The just-related episode in the history of New York contains nothing to surprise an observant mind accustomed to note the present tendency of things in that city. But that Boston, the liberal, the cultured, the nursing mother of American literature,—that Boston should become the focus of Romanism, not for America only, but for the world,—should, in fine, become associated in the minds of men with all now associated with the name of Rome, will, no doubt, overwhelm others with the same incredulous astonishment the story at first evoked in me. But so it was. Driven from Italy, the Papacy found a welcome and a refuge in New England. Boston became, and remained during long ages, the chosen seat of that church of which its founders had a special abhorrence. Yet history shows mutations quite as strange. What similitude can be found between the Rome of Scipio and the Rome of Leo X.? How utterly dissimilar the ideas evoked by that one name at these different epochs! After all, how comparatively slight the change in the case of Boston!
The strange mutation was rendered possible, in both
298
