having relations with the Council, who are not restrained by duty and conscience.'[1] We had reason to believe that the names of these people, both German and English, were well known to us.
Now the testimony of the Bishop of Mayence, as to the falsehoods of these correspondents respecting Rome and Germany, I can confirm by my testimony as to their treatment of matters relating to Rome and England. I do not think there is a mention of my own name without, as the Bishop of Mayence says, the appendage of a falsehood. The whole tissue of the correspondence is false. Even the truths it narrates are falsified: and through this discoloured medium the English people, by the help of Quirinus and the 'Saturday Review,' gaze and are misled.
To relieve this graver aspect of the subject, I will add a few livelier exploits of our English correspondents. On January 14, an English journal announced that the Bishops were unable to speak Latin; and that Cardinal Altieri (who laid down his life for his flock in the cholera three years ago), in whose rooms the Bishops met, 'was beside himself.' 'What is there,' the correspondent of another paper asked, 'in seven hundred old men dressed in white, and wearing tall paper caps?' 'The Oriental Bishops,' he says, 'refused to wear white mitres:' reasonably, because they never wear them. 'The Bishop of Thun attacked the Bishop of Sura with a violence which threatened personal collision.' There is no Bishop of Thun. The same paper, July 7, says, 'I was positively shocked, yesterday, at finding that the Roman
- ↑ The Vatican, March 4, 1870, p. 145.
