female portion of the crowd and all the beggars followed us. I had now, however, had enough of the "humours of the fair," and left the town without waiting to try my luck at the _tombola_, which was to come off directly High Mass was over. CHAPTER XV. THE HOLY WEEK. The _nil admirari_ school are out of favour. In our earnest working age, it is the fashion to treat everything seriously, to find in every thing a deep hidden meaning, in fact, to admire everything. Since the days of Wordsworth and Peter Bell, every petty poet and romantic writer has had his sneer at the shallow sceptic to whom a cowslip was a cowslip only, and who called a spade a spade. I feel, therefore, painfully that I am not of my own day when I express my deliberate conviction, that the ceremonies of Holy Week at Rome are--the word must come out sooner or later--an imposture. This is not the place to enter into the religious aspect of the Catholic question, nor if it were, should I have any wish to enter the lists of controversy as a champion of either side. I can understand that for some minds the ideas of Church unity, of a mystic communion of the faithful, and of an infallible head of a spiritual body have a strange attraction, nay, even a real existence. I can understand too, that for such persons all the pomps and pageantry of the Papal services present themselves under an aspect to me unintelligible. Whether these ideas be right or wrong, I am not able, nor do I care, to argue. The Pontifical ceremonies, however, have not only a spiritual aspect, but a material and very matter-of-fact one. They are after all great spectacles got up with the aid of music and upholstery and dramatic mechanism. Now, how far in this latter point of view the ceremonies are successful or not, I think from some small experience I am pretty well qualified to judge; and if I am asked whether, as ceremonies, the services of the Church of Rome are imposing and effective, I answer most unhesitatingly, No. I know that this assertion upsets a received article of faith in Protestant England as to the seductive character of the Papal ceremonies. I remember well the time when I too believed that the shrines of the old faith were the haunts of sense-enthralling grandeur, of wild enchantment and bewitching beauty; when I too dreamt how amidst crowds of rapt worshippers, while unearthly music pealed around you and the fragrant incense floated heavenwards, your soul became lost to everything, save to a feeling of unreasoning ecstasy. In fact, I believed in the enchantments of Papal pageantry, as firmly as I believed that a Lord Mayor's feast was a repast in which Apicius would have revelled, or that an opera ball was a scene of oriental and voluptuous delight. Alas! I have seen all, and known all, and have found all three to be but vanity.