tribute to augment its resources and secure its stability, appear to render indispensable a central establishment in the capital, namely, a supreme board charged with the audit of the public accounts for the service of each year, in each branch of the administration, both civil and military, and likewise charged with the care of the public debt, and having powers proportionate to its great and salutary purposes. The more independent such an institution shall be in its nature, and the more it shall present the marks of an intimate union between the government and the people, the more it will conform to the beneficent intention of the sove

reign, and to the general anticipations. On this account we think that it ought to include persons chosen by the municipal councils, who, in union with the advisers of the sovereign, should form an administrative giunta or consulta. This body might or might not form a part of a council of state, to be chosen by the Sovereign from among the persons most distinguished in birth, property, or talent.

Unless there were one or more central institutions of such a kind, intimately allied with the influential classes. of a country so rich in aristocratic and conservative elements, the very nature of an elective government would naturally deprive the improvements, which will form the lasting glory of the reigning pope, of those guarantees of endurance, the need of which is generally and strongly felt, and will be felt so much the more in proportion as the benefits conferred by the pontiff shall be great and valuable."

Again and again, both before and after the events of 1848-9, the representatives of the European powers, acting on the best information which they could obtain as to the actual state of affairs, have reiterated their complaints and their recommendations as to the redress of grievances. Again and again the existence of such grievances has been admitted by the Holy See, and their redress apologetically deferred to "a more convenient season." This acknowledgment of the existence of evil, and this dogged persistence in the denial of its redress, are a sufficient answer in themselves to some of the points which we have just suggested. A strong à priori argument might be also deduced from them as to the incompatibility of the government of ecclesiastics with the wellbeing of a state. An historian, distinguished by his almost frigid impartiality in estimating the great events of the past, has thus summed up the effects of the temporal sovereignty of the popes during the latter part of the middle ages, when their vast spiritual pretensions abroad had been curbed by the spirit and sagacity of

European nations: "As the popes found their ambition thwarted beyond the Alps, it was diverted more and more towards schemes of temporal sovereignty. In these we do not perceive that consistent policy which remarkably actuated their conduct as supreme heads of the Church. Men generally advanced in years, and born of noble Italian families, made the papacy subservient to the elevation of their kindred, or to the interests of a local faction. For such ends they mingled in the dark conspiracies of that bad age, distinguished only by the more scandalous turpitude of their vices from the petty tyrants and intriguers with whom they were engaged. In the latter part of the fifteenth century, when all favorable prejudices were worn away, those who occupied the most conspicuous station in Europe disgraced their name by more notorious profligacy than could be paral leled in the darkest age that had preceded." We have no intention of drawing any parallel between the Borgias and recent occupants of the papal chair — between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries; but the mass of corruption so long superincumbent on the body-politic of Rome could not but have infected the general spirit of the administration, and the effects of the earlier demoralization of the popes has survived to obscure and render ineffectual the personal morality and good intentions of the weak pietist who is now the nominal head of the papal government. If we accept the vigorous periods of an eloquent pamphleteer, whose denunciation has had bestowed upon it the stamp of truth implied in an official suppression, the morality immediately below the chair of St. Peter by no means corresponds to the virtues of the holy father himself. The accusations against the cardinal-secretary Antonelli may be true, or they may be exaggerated, but it is a very serious thing that such charges should be boldly brought against the chief minister of the representative of the apostles; and more than a doubt may be suggested by it whether a government which exposes itself to such imputations in its highest offices is likely to have conduced to the morality and happiness of the popu lation subjected more immediately to its subordinate jurisdictions. If we are to believe the representation of the papal administration and of the papal administrators given by the author of the book which

we have placed at the head of our remarks, a very decided corroboration will be afforded to our previous impressions. "I do not conceal from myself," says the ex-member of the Roman Constituent, "that the words of a proscrit, branding those who proscribed him, are open to suspicion; no doubt the pains of exile may mislead the mind and excite the soul, so as to produce a sort of mental vertigo, and passion may sometimes obscure the truth. But when the proscrit, without dwelling upon his own misfortunes, his own feelings, his own convictions, comes to tell of facts-when he mentions dates, places, men, so as to afford to any one the means of verifying or criticising his assertions-when circumstances and the general relation of facts afford a striking confirmation to these special facts - when their character is such as to render it impossible to assign to them another origin when they are not controverted but simply denied, without any proof- and when, lastly, no serious argument can be adduced to invalidate their moral significance it is impossible for any conscientious man to refuse his confidence to the writer. I shall not dwell at length on the particular circumstances in which I am placed; but what I am about to relate, and the just expectations of the reader, render some brief statement necessary. My family is well known both at Rome and throughout the Papal States; its position and its extensive connections have brought me from my childhood into intercourse with all the influential members of the papal government. I have heard all the high dignitaries of the Church and of the government converse in my presence-not with that language of reserve which they affect in their official relations, but in the undisguised language of private intimacy. When I was scarcely seven years old, I began to be an attentive listener to these persons, and from that time my mind has received a strong impression from the strange things which I perceived — which instinctively astonished me when I could not yet interpret them, and which, on subsequent reflection, have filled me with horror. These impressions have not since been given the lie to. I might, indeed, have been deceived in my deductions from my personal observations, but in dealing with facts I can not be mistaken. These have multiplied under my own eyes, have taken

place in my own presence, have been, so to speak, in my very hands, when to my own family connections have been added those I had myself formed. The offices which have been intrusted to me, the employments which I have filled, almost in the heart of the government itself, have given me the opportunity of mixing with men of all classes, of examining into the machine of government closely in all its details, or becoming acquainted with its. practical working, and of witnessing the sardonic smiles of the inquisitors, and listening to the hopeless complaints of the victims. From that time forward I had a horror of the government of priests. . . . If my father had sown in my heart the seeds of corruption, and busied himself in bringing them to maturity, he would indeed have opened to me a career full of honors, and might perhaps have made of me a cardinal of the holy Roman Church. My father preferred that I should be an honorable man, and by so doing predestined me to be a rebel; he secured to me the bitterness of finding myself a proscrit, and for this title I owe him the deepest acknowledgments." A statement thus heralded ought to obtain a respectful audience; and, having given our readers the author's own appeal to their confidence, we must leave them to gather for themselves that impression as to his credibility, which the perusal of the work itself can alone adequately convey. One extract may suffice to show the materials out of which the rulers of the ecclesiastical states are formed, and the motives by which their choice of the sacred office is at present actuated. The author takes the case of the lower orders, who might be supposed to benefit most from a system which opens the way of preferment to all classes through the same sacred portal. He takes the case of one "whose father is a wretched peasant, toiling from morning to night, and yet scarcely able to keep his family; who has to beg from his landed proprietor, to humble himself before the steward, to learn to conciliate the servants to get admitted into his master's presence; who, if he dare to enter the palace, is abashed at his own dress and his ignorance. But you shall be a priest,' says the wretched father to his son. 'I will be a priest,' thinks then the child; and I shall have no more need to give myself up to exhausting toil; the Church provides for the wants of her ministers. I

Ir has been said that the world rarely acknowledges its greatest benefactors, and usually behaves with indifference to those to whom it is the most indebted. There is certainly no object from which we derive so many comforts, and even necessaries, as from the glorious sun, and yet with what neglect he is usually treated. Seldom do we find any remarks made about him in which some complaint is not mixed up. "The sun is awfully hot," is a most common observation; and rarely, indeed, do we hear any thanks given for the heat and light with which he favors us. "To make hay while the sun shines," has become a homely proverb; but it is one which appears to insinuate that we ought to take all the advantage that we can of his light whilst he yields it, instead of intimating that we are under great obligations to our central orb for that which he does give.

Nevertheless, those idolaters who worshiped the sun had much reason for their idolatry; for we may fairly conclude that were it not for sun-light and sun heat, we should soon be destitute of our daily bread, and all that now flourishes on earth would cease to be. Considering, therefore, how essential to the existence of all earthly things is this sun that we so neglect, let us inquire into the size, appearance, character, and habits of that primary orb, around which our earth revolves but as a little satellite.

The sun is situated at about ninety-five millions of miles from the earth, a distance which it is difficult to realize, unless we compare it with terrestrial objects. If a man were to travel 3800 times round our globe-a distance equal to 7600 voyages to Australia-he would pass over a distance equal to that of the earth from the sun or if we could perform a journey by express train to the sun, we should, if we traveled at the rate of sixty miles per hour, occupy upwards of one hundred and eighty years upon the journey. Thus, to make a voyage round the sun, and to keep

at a mean distance of ninety-five millions of miles, obliges the earth to pass over 565,488,000 miles every year.

When we reflect upon the vastness of this machinery, and upon the astounding facts which these movements reveal, we can readily conceive how repulsive were the announcements of the earth's movements to those heathen and bigoted minds who had taught that this tiny world was the grandest and most important object in the universe; for to displace it from the center of the universe, was to remove it from the position of honor, and make it but a secondary planet in the system.

Having found the sun's distance from the earth, the astronomer can then find his size, which is upon an equally tremendous scale. While our earth is about eight thousand miles in diameter, or, more correctly speaking, 7926 in the broadest part, the sun is rather more than one hundred times that magnitude, his correct diameter being 882,000 miles. His circumference, therefore, instead of being about twenty-five thousand miles, like our little earth, is 2,764,000 miles; and in bulk the sun is about a million and a quarter times the greater, The difference between the sun and our earth is, in short, not less than that between the Great Eastern and a boy's toy sailing-boat.

Here, then, we have the distance and the size of the orb to which we owe all our heat and light, our ripened crops and fruit, and much more, probably, than we yet are aware of. If an observer examine the sun by the aid of a common telescope, taking the precaution to use a dark-colored glass, he will note upon the surface of the sun some small black spots; these will first appear upon the eastern limb of the sun, and will then pass near the center, and will disappear upon the opposite side. Continued observation will show that some of these spots will, after a certain period, return into view, will pass across as before, and so on. to prove that the

This fact is sufficient sun, like the planets