who receives the reverence once paid to the blue vision upon the inner dome. With rouged cheeks and painted brows, the frightful doll stands in wretchedness of rags, blackened with the smoke of the votive lamp at its feet; and if we would know what has been lost or gained by Italy in the six hundred years that have worn the marbles of Murano, let us consider how far the priests who set up this to worship, the populace who have this to adore, may be nobler than the men who conceived that lonely figure standing on the golden field, or than those to whom it seemed to receive their prayer at evening, far away, where they only saw the blue clouds rising out of the burning sea. THE PALACE OF THE POPES CHARLES DICKENS Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while gloomy suites of apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither went there to see state-rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst the prisoners themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit. [Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE POPES, FRANCE.] A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes--proof that the world hadn’t conjured down the devil within her, though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in--came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer (_concierge du palais apostolique_) and had been for I don’t know how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant--had been born there, if I recollect right--I needn’t relate. But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld. She was alight and flaming all the time. Her action was violent in the extreme. She never spoke without stopping expressly for the purpose. She stomped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes, hammered against the walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the remains of some new horror--looking back and walking stealthily, and making horrible grimaces--that might alone have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man’s counterpane, to the exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.