Of all the panegyrics of St. Francis, and of the “Lady Poverty,” I think the one that Dante put into the mouth of St. Thomas Aquinas in the eleventh canto of the “Paradiso,” is the most perfect and complete. And the description of St. Dominic in the next canto is its match. Here, Dante let his “great, grieved heart” have its way for once, and every line that he wrote about these glorious friends of God throbs with passionate veneration. Brothers in heart they were on earth, and he sees them not separated in Heaven. How one wishes that he had left us, in the two lines that are all he needs to paint an immortal picture, a description of their first meeting in the Church of St. John Lateran! For it was there that they met. St. Dominic had had a strange dream the night before, in which he beheld the Saviour preparing to smite and exterminate the wicked—the proud, the voluptuaries, the misers; but His Blessed Mother suddenly appeared, and stayed His wrath by presenting to Him two monks: one was Dominic himself; the other, a poor holy man clothed in rags, whom he had never seen. Greatly exercised in soul, he went to the Lateran Church in the morning to ask for light and guidance. As he entered his eyes fell on a ragged mendicant who was praying so fervently that his face was all aflame with love and joy. It was the face Dominic had seen in his dream. He rushed to Francis and clasped him in his arms, exclaiming: “Thou art my comrade and my brother! We run one race, we pant for the same goal. Let us be united henceforth, and no enemy can conquer us!” And so it was. These two suns of warmth and light, as Dante calls them, founded each his own great spiritual family, worked wherever their beloved Master sent them, in separate fields, but from that morning moment in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano to the end of their blessed lives they were, as the old chronicle says, “One heart and one soul in God.” Of the riches and glories of the Lateran Basilica and the Lateran Palace it is not for me to write. The mere lists of them occupy whole chapters in the guidebooks and even there they have to be much boiled down, often only a word or two indicating objects and places of paramount interest to Catholic travellers; and these slighting mentions are defaced for us, even in such valuable and sweet-minded works as Augustus Hare’s “Walks in Rome,” by a question mark or an exclamation mark, intended to denote ridicule, inserted after the word “miracle” or “relic,” to show that the writer was anxious to be exonerated from any suspicion of sharing the pious beliefs of devout persons on such subjects. I have seen one or two Catholic guidebooks to Rome, but they were meagre and unsatisfactory, more pamphlets than books. If a really good modern one exists, I should be grateful to any reader who would tell me about it.