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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 18, 24 August 1883, Page 23

" Poor Mario 1 I regret that there is no world beyond. We wil not see him any more, serenely youthful, as in the days of his beauty My heart is more than ever with the dead." These are the words written by Professor Giosue Carducci, the chief Italian poet of the present day— and a veritable hymnologist of Satan— on the death of his republican friend, Alberto Mario. One of the most bitter opponents of the Papacy in the columns of tbe Lega Bella Demoeraxia, which he founded, was Alberto Mario, who died of cancer in the tongue on 2nd June, aged 59, at Sendinara, in Lombardy. It wag Mario who first gave the title « Signor Pecci " to his Holiness Leo XIII. To him Pius IX. was the "clownish, parricidal" Pontiff whose remains, on the night of their removal from the Vatican to ban Lorenzo, on the 13th July, 1881, ought to have been thrown over the Bridge of Sant Angelo into the Tiber. Had he lived, and been in London on the 2nd of June, he would doubtless have been found by Mr. Gladstone's side at Stafford House, when the English Premier stood up and expressed his unbounded admiration for Garibaldi ; for on the death of the hero Mario went to Caprera " to kiss his General for the last time." In hatred for the person of Pius IX., Mario, in his Lega Delia Z>emocrazia, equalled, if he did not, surpass, Mr. Gladstone in the pages of the Quarterly Beview. Mario's ideal was " Home without the Pope." But he was doomed to die without seeing it realised ; and his best friend says of him that he has gone into nothingness . — Catholic Times. «v ,, Mgl \ Kende » the pa P al Nuncio, has communicated to M. Challemel-Lacour an important document from Cardinal Jacjobini, on the condition of the Catholic missions at Tonquin. M. Bechet, the unfortunate youDg missionary who has been beheaded by the Annamites, was one of a host of French and Italian missionaries who up to the time of his death had enjoyed tbe most perfect security in all parts of the empire. The Pope is naturally anxious that a similar fate should not happen to any more missionaries who have been made prisoners. A- long list of them, including a considerable aumber of nuns, has been presented: together with the note in which the Cardinal points out the dangers accruing to Catholic interests by the adoption of a policy which brings confusion and war in pacific and inoffensive countries.

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