We waited in a great
gallery with a great crowd of people (three-fourths of them
English) for an hour or so, while they were chaunting the Miserere,
in the Sistine chapel again. Both chapels opened out of the
gallery; and the general attention was concentrated on the
occasional opening and shutting of the door of the one for which
the Pope was ultimately bound. None of these openings disclosed
anything more tremendous than a man on a ladder, lighting a great
quantity of candles; but at each and every opening, there was a
terrific rush made at this ladder and this man, something like (I
should think) a charge of the heavy British cavalry at Waterloo.
The man was never brought down, however, nor the ladder; for it
performed the strangest antics in the world among the crowd--where
it was carried by the man, when the candles were all lighted; and
finally it was stuck up against the gallery wall, in a very
disorderly manner, just before the opening of the other chapel, and
the commencement of a new chaunt, announced the approach of his
Holiness. At this crisis, the soldiers of the guard, who had been
poking the crowd into all sorts of shapes, formed down the gallery:
and the procession came up, between the two lines they made.
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