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New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 275, 9 August 1878, Page 9

Ox the evening of the 16th April, Lord Talbot de Malahide, introduced by the Hon. and Right Rev. Mgr. Slonor, had a private audience. In the course of this interview Leo XIII. mentioned the circumstance that when he was Nuncio at Brussels he had conversed with Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Mon&ignor Pccci had the precedence as senior of the diplomatic corps, and sat next to her Majesty at dinner when she was entertained by the king of the Belgians. When Mgr. Pecci, in 1846, left Belgium, he thought it a good opportunity to visit England, and accordingly he spent a month in London, lodging in Regent street. He was there visited by Bishop Griffiths, the Vicar-Apostolic of the London district, and was surprised to find him attired without any of the external tokens of his episcopal rank. The Austrian Ambassador to Great Britain brought Mgr. Pecci to Lord Palmerston. and Lord Palmerston, finding that Mgr. Pecci had been previously acquainted with Queen Victoria in Belgium, brought Mgr. Pecci to one of the Queen's drawing rooms. Her Majesty received him on that occasion with much affability. The results of the magisterial inquiry into the Crispi case are the following : — Francesco Crispi was married in 1845 to a Sicilian. In 1854, while his first wife was alive, he married in Malta a Savoyard lady named Rosalie Montmasson. This second marriage if legally celebrated would have been bigamous, but the magistrates do not consider this marriage to have been legal. Crispi married lastly in January, 1878, Filomena Barbagallo, and as the first wife was then dead, and the second was not legally married, this third marriage is valid and legal. Consequently the ex- Minister of the Interior is not to be prosecuted for bigamy.