The insuperable objection, however, to the impressiveness of the whole scene is the same as mars all Papal pageants,—­I mean the length and monotony of the performance.  One chant may be fine, one prostration before the altar may be striking, one burst of the choral litany may act upon your senses; but, when you have chant after chant, prostration after prostration, chorus after chorus, each the twin brother to the other, and going on for hours, without apparent rhyme or reason, you cease to take thought of anything, in order to speculate idly when, if ever, there is likely to be an end.  There is no variety, and little change, too, about the ceremonies.  When you have seen one you have seen all; and when you have seen them once, you can understand how to the Romans themselves these sights have become stale and dull, till they look upon them much as I fancy the musician in the orchestra of the old Princess’s must have looked upon one of Kean’s Shaksperian revivals when the season was far spent.

CHAPTER XVI.  ISOLATION OF ROME.

There is, I think, no city in the world where Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” would be so hard to answer as in Rome.  In addition to the ordinary difficulties which everywhere beset the path of the foreigner in search of knowledge, there are a number of obstacles peculiar and special to Rome alone.

The whole policy of the government is directed towards maintaining the country in a state of isolation, towards drawing, in fact, a moral cordon sanitaire round the Papal dominions.  Indeed, if one lived long in Rome, one would get to doubt the reality of anything.  When I last came to Rome straight from Tuscany, seething in the turmoil of its new-bought liberties, I could hardly believe that only six months ago there had been war in Italy within two hundred miles from the Papal city, that the fate of Italy still hung trembling in the balance, and that the chief province of the country was still in open revolt against its rulers.  There was no sign, no trace, scarce a symptom even of what had passed or was passing in the world without.  We all seemed spellbound in a dull, dead, dreary circle.  There were no advertisements in the streets, except of devotional works for the coming season of Lent; no pamphlets or books placed in the booksellers’ windows, which by their titles even implied the existence of the war and the revolution; no prints for sale of the scenes of the campaign, or the popular heroes of the day.  This was the normal state of Rome, such as I had seen it in former years.  Later on, indeed, either the force of events, or a change in the counsels of the Vatican, induced the Papacy to drop the defensive passive attitude which constituted its real strength, and to adopt an active offensive policy, which served rather to show the greatness of the dreaded danger than to avert its occurrence.  Still the increased animation,