You cannot look at the walls
without feeling a solemn sadness steal over you, as you think of the
thousands of your fellow-creatures who have gazed on them with the same
freshness and fulness of life with which you now gaze on them, since
Raphael and Michel Angelo first clothed them with their own immortal
conceptions, three hundred years ago. It was in an assembly like this,
and perhaps in this very room, that the condemnation of Luther was
pronounced, that Henry was proclaimed "Defender of the Faith," and that
Cardinal Pole rejoiced with his brethren of the purple over the
approaching return of England to the bosom of the Church. And as you are
musing on these things, and centuries seem to pass before you like the
figures of a dream, the room gradually fills, the cardinals come in and
take their places, each clad in the simple majesty of the purple, and
last of all comes the Pope himself, the steel sabres of his guard
ringing on the marble floor with a clang that breaks the harmonious
silence most discordantly. Then in a moment all is hushed again. The
cardinals go one by one to pay their homage to their spiritual father,
kneeling and kissing the cross on his mantle, he blessing them all, as
duteous children, in return.
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