determination to break their fetters entirely. As each day passed, the people became better acquainted with the opinions and purposes of Pius IX. Yet, with commendable patience, they submitted to his repeated censures, on account of their real love for him, no less than their veneration for his office. If he could have comprehended them fully, mingled emotions would have been excited in his mind--those which spring up when the cords that reach the sympathies of the heart are touched, and such as pride, vanity, and ambition invariably engender. But, apart from the emotions he may have personally experienced, he was controlled by circumstances against which he was powerless to contend, because the existing complications had been produced before his time, by combinations which recognized no sympathy for popular suffering, and had become strong enough to master even the papacy itself. Possibly his natural tendencies may have inclined him to break the bonds which held him in the grasp of the monarchs and the Jesuits; but he was as unable to do this as a child is to tear away from the arms of a strong man. He was, in fact, scarcely himself, but the victim of others far less scrupulous, who lulled or aroused his passions and vanity at their pleasure, no matter what fate befell him, the Church, or the people of Italy. If he looked beyond Italy, he found the great military and monarchical power of Austria holding him by the throat, and tightening its grasp every day. If he looked at Rome, where he ought to have had wise counsels, he saw himself surrounded by a corps of ecclesiastics whose minds--howsoever otherwise enlightened--were dwarfed from the want of practical knowledge of the world and practical experience in the management of affairs, and who saw in human progress only that which placed a curb upon their own ambition and a limit to ecclesiastical authority. But in whatsoever direction he turned his eyes, he was haunted by the specter of Loyola, which flitted through the recesses of the Vatican at all times, ready "to whet his almost blunted purpose" whensoever he became wavering and irresolute. The popular cry of "constitution" sounded like a death-knell to all these advisers, with whom a war with Austria and an independent Italy were sacrilegious violations of the divine law. We should not, therefore, censure Pius IX too severely when we find him surrounded and hedged in by such influences as these, which few men would have strength enough to resist. No matter what glories clustered about his sacred office, he was human like other men.