On the sixth day of the Octave the Pontiff said Mass in the Mamertine Prison, where the two Apostles passed the last days of their life on earth—the “Voters of the Chamber” assisting at the function. On the seventh, the chosen sanctuary was that of S. Pietro in Montorio, the spot on the Janiculum Hill where St. Peter suffered martyrdom. Its terrace porch, high on the side of the slope, is the one spot I know of from which all Rome can be seen, spread out like a mantle of jewels on either side of its yellow river and raising its classic hills in a wide semicircle against the shifting red and gold of the Campagna, the blue of the serrated Sabines to the east and the soft green outlines of the Alban Mountains to the south. The vast perfection of the scene is almost more than sight can suffer; the beauty becomes a menace in some strange way; it is as if man had challenged the Creator to a contest of production. Exquisite as is the distant landscape, more lovely still is that huge city with its hundred domes tossed up like opals to the sun, its proud honey-coloured palaces raising tier after tier of fretted marble in noble and perfect outlines, its mediæval towers, windowless, huge, indestructible memorials of long past strife and carnage, standing like half-drowned breakwaters frowning on the tide of ever growing life and splendour that they have been powerless to arrest; the Coliseum crouches like a sulky monster at the foot of the Esquiline, whence St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran look down on it as the angels might look down on the dead; wherever a convent or villa lies along a ridge, the slender spires of cypresses mark the line, answering to every kiss of the breeze, though the dark velvet of their foliage refuses a single gleam to the sun; add to this the rush and sparkle of Rome’s innumerable fountains, and you have a vision so matchless in beauty and so supreme in associations that it inspires an awe too great for delight. Yet, splendid as it appears to us, how much more splendid must it have shone, externally, when St. Peter’s dying eyes looked their last on the “Golden City” of Nero, teeming with its two millions of inhabitants; and St. Peter saw what our eyes are too dim to see, the victorious army of his martyred children already crowned in Heaven, the vast field which they had bedewed with their blood to nourish the seed of the Church—the miles of hidden sepulchres whence their bodies are to rise triumphant at the Last Day; and the tears we are told he shed ere he died were surely tears of joy for the glory that was to be Rome’s.