174 A HOUSE OF FENANCE. piety recommendatory and acceptable to God. From the exhibitions of this kind which I have witnessed in seeming penitents weeping at a shrine, and after observation on the fruits of their devotion, I am persuaded that, independent of every error in belief or practice in the religion of the people, a deadly delusion on this point most extensively prevails among the common if not higher classes here. The piece representing the scourging after condemnation is the best in the number, and an admirable painting, worth at Lima, the Padre says, a thousand dollars, and it would in Europe probably be valued at a much greater sum. 66 A house of penance" is one to which those desirous or under an obligation from the church of doing penance resort during its performance, and where they remain so many days or weeks in the practice of various austerities, in listening to the exhortations of the father, and joining in the repetition of prayers and the celebration of mass. At the close of the appointed time they make confession, and being absolved by the breath of man return to the world, too often, from all I can learn, only again to become the victims of its sins and its guilt. So great is the reputation of the Padre Arrieta for sanctity, that his house often contains not less than fifty or more penitents at the same time, all eating and sleeping for the period within its walls. The whole establishment has been erected and is supported at his own expense or by funds collected by him for the purpose. Though the convent of St. Francisco is deserted, IMAGE OF ONE IN PURGATORY. 175 and in comparative ruins, still it is in better repair than any other foundation of a similar kind in the city. Churches, convents, and nunneries may be seen in every direction shattered and peeled without by earthquakes, and stripped of much of their riches within by the hand of the marauder and revolutionist; while the impoverished monks are scattered abroad in the country for subsistence, or still linger in ragged and dirty garb around their ruinous and deserted cloisters in the city in many instances bearing in every look marks of low dissipation, seen in America and in England only in the most inveterate frequenters of the tippling-shop and tap-room. Still the devotion of the population to Catholicism is manifested in almost daily processions, in which are exhibited a most incongruous mixture of splendour and beggary, in the number of the priesthood yet in apparent affluence and power, in the numerous shrines in the streets, and in public appeals at the corners for money to deliver souls from purgatory. I passed a priest this morning standing in the street with a plate extended for this charity. Beside him, fixed to the angle of a building, was an image representing a beautiful young female enveloped to the waist in raging flames; while with dishevelled hair, eyes streaming with tears and arms extended in a supplicating attitude, the commiseration and mercy of all were invoked by the following inscription in Spanish on a tablet beneath : : "Fathers, brothers, friends, sons, treat us not with impiety have you no charity? Are we your 176 CLIMATE OF PERU. enemies? Like beggars we beseech alms to appease an offended Deity. Passing us without regard, what souls can you have not to wish to relieve us!" LETTER XXII. RETURN TO LIMA, AND FAREWELL VISIT ON SHORE. Climate of Peru.-The Pantheon.-Castle of Callao.-The Old Town.- Earthquake of 1746. — Unburied Dead. — Evening Prayers. U. S. Ship Guerriere, at Callao, In this you have my last date, dear H————, on board the Guerriere: it is now ten o'clock at night and the Vincennes sails to-morrow. I returned from Lima two days since quite ill, after having been so much indisposed for three days preceding, as to take little enjoyment in the scenes around me. The weather and climate of Peru, during the fortnight I have been here, have disappointed me as greatly as the desolate aspect of the country and the state of its capital. It is the winter of the latitude; and to me, in this respect, it has emphatically been "the winter of my discontent." There is an unceasing haze and drizzly mist in the atmosphere, often bordering very closely on a shower, called ironically by the sailors, who feel all the inconvenience of it in their night and morning watches, "Peruvian dew", which is very far from having the CLIMATE OF PERU. 177 effect of a Claude Lorraine glass on my vision. Even in its summer brightness, though equable and bland as a zephyr on May-day with us, I am told that to foreign residents the climate is as insidious as fair, that it smiles only to destroy. The powers of the constitution are insensibly undermined beneath its blandishments, and premature decrepitude and an early grave are the result. The principal visits of interest made in Lima, after that to the Padre Arrieta, were to the churches and monasteries of the Dominican and St. Augustine friars, to the chapels of the nunneries of Santa Anna and Santa Clara, where I had a sight through the grates of the nuns at worship, &c., to a Lancasterian school, to some of the hospitals, and to the Pantheon, or general place of burial, three miles from the city, up the valley of the Rimac. The school, the only one of the kind in the city, kept in a part of the convent of St. Thomas, is in a languishing state, and contains only one hundred and forty children, though the population of the city is fifty thousand. The principal appears an intelligent man, and much interested in the success of the experiment in the republic, but complains of a want of patronage. General Santa Cruz, a full length portrait of whom hangs against the wall of one of the rooms, was a warm friend of the institution when he was at the head of the government, but none of his successors have followed the praiseworthy example. The Pantheon shows to great advantage from the walls and bridge of Lima and from many points of the road leading to it. The main building, fronting on the street, is an octagon ninety feet in circumference, with a lofty dome, seen in every direction rising above a scattered plantation of cypress-trees, within an inclosure covering five or six acres of ground. In a rotunda, immediately beneath the dome in the centre of the building, stands a sarcophagus of glass containing a full-sized representation of our Saviour in the tomb, the only object attracting special attention as you pass through to the grounds beyond. When a funeral occurs the body is not interred in the ground, but deposited in a horizontal position in a niche in broad walls erected for the purpose. It is then surrounded with lime and the opening in front plastered up. These niches are arranged in tiers one above another, and are hired for a certain time, according to the wealth and rank of the individual deceased, at the expiration of which the remains are cast into a common vault, or if the person be poor and unknown, are soon tossed over the walls in the rear, where the surface of the ground is white with fragments of the human form, and literally “a place of skulls." Indeed the whole establishment, notwithstanding the neatness of the architecture and beauty of its aspect without, from the carelessness in the manner of interment and an unnecessary exposure of the common and last receptacle, is a disgusting place, and the moment you enter, manifestly to every sense "filled with dead men's bones and all uncleanness." Since my return to the Guerriere, I have been |