We are just back from a great function at St. Peter’s.  It is the festa of St. Peter’s chair, and the ex-dragoon Cardinal Howard has been fugleman in the devout adorations addressed to that venerable article of furniture, which, as you ought to know, but probably don’t, is inclosed in a bronze double and perched up in a shrine of the worst possible taste in the Tribuna of St. Peter’s.  The display of man-millinery and lace was enough to fill the lightest-minded woman with envy, and a general concert—­some of the music very good—­prevented us from feeling dull, while the ci-devant guardsman—­big, burly, and bullet-headed—­made God and then eat him.

[A reminiscence of Browning in “The Bishop Orders his Tomb":—­

    And then how I shall lie through centuries,
    And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
    And see God made and eaten all day long.]

I must have a strong strain of Puritan blood in me somewhere, for I am possessed with a desire to arise and slay the whole brood of idolators whenever I assist at one of these ceremonies.  You will observe that I am decidedly better, and have a capacity for a good hatred still.

The last news about Gordon is delightful.  The chances are he will rescue Wolseley yet.

With our love.

Ever yours,

T.H.  Huxley.

[To his eldest son.]

Rome, January 20, 1885.

I need hardly tell you that I find Rome wonderfully interesting, and the attraction increases the longer one stays.  I am obliged to take care of myself and do but little in the way of sight-seeing, but by directing one’s attention to particular objects one can learn a great deal without much trouble.  I begin to understand Old Rome pretty well, and I am quite learned in the Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church.  She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which she has been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of Nazareth would not know her if he met her.

I have been to several great papistical functions—­among others to the festa of the Cathedra Petri in St. Peter’s last Sunday, and I confess I am unable to understand how grown men can lend themselves to such elaborate tomfooleries—­nothing but mere fetish worship—­in forms of execrably bad taste, devised, one would think, by a college of ecclesiastical man-milliners for the delectation of school-girls.  It is curious to notice that intellectual and aesthetic degradation go hand in hand.  You have only to go from the Pantheon to St. Peter’s to understand the great abyss which lies between the Roman of paganism and the Roman of the papacy.  I have seen nothing grander than Agrippa’s work—­the popes have stripped it to adorn their own petrified lies, but in its nakedness it has a dignity with which there is nothing to compare in the ill-proportioned, worse decorated tawdry stone mountain on the Vatican.