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Show Rome and Its Sovereigns. THE Vatican and the Quirinal is the topic reviewed by William O'Brien in a late number of the Dublin Freeman. Mr. O'Brien was at Rome during the week opening the Papal Jubilee, and was a w itness, also, of the opening of the Italian parliament by the king. The chief wonder of Rome, writes Mr. O'Brien, Is to see two armies o occupation, owning different sovereigns sover-eigns and fighting under rival Hags, circulating in the same streets, and day by day carrying on their, smokeless smoke-less struggle for mastery without as much as the noise of a cannon shot. In the trastevard. the heroic old man of A3, whose empire is apparently bounded by the walls of the Vatican, yet mystically mysti-cally extends to the uttermost ends of the earth; across the river, only three streets away, although with an abyss deep as an ocean between them, the youthful king of the house of Savoy, who owes to a murderer's- knife his untimely accession to the throne. Both potentates have their separate embassies, embas-sies, their separate nobility, their sep arate armies -and encampments. The ' French or Austrian minister to the Vatican Vat-ican has hardly a bowing acquaintance with his brother French or Austrian minister to the Quirinal. The haughty black patricians, who adhere to the pope, would rather freeze to death in their palaces than open them to the white patricians the princely bankers and marquises, flunkeys and adventurers adven-turers whose patents of nobility date from yesterday, and who find themselves them-selves attracted towards the loaves and fishes of the Quirinal by the same instinct in-stinct which brings their Irish brother i flunkey groveling on his beily to Dublin Dub-lin castle. The trumpets of the rival posts are forever sounding be they church bells or rollcal's. Every big building which is not a convent is a barrack, or a convent expropriated into a barrack. Every street is alive with . the uniforms of the two armies the cockades and feathers and swords of the army of the flesh flashing in and out among those monks' garbs of brown and white and black, which are as Incomparably In-comparably picturesque today as when Fra Angelico painted them. Often and desperately as the possession of Rome has been contested by Volscian and Etruscan, by Carth agenian and Hun I and Goth, by Austrian and Frenchman and Spaniard, there was surely never a more enthralling passage in its story than this silent, bloodless, invisible, subterranean, supernatural warfare which divides the Eternal City day by day from the dawn when the sun peeps into the early masses on the thousand altars of Rome until it sets behind St. Peter's in a sea of gold. Comparing the glamor and glitter of the king's parade and the scant enthusiasm en-thusiasm it evoked, with the quiet, religious re-ligious admiration of the multitude who gazed upon the Hoiy Father when he was borne into the great basilica, Mr. O'Brien writes: "The Italian journals make much of the circumstance that the cries of "Er-viva "Er-viva il Papa Re!" were few. It is quite true. I only heard one, and it was reproved re-proved by one of those half-spoken murmurs by which a well-bred crowd puts a stop to an indiscretion. To me, ar least, it seemed as if there is an irreverence akin to insult in linking the title of the sovereign potentate who could command such world-wide love and reverence as lay at Pope Leo's feet that day, with the poor trade of the kinglets of the earth, who strut through their threadbare court festivities, and amuse themselves with their boxes of soldiers until the knife or bomb of some lunatic subject turns the poor little comedy into a tragedy. There are three live things in Rome: Religion, nationality and the gathering power of labor. AVhatever ephemeral excesses may disfigure all human ideals, the papacy has nothing to fear from the true and passionate longing for Italian unity which sounded through Dante's immortal song, and in Fjlicerga's cry: "Deh! fossi tu men bella o almen fui forte!" (Ah! wert thou only less lovely or more strong) many a century before the cause fell under the sinister patronage pat-ronage of the Victor Emmanuels and the Crispis. Still dess need 'the Democratic Demo-cratic pope' w ho . penned the famous bull, which is the most sacred charter of the toilers, dread an ultimate antagonism an-tagonism betw-een the cry of the poor and weakly for a larger share of this world's sunshine, and their ineradicable hopes in a world where sunshine will be more enduring. There are not wanting want-ing signs that, in spite of the teles mon-tees mon-tees that abound in all thp camns- tt may not be imposible to find a formula which will bring all the best forces of a united Italy and of the army of labor la-bor to recognize that, without the papacy, pap-acy, Rome wou'ld 'be simply one more stratum of shabby twentieth century ruins, superposed upon all the strata of more magnificent ruins underneath, and that, come what may, the power that chanted its "Te Deum" in St. Peter's upon this memorable day, will live and thrive when the mere men of parliaments and anarchfs't clubs are buried deeper down than Romulus and Remus in the entrails of the Eternal City." |