And there could be no more familiar or characteristic figure in Rome than that of this monk-Pope threading everywhere those familiar streets, in which there were more ruins, and those all fresh and terrible in their suggestions of life destroyed--than now: the gentle spectator full of meditation, who lingered among the group of slaves, and saw and loved and smiled at the Saxon boys: who passed by Trajan's Forum which we all know so well, that field of broken pillars, not then railed off and trim in all the orderliness of an outdoor museum, but wild in the neglect of nature: and heard the story of the Emperor, and loved him too, and poured out his soul to God for the great heathen, so that the gates of Hades were rolled back and the soul set free--strange parable of brotherly kindness as the dominant principle of heart and life. We can follow him through all the lists of the poor laid up in his Scrivii, like the catalogues of books enclosed in caskets, in an old-fashioned library--with careful enumeration of every half-ruined tenement and degraded palace where the miserable had found shelter: or passing among the crowds who received their portions before, not after, the Pope in the precincts of the great basilica; or "modulating," with a voice broken by age and weakness, the new tones of his music which the "bibulous throats" of the barbarian converts turned into thunder, and of which even his own choristers, careless as is their use, would make discords, till the whip of the Master trembled in the air, adding the sting of a sharper sound to the long-drawn notes of the monotone, and compelling every heedless tenor and frivolous soprano to attention. These are his simpler aspects, the lower life of the great Benedictine, the picture of the Pope as he endeared himself to the popular imagination, round which all manner of tender legends grew. His aspect is less familiar yet not less true as he sits at the head of affairs, dictating or writing with his own hand those innumerable letters which treat of every subject under heaven, from the safety of Rome to the cross which is to be hung round a royal infant's neck, or the amethyst ring for the finger of a little princess; from the pretensions of John of Constantinople, that would-be head of the Church, down to the ass sent by the blundering intendant from Sicily. Nothing was too great, nothing too little for his care. He had to manage the mint and cummin without leaving graver matters undone.