columns of advertisements which bring before you day by day the wants
and hopes and pursuits of so many of your fellow-creatures, carrying
you, as it were, into hundreds of families, and laying open to your
scrutiny hundreds of human hearts, the different lights in which men and
things appear to the organs of different parties, and the proof which,
in the midst of their contradictions, they all concur in giving that
there is a spirit abroad which cannot be lulled to sleep, are lessons
all lost for him, and which, perhaps, would be equally lost, even if he
had the leisure and the knowledge to study them.

He dines alone,--for in the city, in the dearth of publicans and
sinners, no one can sit at table with the Vicar of Christ; and thus
dinner-hour, the open-hearted hour, puts him almost more absolutely in
the hands of his immediate attendants than any hour of the twenty-four.
If he walks, it is in the garden or library; if he rides, it is
surrounded by guards and followed by his household train. He took his
last walk in the streets when he was a prelate, and thenceforth knows no
more of the city than he can see through his carriage-windows; and now
even that imperfect view is more than half cut off by the officers of
the guard, who ride their great black horses close to the carriage-door.

But enough of the Pope, and much more than I had intended when I first
took up my pen. That, even when he has studied them most, the temporal
interests of his people must suffer in his hands, has been proved by the
sufferings of millions through centuries of oppression and misrule. And
must it not always be so, when the interests of husbands and fathers are
intrusted to men cut off by education and profession from the domestic
sympathies wherein these interests have birth, and that domestic hearth
which is at once the source and the emblem and the purifier of the
State?