mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic. These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example, Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal, the priests are quaestors and their vergers are lictors. Such things certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same title, the house of the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis, that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral, in both cases women and Catholics, were assaulted by the beadle in charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does not easily feel that desire to assault which possesses the Teutonic official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of a Cologne beadle in their souls. The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation. [Illustration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.]