The walk down the Corso has indeed taken us a long way from our starting-point, the Church of Sta. Maria in Via Lata, where over the now subterranean chapel in which the Doctor of the Gentiles dictated to St. Luke the Acts of the Apostles, the prelates called the “Auditors of the Rota” with the “Master of the Sacred Palace” (the Vatican) celebrated the fourth day of the Octave of the Feast of the Apostles. On the fifth day, in pursuance of the design by which each department of the hierarchy should in its turn honour the Princes of the Faith, the Pope said Mass at the Church of St. Peter of the Chains, assisted by the ecclesiastical body known as the Clerks of the Chamber. “San Pietro in Vincoli” stands on a rather lonely part of the Esquiline, the highest of the Seven Hills. The great poet of the Tenth Century, Adam of St. Victor, the author of some of our most beautiful hymns, compares the Apostles to the Hills, because the rising sun strikes them first and then reaches the regions below. On the spot where now stands the Church of St. Peter’s Chains there was originally, according to the most ancient authorities, St. Jerome, the Venerable Bede, and others, a sanctuary dedicated by St. Peter himself on the first of August, in order to consecrate to God the month which the Romans had named after Augustus Cæsar, and which they devoted to his worship. Of the precious chains with which the sanctuary was destined to be enriched, those which had fallen from St. Peter’s limbs in Herod’s prison were still treasured by the Christians in Jerusalem; the others, in which he was to be led out to martyrdom, were perhaps not yet forged, for he was still a free man when he came to consecrate the Church on the Hill that looks to the east, and to fix August the first as a day of special reparation to the Almighty for the idolatry which that month saw the Romans lavish on a dead mortal.