Such study, such reading, is really within reach of all in these days of almost universal translation and simplification; but so many know nothing of how to obtain the right books—so many, indeed, are utterly unconscious that there is anything to know beyond the few distorted facts doled out in non-Catholic schools, that even the most unassuming effort to share these riches with them may be useful and welcome. Modern life is apt to be a dry, unflowery affair, but that is because our own laziness of mind permits it to become so. If we choose to take the past, it is ours; and I defy any one to claim his inheritance therein and not find a heart-warming thought, a refreshment and a fragrance for every moment of solitude, a chapter of high romance for every day of the long, working year! A romance must be a love story, and of all the love stories of time, that of Rome is the most marvellous. Certain girl children, we are told, were born so beautiful that, like Helen of Troy, Lucrezia Borgia—and she whose soul was of equal loveliness with what the chronicler calls “the supreme and royal beauty” of her body, Saint Radegonde, Queen of France, they were passionately loved, passionately defended, passionately sung, from the hour of their birth. And Rome, from the hour when the first hut was built on the right bank of the yet nameless river, when the stones of her first low wall wrote her name on that predestined soil, has been loved with a personal passion that has not its like in the world’s history. So, we know, she will be loved to the end. The very hatreds that have attacked her, the cataclysms that have exhausted themselves in attempts to annihilate her, the cupidity and treachery that have bargained for her whom no price can buy, no hand of man can hold, all testify to the desire of the nations to call her theirs. Above and beyond the clamours of earth, she pursues her immortal destiny, “mother of all earth’s orphans” as Byron called her, the nurse of every noble and humble soul, the home and property of the poorest, most ignorant Catholic—but no man’s henchwoman, no King’s chattel; now as in the past, and till earth’s last sunrise, the true mistress of the world. Could she be less, marked at her birth for empire, first of nations and then of souls? What has not been brought to her by tribute humanity since nature bore her in flame and upheaval, cradled her in sunshine and nurtured her with balm? Looking at her to-day and remembering her past, what wonderful pictures are unrolled before our eyes! Let us go back to the first of which history speaks, and call up the time when the nameless river flowed past the yet nameless hills that were to become the judgment seats of the world.