The ecclesiastical authorities were so severe on heresy that a friend of mine, who had married an English lady who remained a Protestant, was brought before the Inquisition (the “Holy Office”) and put under the severest pressure to compel his wife to abstain from attending the English church outside the Porta del Popolo.  He escaped ulterior consequences only by appealing to the French authorities, he being a surgeon in the service of the French garrison.  For common morality there was little care.  The sexual relations were flagrantly loose, and the scandal even of some of the great dignitaries was widespread.  Antonelli’s amours were the subject of common gossip, and most of the parish priests were in undisguised marital relations with their housekeepers; nor was this considered as at all to their discredit by the population at large.  One of the leading Liberals, permitted to remain in the city on account of the importance of his industry, one of the great goldsmiths’ works, told me that the Liberals never permitted the priests to frequent their houses, as they invariably conspired to corrupt the newly married women, unmarried girls being unmolested.  In the lower circles of the bourgeoisie it was a matter of common knowledge that the husbands openly made a traffic of the virtue of their wives; and in my personal acquaintance amongst the artists, I knew of a number of cases in which the artist had the wife as a mistress for a fixed compensation to the husband.

For this kind of immorality the police had no eyes, and, admitting enormous exaggeration in the common report of the conduct of the younger priesthood and the students of the theological schools (and there is no smoke without some fire), the conditions of morality amongst the younger Italian clergy was a gross scandal.  Houses of ill-fame were notorious, and it used to be said that when Pius IX. was urged by the French authorities to put them under control and license he replied that “every house was a brothel, and it was useless to license any.”  There was another saying which I heard often, that “if you wanted to go to a brothel you must go in the daytime, for at night they were full of priests.”  How far this was justified I do not know, but I remember that two American acquaintances went one night to one of the best recognized houses of the kind, a place of the most common notoriety on the Corso, and they were told at the door that there was no room,—­“every place was occupied.”

Let me not be charged with making of this state of things an accusation against the Catholic religion.  The English, Irish, and American students, who were those with whom I principally came in contact, were ardent and enthusiastic devotees, as earnest in their religious observances as any of the most devoted members of any other church I have known.  Indeed, it is my personal experience that so far as regards the younger men, I have never found so many animated by the true apostolical spirit as amongst the students