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."