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If any church festival was held by universal consent to call for exceptional efforts, it was the feast of Corpus Christi, which in Spain gave rise to a special class of poetry. We possess a splendid description of the manner in which that feast was celebrated at Viterbo by Pius II in 1462.
Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., took a real lamb to bed with her, kissed it, and suckled it at her breasts. St. Catherine of Genoa threw herself on the ground to cool herself, crying out, "Love, love, I can bear it no longer." She also confessed to a peculiar longing towards her confessor.
In the days of Pius the Ninth, after the fall of the temporal power, the Vatican was overrun and overcrowded with useless but well-paid officials, officers and functionaries great and small, who took refuge there against the advancing wave of change.
Orlando loved Garibaldi as though the latter were a demi-god, fought beside him in defence of Republican Rome, took part in the victory of Rieti over the Neapolitans, and followed the stubborn patriot in his retreat when he sought to succour Venice, compelled as he was to relinquish the Eternal City to the French army of General Oudinot, who came thither to reinstate Pius IX. And what an extraordinary and madly heroic adventure was that of Garibaldi and Venice!
There being many Christians of the United Greek rite throughout the dominions of the Sultan, it was necessary that the Holy Father should negotiate, occasionally, with the successor of Mahomet. Pius IX. yielded not to any of his predecessors in zeal for the welfare of all Catholic people. Those who lived and often suffered under the Moslem yoke were, especially, objects of his fatherly solicitude.
'He died very peacefully and calmly, about seven. To this is only to be added that there was conveyed to Mr. Hope-Scott on his death-bed the special blessing of his Holiness Pope Pius IX.
Those republics which still existed, and the princes who had risen on the ruins of the more ephemeral ones, rivaled each other in their patronage of literary men; the popes, who in the preceding ages had denounced all secular learning, now became its munificent patrons; and two of them, Nicholas V. and Pius II., were themselves scholars of high distinction.
Pius IX. gave his judgment as a result of the examination made by the last-named Congregation; but he had made a personal study of all the evidence, and had given private audiences to both the General and Father Hecker.
He had, for my advantage, many jibes at our past ministers, of some of whom he had diverting memories, and especially of Major Cass, of whom he always spoke as "quel Cass," who had curious habits of night wandering and adventure seeking, or, as Pius put it, "could not be quiet of nights."
Herodes Atticus, that remarkable figure who traced his descent to the very beginnings of Athenian history and the semi-mythical Aeacidae of Aegina, and who was consul of Rome under Antoninus Pius, had taken up his permanent residence in his native town, and devoted his vast wealth to the architectural embellishment of Athens, and to a munificent patronage of letters.
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