public under such circumstances? I was walking with an Italian friend at the time, who saw my state of amazement at so strange a phenomenon, and explained it all by a single remark. "Yes," said he, "there go a pair of His Eminence's wheels. They are sharing the fortunes of their late master in a manner that is at once dramatic and historical." The wheels from a cardinal's carriage! Of course they were. How was it possible that such wheels should be mistaken for any other in the world? A few years ago, when pope and cardinals had not yet suffered the horrible eclipse which has overtaken them, one of the most notable features of the Roman streets and suburban roads used to consist of the carriages of the members of the Sacred College taking their diurnal drive. It was not etiquette for a cardinal to walk in the streets, or indeed anywhere else, without his carriage following him. There was no mistaking these barbarously gorgeous vehicles. They were all exactly like each other, and unlike any other carriages to be seen in the nineteenth century--heavy, clumsy, coarsely built and gorgeously painted of the most flaming scarlet, and largely gilded. They were drawn by long-tailed black horses covered with heavy harness richly plated with silver, or something that looked like it, and driven by a coachman whose livery, always as shabby as magnificent, was as heavily laden with huge masses of worsted lace of the kind that used to be placed on carriage-linings some five-and-twenty years ago. Two similarly bedizened footmen always stood on the monkey-board at the rear, who descended and walked behind His Eminence and his chaplain when the cardinal left his carriage to get his constitutional. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory has departed! Such cavalcades are no longer to be seen crawling along the Via Appia, or following His Eminence on a fine and sunny afternoon about four o'clock as he walks on the footpath between the Porta Pia and the Basilica of St. Agnes in search of an appetite for his dinner. The world will never see such carriages and such servants any more. _Fuit Ilium!_ I thought of the old lines on the "high--mettled racer," and of "imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, stopping a hole to keep the wind away." To see such splendor reduced to the service of such vile uses! Yes, as my Italian friend said, "There go the cardinal's wheels," and it is impossible not to feel sure that the phenomenon is symbolical of the way the cardinal is going himself. When an institution, a dignity, a social arrangement of any sort, has grown to be purely ornamental, has become so splendid that its splendor has come to be the essence of it, it will no longer be able to exist shorn of its splendor, however much it may in its origin have been adapted for use rather than for show. The wheels were heavy, cumbrous and ill put together; they were not well adapted for the costermonger's purpose, and will probably fall to pieces before long. Their fate is