From this moment the whole machinery of Government is suspended, and remains so until the creation of a Pope calls it again into activity. For all purposes of administration Rome is as it were placed under sequestration. Even the law courts suspend their sittings, and in every branch of the Executive there is left only that amount of activity which is indispensably requisite to prevent the absolute dissolution of society and order. This state of things proceeds from strict limitations imposed by Papal decrees upon the provisional authorities called into existence during the interregnum-limitations that were devised with the view of removing temptations to spin out the tenure of provisional office. Systematically the jealousy of the popes has carefully circumscribed the powers to be exercised during a vacancy of the Papal Chair until they have become stripped of all serious initiatory faculty, and extend only over the merest matters of indispensable routine. Of this the pomp and glitter devolve, as we have said, chiefly on the Cardinal Camerlengo, who forthwith receives from the Maestro di Camera the late Pope's piscatorial ring,* The ring is called so from having engraved on its stone the figure of St. Peter drawing in his fisherman's net. According to Cancellieri, 'Notizie sopra l'Origine e l'Uso dell' Annello Pescatorio, Rome, 1823,' the earliest record of its use is of the year 1265. Originally it was nothing more than the Pope's private signet for his own correspondence. From the middle of the fifteenth century its use became reserved to the pontifical utterances called Briefs, and has remained so ever since. The distinction between a Brief and Bull lies in a degree of weight and solemnity. The Bull is the most authoritative expression of the pontifical infallibility, as such almost incapable of repeal; while the Brief is directed to something of comparatively immediate and passing importance. The name of the former comes from its leaden seal, which is tied by a hempen cord to bulls of ordinary import, and by a silken to those conferring sees, and containing matters of grave weight. The style of the Bull runs always-Pius IX. Episcopus Servus Servorum Dei ad futuram' or 'perpetuam rei memoriam,' with date from the Incarnation, and signature of the various functionaries of the Apostolic Chancery, the document being written in Latin in medieval letters upon dark rough parchment. A Brief, which is likewise in Latin, has but the Pope's name at the beginning -Pius Papa Ix.-is signed by the Cardinal Secretary of Briefs, bears date from the Nativity, and is written in modern letters upon soft white parch ment. The die of the leaden seal affixed to Bulls was kept at the Vatican until Pius VII. solemnly deposited it at the Cancellaria with pain of excommunication against whoever enters without express permission the room in which it is. At one period the Cistercian Friars had the privilege of furnishing the keepers of this seal. There is yet a third form of Papal expression in writing, called a Chirograph, the exact nature of which it is difficult to define. It appears indeed to have no binding force except what it may derive from personal which is broken at the first general meeting of Cardinals, held on the day immediately following the Pope's decease. His next duty, after consigning the corpse to the care of the penitentiaries of the Vatican Basilica, is to take an inventory of all objects in the Apostolic Palace, a very natural proceeding, and deserving notice only because it owes its origin to the once customary riots in Rome during an interregnum, when it was an established thing for the mob to rifle the Pope's Palace. To guard against the illicit removal of pontifical property, the Camerlengo stays therefore in the palace until all has been properly registered, when, carrying away the key of the Pope's apartments, he returns in state to his private residence, his carriage being escorted by the Pope's particular body-guard of Swiss halberdiers, which continues in attendance on him until the election of a new Pope. Also all edicts issued during the interregnum run in his name, and the coin struck by the mint has on it the Camerlengo's private arms. And here at this early stage we already meet the checking contrivances invented against the possibility of some ambitious Cardinal usurping what is due only to the Pope. As soon as the Camarlengo has reached his dwelling he sees three Cardinals arrive-the senior members of the three classes in the Sacred College, bishops, priests, and deacons-who, during the nine days that are prescribed to elapse before a Conclave can be constituted, remain associated with him in a special congregation representing the Executive of the State.* The prerogatives of this Board are, however, again carefully limited to carrying out the resolutions taken by the general assembly of Cardinals which meets each day for the transaction of business that is laid down and defined with extraordinary minuteness. It comprises the arrangements for the Pope's funeral, the preparatory disposi tion for getting the Conclave ready, and the nomination of various officers specially charged with duties either in the Conclave or for securing the peace of the town. of the great functionaries in the Court of Rome hold their offices only for the Pope's lifetime. His decease produces therefore an instantaneous absence of authority which Most the Cardinals have to make good; and in former times, when tumults were the order of an election season, the appointment of the military officer-who, with the title of Lieutenant of the Holy Church, held the Castle of St. Angelo, and together with the Bargello, the chief of the city police, the Sbirri, had the duty of preserving order in the town, and of protecting particularly the Trasteverine quarter, where lies the Vatican, in which Conclaves then met was a matter of very great importance. On all these points the Board, at the head of which figures the Camerlengo, has no power of initiative, while the general assembly is itself bound by prescriptions, the painful minuteness of which is conclusively illustrative of the spirit of formalism pervading the whole system. For each of the nine preliminary days there is an enjoined assembly of Cardinals that is limited to go through the form of some minutely prescribed bit of ceremonial mechanism, not to be departed from, not to be exceeded, not to be innovated upon. Every attribute of these assemblies is rigidly fixed and circumscribed. Here we have the unmistakeable impress of generations of jealous Popes, who have been assiduously at work in hammering out a system into such elaborately fine points as must preclude the possibility of their being twisted into other shapes that might be turned against the perfect absoluteness which Popes will allow to reside only in themselves. During the vacation of the See,' says Pius IV., in a Bull that is inserted in the last official collection of regulations in force during an interregnum, in those things which appertained to the Pope when alive, the College of Cardinals can have no power or jurisdic-secrated by custom, and looked upon as a tion whatever, whether of grace or justice, or of giving execution to such resolutions of the deceased Pope; but it is bound to reserve them to the future Pope.' There is an explicit prohibition against this body assuming to dispose of any of the properties of the Church, or any of the moneys belonging to the Apostolical Chamber or to the Datary's office, even for the discharge of debts contracted before the late Pope's death, its power over the cof fers of the exchequer extending merely to the maintenance of the functionaries constituting the Papal establishment, and the payment of what may be required for the defence of the lands and places of the Church.' It is only on the occurrence of what may be deemed a grave peril' by at least two-thirds of the Cardinals assembled that the Sacred College can be dispensed from a literal observance of these limitations upon its prerogatives, and proceed to adopt such resolutions and meas ures as may seem to it demanded by circumstances.* The faculty contained in this provision is of moment, and not to be overlooked. The more one studies the regu lations of the Court of Rome, the more will one be impressed by the fact, how, athwart all the dense accumulation of punctilious formalism which has been the aggregate deposit of a current setting in the same direction for centuries, there is yet preserved an element of subtle elasticity that has been shrewdly cherished in secret against the event of the force of altered circumstances making it some day desirable to seek protection in what has been so jealously suppressed and scouted in ordinary times-liberty of individual initiative. Now-a-days Rome wears during an interregnum no great outer look of change-all going on pretty much in the same steady order as before. But formerly the case was very different. Let not him say that he has been in Rome who has not happened to be there during the vacation of the See,' are the words of a contemporary who wrote a narrative of the Conclave which, in 1621, resulted in the election of Gregory xv.t Down to comparatively a quite recent date entry upon an interregnum was synonymous with entry upon a period of riot and brawl, which made the streets unsafe for quiet citizens. Every kind of misdemeanour revelled at this season in Rome, which became for the time a perfect bear-garden, in which the criminals let out of jail enjoyed themselves mightily at the expense of peace-loving folk. The lawlessness which then reigned in Rome was a recognised order of things, con- prescriptive right during the period of Conclave, just as the right of mummery during the Carnival season. The origin of this strange state of things must be sought in the general want of discipline that distinguished the armed force kept by States in the middle ages, and especially in that kept by the Pope. The trained bands were so many bodies of mutinous and lawless brawlers, who seized every opportunity for indulging their natural disposition to insubordination, outrage, and crime. Their pay as a rule was terribly in arrear, and therefore they hardly ever failed to begin operations on the *These prescriptions are repeated almost word for word in the Bull Apostolatus Officium issued in 1732 by Clement xu., the latest Papal statute on the subject of Conclaves. Carinci, the excellent archivist of the Duke of SerThis manuscript is in the possession of Signor moneta few were picked up in this plight who had been thrown into the Tiber. Many were the houses broken into at night and sadly rifled. Doors were thrown down, women violated,— some were murdered, and others ravished; so also many young girls were dishonoured and carried off. As for the Sbirri, who tried to make arrests, some were killed outright, and others grievously maimed and wounded. The chief of the Trastevere region was stabbed as he went at night the rounds of his beat, and other chiefs of regions were many times in danger of their lives. Many of these outrages and acts of insolence were done by the soldiers who were in Rome as guards of the various lords and princes; as happened especially with those whom the Cardinal of Savoy had brought for his guard, at whose hands were killed several Sbirri who had taken into custody a comrade of theirs. In short, from day to day did the evil grow so much, that had the making a new Pope been deferred as long as it once seemed likely to be, through the dissensions of the Cardinals, there was ground to apprehend many other strange and most grievous incon veniences.' decease of a Pope by a mutinous demand to have their claims settled, or they would do no duty. These men, swept together from all corners, true mercenaries and adventurers of the purest water, were the dread of all classes of the Cardinals, who could not dispense with their services, and had to buy their good humour;-of the townspeople, who were at the mercy of their recklessness. The natural consequence was that during an interregnum Rome wore the look of a city armed for civil war. Every noble in selfdefense assumed the privilege of arming his retainers and drawing chains across the street in the neighbourhood of his palace, which was garrisoned by his followers, and converted into an asylum: he usurped the right of keeping his own quarter of the city free from all police but his own. Some of the great families succeeded in obtaining a recognition of this claim, like the Mattei, who had the right to hold the bridges of San Sisto and Quattro Capi, together with the intervening region of the Ghetto, with retainers wearing the badges of their house.* But in most cases the authority exercised by the various magnates was only the outflow of an all-pervading spirit of license and tumult, that wrested as much power as it could, without any warrant for the peculiar pretensions advanced. The nominal police of Rome was vested in two officers, who, to add to the confusion, were traditionally jealously unsafe as its streets are, their condi ous of each other's authority-the Bargello, who was the ordinary head of the regular city police, the Sbirri; and the Lieutenant of the Holy Church, who, as commander-inchief of the soldiery, and special governor of the Leonine city, held office only for the period of interregnum. The particular duty intrusted to his charge was to secure the Cardinals from molestation, and to this end it became customary to erect barricades at the limits of the Leonine city, whereby the free circulation through it was prevented, except for those armed with a special permit. One of the most riotous elections on record is that of 1623, when Urban VIII.Barberini-was raised to the chair of St. Peter. The disturbances which then happened are stated by the contemporary diarist Gigli to have been such as no one could remember having ever witnessed.' 'Not a day passed,' he writes, "without many brawls, murders, and waylayings. Men and women were often found killed in various places, many being without heads, while not a *At the corner of the streets running along the Mattei Palace there can still be seen the stone posts and rings for drawing chains during Conclave times. Against such an all-pervading spirit of lawlessness it was a very inadequate provision for making the streets safe at night that every householder was bound to hang out a lamp before his dwelling during the period of an interregnum. Even now Rome is, of all capitals in Europe, the least pleasant to walk about in the dark; but scandal tion is yet a very pale copy of the state they were habitually reduced to, as it were by privilege, during the pandemonium season of former Conclaves. Pius IV., a Pope of a certain reforming vigour, issued in 1562 a long_Bull, repeating older regulations for a Conclave that seemed to require being called to mind, and forbidding a variety of abuses which had cropped up. The twenty-first clause runs thus:-Also we forbid wagers, quas excommissas vocant, being made on a pending Papal election; and decree that if against these presents any should yet be made, they shall be held and deemed altogether null and void in court, and out of the same; and that those thus contravening, and their brokers, be punished as it may please the Governor and the future Pope. It will create surprise to find such an injunction amongst the matters considered worthy of particular attention by a Pope when making regulations for the election of his successors. An explanation for the importance here attached to what would seem so irrelevant is to be found in the incidents that came At one habitually to attend these bets. matter involving considerable interests, occupying whole classes, and producing a standing excitement. The gambling propensities prevalent amongst Italians seized upon the conflicting elements offered by a Conclave to reduce them into a series of chances on which to stake. The shopkeep ers and merchants of Rome entered into the game with a passion which resembled onr modern habits of speculation in stock. As soon as ever a Pope had breathed his last, Banchi Vecchii, and Nuovi-streets still bearing these names, and running from the small square in front of the bridge of St. Angelo-became an improvised Exchange, where the rival chances of candidates were publicly quoted and eagerly discounted, amidst commotion that commonly was at tended with riot. This locality was the Fleet Street of Rome. Here resided the chief merchants, especially the goldsmiths, from whom the quarter derived its name; for in Rome, as elsewhere, the goldsmiths did business as money-brokers and bankers, figuring as the natural agents and go-betweens in all money operations.* of Sbirri, whereupon the Bargello had hurried in person to the spot to assert his authority, but the soldiers laughed to scorn his pretensions, and a scuffle ensued, with a discharge of firearms, which killed several individuals. The Bargello beat a retreat into the palace of the Governor of Rome, while the Duke, who happened to be standing at the Castle gate when the tumult occurred, hastened across the bridge to appease it, and draw off into the Borgo his riotous soldiers. In his report he then recommends measures to prevent the recurrence of such scenes, and states the cause that lay at their bottom: 'I have sent,' he writes, another company to be in guard at the Banchi; but it may be deemed advisable, on account of what has happened, to remove altogether this post from there, as the brokers and dealers wish and ask for the same only because it affords them protection for laying their wagers, and they are the parties who sow dissensions between soldiers and Sbirri. ( . . If this guard were taken away from the Banchi, the Bargello would then be able to pass there freely, and thus a stop would be put to these wagers, from which proceed all these riots.' Now-a-days this mode of making a Papal election subserve the gen the system of the lottery; and whereas formerly heads were often broken in the angry excitement caused by the daily rise and fall in the rival chances of favourite Cardinals, the population of Rome at present during an interregnum satisfies its gambling passion by peacefully playing on combinations of numbers formed out of the ages of Cardinals, or any other circumstances connected with their individualities which human ingenuity may be able to translate into a cabalistic expression.* The Bull of Pius IV. was not sufficient to arrest the betting propensities of the inhabitants of the Banchi; and in spite of Papal fulminations, the chances of an elec-eral love for play has been superseded by tion were still made the subject of wagers that led to frequent breaches of the peace. Amongst the many valuable papers preserved in the Gaetani archives, there is one which is singularly illustrative of what used to occur in this quarter. It is the report by the Duke of Sermoneta, who in the interregnum of 1590 was the Lieutenant of the Holy Church, of the circumstances that led to a murderous scuffle between his own soldiers on guard in the Banchi and a patrol of the city sbirri. By right the Banchi lay within the bounds of the Bargello's authority, but at the request of the shopkeepers the Lieutenant had posted a watch of soldiers in this street. Here he had refused, it was said by mistake, to let pass a round When Benvenuto Cellini plied his calling in Rome he had his workshop in this locality; and it was while sitting in it-probably a dark vaulted chamber in the ground-floor of a palazzo, with an arch on the street to serve at once as door and window, such as are many shops in the older portions of Rome-that he was affronted by the insulting gestures of the goldsmith Pompeo, who, swaggering down the street, and infected with the licentious spirit of an interregnum season-for this happened when the Cardinals had just entered Conclave, drew up opposite Benvenuto's shop, and insolently flouted the hot-blooded Florentine, until, unable any longer to check his passion, he bounded out after Pompeo, and stabbed him to the heart for his sauciness.See Cellini's Autobiography, book i. chapter xv. *It is proverbial that in Italy nothing is sacred from conversion into some reduction into numbers that are made available for the lottery. It is not the public alone, but the Conscript Fathers of the Church themselves, who during Conclave time con trive to indulge their gambling passions in numbers that are considered to represent the mystical operations of the Holy Ghost. Stendhal, who gives a very capital account of the Conclave in 1829 in his Promenades dans Rome, has a good story of his witnessing some inmate of the Conclave playing in the lottery through the wheel which serves for conveying meals in: 'Just as after the inspection of two or three dinners all this kitchenwork bored us,' he writes, and we were on the point to withdraw, we saw a ticket come through the turning-wheel from within the Conclave, with the numbers 17 and 25 thereon, and the request to put it in the lottery. These numbers might signify that in the morning's balloting the Cardinal occupying apartment 25 had 17 votes, or any other combination. These numbers were faithfully handed over to a servant of Cardinal P-. A Bull of Clement XII. (1730-40), impregnated with the spirit of economy, abolished, together with a number of offices, the Governorship of the Leonine city. The reforming hand of the age, quickened by the prickings of inexorable penury, has been successfully engaged in paring down the oldfashioned lavishness of even arch con-servative Rome. At present the peace of the Popeless city is left entirely to the care of Monsignor Governatore, who with drilled gendarmes in modern plight has superseded the once rival powers and fantastic archers of the Church's Lieutenant and the civic Bargello,--ruling Rome during an interreg num by the same grim intervention of prowling police that is ordinarily busy in its streets when an actual Pope resides in the Vatican. One vestige alone still figures of the peculiar powers which started into existence at the beck of necessities now happily vanished. It is to be found in the pomp and parade that attend the Marshal of the Conclave, an officer who is a member of the great Roman aristocracy, and whose professed duty is to be the jailer of the assembled Cardinals, having it on his conscience to keep them tightly shut off from contact with the outer world. In reality, this dignity is now become an appanage of the Chigi family, though, in strictness, not hereditary, the office being conferred afresh for life on each new head of the house. The origin of the creation dates from the troubled period of Gregory x.'s elevation (1271). Innocent VI. (1352-62) bestowed the office on the member of the great Savelli family, which from father to son retained it until in 1712 this house became extinct, having held the dignity always by the same tenure by which it now descends in the Chigis, on whom it was conferred at this period. Once the authority attached to this office was very considerable, and not confined only to the season of interregnum, for the Marshal possessed jurisdiction over all lay members of the Pontifical Court, who were tried before his special tribunal, the Corte Savella, and lodged in his special prison. That privilege came to an end under Innocent x. (1644-55) in whose edict of suppression the grave abuses prevalent in that Court, and the scandalous state of the prisons, are especially alluded to as rendering reform indispensable. In spite of these curtailments of his powers, the Marshal retains all the outward display of high rank, and figures during a Conclave as second in precedence only to the Camerlengo. The essence of his importance has indeed much waned; about the only real exercise of authority which he may yet be called upon to put in practice being the legitimate dis tribution of pass-medals, which the Marshal is entitled to get coined in silver and gold. Nevertheless, in the ceremonial pageant of Rome, this dignitary makes a prominent show, although his splendour has not escaped the paring action of that spirit of reduction which has been in the ascendant of late. The Diario di Roma of the day gives a glowing description of the sumptuous magnificence displayed by the first Marshal of the Chigi family on his first appearance in this capacity after the death of Clement XI. in 1721 : 'Before his palace in Piazza Colonna there was drawn up his company of hundred men enlisted and clothed in blue cloth at the Prince's own cost, together with their officers. Then there went to attend his Excellency a company of fish-venders, clothed in gala, in white and blue calico, and white feathers in the hats, with borders, after which come a troop of rosarymakers, and then another from the quarter of La Regola, and these going in a body before the great standards with his Excellency's arms, Peter's, and mounted guard at the Prince's marched along the whole Strada Papale to St. own apartment, which is at the great staircase of the Vatican Basilica.' During a conclave, the Marshal still takes up his quarters in the building where it meets, and just outside the barriers that shut in the Cardinals, to watch over whose strict. confinement, and to inspect the unimpeachable nature of the articles passed through the turning-wheels for the admission of really indispensable objects, constitute the only duties he still has any pretension to perform. The thrifty spirit of Clement XIII. (1758-69) included the gay bands of retainers amongst the items suppressed by his reforming Bull, so that now the Prince-Marshal has a less ostentatious, but also a less costly guard, furnished by a contingent of Papal regulars. It would be tedious to recount the prescriptive ceremonial for each of the nine days of preparation before entering Conclave. The first three are more particularly devoted to the obsequies of the Pope, which take place always at St. Peter's-the chapel of the Pontifical residence, and are marked by many striking rites, full of obscure symbolism, and quaint mementoes of obsolete customs. Stendhal, who was in Rome at the death of Leo XII., and curiously followed the ceremonies of the interregnum, gives in his Promenades an excellent account of what is still practised :— St. Peter's,' he writes, and we were there 'To-day the obsequies of the Pope began at from eleven in the forenoon. The Pope's catafalque has been raised in the Chapel of the Choir, surrounded by the noble Guards in their handsome scarlet uniforms. The body of the |