Our readers may remember the recent letter of Cardinal Antonelli, lamenting that owing to the “financial straits” of the pope, and the cruel “deprivation of his States of which he had become the victim,” he could not carry out his desire of sending a large contribution of articles to the Centennial Exhibition in this country, but must content himself by showing his sympathy for and admiration of the United States by sending a few specimens of mosaic and tapestry. The venerable and excellent William Howitt, who is now in Rome, has written a remarkable letter showing the fallacy and hypocrisy of the pope’s plea, in which he contrasts with the pope’s allegation of penury the real luxury he enjoys, and the wealth in which he revels. Mr. Howitt, addressing himself to the statements of the pope’s American letter, says:— “All this is in true beggars’ whine, which the church has made universal as far as its rule has extended. The deprivation of his States has been the finest thing in the world for the pope, and the means of working on the feelings of the whole Catholic universe, and of pouring into his coffers treasures such as his predecessors in their halcyon times never possessed. The fiction of his miserable imprisonment, with his lying on rotten straw, the open sale of little bundles of the fabled straws in most Catholic countries, the photograph of him peeping through his prison bars, with a soldier, with a musket and bayonet fixed, on each side of him—all these outrageous lies have drawn an actual river of gold from the bosoms of the silly popish pelicans that far outrivals the ancient Pactolus. By these means no less than twenty millions of francs have been poured into the papal chest during the year of jubilee just passed, and all this is described as the voluntary tribute of the faithful! And all this time, this so-called miserable prisoner has been living in a palace of eleven thousand rooms, crammed with such wealth as was never before collected in one place, not even in the Bank of England. Treasures of gold, of silver, of all precious gems, of the most beautiful and noble works of art, statues, pictures by the finest masters, bronzes, coins, medals, crosses sparkling with the most valuable diamonds, rubies, emeralds, etc.; vessels and ornaments in silver and gold of the most exquisite workmanship, by such masters as Benvenuto Cellini, of the richest arrases and tapestries, all these arranged in galleries miles in length, and this wretched prisoner attended by hundreds of guards in an old costume very like our Windsor beef-eaters, and by crowds of cardinals, monsignours, archbishops, bishops, priests, and lackeys without end.” “As for money, besides the 20,000,000 francs from Peter’s pence and jubilee indulgences in 1875, the imbecile ex-Emperor of Austria has left him $3,000,000, and rich arras and gold vessels to adorn his chapel. The Duke of Modena, the father-in-law of the ex-King of Naples and Count Chambord, has made him his heir, and it is said he will derive £10,000 sterling from that source annually. And yet the pope has the unparalleled impudence to tell the Americans that he cannot send much to their Exhibition because of his poverty.”—Sel.