must all have their days, their eves, and
feasts. Where, above all, was my little Saint
Zita?

If one of the best of Christian gentlemen—
the kind by humourist, who wrote the
Ingoldsby Legends—could tell us, without scandal
to his cloth or creed, the wondrous stones
of Saint Geugulphus and Saint Odille, Saint
Anthony and Saint Nicholas, shall I be
accused of irreverence, if, in my own way, I tell
the legend of little Saint Zita? I must
premise that the first discovery of the saintly
tradition is due to M. Alphonse Karr, who
has a villa at Genoa, the birth-place of the
saint herself.

I have no memory for dates, and have no
printed information to go upon, so I am
unable to state the exact year, or even
century, in which Saint Zita nourished. But I
know that it was in the dark ages, and that
the Christian religion was young, and that it
was considerably more than one thousand
five hundred years ago.

Now, Pomponius Cotta (I give him that
name because it is a sounding one—not that
I know his real denomination) was a noble
Roman. He was one of the actors in that
drama which Mr. Gibbon of London and
Lausanne so elegantly described some centuries
afterwards: The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. It must have been a strange
time, that Decline and Fall. Reflecting upon
the gigantic, overgrown, diseased civilisation
of the wonderful empire, surrounded and
preyed upon by savage and barbarous Goths
and Visigoths, Vandals, Dacians, and
Panonians, I cannot help picturing to myself
some superannuated old noble, accomplished,
luxurious, diseased and depraved—learned in
bon-mots and scandalous histories of a former
age, uselessly wealthy, corruptly cultivated,
obsoletely magnificent, full of memories of a
splendid but infamous life, too old to reform,
too callous to repent, cynically presaging a
deluge after him, yet trembling lest that
deluge should come while he was yet upon
the stage, and wash his death-bed with bitter
waters; who is the sport and mock, the
unwilling companion and victim unable to
help himself, of a throng of rough, brutal,
unpolished youngsters—hobbedehoys of the
new generation who carouse at his expense,
smoke tobacco under his nose, borrow his
money, slap him on the back, and call him
old fogey behind it, sneer at his worn-out
stories, tread on his gouty toes, ridicule his
obsolete politeness, and tie crackers to the
back of his coat collar. Have you not
the decline and fall of the human empire?
So men and empires have alike their
decadence.

But Pomponius Cotta never recked, it is
very probable, of such things, he might
have occasionally expressed his belief, like
some noble Romans of our own age and
empire, that the country was going to the
bad; but he had large revenues, which he
spent in a right noble and Roman manner;
and he laid whatever ugly misgivings he had
in a red sea of Falernian and Chiajian (if,
indeed, all the stock of those celebrated
brands had not already been drunk out by
the thirsty Visigoths and Vandals). He had
the finest house in Genoa; and you who know
what glorious palaces the city of the Dorias
and the Spinolas can yet boast of, even in
these degenerate days, may form an idea of
what marvels of marble, statuary, frescos,
and mosaics owned Pomponius Cotta for
lord, in the days when there was yet a
Parthenon at Athens and a Capitol at Rome.

The noble Pomponius was a Christian, but
I am afraid in a very slovenly, lukewarm,
semi-pagan sort of way. As there are yet
in France some shrivelled old good-for-
nothings whose sympathies are with Voltaire
and d'Alembert—who sigh for the days of
the Encyclopedia, the Esprits-forts, and the
Baron d'Holbach's witty, wicked suppers, so
Pomponius furtively regretted the old bad
era before creation heard the voice that cried
out that the good Pan was dead *—the days
when there were mysteries and oracles,
sacrifices and haruspices, Lares and Penates,
and when laziness and lust, dishonesty and
superstition, were reduced into systems, and
dignified with the name of philosophy. So
Pomponius half believed in the five
thousand gods he had lost, and was but a skin-
deep worshipper of the One left. As for his
wife, the Domina Flavia Pomponia, she came
of far too noble a Roman family, was far too
great a lady, thought far too much of crimping
her tresses, perfuming her dress, painting
her face, giving grand entertainments, and
worrying her slaves, to give herself to piety
and the practice of religion; and though
Onesimus, that blessed though somewhat
unclean hermit, did often come to the
Pomponian house and take its mistress roundly
to task for her mundane mode of life, she
only laughed at the good man; quizzed his
hair, shirt, and long thickly-peopled beard;
and endeavoured to seduce him from his
hermit fare of roots and herbs and spring-
water, by pressing invitations to partake of
dainty meals and draughts of hot wine.
* This is one of the earliest traditions of the Christian
era. That at midnight on the first Christmias-Eve a great
voice was heard all over the world, crying "The God
Pan is dead." Milton bursts into colossal melody on
this key-note in his magnificent Christmas hymn.

I am not so uncharitable as to assume that
all the seven deadly sins found refuge in the
mansion of Pomponius Cotta, but it is
certain that it was a very fortalice and citadel
for one of them namely, gluttony. There
never were such noble Romans (out of
Guildhall) as the Pomponii for guzzling and
guttling, banqueting, junketing, feasting, and
carousing. It was well that plate glass was
not invented in those times, for the house
was turned out of windows regularly every
day, and the major part of the Pomponian