I imagine that a man like Dr. Johnson might have said severe things about him, and I once heard a critic (who admired and appreciated him) say it was a pity Brewster was such an idle and ignorant man. But his ignorance was more suggestive than the knowledge of others, for he ignored not what he was unable to learn, but what he had no wish to learn, and his idleness was a benefit to others as well as to himself: a fertile oasis in an arid country. His mind had the message of the flowers that need neither to toil nor to spin.
In February 1902 Pope Leo the Thirteenth celebrated his jubilee. I heard him officiate at Mass at the Sixtine Chapel, and I also went—although I forget if this was later or not—to High Mass at St. Peter’s, when the Pope was carried in on his chair and blessed the crowd. I had a place under the dome. At the elevation of the Host the Papal Guard went down on one knee, and their halberds struck the marble floor with one sharp, thunderous rap, and presently the silver trumpets rang out in the dome. At that moment I looked up and my eye caught the inscription, written in large letters all round it: “_Tu es Petrus_,” and I reflected the prophecy had certainly received a most substantial and concrete fulfilment. Not that at that time I felt any sympathy with the Catholic Church; indeed, it might not have existed for me at Rome at that time. I thought, too, that the English Catholic inhabitants of Rome were on the look out for converts, and were busy casting their nets. Of this, however, I saw no trace, although I met several of them at various times.
But that ceremony in St. Peter’s would have impressed anyone. And when the Pope was carried through St. Peter’s, with his cortège of fan-bearers, and rose from his chair and blessed the crowd with a sweeping, regal, all-embracing gesture, the solemnity and the majesty of the spectacle were indescribable, especially as the pallor of the Pope’s face seemed transparent, as if the veil of flesh between himself and the other world had been refined and attenuated to the utmost and to an almost unearthly limit.
During Holy Week I attended some of the ceremonies at St. Peter’s, and I think what impressed me most was the blessing of the oils on Maundy Thursday, and the washing of the altar, when that great church is full of fragrant sacrificial smells of wine and myrrh, and when the vastness of the crowd suddenly brings home to you the immense size of the building which the scale of the ornamentation dwarfs to the eye.