in its composition for mortal conception. No one, I am satisfied, truly completely realizes how _grand_ it is. It answers to that word exactly. Browning’s poem, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s,” gives a faint suggestion of what any least bit of it is like. Any single tomb of any single pope--of which it seemed to me there were no end--might have had this poem written about it. Each one appears to have desired a finer tomb than the other; and I can understand the eager enthusiasm of Sixtus V (1588), who kept eight hundred men working night and day on the dome in order to see how it was going to look. And well he might. Murray tells the story of how on one occasion, being in want of another receptacle for water, the masons tossed the body of Urban VI out of his sarcophagus, put aside his bones in a corner, and gave the ring on his finger to the architect. The pope’s remains were out of their receptacle for fifteen years or more before they were finally restored. The Vatican sculptural and art museums were equally astonishing. I had always heard of its eleven hundred rooms and its priceless collections; but it was thrilling and delightful to see them face to face, all the long line of Greek and Roman and medieval perfections, chiseled or painted, transported from ruins or dug from the earth--such wonders as the porphyry vase and Laocoon, taken from the silent underground rooms of Nero’s house, where they had stood for centuries, unheeded, in all their perfection; and the river god, representative of the Tiber. I was especially interested to see the vast number of portrait busts of Roman personalities--known and unknown--which gave me a face-to-face understanding of that astounding people. They came back now or arose vital before me--Claudius, Nerva, Hadrian, Faustina the elder, wife of Antoninus Pius, Pertinax, whose birthplace was near Monte Carlo, Julius Cæsar, Cicero, Antoninus Pius, Tiberius, Mark Antony, Aurelius Lepidus, and a score of others. It was amazing to me to see how like the modern English and Americans they were, and how practical and present-day-like they appeared. It swept away the space of two thousand years as having no significance whatever, and left you face to face with the far older problem of humanity. I could not help thinking that the duplicates of these men are on our streets to-day in New York and Chicago and London--urgent, calculating, thinking figures--and that they are doing to-day much as these forerunners did two thousand years before. I cannot see the slightest difference between an emperor like Hadrian and a banker like Morgan. And the head of a man like Lord Salisbury is to be found duplicated in a score of sculptures in various museums throughout the Holy City. I realized, too, that any one of hundreds of these splendid marbles, if separated from their populous surroundings and given to a separate city, meager in artistic possessions, would prove a great public attraction.