself are, as sights, much better; but yet I often think that the very size and grandeur of the giant edifice increases the mesquin-ness (for want of an English word I must manufacture a French one) of the whole ceremony.  At the exposition of the relics, for instance, you see in a very lofty gallery two small figures, holding up something—­what, you cannot tell—­set up in a rich framework of gold and jewels; it may be a piece of the cross, or a martyr’s finger-bone,