permit me to be the medium of your sentiments upon the subject?” Aldrovandi is delighted, and feels the tiara already on his head.  Then, after a little indifferent talk, the Cordelier, in the act of taking leave of the cardinal, turns back and says, “But, after all, the mere word of a poor monk like me is hardly sufficient between personages such as Your Eminence and the cardinal Albani.  Permit me to write you a letter, in which I will lay before Your Eminence those considerations concerning the crying evils of the length of this conclave which I have ventured to mention to you, and that will give me an opportunity of entering on the matters we have been speaking of.  And then you, in your reply to me, can take occasion to say what you have already been observing to me of your sentiments toward the cardinal Albani.”  Aldrovandi eagerly agreed to this, and the two letters were at once written.  “I am told,” adds De Brosses, “that the letter of Aldrovandi was strong on the subject of the gratitude he should feel toward Albani.”  No sooner has the perfidious Cordelier got the letter into his hand than he runs with it to Albani, who goes with it at once to the body of the “Zelanti” cardinals with pious horror in his face:  “Here!  Look at your Aldrovandi, your man of God, that you tell me is incapable of intriguing in order to become His vicar!  Here he is making promises to seduce me into violating my conscience.”—­“Alas! alas!  It is too true!  Clearly the Holy Ghost will none of him.  Speak to us of him no more!” So Aldrovandi’s chance was gone, and Albani found the means of uniting the necessary number of voices on Lambertini, a good-enough sort of man, by all accounts, but hardly of the wood from which popes are or should be made.  He became that Benedict XIV. who was Voltaire’s correspondent, and who, as the story goes, when he was asked by a young Roman patrician to make him a list of the books he would recommend for his studies, replied, “My dear boy, we always keep a list of the best books ready made.  It is called the Index Expurgatorius!”

Such were the doings of conclaves, and such the popes which resulted from them, in that eighteenth century whose boasted philosophy pretty well culminated in the conviction that pudding was good and sugar sweet.  Such will not be the conclave which will assemble at the death of the present pontiff.  The election will doubtless be scrupulously canonical on all points; and, though it may be doubted how far the deliberations of the Sacred College will be calculated to advance the truly understood spiritual interests of humanity, there is, I think, little doubt that they will be directed, according to the lights of the members, to the choice of that individual who shall in their opinion be most likely to advance the interests of the Church “A.D.M.G.”

T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE.

MONSOOR PACHA.

  Monsoor Pacha, it is pleasant to meet
     Here, in the heart of this treacherous town—­
  Where faith is a peril and courtship a cheat,
     More false to the touch than a rose overblown—­
     With a soul that is true to itself, as your own.