After this we need add nothing more. Our opinion of Mr Cobden could be thoroughly expressed in a much shorter sentence. ROMANISM IN ROME. CATECHISM IN THE MINERVA. "Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros."--JUVENAL. "Et qui parlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien."--BOILEAU. Visitors to Rome are ofttimes puzzled and surprised at hearing the very unusual affix, _della Minerva_, applied to one of the Christian churches of that city; more especially when they find it also familiarly known to the common people, not so well read as their priests in the calendar of the saints, as LA STA. MINERVA; but the apparent misnomer originates in an ellipsis of the full title, which runs thus, _Sta. Maria sopra Minerva_--the church in question having supplanted a temple formerly dedicated to Pallas, upon the ruins of which it has been reared. But though the goddess of wisdom still retains a _nominal_ interest in the edifice, certainly, to judge from the catechetical exercises of which we are about to give a specimen, her reign is past, and there remains but the _nominis umbra_ in lieu of it. Exorcised the church, she has been fain to accept such a humiliating asylum in the library adjoining, as inquisitorial Dominicans would be likely to afford a heathen goddess, whose proceedings they must narrowly watch. There she has the mortification of hearing, from year to year, some new relay of "gray-hair'd synods damning books unread," and, club-fashion, blackballing all _her_ friends in order to make way for their own; just as old Pope Gregory is said to have burned a whole library of Pagan literature, that the Christian Fathers and Roman Catholic Saints might have more elbow-room; and also that, in the absence of rivals, their authority might not be disputed. "_Fertur beatus Gregorius bibliothecam combussisse gentilum, quo divinæ paginæ gratior esset locus et major auctoritas et diligentia studiosior._"[A] [A] _Vide_ Notes to Pope's _Dunciad_, book iii. At Easter-tide, those who have any curiosity on the subject may hear Bellarmine's Catechism, as it is squealed, bawled, or otherwise intonated by the young children of the different _Riones_, and commented on and explained for their edification by the pedagogue priest of the district. He is generally surrounded at such times by a bevy of from forty to fifty scholars, _gamins_ or _gamines_ as the case may be; and to work they set with such earnestness of vociferation that all Bedlam and Parnassus, raving and reciting together, could not well surpass the discord: the shrill diapason, peeling through nave and aisle, shakes the floating _Baldaquino_, and makes the trembling walls bellow again, furnishing an apt and lively illustration of the "_convulsaque marmora clamant_" of the poet.