facilities he affords; he is not in business as the
preserver of mercantile morality, and has only
to make his profits in the usual average way.
He has little more than an affected horror
even of forged documents, until they are
left unpaid in his cash-box, and then he is
loud in his abuse of the edged tools, in playing
with which he has cut his hands. He has been
taught to conceal so much, from motives of
prudence, that he has lost the relish for
straightforward truth, and when truth presents itself
to him, he regards it only as another imposition
of a novel and elaborate kind.

These are only some of the deeper vices of
our present commercial system, which the
association before mentioned has no ambition to
attack. The committee have doubtless formed
a modest and accurate estimate of their own
strength. Being drawn from the class whose
disreputable members they are trying to reform,
they start with no ignorance of the nature of
their work. Our good wishes go with them. If
they fail—as they possibly may—the disgrace
will fall on the British merchant; while, if
victorious, they may pave the way for bolder
missionaries, who will endeavour yet further to
purify the morals of trade.

VITTORIA ACCORAMBONI.
A TRUE ITALIAN HISTORY. IN NINE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER V. LEAST SAID, SOONEST MENDED.

NOT a cardinal in all Rome was more
scrupulously punctual in his attendance at all
consistorial and other meetings than the old and
infirm Cardinal di Montalto. He was noted for
being almost always the first, or among the first,
to enter the hall of meeting. But it was
universally thought that on this occasion he would
absent himself from the unluckily inopportune
assembly. His much-loved nephew, the prop
of his old age, the hope of his ambition, who
alone could have made the triple crown, in any
worldly point of view, worth having to him, was
lying a yet unburied mangled corpse in the
house of mourning he must leave to attend the
conference. He must quit his desolate sister in
her sorrow, and leave alone with the dead the
weeping women whom his presence and
authority alone had restrained from abandoning
themselves to all the excesses of hysterical
emotion. But it was not so much the painful
effort necessary for tearing himself from this
sad scene to present himself in his place at the
Consistory, that led people to whisper to each
other that old Montalto would never be able to
be at that day's meeting; it was the thought
that surely, under such circumstances, he would
not venture to meet the prying eyes of the
public, and especially of his peers of the Sacred
College. Human infirmity, it, was thought,
could hardly in such a case attain to that
perfect suppression of all emotion, that impassible
and inscrutable demeanour of features, voice,
and manner, which it was, as a matter of course,
considered that policy and prudence in such a
case demanded. What was it the old man had
to conceal? Was he not to be supposed to
grieve over his nephew's untimely death? He
was to conceal everything he felt on any subject.
It was the traditional rule of conduct so
universal, received from generation to generation,
as to have become instinctive in the Roman
nature. Something might gleam out from the
inner hidden soul of the man in the weak
moment of deep affliction; some feeling which
might be made the basis of carefully reasoned
theories as to the inscrutable old man's real
thoughts and desires! We are told of profound
comparative anatomists, who, from the sight of
the small fragment of an antediluvian fossil
skeleton, can determine the structure of the
entire organisation. And the cunning moral
anatomists of Rome ask only a momentary flash
of real emotion to construct from it a whole
theory of probable human character and intentions.
This was the ordeal to which it was
thought that the heavily stricken Cardinal di
Montalto would not venture to expose himself.

All Rome was wrong. Punctual at the
appointed hour, with bent body and tottering step,
as usual, but not one iota more so than usual,
and with his wonted calmly benignant but
wholly impassible expression of features, the
old man walked, one of the first to arrive, as
ever, into the hall of meeting.

Of course every eye was on him, striving in
vain to penetrate below that unruffled surface to
the tumultuous movements which they thought
must needs be raging beneath it. Then, one
after another, their eminences advanced to
condole with him on his misfortune. Just as in an
exhibition of animal magnetism, the spectators
attempt to satisfy themselves of the genuineness
of the patient's insensibility by poking, pricking,
and pinching him in every sensitive part, so the
curious witnesses of this exhibition of stoicism
proceeded to test the perfection of it by the
closest scrutiny of the performer under the
scalpel of their compassion and sympathy. But,
to the admiration of all present, no shadow of
failing under the ordeal rewarded the vigilance
of the observers. With affectionate thanks to
each for their kind sympathy, the old man
replied to one, that in this world such misfortunes
must be looked for, that history was full of
such; to another, that excessive grief for the
irremediable was but blamable weakness; and
reminded a third that David, the man after
God's own heart, had arisen and washed his face
when his child was finally taken from him.

The most accomplished and practised
members of the court, writes an historian, attributed
this immobility of his to an affectation of the
stoic courage of Brutus and Cato; but the wise
judged that "without true Christian virtue it
was impossible to feign to such perfection!"
So that the capacity for dissimulation, so much
admired by Rome, was actually erected by it
into "a Christian virtue!"

When Gregory, the octogenarian pope,
entered the Consistory, "the first thing he did,"
says the chronicler, "was to fix his eyes on
the Cardinal di Montalto, and burst into tears."