As a family, we might never collectively
visit it, and, in fact, we never did; but one day I drove boldly (if
secretly) off alone and renewed my acquaintance with this contemporary
of mine; for, if you have been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you
find that you are coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and
the imperial Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at
least, to that of Pius IX. St. Peter's will not be, by any means, your
oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long standing that
you may not wish to use it with all the frankness which its faults
invite. If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime
colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the
whole world to the church's heart, that here is the best of St. Peter's,
you will not be wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there
where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong.
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