the fantastic celebrations which are the staple business of the
place. Or it may be used by Jesuits, who have a knack of
authorship, or by aspiring employés, who would parade their
servility, in the production of some little tract inculcating the
duty of passive quiescence. A pamphlet filled with their adu-
lation of the Papal reign and their abhorrence of the profane
revolution, or a faint little manual of Church piety, may flutter
from the Sacristy press. But there is nothing like what we call
the public press,-no current journalism nor any flow of sponta-
neous literary production, emanating from the social life of Rome.
Instead of newspapers, there is a sort of Court Circular, issued on
three days in the week; and a fortnightly sheet of feeble, though
very rabid, polemics against the Liberal and National party.
It may sometimes happen that, to relieve the vacuous dullness
of local society with a poor semblance of intellectual amusement,
the spiritless sugar-and-water effusions of an Arcadian son-
neteer will be printed for complimentary distribution among his
acquaintance. It may happen, now and then, that a graver spe-
cies of pedantic trifling is indulged, without prejudice to Church
or State, in the more ambitious production of some innocuous
treatise on local antiquities-dead and dry as the dust of crum-
bling skeletons in those burial vaults of early Christendom with
which the sterile soil is undermined. But the only popular
literature freely proffered, abundantly provided, for the instruc-
tion and entertainment of Roman citizens, is the blessed semi-
official "Dream-Book," with its interpretations of golden pro-
mise, revealing prize numbers in the pontifical lottery. It is no
wonder that booksellers and printers in the Pope's petty king-
dom are unwilling to risk fine and imprisonment, by furnishing
the ill-advised and too thoughtful reader with instruments of
intellectual excitement which would be detrimental to the peace-
ful stagnation and pure inanity of a submissively recipient faith.
We are bound also to acknowledge, that even those foreign
visitors who, as they do not share in the blessings of that faith,
might have been supposed to require no such protection for its
integrity, are cared for by this paternal supervision of the litera-
ture accessible to them; so that, without a special permission,
the Englishman, the Frenchman, or the German in Rome may
neither purchase nor borrow many standard books in his own
language, which the Papal government, under whose hospitality
he sojourns there, deems it harmful for him to peruse.

It is not, however, our principal object now to discuss the
efficient restrictions on the use of that dangerous social element
called literature, which are enforced by the Pope's temporal
dominion in the unhappy city where he reigns. A matter no
less curious, and comparatively little known to the generality
of men, is the peculiar organisation and working of that system

of bibliographical police-that ecclesiastico-literary censorship,
by which the Papacy still contrives in some degree or at least
attempts to check the communication of forbidden thoughts in
print among the hundred million souls owning its religious au-
thority throughout the world. Not many months ago an inci-
dent happened to show the present operation of that double
machinery which the Roman See keeps in use to detect and to
denounce in all writers, of whatever country, any invasion of
orthodox belief. Many persons, however, when they hear of the
Index Expurgatorius, as it is commonly but incorrectly styled,
have perhaps but a vague and imperfect notion of what it is.
We have the thing here upon our table-an ugly, coarse-looking
octavo volume of 420 pages originally, swelled by a multitude
of fly-sheets, containing supplements or appendices, to nearly
600 pages, issued from the official printing-press of the Reverend
Apostolic Chamber at Rome. Its proper title is the "Index of
Forbidden Books," otherwise the "Index to the proscription or
expurgation of books of depraved doctrine." Opposite the title-
page, by way of a frontispiece, is the picture of that scene de-
scribed in the Acts of the Apostles, where those who had been
addicted to "curious arts," in the city of Ephesus, brought their
books to cast them into the fire. For as old Pagan supersti-
tions were once denounced by the apostles, so it is the monu-
ments of sound learning, refined sentiment, and philosophy,
which the Papal Index abhors not less than the cabalistic im-
postures of the Ephesian necromancers were abhorred by the
holy indignation of the primitive Christian Church.

The constitution of that official authority in the Romish
communion, by which this "Index of Forbidden Books" is com-
piled, and its regulations continually applied, requires but a
brief explanation. The whole affair is under the management
of a "Congregation" or permanent committee of certain "most
eminent and most reverend" cardinals, deputed by his Holiness
to superintend that special department, with the assistance of a
number of "consultors" and "reporters," chosen out of the
secular and regular clergy, besides the "Master of the Sacred
Palaces," who is always a monk, and, for their secretary, one
of the Order of Preaching Friars. But it must be observed
that there exists, alongside of this institution, another congre-
gation of cardinals, with its requisite staff of assistants, ap-
pointed to manage the "Universal Inquisition with regard to
Heretical Depravity." The jurisdiction of these two prelatical
courts of conscience is affirmed to extend throughout the whole
Christian commonwealth. It will be perceived that in certain
cases, where books are indicted for heresy, the functions of these
twin correctional tribunals in some degree coincide. The
"Holy Office," or Inquisition, as it is commonly called, has to

deal with a variety of matters, but it has most notoriously to investigate and to pass sentence "in causes respecting the faith, and against persons guilty of offending religion." This is, by a Bull of Benedict XIV., declared to be its principal function, but the same statute further provides that, whenever a book is denounced to the Inquisition as heretical, that congregation may either refer it for judgment to the Congregation of the Index, or may itself decide, by its own authority, on the doctrine which the book is alleged to contain. The judgment of the Inquisition, in such a case, assumes the character of a personal condemnation of the author, and forms henceforth a precedent against the doctrine ascribed to him. On the other hand, the Index merely forbids the circulation of the book, or of its current edition, while enjoining the omission or correction of certain specified passages of the book, if a new edition be published. It is the latter form of procedure, though seldom resorted to now, that has given rise to the popular name of "Index Expurgatorius," which is not, as we have already remarked, the official or the characteristic designation. It appears to belong more especially to the Congregation of the Index to ascertain whether or not any doctrine already proved to be heretical is actually expressed or implied in the book against which an information has been laid. But neither the one nor the other set of cardinals may pronounce definitively and dogmatically on any point of doctrine. That is reserved for the prerogative of the infallible Pontiff alone.

It may be within the recollection of our readers that several months ago they heard of a conflict of jurisdictions between these Romish censorial authorities, which induced Cardinal De Andrea, the late Prefect of the Congregation of the Index, to resign his post. His grievance was that the Pope had taken the arbitrary and unprecedented step of overruling a formal sentence of that tribunal, and ordering it to commence a fresh deliberation on the same case, conjointly with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The matter in question was one which the Index had twice examined, and determined twice over. It was an old charge of heterodoxy, preferred by the Archbishop of Bruges against the Professors of Theology and Philosophy in the University of Louvain. They, it seems, had taught and written that mankind in a state of nature are "incapable of attaining by their unaided reason an immediate, full, and distinct knowledge of any metaphysical or transcendental truth." For some years past the Belgian clergy had been distracted with a quarrel about the culpability of those professors who published such an opinion. In May last the Congregation of the Index, having been urged by the Archbishop to reconsider its former rejection of the charge of heresy, consulted Professor

Passaglia, who was not then, as he is now, the avowed antagonist of the Papal Court, but the most cherished and admired champion of orthodoxy in the University of Rome. He advised the cardinals that the inculpated proposition was one belonging to the domain of mental philosophy, and that theology had nothing to say to it. Its authors were therefore duly acquitted by the Index; but their Jesuit accusers persuaded the Pope to set aside that judgment, and submit the cause to the Inquisition, in which their own faction prevails. Hinc illo lacrymæ. We remember that it was by a similar intrigue, a few years since, that they contrived to procure a condemnation of the works of Gioberti, adding to this iniquity the insult of mixing him up in one decree of proscription with Proudhon and Eugène Sue. On several occasions, in fact, the Congregation of the Index, badly as we must think of it, has proved a far less convenient tool of ecclesiastical despotism than its rival the Holy Office. It has sometimes happened, to the surprise of every body, that erudite theologians, deputed to examine the writings of men obnoxious to the Papal Court, whom it was sought to stigmatise as hostile to the Catholic creed, have declined to prostitute the science of divinity to purposes of political vengeance. We know that this is what took place last autumn, when, by the Pope's express desire, certain theological experts were directed, under the authority of the Index, to examine and report upon the pamphlets of Monsignor Liverani and Father Passaglia against the Pope's temporal power. They reported that, the subjects treated of in those pamphlets being wholly of a political nature, they contained nothing contrary to the faith. But the Pope, in that case as in others recently, intervened with a sort of coup-d'état, and peremptorily ordered that the writings of Liverani and Passaglia should be denounced by the Index, whose judicial and constitutional authority is thus nullified by the sic jubeo of one peevish old man—the autocrat of the Catholic Church.

It must not, however, be supposed that all the literature which is brought under this ecclesiastical ban is accused of the vice of corrupt religious doctrine; since very much of it is so purely secular that one might almost wonder how or why it should ever have found its way into the Papal Index at all. But the scope of this institution is to protect the morals as well as the creed of all Christendom from being contaminated by pernicious reading of any kind whatsoever. The "Rules of the Index," which were drawn up by the Council of Trent, with the "Instructions" subsequently added by Clement VIII., and the "Constitution" which was finally decreed by Benedict XIV., reinforced or explained in some points by occasional rescripts of various dates, embody all the ordinances affecting

the legal toleration of literature. All the works of every one of the "heresiarchs," treating of whatsoever matters, and all works treating of religious matters, written by any heretic, are expressly prohibited in general terms. And so are all versions of the Bible, excepting those which have been specially approved by Papal authority, as well as all writings on the adverse side in those lengthy controversies which have had their day, with respect to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, or the Augustinian dispute between the Jesuits and Jansenists, or certain other occasions, too tedious to mention, on which the Catholic Church has been divided against itself. Some of these categories of prohibition, based on the necessity of excluding particular doctrines, are oddly significant. For instance, we find it distinctly laid down as a rule, from motives sufficiently obvious, that all books in which St. Peter and St. Paul are spoken of as on a footing of equality, or as a pair of chief apostles and leaders of the Church, are to be proscribed, inasmuch as Paul ought to be kept in subordination to Peter. By another rule, all books of legal argument impugning the inalienable nature of ecclesiastical property are equally condemned. Throughout all the regulations of the Index, as of every other Papal institution, is to be observed the same vigilant solicitude for that spiritual monopoly which Italian scoffers call the "the holy shop.'

With regard, however, to the principles by which the Index is directed in the prohibition of books on other than theological grounds, legislation and practice are not so clearly defined. All blasphemous and lascivious writings are forbidden, of course, though we cannot help recollecting that the filthy libeller Aretino was a cardinal's favourite buffoon. All fortune-telling books are forbidden, though, as we have stated, in the Pope's own city there is no more permitted and popular reading than the dream-book of lucky numbers in the Papal lottery. All books written in justification of the unchristian statecraft of "a tyrannical polity" are distinctly forbidden,-though such books, in the name of political unrighteousness, might apologise for Antonelli's administration. All slanderous and vituperative libels, especially against princes and persons in authority, are forbidden,-though M. Veuillot's ravings against Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and Ricasoli, are to be rewarded as laudable service by the Vicar of the Prince of Peace. It is still deemed necessary, in this enlightened age, to prohibit the curious student from peeping into an ancient treatise upon astrology or alchemy, necromancy or witchcraft, lest he should be tempted, like Doctor Faustus, to enter into a correspondence with some diabolical agents of perdition. Spirit-rapping revelations, narrated by the pitiful credulity of some English and American writers, may properly come within this censure. But liberalism