I Do Not Know How Equally Roman Society, In
The Large Or The Small Sense, Is Divided Into The Black
Of the Papists
and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and
Bianchi are revived in
The modern differences), but one cannot help
hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions
part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly
noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled
by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning
family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not
as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to
meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them
openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I
cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of
priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance
than mine.
One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is
built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or
below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval,
and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the
visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its
antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I
fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them,
that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the
Irish Dominicans.
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