On the whole, the air here is much too raw, the soil inhospitable, the Index too near, and the censorship too merciless, for scientific works and serious investigations. The Italians say of a mindless work, “É scritto in tempo di Scirocco.” And here there is an intellectual scirocco established in permanence. And thus the brave German Benedictines, who assembled here some years ago under an Italian Abbot, Pescetelli, in St. Paul’s without the Walls, have become victims of the unhealthy atmosphere—that is, besides the mental scirocco indigenous here, the sharp north wind blowing from the Gesù. They had energetic men among them, such as Nickes and others, were anxious to work in German fashion, and made a good beginning in a volume of _Voices from Rome_, published in 1860; a German Cardinal was their protector. But no sooner had they been denounced to the Pope by the Jesuits—German and of ill-repute for orthodoxy are synonymous terms here than they had to decamp. The Abbot, weary of these chicaneries, resigned his office and returned to Montecassino. But the Benedictines generally are looked on most unfavourably by the authorities here. As it was said in a capital sentence at Paris, in 1794, that the condemned man was “suspected of being suspected of deficient sense of citizenship,” so must it be said of the Benedictines here that they “are suspected of being suspected of a deficient sense of Papalism.” They are not devoted enough towards the _Curia_; these little religious communities cannot be so entirely kept in hand, the Jesuits from of old are hostile to them, and it is found in Rome that they have not hitherto rendered sufficient service to the great cause of strengthening Roman domination. They are therefore to be revolutionized, and, like the Jesuits and the Mendicant Orders, to receive a monarchical constitution. Their autocratic General will then reside in Rome, and the Pope will do with them what he did with the Dominicans, when he made Jandel, the Jesuit pupil, their General. Then the Benedictines will be for the Jesuits what the Gibeonites were for the Israelites, their “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”(48)