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"The Gods have spoken!" exclaimed Cicero, flinging his arms abroad majestically. "The guilty are struck dumb! The Gods have spoken aloud their sympathy for Rome’s peril; and will ye, ye its chosen sons, whose all of happiness and life lie in its sanctity and safety, will ye, I say, love your own country, your own mother, less than the Gods love her?"
Mary of the Martyrs. The Pantheon was not too grand for so great a king. It was only fitting that he who had lent himself to the baleful work of paganizing modern Rome should have his final resting-place in the temple that was so long sacred to Rome’s heathen deities.
A dissipated, spendthrift, and luxurious youth, devoted solely as it would seem to the pleasures of the table, or to intrigues with the most fair and noble of Rome’s ladies, he had yet, amid those unworthy occupations, displayed such gleams of overmastering talent, such wondrous energy, such deep sagacity, and above all such uncurbed though ill-directed ambition, that the perpetual Dictator had already, years before, exclaimed with prescient wisdom,—"In yon unzoned youth I perceive the germ of many a Marius."
For unto ye we swear, never to quench the torch; never to sheath the brand; till all our foes be prostrate, till not one drop shall run in living veins of Rome’s patricians; till not one hearth shall warm; one roof shall shelter; till Rome shall be like Carthage, and we, like mighty Marius, lords and spectators of her desolation!
What is not fitting for a girl to speak to her own mother, it is not fitting that she should hear at all—least of all from a man, and that man—her lover!" "It is not that, my Julia. But what I have to say contains many lives—mine among others! contains Rome’s safety, nay! existence! One whisper breathed abroad, or lisped in a slave’s hearing, were the World’s ruin.
And here, meet scene for orgies such as it beheld, Rome’s parricides were wont to hold their murderous assemblies. With a slow stealthy tread, that woke no echo, Cataline advanced to the door.
But, for the most part, not a single ray cheered the dull murky streets, except that here and there, before the holy shrine, or vaster and more elaborate temple, of some one of Rome’s hundred gods, the votive lanthorns, though shorn of half their beams by the dense fog-wreaths, burnt perennial.
Though all this were true, yet forasmuch as they have been abused by the Papists unto idolatry and superstition, and are monuments of Popery, the trophies of Antichrist, and the relics of Rome’s whorish bravery,—they must be granted, at least for this respect, to be more than manifest appearances of evil, and so scandalous.
Under all these circumstances, it cannot be doubted, for a moment, that had Catiline and his friends entertained any real desire of ameliorating the condition of the masses, of extending the privileges, or improving the condition, of the discontented and suffering plebeians, they could have overturned the ancient fabric of Rome’s world-conquering oligarchy.
The Romans, far from being jealous of so great a concourse of strangers, hailed them as brothers, engaged, as they also were, in the great object of doing honor to the memory of Rome’s apostles. The first grand public ceremony of the day was the solemn canonization, of which no description need be given in this place, as everything was conducted in the same way as in 1852 and 1863.
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