"In all seriousness--without meaning to be frivolous, without meaning to be irreverent, and, more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous--I state, as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:
"_First._ 'The Mother of God'--otherwise the Virgin Mary.
"_Fourth._ Some twelve or fifteen canonized popes and martyrs.
"_Fifth._ Jesus Christ the Saviour (but always an infant in arms).
"I may be wrong in this--my judgment errs often, just as is the case with other men's--but it _is_ my judgment, be it good or bad.
"Just here I will mention something that seems curious to me. There are no 'Christ's Churches' in Rome, and no 'Churches of the Holy Ghost,' that I can discover. There are some four hundred churches, but about a fourth of them seem to be named for the Madonna and St. Peter. There are so many named for Mary that they have to be distinguished by all sorts of affixes, if I understand the matter rightly. Then we have churches of St. Louis, St. Augustine, St. Agnes, St. Calixtus, St. Lorenzo in Lucina, St. Lorenzo in Damaso, St. Cecilia, St. Athanasius, St. Philip Neri, St. Catherine, St. Dominico, and a multitude of lesser saints whose names are not familiar in the world--and away down, clear out of the list of the churches, comes a couple of hospitals; one of them is named for the Saviour and the other for the Holy Ghost!"
[Sidenote: The Fee of the Visitor more Important than the Soul of the Worshipper.]
But we have allowed this clean, shrewd, racy American with his biting satire and his outspoken common sense, to lead us far away from our subject. Let us come back to the Church of the Cappuccini. For, besides its horrible cemetery, it contains another object of great interest, though of a very different character, viz., Guido's great picture of the Archangel Michael trampling upon the devil. The devil's face is said to be a portrait of Pope Innocent X., against whom the painter had a spite. It is not for the purpose of describing the picture that I refer to it, for I am not competent to do that, but for the purpose of quoting the animadversions of another American writer upon the custom of concealing this picture and others of special interest in Romish churches with closely drawn curtains, requiring the presence of an attendant to unveil them and the bestowment of a fee by the visitor. "The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been created, that of opening the way for religious sentiment through the quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints and martyrs down visibly upon earth--of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught they know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a paltry fee. Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a veil, and seldom revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an object of devotion, and value it only for its artistic merit."