98 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP, vi 



To HIS ELDEST SON 



ROME, Jan. 20, 1885. 



I need hardly tell you that I find Rome wonderfully interest- 

 ing, and the attraction increases the longer one stays. I am 

 obliged to take care of myself and do but little in the way of 

 sight-seeing, but by directing one's attention to particular ob- 

 jects one can learn a great deal without much trouble. I begin 

 to understand Old Rome pretty well, and I am quite learned in 

 the Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils 

 out of which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive 

 Church. She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more 

 attractive than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, 

 so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which she has 

 been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of 

 Nazareth would not know her if he met her. 



I have been to several great papistical functions among 

 others to the festa of the Cathedra Petri in St. Peter's last Sun- 

 day, and I confess I am unable to understand how grown men 

 can lend themselves to such elaborate tomfooleries nothing but 

 mere fetish worship in forms of execrably bad taste, devised, 

 one would think, by a college of ecclesiastical man-milliners for 

 the delectation of school-girls. It is curious to notice that intel- 

 lectual and aesthetic degradation go hand in hand. You have 

 only to go from the Pantheon to St. Peter's to understand the 

 great abyss which lies between the Roman of paganism and the 

 Roman of the papacy. I have seen nothing grander than 

 Agrippa's work the popes have stripped it to adorn their own 

 petrified lies, but in its nakedness it has a dignity with which 

 there is nothing to compare in the ill-proportioned, worse deco- 

 rated tawdry stone mountain on the Vatican. 



The best thing, from an aesthetic point of view, that could be 

 done with Rome would be to destroy everything except St. Paolo 

 fuor le Mure, of later date than the fourth century. 



But you will have had enough of my scrawl, and your 

 mother wants to add something. She is in great force, and is 

 gone prospecting to some Palazzo or other to tell me if it is 

 worth seeing. Ever your loving father, T. H. HUXLEY. 



HOTEL VICTORIA, ROME, VIA DEI DUE MACELLI, 



Jan. 25, 1885. 



MY DEAR DONNELLY Best thanks for the telegram which 

 arrived the day before yesterday and set my mind at ease. 



