There Are Always A Hundred And Twelve Lamps Burning
Near The Altar, And There Were Two Tall Tapers, Besides, Near The
Black Statue Of St. Peter; But These Were Nothing In Such An
Immense Edifice.
The gloom, and the general upturning of faces to
the balcony, and the prostration of true believers on the
Pavement,
as shining objects, like pictures or looking-glasses, were brought
out and shown, had something effective in it, despite the very
preposterous manner in which they were held up for the general
edification, and the great elevation at which they were displayed;
which one would think rather calculated to diminish the comfort
derivable from a full conviction of their being genuine.
On the Thursday, we went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament from
the Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina, another
chapel in the Vatican;--a ceremony emblematical of the entombment
of the Saviour before His Resurrection. We waited in a great
gallery with a great crowd of people (three-fourths of them
English) for an hour or so, while they were chaunting the Miserere,
in the Sistine chapel again. Both chapels opened out of the
gallery; and the general attention was concentrated on the
occasional opening and shutting of the door of the one for which
the Pope was ultimately bound. None of these openings disclosed
anything more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting a great
quantity of candles; but at each and every opening, there was a
terrific rush made at this ladder and this man, something like (I
should think) a charge of the heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.
The man was never brought down, however, nor the ladder; for it
performed the strangest antics in the world among the crowd--where
it was carried by the man, when the candles were all lighted; and
finally it was stuck up against the gallery wall, in a very
disorderly manner, just before the opening of the other chapel, and
the commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach of his
Holiness.
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