ST.LUKE’S AND BEDLAM.

On Wednesday evening, last week, took place the Annual Christmas Ball of the patients in St. Luke’s Hospital. On the previous day the Roman Catholics of London met together at the Hanover Square Rooms, to express sympathy with the Pope, and antipathy to Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and Louis Napoleon. The former assembly, we are informed by the report of it in the Times, was characterised by the utmost good order and strict decorum. At the latter, the language employed by the principal speakers afforded evidence of violent delusions. Mr. Richard Keeley, the Chairman, vituperated “the publisher of Punch.” A letter, said to have been written by Lord Fielding, was read, declaring that the Pope had been driven from the Rome in 1848 by the Government of Lord John Russell, which had supplied the chiefs of the Revolution with money at the rate of half-a-dollar a day. Another letter, attributed to Mr. M. J. Rhodes, denounced the constitutional movement in Italy in outrageous terms. Mr. H. J. Prendergast delivered a long harangue, in which he insisted not merely that “the Pope had exercised his temporal power most discreetly, religiously, and humanely,” but even “that his great fault in the eyes of English Protestants was, that he had no fault at all,”- the orator evidently having confounded the idea of his Holiness with that of the Immaculate Conception. Mr. Brett moved an inconsistent resolution, which affirmed, in a roundabout way, the belief of Catholics in the independence of the Pope’s spiritual authority on his temporal power; and also their opinion that the one could not be duly exercised apart from the other. The proceedings came to a conclusion attended with the characteristic incident thus reported:-

“The meeting was subsequently addressed by Mr. Harper, who formerly held high preferment in the Established Church, and during whose speech Mr. T.A. Malone, a lecturer on chemistry and a Catholic, who had ventured to say the Pope would be freer in Ireland than in Rome, received some very tough usage indeed at the hands of some violent partisans near the door. He was struck violently in the eye, forced from the room, and lost his hat in the melee.”

In all particulars that may be considered as indication of right mind, the assemblage at St. Luke’s had manifestly very much the advantage of the gathering at Hanover Square. The latter appears to have included some persons who were positively dangerous. The whole number of people present was about 2,000. It is probable that the institution, whose inmates exhibit so favourable a contrast by the side of those other parties, would not hold so many patients as these amount to, or else the right persons would have been in the right places if they had all taken part in the quiet ball of the night following the day of their excited demonstration, and had stayed where they were after it was over. As it was, they were dancing-mad. It would be something quite in their own way, to sacrifice a little time at the shrine, and partake for a season of the hospitality, of St. Luke.

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