going round to all the altars in succession, and kneeling before them to offer up his pompous prayers. The servants, dressed in sumptuous liveries, were on their knees behind, but some of them growing tired of the length of his devotions, were in this posture making grimaces at each other, and cutting jokes, sotto voce; and one or two of them in the rear had got up again, when the cardinal's eye glanced round, and down they plumped, more deep in apparent prayer than ever. Near this princely priest, as near as they could get, were some wretched diseased cripples, covered with rags and filth, and crawling on their hands and knees over the marble pavement of this superb edifice, vainly demanding charity in the most abject terms of misery and supplication. One of these unfortunate wretches, finding his petitions disregarded, at last, at a distance and in silence, began to worship at the same shrine, as if to implore from Heaven that mercy which man had denied. Some pilgrims, too, were among the supplicants of the manifold shrines, and it would be a curious task to analyse the motives that led them hither. They were chiefly young, strong men, apparently from the lower classes of society, whose appearance certainly did not denote that they had suffered much from the hardships and privations of the way. * * * Some of them were very fine-looking men. Their large black eyes and expressive countenances overshadowed by their broad-brimmed hats, their oil-skin tippets, cockle-shells, scrip, rosaries, and staff, had to us a novelty that was poetical as well as picturesque. Some of them had come from the moun * * * tains of Spain, and seemed resolved to lay in a stock of indulgences to serve them the rest of their lives." An enthusiastic old traveller, Lassels, concludes his account of St. Peter's with the following remarkable eulogy. "You will, perhaps, wonder, when you hear that this church is the eighth wonder of the world; that the pyramids of Egypt, the walls of Babylon, the Pharos, Colossus, &c. were but heaps of stones, compared to this fabric; that it hath put all antiquity to the blush, and all posterity to a nonplus; that its several parts are all incomparable master-pieces; its pictures all originals; its statues perfect models; that it hath a revenue of above twenty thousand pounds a-year only for the fabric; that it hath cost, till the year 1654 (the accounts being then summed up), forty millions of crowns; that most of the popes since Julius the Second's time (and they have been twenty-three in all) have heartened and advanced this work; that the prime architects of the world, San Gallo, Bramante, Baldassere, Buonarota, Giacomo della Porta, Giovanni Fontana, Carlo Maderno, and now Cavaliero Bernino, have brought it on to this perfection, that the whole church itself is nothing but the quintessence of wit and wealth strained into a religious design of making a handsome house to God, and of fulfilling the divine oracle, which promised that magna erit gloria domus istius novissimæ plusquam primæ." |