Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber : $b or, The influence of Romanism on trade, justice, and knowledgeWylie, J. A. (James Aitken)
History
Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber : $b or, The influence of Romanism on trade, justice, and knowledge
Wylie, J. A. (James Aitken)
Catholic Church -- Italy; Italy -- Description and travel
anything in an English family, to be out of reach of the priests. The
things she told were most harrowing, and some of them very true-like.
One English gentleman here thought of taking her into his family as
governess, until he should get her father to come for her. I was asked
to visit her at his house, and hear her woeful history. I went; but the
line 'Timeo Danaos,' &c., was ever forcing itself upon me as I walked
musingly along to the house, which was a little distance out of town.
While hearing her long unconnected string of falsehoods, the thing that
astonished me was, why the Roman Catholic priests should have chosen
such an ugly woman to do such a piece of work; and not only had she the
most forbidding appearance of any woman I ever saw, but she was the most
illiterate; not a single sentence came correctly from her lips, and, in
pronunciation, the letter 'h' ever was prefixed to the 'aunt' and the
'Oxford,'--the very quintescence of Cockneyism. It was clear to my mind
that she had 'done' the priests, and the sequel proves my suspicions to
be correct. That day before she left, she discovered that she was
suspected, and very prudently threw off her mask very soon after. Her
correct history we are only getting bit by bit; but all we have learned
convinces us that she has deceived the Italian priest, who knows very
little of English, by persuading him that she is the daughter of an
English clergyman, and very highly connected in England. You have enough
of the story to see the kind of plot regularly carried on. What they
expected to gain by passing her off upon us, we cannot tell, unless that
they wished to know earlier and more fully our movements. There is an
English pervert here just now,--a weak fool, but an educated one,--on a
mission to Geymonat's people, to assure them that they have committed a
great sin. Having proved both systems of religion, he can judge, and
there is no comfort whatever in the Protestant. He has taken up his
abode here, and is prosecuting his mission vigorously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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