The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877
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Title: The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877

Author: Various

Release date: August 26, 2018 [eBook #57779]

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC WORLD, VOL. 25, APRIL 1877 TO SEPTEMBER 1877 ***

The Catholic World, Vol. XXV

The Catholic World.

A Monthly Magazine Of General Literature And Science

Vol. XXV.

April, 1877, To September, 1877.

New York:

The Catholic Publication Society Company,

9 Barclay Street.

1877.

CONTENTS

Alba’s Dream, 443, 621, 735

Along the Foot of the Pyrenees, 651

Among the Translators, 721

Ancient Music, Prose and Poetry of, 395

Anglicanism in 1877, 131

Catacombs, Testimony of the, 205

Christendom, The Iron Age of, 459

Cluny, The Congregation of, 691

College Education, 814

Colonization and Future Emigration, 677

Congregation of Cluny, The, 691

Copernican Theory, Evolution and the, 90

Count Frederick Leopold Stolberg, 535

Destiny of Man, Doubts of a Contemporary on the, 494

De Vere’s “Mary Tudor,” 261

Divorce and Divorce Laws, 340

Doubts of a Contemporary on the Destiny of Man, 494

Echternach, The Dancing Procession of, 826

Emigration, Colonization and Future, 677

English Rule in Ireland, 103

Eros, The Unknown, 702

European Exodus, The, 433

Evolution and the Copernican Theory, 90

France, The Political Crisis in, and its Bearings, 577

French Clergy during the late War in France, The, 247

Gothic Revival, The Story of the, 639

How Percy Bingham Caught his Trout, 77

Ireland, English Rule in, 103

Irish Revolution, The True, 551

Iron Age of Christendom, The, 459

Jane’s Vocation, 525

Job and Egypt, 764

Judaism in America, The Present State of, 365

Juliette, 667

Lavedan, The Seven Valleys of the, 748

Lepers of Tracadie, The, 191

Letters of a Young Irishwoman to her Sister, 56, 218, 377

Madonna-and-Child, The, a Test-Symbol, 804

Marshal MacMahon and the French Revolutionists, 558

“Mary Tudor,” De Vere’s, 261

Millicent, 777

Nagualism, Voodooism, etc., in the United States, 1

Nanette, 270

Natalie Narischkin, 32

Nile, Up the, 45, 236

Pan-Presbyterians, The, 843

Phil Redmond of Ballymacreedy, 591

Political Crisis in France and its Bearings, The, 577

Pope Pius the Ninth, 291

Pope’s Temporal Principality, The Beginning of the, 609

Presbyterian Infidelity in Scotland, 69

Present State of Judaism in America, The, 365

Prose and Poetry of Ancient Music, 395

Prussian Chancellor, The, 145

Pyrenees, Along the Foot of the, 651

Revolutionists, Marshal MacMahon and the French, 558

Romance of a Portmanteau, The, 403

Sannazzaro, 511

Scotland, Presbyterian Infidelity in, 69

Seven Valleys of the Lavedan, The, 748

Shakspere, from an American Point of View, 422

Six Sunny Months, 15, 175, 354, 478

Stolberg, Count Frederick Leopold, 535

Story of the Gothic Revival, The, 639

Tennyson as a Dramatist, 118

Testimony of the Catacombs, 205

The Beginning of the Pope’s Temporal Principality, 609

The Dancing Procession of Echternach, 826

The Doom of the Bell, 324

The European Exodus, 433

The Romance of a Portmanteau, 403

The True Irish Revolution, 551

The Unknown Eros, 702

Tracadie, The Lepers of, 191

Up the Nile, 45, 236

Veronica, 161

Voodooism, Nagualism, etc, in the United States, 1

POETRY.

A Thrush’s Song, 689

A Vision of the Colosseum, 318

A Waif from the Great Exhibition, 101

Ashes of the Palms, The, 142

Aubrey de Vere, To, 676

Birthday Song, A, 523

Brides of Christ, The, 420, 556, 701

Cathedral Woods, 665

Colosseum, A Vision of the, 318

Dante’s Purgatorio, 171

From the Hecuba of Euripides, 353, 550

From the Medea of Euripides, 638

Higher, 456

Italy, 745

Magdalen at the Tomb, 637

May, 246

May Carols, Two, 217

May Flowers, 189

Papal Jubilee, The, 289

Pope Pius IX., To, 363

Purgatorio, Dante’s, 171

St. Francis of Assisi, 11

The Ashes of the Palms, 142

To Aubrey de Vere, 676

Translation from Horace, 854

Wild Roses by the Sea, 338

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

A Question of Honor, 716

An Old World as seen through Young Eyes, 143

Beside the Western Sea, 718

Bessy, 720

Biographical Sketches, 717

Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Marylanders, 573

Carte Ecclésiastique des Etats-Unis de l’Amérique, 288

Childhood of the English Nation, The, 284

Christ, The Cradle of the, 281

Christopher Columbus, The Life of, 572

Classic Literature, 280

Code Poetical Reader, The, 287

Complete Office of Holy Week, The, 144

Comprehensive Geography, The, 144

Consolation of the Devout Soul, The, 286

Cradle of the Christ, The, 281

Discipline of Drink, The, 575

Dora, Bessie, Silvia, 720

Dr. Joseph Salzmann’s Leben und Wirken, 285

Ecclesiastical Law, Elements of, 860

Edmondo, 720

English Nation, Childhood of the, 284

Essays and Reviews, 429

Geometry, Elements of, 860

God the Teacher of Mankind, 720

Golden Sands, 430

Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church, 288

Hofbauer, Ven. Clement Mary, Life of, 432, 572

Known Too Late, 576

Lady of Neville Court, The, 432

Legends of the B. Sacrament, 574

Libraries, Public, in the United States of America, 855

Life of the Ven. Clement Mary Hofbauer, 432, 572

Magister Choralis, 430

Marylanders, Distinguished, Biographical Sketches of, 573

Musica Ecclesiastica, 144

Paradise of the Christian Soul, The, 576

Philip Nolan’s Friends, 719

Priesthood in the Light of the New Testament, 713

Problem of Problems, The, 282

Reply to the Hon. R. W. Thompson, 719

Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York, 715

Roman Legends, 718

Salzmann’s Leben und Wirken, 285

Sidonie, 574

Songs of the Land and Sea, 720

Spirit Invocations, 576

Summa Summæ, 288

The Catholic Keepsake, 720

The Little Pearls, 718

The Pearl among the Virtues, 720

The Story of Felice, 720

The Wonders of Prayer, 718

Why are We Roman Catholics? 288

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 145.—APRIL, 1877.

NAGUALISM, VOODOOISM, AND OTHER FORMS OF CRYPTO-PAGANISM IN THE UNITED STATES.

When the Almighty introduced the children of Israel into the Promised Land he enjoined the utter extirpation of the heathen races, and the destruction of all belonging to them. But the tribes grew weary of war; they spared, and their subsequent history shows us the result. The Chanaanites became in time the conquerors and made the Hebrews their subjects politically and in religion. The paganism learned on the banks of the Nile had become but a faint reminiscence in the minds of the descendants of those who marched out under Moses and Aaron; but the worship of Baal and of Moloch and of Astaroth overran the land. A long series of disasters ending with the overthrow of their national existence, and a seventy years’ captivity, were required to purge the Hebrew mind of the poison imbibed from the heathen remnant. Then all the power of the Alexandrian sovereigns failed to compel them to worship the gods of Greece. Omnes dii gentium dæmonia is a statement, clear, plain, and definite, that we Catholics cannot refuse to accept. Modern indifferentism may regard all the pagan worships as expressions of truth, and the worship of their deities as something merely symbolical of the operations of nature, not the actual rendering of divine honors. But to us there can be no such theory. The worship was real and the objects were demons, blinding and misleading men through their passions and ignorance. The very vitality of paganism in regaining lost ground, and in rising against the truth, shows its satanic character.

The experience of the Jewish people is reproduced elsewhere. When Christianity, beginning the conquest of Europe with Greece and Italy, closed its victorious career by reducing to the cross the Scandinavians and the German tribes of Prussia, later even than the conversion of the Tartaric Russians, there was left in all lands a pagan element, on which the arch-enemy based his new schemes of revolt and war upon the truth. We of the Gentiles, whether from the sunny south or the colder north, bear to this day, in our terms for the divisions of the week and year, the names of the deities whom our heathen ancestors worshipped—the demons who blinded them to the truth. The Italian, Frenchman, and Spaniard thus keep alive the memory of Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Saturn; the German and Scandinavian tribes of Tuisco, Woden, Thor, Freya, and Sator. Janus opens the year, followed by Februata, Juno, and Mars; Maia claims a month we dedicate to Mary, and which the Irish in his own language still calls the Fire of Baal—Baal-tinne.

Earth and time even seem not enough; we go, so to speak, to the very footstool of God, and name the glorious orbs that move in celestial harmony through the realms of space, from the very demons who for ages received from men the honors due to God—from Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and Mars, Juno and Ceres, Castor and Pollux, and the whole array of gods and demi-gods.

And it is a strange fact that the only attempt made to do away with these pagan relics was that of the infidel and bloodthirsty Revolutionists of France, pagan in all but this.

We bear, as it were, badges of our heathen origin—tokens, perhaps, of the general apostasy which, as some interpreters hold, will one day behold the Gentile nations renounce Christianity, when the number of the elect is to be completed from the remnant of the Jews.

In the heresies, schisms, and revolts against the church the pagan element appears as an uprising, an attempt to retrieve a defeat by causing an overthrow of the victorious church even where a restoration of the old demonic gods seems in itself hopeless. The German tribes and those of Scandinavia, receiving the faith later than the Latin and Celtic races, revolted from the church while the remembrance of pagan rites and license was still fresh. The so-called Reformation was essentially gross and sensual, and none the less so because the Christian influence made the absolute rejection of God for a time impossible, and compelled it to borrow tone, and expression, and the outer garb of Christianity. Vice, in its open and undisguised form, would have shocked communities that had tasted of Christian truth. The arch-enemy was subtle enough to meet the wants of the case, and to present what would appear to the sixteenth century as true, as shrewdly as he presented the grosser forms to earlier minds gross enough to accept them. But, it may be said, it is going too far to make all heresies diabolical; yet the church so speaks. If, in the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday, it asks that God would remove the veil from their hearts, that light might shine in upon the darkness, we cannot but observe that when the petitions arise for those misled by heresy, the church speaks of them as souls deceived by the fraud of the devil. The New Testament is full of allusions to this war of the arch-enemy: he is held up as one who will come to some as a roaring lion, terrifying and alarming; while to others he comes as an angel of light, plausible and Heaven-sent, as it were, raising up false teachers whose reasonings would, were that possible, deceive even the elect. And St. Paul tells us that our struggle is not with flesh and blood—not with the men who are but instruments—but with the spirits of darkness who are the prime movers.

The war waged took different forms. In the north sensualism and the grosser forms of self-indulgence were the revolt against the spirit of mortification, of self-conquest and control. It required and had no aid from the imagination, art, poetry, music. But at the south the old pagan classics, imbued with the religion of Greece and Rome, became the literature of the new Christian world and exercised a steadily-increasing pagan influence. In the French Revolution, and in the modern less bloody but as deadly Masonic war, we see the old pagan ideas and thoughts come as if spontaneously to the surface. From the reverence for all connected with the old pagan worship down to pagan cremation we see the revival, less gross, less sensual than in the north, idealized by the conception of beauty in form and color, with all the allurement of symmetry to win the eye, the ear, the imagination. That ancient art and the ancient classics have been a potent instrument in weakening the Christian spirit, and in paganizing the learned and the young whom they train, is admitted, and attempts are made to counteract the influence.

Our country was settled by communities more or less imbued with all the Old-World paganisms, some of which shot out into new and strange forms, generally of the northern type, hiding sensualism under a cloak of religion, as in the Oneida community and the Mormons, the latter going directly into the ancient pagan channel in their anthropomorphic conception of God.

But besides this pagan element—the more insidious because scarcely suspected by most, and which many even now would treat as absolutely null for evil—the country was, in its aboriginal inhabitants, utterly pagan; and within our limits the remnant of those nations and tribes which now represent the original occupants are to a very great extent as pagan as they were three centuries ago. Even where tribes have been converted to Christianity, and been for a long series of years under Christian teachers, a pagan element often remains, nurtured in secret, and heathen rites are practised with the utmost fidelity by many who keep up the semblance of being faithful worshippers of the true God. This crypto-paganism is termed by the Spanish writers in Mexico nagualism, and, from its secret character, formed one of the greatest afflictions of the missionaries, eating out the very heart of the apparently flourishing tree planted by the toil and watered by the blood of the earlier heralds of the Gospel.

Another pagan element came with the negro slaves—barbarous men torn from Africa, without culture, imbued with the most degrading superstitions of fetichism, and believers in the power of intercourse with the evil spirits whom they dreaded and invoked. In the utter disregard of their moral welfare which prevailed in the English colonies, no attempt was made in colonial days to eradicate their pagan ideas and to instil Christian principles; on the contrary, efforts were actually made to prevent their instruction and baptism, from an idea that Christianity was incompatible with a condition of slavery.

In time the negro slaves and their descendants imitated externally the religious manner of their white masters, but their old fetichism was maintained, with the invocation of evil spirits and attempted intercourse with them. The more Christianity in any form penetrated among these people, the more this pagan element assumed a secret character, until it became, as it is in our day in the West Indies and the South, under the name of vaudoux or voodoo worship, the secret pagan religion of the negro and mixed races.

Another pagan element—which cannot be called cryptic, because it meets the full meridian blaze of day, as though it were a thing entitled to existence and protection without limit or check—is the Buddhic worship of the Chinese, with perhaps the less debasing ancient paganism of that nation. Temples arise and pagan worship is carried on before hundreds of altars, chiefly on the Pacific slope. This, with the degraded morals of the heathenism it represents, forms a question difficult to solve, and exciting grave attention not only in California, but in other parts of the country.

The facility with which Mormonism has gained hundreds of thousands of votaries to its monstrous doctrines, and the difficulty under our system of laws of counteracting its influence, leaving its suppression simply to the general condemnation it receives from the public opinion of the country, convince all thinking men that it is a great and serious danger to the well-being of our country in the future. It lies between the unchecked, uncensured paganism of the Chinese in California and the heathenism of the wild Indian tribes, the nagualism of the New Mexican Pueblos, and, still further east, the voodooism of the negro. Who can foresee the fearful creation of evil that the Prince of Darkness may form out of this material ready to his hand? Buddhism overran nations of various origin, civilization, and mode of life—the lettered Chinese, the nobler Japanese, the wild Tartar; it has adaptability, as seen in its assuming external Christian dress and ideas, taken from early envoys of the faith. Mormonism shows a vitality and a power of extension that none who remember its origin could, at the time it arose, have believed within the limits of possibility. The voodoo mysteries permeate through a population numbered by millions. If nagualism and Indian paganism exist only among tribes rapidly hurrying to extinction, these tribes have shown in some cases recuperative power, and, fostered by the stronger heathen elements, may revive sufficiently to be a source of mischief. It may be said that, except in the case of the Mormons, this element is confined to inferior races—the Mongolian, negro, and Indian—and cannot affect the mass of the American people; but this is really not the fact, as in almost every case whites living near the inferior races do actually imbibe some of these pagan superstitions and become believers in them and in their power, while the spread of the so-called spiritualism through all classes in this country shows at once a vehicle for the propagation of any form of diabolism that may rise up with dazzling powers of attraction.

The influence of crypto-paganism on the whites can be seen in our history. The New England settlers made comparatively short work of the native tribes, who were in their eyes Chanaanites not to be spared. But though they slaughtered the men, women were saved, and not always from motives that will stand too close a scrutiny. Indian women became slaves in the houses of the New England colonists. If there was any outward conformity to Christian usage, most of them remained at heart as heathen as ever. The Indians of almost every known tribe avowedly worshipped the Spirit of Evil. North and South missionaries found the natives acknowledge and justify this practice. As a rule they admitted a Spirit of Good, but, as they argued, being inherently good, he could do only good to them, and need not be propitiated; whereas the Spirit of Evil continually sought to injure men, and must necessarily be propitiated to ward off the intended scourge. This adoration of the Evil One, and the attempt to propitiate him, win his favor, and do his will, the Indian slaves bore with them in their bondage. What New England witchcraft really was—diabolic, delusion, or imposture—has never been settled. No sound Catholic divine versed in mystic theology has ever, to our knowledge, marshalled and sifted the facts, and the evidence cited to support them, in order to come to any reasonable theory in the matter. New England of the seventeenth century firmly believed it diabolical; New England of the nineteenth century as dogmatically decides that it was delusion or imposture; but, unfortunately, neither seventeenth-century nor nineteenth-century New Englandism can be deemed a very safe guide, and each is condemned by the other and admits its liability to err, although both had the same energy for forcing their opinions for the time being on all mankind.

But, whatever the real character of New England witchcraft was, one thing is certain: Indian crypto-paganism was at the root of it. Tituba, the Indian servant of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem, practised wild incantations and imbued the daughter and niece of her master with her whole system of diabolism. The strange actions of the children excited alarm. Tituba was arraigned as a witch and confessed her incantations; but the devil protects his own. Witchcraft trials began, and Tituba and her fellow Indian slaves, who must have quaked for the moment, saw themselves, not punished, but used as witnesses, until more than a hundred women were apprehended and most of them committed to prison. It did not end there. The gallows was to play its part. Nineteen were hanged, and one Giles Corey was pressed to death. If Tituba invoked her demon to avenge his fallen votaries in her tribe, she was gratified by beholding the victorious whites murder each other at her instance. Neither Tituba nor any other of the Indians, though they avowed their intercourse with the fallen spirits, was tried or condemned for witchcraft. What took place in the Parris household took place in hundreds of others where Indian slaves were kept, as in our time in the South. Thousands of children have there been imbued by their negro nurses with the pagan obeah and voodoo superstitions, as doubtless on the Pacific slope many a mother is horrified to find her child’s mind filled with the grossest heathenism by the Chinese servant, and fondly hopes she has disabused her little one, when, in reality, the faith and the terror then implanted in the child’s susceptible mind will last through life, burned into the very soul by the vivid impression produced.

A Catholic may say that the grace of baptism will protect many from this evil; but, alas! to how many thousands of families in this land is baptism a stranger! In them there is nothing to check the insidious progress of evil.

The Huron nation was converted to Christianity by the early Catholic missionaries, and the Iroquois were induced by them to abandon the worship of their evil spirit Tharonhyawagon, or Agreskoue, whose name even seems to be unknown to the present so-called pagan bands, who worship the God of the Christians, but with strange heathenish rites. The vices prevalent among the Hurons of Ohio, nominal Catholics in the last century, show that secret worship of evil spirits still prevailed. All know how the medicine-men have maintained their ground among the Chippewas, Ottawas, and other Algonquin tribes on the borders of the great lakes, although Catholic missionaries began their labors among them two centuries ago. Whenever for a time Catholicity has seemed to gain a tribe, any interruption of the mission for a brief period seems to revive the old diabolism. There are medicine-men now with votaries as earnest as any whom Dablon, Marquette, and Allouez tried to convert in the seventeenth century. But data are wanting for a full consideration of the subject as to these and other northern tribes.

Of the nagualism in the Texas tribes after their conversion by the Franciscan missionaries we have evidence in the life of Father Margil, a holy and illustrious laborer in that field. The tribes among whom he and his compeers labored have vanished, but the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico still remain. The succession of missionaries became irregular; no bishop visited those parts to confirm the converts; the revolutions following that which separated Mexico from Spain almost utterly destroyed the Indian missions of New Mexico. Then the nagualism which had been evidently maintained from the first by a few adepts and in great secrecy became bolder; and these tribes, whose conversion dates back nearly three centuries, revived the old paganism of their ancestry, mingled with dreams of Montezuma’s future coming, taught them by the Mexican Indians who accompanied the first Spanish settlers.

Father Margil once asked some Indians: “How is it that you are so heathenish after having been Christians so long?” The answer was: “What would you do, father, if enemies of your faith entered your land? Would you not take all your books and vestments and signs of religion, and retire to the most secret caves and mountains? This is just what our priests, and prophets, and sooth-sayers, and nagualists have done to this time and are still doing.” Experience showed, too, that this worship of the evil spirit assumed the form of various sects, some imitating the Catholic Church in having bishops, priests, and sacraments, which they secretly administered to consecrate their victims to Satan before they received the real ones from the hands of the missionaries.

All those who have studied at all the pueblos of New Mexico describe to some extent the nagual rites, some of which are indeed hidden under the veil of secrecy in their estufas, but others are more open and avowed.

Colonel Meline, after noting the execution of two men accused of witchcraft and sacrificing children, says of the Pueblos generally “that they are more than suspected of clinging to and practising many of their ancient heathen rites. The estufa is frequently spoken of as their heathen temple.”[1]

A report addressed to the Cortes in Spain by Don Pedro Bautista Pino in 1812 says: “All the pueblos have their estufas—so the natives call subterranean rooms with only a single door, where they assemble to perform their dances, to celebrate feasts, and hold meetings; these are impenetrable temples where they gather to discuss mysteriously their good or evil fortunes, and the doors are always closed on the Spaniards.

“All these pueblos, in spite of the sway which religion has had over them, cannot forget a part of the beliefs which have been transmitted to them, and which they are careful to transmit to their descendants. Hence come the adoration they render the sun and moon, and other heavenly bodies, the respect they entertain for fire, etc.”[2]

“The Pueblo chiefs seem to be at the same time priests; they perform various simple rites by which the power of the sun and of Montezuma is recognized, as well as the power (according to some accounts) of the Great Snake, to whom, by order of Montezuma, they are to look for life. They also officiate in certain ceremonies with which they pray for rain. There are painted representations of the Great Snake, together with that of a misshapen, red-haired man declared to stand for Montezuma. Of this last there was also in the year 1845, in the pueblo of Laguna, a rude effigy or idol, intended, apparently, to represent only the head of the deity.”[3]

Others portray their setting up of idols or mementos of their national deities, and surrounding them with circles of stones, repairing to the spot regularly to pray.

The Pueblos thus show, after nearly three centuries of Catholic instruction, almost ineradicable elements of heathenism.

Of the real interior life of other tribes we know comparatively little: but by the example of so-called prophets who arise from time to time in one part or another, giving new life to the old heathenism, borrowing some idea from Christianity, and using their new creed as a means to excite a great national feeling, we see clearly that in the Indian mind the old worship, though dormant and concealed, has still a power and mastery.

To this deep-rooted feeling the Mormons have appealed, and succeeded in drawing large numbers within the circle of their influence. Almost all the Indian wars are stimulated by some prophet promising victory and the triumph of the old Indian beliefs.

The Cherokees have embraced many usages of civilization, and the Choctaws approach them. The Chickasaws, the other great tribe in Indian Territory, retain more of their old manners. In all these tribes Protestantism has gained a hearing and has a few church members; but there are strong pagan parties, and even among the Christian part there is undoubtedly a strong old heathen element beneath an outward conformity to Christianity. It was strongly urged on Congress a few years since to erect this tract into a recognized territory of Oklahoma, with a government like that of other Territories, preparatory to its admission as a State. The outbursts of savage fury between factions in the tribes, however, made men hesitate to give autonomy to them.

Investigation will, we think, show that crypto-paganism largely controls this mass of native Indians, and is the great obstacle to their improvement. It is, however, confined to themselves, and we do not find that even in New Mexico the whites of Spanish origin have, during their long residence near the pueblos, adopted to any extent the heathenish usages of those tribes. The isolation of the nations in Indian Territory has also prevented any great external influence. Thus this Indian crypto-paganism, though wide-spread and unbroken, seems doomed, unless taken in hand by some master-spirit.

The voodoo worship of the negroes shows greater vitality and diffusiveness. The slaves taken in early times to St. Domingo came from all parts of Africa, some from the fiercest tribes addicted to human sacrifices and cannibalism. They brought over their demonic worship, and by their force of character propagated it among the negroes generally. It became the great religion of the slaves, was secretly practised, and exercised a very powerful influence. As a secret society, with terrible forms of initiation and bloody rites, it became a power in Hayti, and has caused more than one revolution. Cases of the offering up of infants in sacrifice, and devouring the victims, were exposed a few years since, and numbers were arrested. Some were put to death, but the power of the organization was unbroken, and Soulouque, if we are not mistaken, was said to have owed his power to the voudoux.

St. Domingo was part French and part Spanish, and in time voodooism spread from the French portion of the island, where it seems to have originated, to the Spanish division, and thence to Cuba.

In this latter island it exists to this day, and has found votaries among the whites. A recent French traveller—Piron—describes a fearful scene which he witnessed in the house of a lady whom he never would have suspected of any connection with so monstrous a sect. A naked white girl acted as a voodoo priestess, wrought up to frenzy by dances and incantations that followed the sacrifice of a white and a black hen. A serpent, trained to its part, and acted on by the music, coiled round the limbs of the girl, its motions studied by the votaries dancing around or standing to watch its contortions. The spectator fled at last in horror when the poor girl fell writhing in an epileptic fit.[4]

While France held St. Domingo and Louisiana the intercourse between the two colonies was constant, and voodooism took root on the banks of the Mississippi soon after its settlement. The early historian of Louisiana, Le Page du Pratz, says: “The negroes are very superstitious and attached to their prejudices and to charms which they call grisgris. These should not be taken from them or spoken about; for they would think themselves ruined, were they deprived of them. The old negro slaves soon disabuse them.”[5] These old negroes were scarcely, it will be confessed, apostles to convert idolaters. In fact, their influence extended only to inducing the new-comers to practise their rites and use the symbols in secrecy.

Le Page du Pratz himself, in defeating a negro plot to massacre the colonists at New Orleans as the Indians had done at Natchez, found that they attributed their defeat to his being a devil—that is, possessing one more powerful than their own. The voodoo rites have been kept up in Louisiana from the commencement, and the power exercised by the priests and priestesses of this horrible creed is very great. Working in secret, with all the terrors of mystery and threats of bodily harm, it is just suited to the negro mind, and has spread over much of the South. As in Cuba and St. Domingo, the white children in many cases learn of it from their negro nurses, and the weak, as they grow up, never shake off its hold on their imagination. Human sacrifices are certainly offered in their infamous rites, and the escape of an old negro doomed to the sacrificial altar drew down upon the voodoos the police of New Orleans only a few years ago.

The Abbé Domenech[6]—whom we should hesitate to cite, were not his accounts here in conformity with numerous others—represents voodooism as having not only spread through Texas, but into Mexico where, in a depraved border community, its horrid rites and secret poisonings are carried on. His details as to the mode of worship in New Orleans—the nudity, the use of serpents, the dances—correspond with the accounts given from Cuba. Reports from Mobile attest its existence there with similar features.

Where voodooism prevails it has not only its adepts and votaries, but a large class who, full of terror, buy at exorbitant prices from voodoo priests charms against its spells.

The late war has given the negroes opportunities for education and a future, but the new prosperity has not broken the power of voodooism. Of a thing kept secret and hidden, which many will deny and more be ashamed of, it is not easy to get precise data or details. Yet from time to time revelations are made attesting its vitality. A negro member of the Louisiana Legislature, and a minister in one of the Protestant denominations, was reported within a few years as undergoing certain rites to free himself from the spell of a voodoo priestess. We may therefore easily infer that the negroes, being not only self-governing, but governing the whites in many parts by force of numbers, are not likely to be influenced so much by whites as by the crafty and aspiring among themselves. They will concentrate, and in their concentration this voodoo power cannot but increase and all vestiges of Christianity disappear. The field upon which it can work—the vast colored population of the South—is ready for it. Some may think the whole matter a shallow imposture that will soon die out before the effulgence of newspapers; but it really shows no signs of decline, and, if no cases have been unearthed which show such frightful enormities as those in Hayti, it is certainly attended with ceremonies which, for their very indecency and pampering of the worst vices, should cause it to be rooted out, even by those who would regard the direct worship of the devil as something with which the state cannot interfere.

Open the map of the United States, and see how a band of country from the Atlantic to the Pacific is thus permeated by heathenism. In the Southern States the voodoo worship; New Mexico and Indian Territory with nagualism; Utah with Mormonism; California with Buddhism. Throughout this tract the church planted there from one to three centuries is still weak, and, except in California, is not gaining ground with any rapidity. Everywhere Catholic influence is less potent than others. The very climate, enervating and disposing to ease and indulgence, seems to lend power to systems that gratify the passions which the church teaches her children to mortify and control.

It looks as though the Prince of Evil were seeking to form a kingdom for himself, combining all the elements for his evil spirits to carry on the war of conquest. St. Jude represents Satan as endeavoring to secure the body of Moses, doubtless to lead the Jews into idolatry and make them worship him. If he tried to induce even our Lord to fall down and worship him, we cannot wonder that he should try to induce weak men to do so. St. Paul constantly represents to us our struggle in life as a war against the evil spirits. St. Ignatius, in the “Exercise of the Two Standards,” pictures Satan as arrayed against our Lord with all his hosts. The battle seems to take actual form, and we should be prepared for it. In this battle we have powerful auxiliaries placed at our command, in the persons of the angelic powers, and though the church, through her whole liturgy and offices, reminds us of their ministry and invokes their aid,[7] we seem to be forgetful of their existence, and go into the fight unaided by forces at our command—forces never defeated, and ready to meet our call. What wonder that we are often worsted? Our books of devotion give a single prayer to our guardian angel. Few think beyond this. The angel guardians of the country, of our city, of our church, our home, of our family, of those committed to our charge, are all fighting for us, earnestly if we seek their aid. St. Michael, the guardian angel of the Jewish nation, defeated Satan’s attempt to use the body of Moses for his wicked designs. So in our day the greater manifestation of diabolical agencies should lead us to ask God to send his angels to our aid. The parents, in training and protecting from evil the children given to them, have mighty coadjutors in the angels of these very children, the teacher in those of his scholars, the pastor in those of his flock. There may be saints to whom we have a special devotion; but in the angels we have powerful spirits directly deputed by God to aid us, and whose duty it is, as it were, to combat by our side against the enemies of salvation.

But we are not giving a devotional treatise: or attempting to propose any new form. Our country is dear to us, and, although it were too sanguine to hope that in the days of any now living the true faith will reach such a point that its influence will be marked on the public mind and heart, we cannot be insensible to the apparently formidable gathering of heathen elements in a section of country where the very climate seems to lend them new force in building up a great empire of paganism.

A new impulse has been given to our Indian missions, which, owing, doubtless, to causes easy of explanation, have never received from the Catholic body at large in the United States the moral and temporal aid they so richly deserved. In fact, the missionaries labored on, almost ignored and forgotten, so that an attempt was made through the instrumentality of the federal government to crush them out altogether. This has roused Catholics to an interest in them, and this interest should be kept up. By prayer, by alms, by direct aid, we must help the missionaries and their coadjutors, the devoted religious women in the missions, to fight the good fight, and root out, so far as lies in us, the paganism of the Indian tribes, where still avowed or cloaked under an external show of Christianity.

On another paganism, that of the Chinese, and on that of the Mormons, we cannot apparently act yet directly, but we can meet them by prayer, and in the regions infected Catholics should exercise the utmost vigilance that this pagan influence should never enter their households, lest their children, if not themselves, may at last imitate the wisest of kings, not in his wisdom, but in his idolatry.

The great and festering sore of voodooism afflicting the negroes calls for all our zeal, as Catholics, to help the bishops and clergy in the South, and the English society which has entered this field, by prayer, by material aid, by earnest and sustained efforts to preserve the purity of faith among colored Catholics. The Church in the Southern States, crippled by the disasters of the late war, is entirely unable to cope single-handed with the new duty imposed upon it by the altered condition of affairs. She appeals to us, and as Catholics we cannot remain deaf to her call.

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI.

O love! you lay the volume by
That held you like a holy chime—
Life of St. Francis—with a sigh
Which says: “That was a pleasant time
In old Perugia’s mountain-town
On the Umbrian valley looking down—
Flushed like an Eden in sublime
Environment of mountains vast;
And do not you, as I, recall
What, morn and even, and first and last,
Attracted most of all?

“The peaks of Apennine we knew
By heart—the many-citied land
Where-through the infant Tiber drew
A thousand streams in silver band,
Filled with the murmur of the pines
That told the olives and the vines
They heard the sea on either hand.
But, kindled on its lofty cape,
A light-tower to that inland coast
O’er waves of greenwood, corn, and grape,
What object charmed us most?

“Assisi seated in the sun!

All round from Monte Sole’s height

The insistent fascination

Of its white walls enthralled our sight.

And moon and starlight on its slope

Showed but a dimmer heliotrope.

We watched it many a mellow night:

Once when a warrior comet came,

And flashed, in high heaven opposite,

A sheathless sword of pallid flame.

Drawn from out the infinite.

“To sweet St. Francis’ native town,
Alas! we made no pilgrimage;
Nor to St. Mary’s, lower down,
His Portiuncula hermitage.
We knew but by its star-like shine
The splendors of Assisi’s shrine,
In mystic triple stage on stage.
It only asked one summer’s day—
How strange it seems in you and me!—
That narrow vale of Umbria
Made severance like the sea.”

O gentle wife! I cannot tell
To wistful eyes of retrospect
What dolce far niente’s spell,
In that midsummer, caused neglect;
What imp, procrastination hight,
Seduced us when we meant no slight.
In life, all paradox and defect,
Easy is difficult—the friend
Next door to visit—duties small,
To be done any day, that end
In not being done at all.

“How can this trite philosophy
Console me in my great regret?”
Nay, love, look not so tearfully,
And we will find some comfort yet.
What figure, think you, in those streets
The gentle, loving youth repeats,
Singing his gay French canzonet?
Doth either temple’s sumptuous pride
Suit stone and crust for bed and board,
And bridegroom joyful in his bride—
The poverty of our Lord?

O brown serge holier than the cope!

Was mystery veiled in long-sleeved gown?

And awful was his girdle-rope?

Were skirts that swept his ankles brown?

Bore he, in hands and feet and side,

The five wounds of the Crucified?

Did high God send his seraph down,

On the lone mount, to imprint such sign?

His brethren wondered, overawed;

Yet not even this made more divine

That sweet-souled man of God!

O happy swallows! circling skim
And twitter o’er the gray church-towers.
He called you sisters; ye with him
Chirped sweetly when he sang the Hours.
And ye, his brothers innocent,
With whom he talked where’er he went,
Play, lamb and leveret, in the flowers!
Wise foolishness and melting ruth—
That move deep chords, O love! in you—
Born of child-instincts, or a truth
He and the angels knew!

“O Sun, my brother above all!

Stars, Sister Moon, in praise accord.

Chaste, humble, useful, precious, full,

O Sister Water, freely poured!

Robust and jocund, strong and bright,

O Brother Fire! illume the night.

Live tongues of beauty, praise the Lord!

O Brother Wind! thy wonders weave

In clouds and the blue sky above,

Wherefrom all creatures life receive,

And weave them all of love.

“Confess the Lord, O Mother Earth!
Through whom so beautiful thou art.
To herb, fruit, flower, he giveth birth
And color from Love’s eyes and heart.
Serve God!” he sang. His sermons good,
Dear to shy creatures of the wood,
Could even to bole and branch impart
Their glowing sense: a conscious soul
Kin to his own in all things moved.
His monument is grand—the whole
Creation that he loved.

O Life, that sought to imitate
The one pure type, its perfect Chief,
By its own purity separate
As is the dew-drop on a leaf,
Which yet doth from its luminous veil
A glory to the flower exhale!
Close sympathy with no touch of grief!
Let fair Assisi on its slope,
An unremote yet reachless star,
Lend to our hearts another trope,
So near and yet so far.

O Poet, who in faltering rhyme
First wove the Tuscan into song!
O poem and miracle sublime,
Thyself, in Dante sweet and strong!
To his fourth circle of Paradise,
To the King-splendor of the skies,
Dost thou, the elder seer, belong.
Thee “Sister Death” hath glorified;
And what an image we have won:
Through kindled mists of mountain-side,
Assisi in the sun!

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER XI.
A MORNING WITH ST. PETER.

As the day approached for their visit to the crypt of St. Peter, Mr. Vane absented himself very much from the house, and the last day was spent entirely away, from early in the morning till late in the evening. They understood that he was to make his First Communion with them, but asked no questions, leaving him entirely free, and he gave no explanation. The Signora and the two daughters made a Triduum for him in the mornings; and so deeply did they feel the event for him that they looked forward to their own Communion almost as if it were to be their first, and lived as though in retreat for two or three days.

“I feel,” Bianca said, “as if I had been having clandestine interviews with some one outside the house, and that now papa were going to invite him home, and make a feast in his honor. Dear papa! how very good he is; how much better than his daughters!”

She would have been quite shocked and alarmed had any one told her that she entertained such a sentiment, but there was, in fact, in her heart an undercurrent of pride in her father’s piety, and a feeling that the Lord would certainly be particularly pleased with him.

At length the day dawned, the sweet bells of Santa Maria Maggiore, the slipshod bells of Sant’ Antonino, all the bells in hearing, ringing their three, four, five, and one out of the white silence of the aurora.

The Signora smiled to hear, through the open doors, Isabel start awake at the sound, and exclaim in her clear voice: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.”

“I really must not have such a preference for Bianca,” she said to herself, “especially now when Bianca has a lover. Isabel is very honest and earnest.”

The Alba turned to a rosy silver, the silver deepened to gold, the north and west were Tyrian purple, and the sun was on the eastern horizon, painting the long lines of the aqueducts, and the billows of the Campagna, and the towers, high roofs, and cupolas of the city with a fiery pencil. A flock of goats pattered by in the street, to be milked at the doors; hand-carts piled with fruit were dragged slowly in from some garden near the walls; three men walked slowly past, in single file, with large baskets on their heads piled with rich flowers. The perfume of them came up to the window as the Signora leaned out. A wine-cart came slowly down from the Esquiline piazza, laden high with small barrels and half and quarter barrels, brought in by night to the Roman shops from cool grottoes in the Castelli Romani, set here or there on the beautiful mountains that were now a velvety blue under the eastern sky. At the back of this cart was perched high the little white dog, with his nose on his paws, and his eyes half shut, but all ready to start up with a sharp bark if any one but looked hard at his precious load. In front, under the side awning, slept the driver. The horse dreamed along through the morning, and the little bunch of bells slung to the cart jingled softly as they went.

“It is certainly earth, but a most beautiful earth,” the Signora thought, sighing with content, as she went out to fasten the girls’ veils on for them.

“There is no need of putting on gloves,” she said, seeing Isabel drawing hers on. “Didn’t you know, child, that one should not wear gloves when going to Communion?”

“Live and learn,” said Isabel, and took her gloves off again. “I have had a doubt on the subject, but I never knew.”

“Another little item you may not know,” the Signora said. “The canonico being a bishop, you have to kiss his ring before receiving. He will himself touch it to your lips after he has taken the Host in his finger and thumb to give you. When I first came here, I was embarrassed by many of these customs, which everybody here takes for granted, you know.”

Nothing could be pleasanter than Mr. Vane’s manner that morning—serious and quiet, but less grave, even, than usual. Seeing Isabel’s eyes fixed anxiously on him while the Signora spoke, he smiled and said: “I am glad your education is not quite finished, my dear. I am still more ignorant, and you must all teach me. I wish, Signora, that you would be so good as to stay by me this morning, so that, if I should be in doubt, I may look at you. I think you would be more correct and prompt than the children here.”

“Certainly,” she said, “I will be near you.”

The porter had sprinkled and swept the stairs just before they went down, and the place was shaded, fresh, and cool. Carlin was whistling to his baby while his wife prepared breakfast—a whistling as soft and clear as the song of a bobolink. The other birds adopted him, and answered him back from the garden, a little surprised, it may be, at the length and smoothness of his carol. The air was so richly scented with orange-flowers that one might almost have thought worth while to bottle it, and there was a rustling sound, exquisitely cool and pervading, of falling water. In a shady corner near the door of the porter’s room was a tiny brazier with a handful of glowing coals in it, and over this Augusto was making his early cup of coffee. Out doors everything shone with a golden color—the light, the houses, the streets—and in that frame the sky was set like a gem, so blue that it could be compared to nothing, and nothing could approach it.

They did not look about as they drove slowly through the city, but, leaning back silent, had a mingled sense of Rome and heaven. It was impossible for any of them to imagine anything more perfect, or to ask for any addition to their happiness. Earth and heaven had united to bless them, and every gift of earth worth the taking was theirs. To have been sovereigns would have oppressed them; to have had millions at their disposal would have been a care and annoyance. They had enough, and their cup was running over.

The narrow streets were beginning to stir as they passed, and some were dim, and all were in shade. Not a ray of sunshine touched them, except in the piazzas, till they reached the bridge of Sant’ Angelo. Then all was light, for the sun shot straight on through the Borgo, and all the piazza of St. Peter’s was in a blaze. They were almost faint with the heat as they walked up the ascent; but in a few minutes they were inside the sacred door, where, before entering, summer and winter meet to give the kiss of peace on the threshold, and the one quenches her fiery arrows, and the other warms his frosty breath.

Not a person was in sight as they went in, but they heard, faintly and far away, the mingled voices of the choir coming and going. The circle of ever-burning lamps twinkled like a constellation before them, and invited their steps. Half way up they paused before the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, which is an exception to the cheerful grandeur of St. Peter’s. For this dim chapel gives a sense of remoteness and mystery, and the inner chamber, from which the eyes can see no outlet, seems to lead to some edifice still more vast; as though St. Peter’s were life and day, but here was the way to death and night, yet a way not gloomy and dreadful, but only solemn and mysterious. The Baptistery is merely dark, and produces no such impression.

When they reached the bronze statue, the ladies kissed the foot and passed on, but Mr. Vane stood thoughtfully there for some time before following. And even then he did not pay the accustomed homage to the venerable image. His soul had saluted it, may be; but he was of a different sort from those who have the act of reverence always ready, whether the heart move or not; who will kiss the relic between the kisses of the shameless, and touch what is holy with lips that have just lied, and which are prompt to lie again. This man’s outward devotion was ever the blossom of a plant that grew in his heart, and filled it so that the act was an overflowing.

Marion was already waiting for them at the grand altar. They recognized each other silently, and seated themselves on the steps to wait, being early. The Signora placed herself beside Mr. Vane, and, noticing that he drew a deep breath, and looked about with a glance that took in their position there in the centre of that immense cross, she pointed upward where the dome, glorious with light and color, rested on the legend that had turned the face of the world: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. And I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” The legend ran in a circle of gigantic letters rimmed with gold, and the circle and the dome were as the ring and mitre of the church let down from heaven, and hovering in air over the ashes of the first pontiff.

A Mass was being said at the altar directly before them, at the end of the south transept, but not a sound of it reached them. They saw indistinctly the priest, and the mosaic crucifixion of St. Peter over the altar. They heard the coro, now swelling loudly in a brave, manly chant as the whole chapter joined, now sinking in a cadence, now fine with a boy’s clear treble. The bronze canopy above them glittered in every gilded point, the twisted columns that supported it soaring like flame and smoke entwined. The wreath of lamps about the confession was as bright as the ever-burning flames within them, and the polished marble answered them back, blaze for blaze. Below—a frozen prayer—knelt the guardian statue, its face turned to the screen behind which rest the relics of St. Peter. Two or three persons, entering the church, looked small as mice down the nave, and intensified the sense of magnificent solitude about them. All this light and splendor seemed so independent of, so superior to, human presence that human beings appeared to be only permitted, not invited, to come. It was a temple for the invisible God.

“There is no outward difference,” the Signora said to Mr. Vane, “between Catholicity and Protestantism which strikes me more than our ways of going to church, and the reasons for going. Protestants go to hear a man talk, and the man goes to talk to them. The affair is a failure if either is missing; for the minister needs the people, and the people need him. On the contrary, one person alone in a Catholic church may accomplish a perfect act of worship. When the priest has offered up a Mass, though no one assist, the world is better for it; and when a worshipper has prayed all alone in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, he has performed a supreme act of piety. There is all the difference between the dwelling-house of God and the house where people go to talk about God.”

“I always felt as if there were too much wind in Protestantism,” Mr. Vane said.

Presently a little company appeared coming out of the sacristy—two boys in white cotte, the canonico’s chaplain and another priest, also in cotte, and, lastly, monsignor the canonico himself, in a purple silk soutane of a color so bright that it was almost red. They passed across the basilica toward the pier of Veronica, and paused there at the altar-rail till the Signora and her friends joined them. A pleasant salutation was exchanged, and the Signora managed to whisper to the canonico that Mr. Vane was to make his First Communion that morning. The beautiful face of the prelate brightened with a pleased surprise, and he turned again and cordially offered his hand to the new convert, who, to the delight of the ladies, bent and kissed the ring on it.

Then the boys lighted their wax tapers, and the party went in behind the altar, down the narrow stair, and through the circling corridor, and found themselves in the heart of St. Peter’s.

This chapel is a tiny place in comparison to the church above, but capable of accommodating many more than the five who are permitted to visit it at a time. Two persons could kneel abreast at each side of the central passage, and four or five ranks, may be, might find room. The end next the screen, visible in the confession from above, is open, the altar being at the upper end, and the whole has not a ray of daylight. From this chapel one can look back and see through the screen Canova’s marble pontiff, and the ring of golden lamps on the railing of the confession, and, perhaps, some worshippers kneeling outside the sanctuary which one has had the privilege of entering. Directly overhead are the grand altar and the dome.

The Signora took a prie-dieu near the altar, motioning Mr. Vane to a place beside her; the sisters knelt behind them at either side the chapel; and Marion, quite apart, and behind the rest, leaned in a chair and hid his face in his hands. He had been surprised into the situation, and, though he had tried sincerely to do his best, was still a little alarmed by it. Shaken out of his usual artistic mood, which regarded first what appeared, and then peeped inside from without, he found himself suddenly whirled into the centre, where, either from darkness or from too much light—he knew not which—he could not see. It was one of those moments of fear in persons who communicate seldom but sincerely, which presently give place to the most perfect reassurance and peace.

The Mass was over. Monsignor laid aside his vestments, and knelt at a prie-dieu reserved for him; his chaplain placed a book on the desk before him, and withdrew, and there was silence.

The church could do no more for them. She had brought them to St. Peter’s tomb, and given them the Bread of angels.

It was impossible that the mind should not shake off the present and go back to the time when the dust in the shrine before them lived, and moved, and spoke, and when the invisible Lord in their breasts was the visible Lord in the flesh, teaching, persuading, and suffering. The Lord in their hearts said to the apostle in the shrine: “Wilt thou also go away?” And the apostle answered him: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” And again Peter said: “Lord, thou shalt never wash my feet.” And Jesus answered him: “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.” The Lord in their hearts was he who stood in the palace of the high-priest, bound and smitten upon the cheek, and Peter, standing by, denied that he knew him. The pallid lamps shone on the face of the Master turned for one reproachful look, and the red light of the coals burned up, as if the very fire blushed, in the face of the cowardly follower. They saw the seaside, where the risen Lord stood and called, and Peter, no longer a coward, but on fire with love and joy, flung himself into the sea to go to him. And yet again, in this memory which had become a presence and a voice, the Lord spoke to Peter: “Lovest thou me?” And Peter answered him once, and again, and, grieving, yet again: “Thou knowest that I love thee.” And Jesus said to him: “Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep.”

O perfection of power and of obedience; for within this hour, which memory, unrolling again her shrunken scroll, showed to be eighteen centuries distant—within this hour both the sheep and the lambs had been fed!

“I feel as though I had a garden in my heart,” Marion said to the canonico as they went up into the church again.

The two were walking slowly and last, and in speaking Marion bent and kissed the prelate’s hand.

The hand held his a moment closely, and the canonico replied: “Where the Tree of Life is, there is always a garden.”

This conversation they had listened to between the Master and Peter followed them down the church, whose splendors seemed rather like virtues made visible than like any work of the hands of man. If they should ever be so lost and ungrateful as to leave this fold, to whom, indeed, should they go? And unless the Lord washed them from their sins, surely they could have no part with him. They still saw the lessening vision of the high-priest’s dim and solemn house as they passed down the church and out through the first portal; then the second fell behind them, and an Italian summer day caught them to its glowing breast.

“It seems to me,” the Signora said, “as if we had just been ordained, and were being sent out as missionaries. Of course you go home to breakfast with us, Marion,” she added.

“I was thinking of Fra Egidio this morning,” said Bianca softly, as they drove home through the hot sunshine. “He used to say, instead of 'I believe in God,’ 'I know God.’”

“That blessed Fra Egidio!” struck in Isabel, who had lately been reading about him. “He used to go into ecstasies, papa, whenever he heard the names of God or of heaven. And when he went into the street, sometimes people would call out, 'Fra Egidio, paradiso! paradiso!’ and instantly he would be rapt into an ecstasy, and perhaps be lifted up into the air. Why doesn’t some one go into ecstasies now at the thought of heaven?”

“Nobody prevents you, my dear,” her father said. “If you will be so lost to the world and so given to God that the mere hearing his name will lift you from the earth, so much the better.”

“You are quite right, papa,” she answered gently. “I had better look to myself.”

He smiled and laid his hand tenderly on hers.

“I was particularly pleased with the account of the interview between Fra Egidio and St. Louis,” the Signora said. “The king came incognito to visit the ecstatic, and went to the convent in Perugia where he was living. Fra Egidio, knowing supernaturally that he was there, and who he was, went out to meet him. They fell on their knees on the threshold, and embraced each other, and, after remaining for some time in that silent embrace, rose and separated, without having uttered a word. That was truly a heavenly meeting.”

Their attention was here attracted to a clergyman who walked slowly along the shady side of their street, accompanied by his chaplain. This prelate, the patriarch of Antioch, was of a venerable age, and wore a long beard. He alone, perhaps, of all the prelates in Rome, appeared in the street with the distinguishing marks of his rank—the chain and cross, the red-purple stockings, sash, and buttons, and the green tassel on his hat.

A little boy on the sidewalk caught sight of him, and instantly snatched his cap off and ran to kiss the patriarch’s hand. The action was perfectly natural and simple, and performed with a charming mixture of reverence and confidence.

“How pretty it is!” exclaimed Isabel. “And there is another.”

A little girl had left her mother’s side, and run also to kiss the patriarch’s hand as he passed. No idea seemed to have entered her curly head that she was approaching too nearly a grand personage, or that he would be annoyed or interrupted by her homage, any more than a crucifix or a picture of Maria Santissima would have been.

“The Roman clergy have the sweetest manners with the poor,” the Signora said; “and the highest dignitaries, when they are in public, are approached with a facility which I found, at first, astonishing. I recollect going to St. Agatha’s, the church of the Irish College, to the Forty Hours, shortly after I came here. It is in a populous neighborhood, as you know, and the streets swarm with children. A clergyman came into the church and knelt at a prie-dieu just in front of me. There were a dozen or so children wandering about, and presently they collected at this prie-dieu, and, sitting on the step or standing at the desk, almost leaning on the priest’s shoulder, they stared at the people and whispered to each other. I expected to see him send them away or go away himself; but he only put his hands over his face and remained immovable. I had almost a mind, for a minute, to go and speak to the children, but, fortunately, did not. After a while, nervous, impatient Yankee though I am, with a passion for an orderliness which strikes the eyes, I began to see the beauty and true piety of this gentle behavior, and to find something more edifying in that priest who suffered the little ones to come near him, and near the Lord, than I should have found if he had gone into an ecstasy before the Blessed Sacrament. It was the sweetest charity. Indeed, much of that which seems to us to be cowardice in the Romans is nothing but a spirit of gentleness fostered by religion. They are non-combatants. The church found them a fiery and warlike people, constantly committing deeds of violence, fond of conquest, and impatient of control, and she has subdued them to children. If they are too submissive to usurpation, that is better than the other extreme. The lion has become the lamb, and the lamb is ever the victim. And now here we are at home.”

Annunciata and Adriano had conspired to make the breakfast as festal as possible, and had succeeded perfectly. But for the light west wind that fluttered in at the still open windows, the air of the rooms would have been too fragrant; and but for the long morning fast and drive, the breakfast would have been too profuse. It was, in fact, both breakfast and dinner, it being nearly noon when they sat down; and they sat two hours talking before they separated. Just before they rose from the table Annunciata came in, bearing a large dish covered with green leaves, a smile of triumph on her face. She placed the dish in the centre of the table, and looked at her mistress.

“Brava!” exclaimed the Signora. “Now, children, do you recognize that leaf?” lifting one from the dish, and holding it up between a thumb and finger. “Do you know what tree grows a hand for a leaf? Do you see the shape?”

“'In the name of the prophet, figs!’” quoted Isabel.

“Yes, the first figs of the season, and perfect; just soft enough to flatten on the plate and against each other, yet firm; and, withal, sweeter than honey. You should see the woman who brings them to me—a rosy, russet creature, with eyes as black as sloes, and pounds of gold on her neck and hands. That gold she wears always. It is their way. She has four gold chains, one hanging below the other, and each bearing a medallion. Through these shines a large gold brooch. Her earrings are immense hoops, and she wears gold rings on every finger, piled up to the joints. She was once so ill that they thought best to give her Extreme Unction, and, when the priest came to administer the sacrament, he found her lying, pale and speechless, but with all her rings and lockets on. These people do not value stones, but they glory in pure, solid gold.”

“Might it not be their dowry?” Mr. Vane asked.

“Very likely; sometimes it certainly is. Sometimes the dowry is in pearls, and a contadina will have strings and strings of them. I am told, however, that the common people in Rome have a saying that pearls are for butchers’ wives. I don’t know why, and one has been pointed out to me as owning half a dozen strings of them. They are not a good investment, however, for they are easy to spoil and easy to steal. A very safe and sensible way for providing a girl’s dowry exists in one of the towns near Rome. All along the river-bank is level land divided into small lots. When a girl is born, the father buys one of these, if he is able, and plants it full of a sort of tree that grows rapidly, and is much used for certain kinds of wood-work. While the girl grows her dowry grows; and when she marries, the trees are cut down and sold. I have often wished that American fathers of families would make some provision for their children when they are born, setting aside a sum, if it should be ever so small, to increase with their years, and be a help in giving them a start in the world. It seems a sin that parents should bring a family of children into the world, all dependent on one life, and, if that life be cut off, be thrown out helpless and unprovided for. How often we see, by the death of a father whose labor or salary maintained his family in comfort, the whole family plunged in distress and left homeless! How would Bianca, here, like to have her dowry in pearls?”

“She has a mouth full of them,” said Marion hastily. He could not bear that his lady should be thought in want of a dowry, when she was a fortune in herself. “And those are not her only jewels.” He reached, and, taking her hand, gathered together the little pink finger-tips like a bunch of rosebuds. “She has ten rubies fit for a crown,” he said, and touched his lips to the clustered fingers, while the girl laughed and blushed.

Mr. Vane seemed to be struck with a sudden recollection. He put his hand to his forehead and considered, then rose from his chair. “Wait a minute,” he said, and went into his own room, where they heard him opening his trunk, and searching about in it. Presently he returned with a tiny morocco case. “It is the merest chance in the world that I did not leave this in America,” he said. “I did not dream of bringing it. Bianca’s mother left a pair of ear-rings for the girl who should marry first.”

He opened the case and took them out—two large, pear-shaped pearls, of exquisite lustre, hanging from a gold leaf, on which a small, pure diamond glistened like a speck of water.

“And you could have such a treasure with you, and never say anything about it!” the Signora exclaimed. “O the insensibility of men! And these girls never saw the pearls before!”

She fastened the jewels in the pretty ears they were destined for. “These are two gems you forgot in your enumeration, Marion,” she said. “And, by the way, how fitting it is that, when the ears are shells, there should be pearls hung in them!”

“I’m glad you think them so pretty,” Mr. Vane said with compunction. “I really never did think of them before. Perhaps it was very stupid of me.”

“On the contrary, it was very wise of you, papa,” Isabel said. “They are a great pleasure to us all now; but if we had known of them, I should now feel as if they had been taken away from me.”

“When you are engaged, you shall have a pair as pretty, if they are to be found,” her father said.

They drank Bianca’s health; and, the talk still running on gems, Marion told an incident of a ring which a friend of his had lost in the snow, in some part of Germany, as he stood looking down on the town from a hill outside. Several months afterward, going to the same spot, he saw the ring at the top of a little plant. The first sprout had come up inside it as it lay on the ground, and, growing, had lifted it, till it stood almost a foot high, glistening round the green stem.

“What a disappointed little plant it must have been when its gold crown was taken off!” the Signora said regretfully.

“It no doubt grew better without it,” Mr. Vane replied. “Besides, the ring did not belong to it.”

It was the tiniest little intimation of a correction, and the Signora was highly pleased. He saw the smile with which she received it, and was content. Nothing can express more kindness than a gentle reproof, and nothing can show more affection than to take pleasure in such a reproof.

When they had separated, the Signora went into the kitchen to give a private and special commendation to Annunciata for her well-doing that morning, and to glance at that part of her domain. She never omitted this word of praise, and the faithful servant counted herself well paid for any pains she could take when she had been assured that what she had done had given pleasure.

This Roman kitchen was as little as possible like the New England kitchen. Closets and pantries there were none; the single stone walls did not admit of them. Two large cases of covered shelves took their place. Instead of the trim range with its one fire-place, was a row of five little furnaces, over each of which a dish could be set. A sheet-iron screen extended out over these, like the hood of a chaise. All the side of the chimney, where it extended into the room, shone with bright copper and tin cooking vessels, hanging in rows. Underneath were two baskets, one with charcoal, another with carbonella—the charred little twigs from the baker’s furnaces, that can be kindled at a lamp. One of the furnaces still had a glow of coals within it, and near by was the feather fan that had been used to kindle and keep it bright. The brick floor was as clean as sprinkling and sweeping could make it. They never wash a floor in Rome, and only the fine marbles and mosaics ever get anything better than that sprinkling and sweeping. The one window looked across the court to the Agostinian convent attached to Sant’ Antonino, and to the little belfry with the two bells that never could be made to strike the right number of times, and into the garden of the frati, where rows of well-kept vegetables were drinking in the sun as if it were wine.

This kitchen was quite deserted, except for the cat, who was standing, with a very mild and innocent expression of countenance, close to the closed door of a cupboard where meat was kept. She glanced calmly at the Signora, and walked away slowly and with dignity.

“Where is Annunciata, Signor Abate?” inquired the Signora.

The cat turned and mewed with great politeness, but in an interrogative tone, as who should say, “I beg your pardon?”

And then a splashing and bubbling of water from without reminded the padrona that her handmaiden was washing that day—was “at the fountain,” as they express it.

“Why should I not go down for once and see how it seems there?” she thought. “After all, this girl is dependent on me, lives with me, serves me in everything, is at my call night and day, and I do not touch her life except at certain points—the table, the cleanliness and order of the house, and the errands she does for me outside. I don’t know much about her, after all.”

She opened a door that she had never passed in the years she had lived in that apartment, and descended a narrow stone stair that wound in a steep spiral, lighted at each turn by a small hole pierced in the outer wall. Down and down—it seemed interminable, but was, in reality, two stories and a half. The landing was in a dim store-room a little below the ground level, and used as a cellar. From this a passage and door led into a small court enclosed between an angle of the house and a high wall, like a room with the ceiling taken off. Here a spout of water flowed into a double fountain-basin, where the girl stood washing and beating linen on the stone border. As she worked, steadily, and too much absorbed to see her mistress standing near her, tears rolled down her face, and dropped one by one on the clothes in her hands.

The Signora looked a moment, astonished and shocked. Was this the girl who had come and gone from early morning cheerfully at her bidding, and who had smiled as she served the table within half an hour? She stood awhile looking at her, then quietly withdrew, and, going up-stairs again, rang a hand-bell from the window. Annunciata came up immediately, quite as usual, with no sign of tears in her face, except a slight flush of the eyelids, and made her usual inquiry: “Che vuole?”—What does she wish for?

“I have several things to say,” her mistress replied. “I came out first to thank you for having given us such a beautiful breakfast. Everything was well done. I forgot you were at the fountain.”

The smile came readily, and with it the ready word: “It pleased her?”—always the ceremonious third person.

“And now I want to ask you something,” the Signora went on kindly. “Sit down. If you do not like to tell me, you need not. But I should be very sorry if you had any trouble, especially anything in which I could help you, and did not let me know. You have been crying. Are you willing to tell me what is the matter?”

The girl looked as startled as if she had been caught in a crime, and began to stammer.

“If it is something you do not want to tell me, I will not say any more about it,” her mistress went on. “You have a right to your privacy, as I have to mine. But if there is anything I can do for you, tell me freely.”

There was a momentary struggle, then the tears started again, and all the story came out. Annunciata had received, three days before, news of the death of her only brother, who had died of fever in some little town a day’s journey from Rome, and was already buried when she learned first that he was sick.

The Signora listened with astonishment and compunction. For three days this girl had gone about with a bitter grief hidden in her heart, missing no duty, submitting, perhaps, to a little fault-finding now and then, and weeping only when she believed herself unobserved, and all the time, while she suffered, ministering to and witnessing the pleasures of others.

“My poor girl, why did you not tell me at first?” she asked gently.

“Oh! why should I?” was the reply. “You were all so happy and you could not bring the dead back.”

“I could have sympathized with you, and given you a few days’ rest,” the Signora said. “I would not have allowed you to work.”

“It was better for me to work,” the girl replied, wiping her eyes. “I should only have cried and worried the more, if I had been idle.”

There seemed nothing that could be done. That class of poor do not adorn the resting-places of their dead, or the Signora would have paid the cost; they do not wear mourning, or, again, she would have paid for it; and this girl had no family to visit and mourn with. In her brother she had lost all. The only service possible—and that she accepted gratefully—was to have Masses said for the dead. That settled, the Signora dismissed her to her work again, and shut herself into her chamber, but not to sleep.

“O the unconscious, pathetic heroism of the suffering poor!” she thought. “Where in the world have I a friend who would cover such a grief with smiles rather than disturb my pleasure? Where in the world does one see such patience under pain and hardship as is shown by the poor? They sigh, but they seldom cry out in rebellion. They accept the cross as their birthright, and both they and we grow to think that it does not hurt them as it would hurt us. How clearly it comes upon me now and then, why our Lord lived and sympathized with the poor, and why he said it would be so hard for the rich to enter heaven!”

She was looking so serious and unrefreshed when the family gathered again that they at once inquired the cause, and she told them.

“I feel as though I must have been lacking in some way,” she concluded, “or a servant who has been with me so long, and who has no nearer friend in the world than I am, would have come to me at once with her troubles. If the relations between servants and employers are what they should be, the servants should go to the master or mistress with all their joys and sorrows, just as children go to their parents. I have been thinking that there is one reason why, the world over, people are complaining of their servants. They have contented themselves with simply paying their wages and exacting their labor. There has been no sympathy. The association has been simply like that of fish and fowl, instead of that of the same creatures in different circumstances.”

“I have always thought that in America,” Mr. Vane said. “There is not a country in the world, probably, where families have been, as a rule, more disagreeable toward their servants, and servants so troublesome, in consequence, to their employers. But I believe it is very seldom that a good mistress or master does not make a good servant, so far as the will goes.”

Seeing her still look downcast and troubled, he added: “You should not reproach yourself. It is rather your kindness toward this girl which has won such a devotion from her. If you had lacked in kindness and sympathy toward her, she would have been far more likely to have shown her trouble, and made it an excuse for not attending to her work as usual.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, brightening; and thought in her own mind, “How very pleasant it is to be reassured when one is distressed about things!”

And then later, when they heard Annunciata in the kitchen, the sisters went out and spoke each a kind and pitying word to her, touching her hard hand softly with their delicate ones; and when she came in later to perform some service, Mr. Vane had also a word of sympathy. But, greatest comfort of all, the Signora and Bianca went up to the Basilica and arranged that a Mass should be said the next morning for the dead, and Annunciata was told that she should go with them to hear it.

That evening the servants were instructed to deny the family to every one but Marion, and, when the sun was low, they all went out on the loggia to see the night come in, and breathe the sweet freshness that still came with it. For it is only in dog-days that the Italian nights are too warm for comfort, and not always then. The great heat comes and goes with the sun.

As they went into the loggia, there was a rustling noise in the garden underneath, and out from the trees leaning against the wall flew clouds of sparrows, and dispersed themselves in every direction. It would appear that every twig must have held a bird.

“I am sorry we have disturbed their nap,” Mr. Vane remarked. “How disgusted they must be with our curious nocturnal habits!”

They did not wish to talk, but only to think and see, and speak a word as the mood took them. The miraculous shadow of St. Peter still hovered above their spirits. They sat in silence, receiving any impression that the scene might make.

Flocks of birds flew in from the seaward, all hastening to some nest or tree-home, their bodies clear and dark, their swift wings twinkling against the topaz sky. The evening star, at first softly visible, like a diamond against another gem, began to grow splendid, while the glowing west changed by imperceptible degrees to a silvery whiteness, and took on an exquisite hint of violet, as if it thought, rather than was, the color. The flowers disappeared in masses of dark green, the gray towers and roofs deepened to black, the pure air was delicious and beaded with coolness, like a summer drift sprinkled with snow. The Ave Maria began to sound here and there, echoed from one church to another. Now and then some bell, besides the Angelus, rang out with a festal clangor for five minutes, a musical chorus coming in from the southward.

“What a grand procession of saints walk for ever through the Roman days!” the Signora exclaimed. “It would be something dazzling to the mind, if one could live on a central height, and hear the bells announce the different festas as they come, singly or in groups, and know who and what each saint is. For example, this evening we hear from the Aventine the rejoicing announcement that to-morrow is the festa of St. Alexis in his church, and from another church is called out the name of St. Leo IV., and from another St. Marcellina, the sister of St. Ambrose, and twelve martyrs will be celebrated in another church. If we should go to-morrow to either of those, we should find them adorned, sprinkled with green out into the very street, High Mass or Vespers going on, and the relics exposed on the altars. To-morrow night other bells will ring in other saints and martyrs. The night after, from a church in Monte Citorio will come the call, Ecco St. Vincent of Paul! and the secular missions and the Sisters of Charity will be doing their best in his honor, and there will be cardinals, and pontifical vespers, and a panegyric. Four or five churches will celebrate their special saints the next day, and the next will be St. Praxides, on the Esquiline here; and the day after we shall be invited to pay our respects to St. Mary Magdalen. And then on to St. James the Great, which will be a great day; and the day after comes St. Anna, the mother of the Blessed Virgin; and, a little later, St. Ignatius marches by. What it would be to set the world aside, sit aloft on some tower there, listen to the announcements rung out from belfry after belfry, meditate, and look with the eyes of faith on what comes! What faces of young maidens, delicate spouses of Christ, bent like clusters of living flowers to listen to the voices that praise them, turned again heavenward to ask for blessings on their clients! What queenly women incline their crowned heads, when the Sacrifice goes up in their name, to see who of those who offer it is worthy and sincere! What glorious men, strong and shining, gaze down into the battle-field where their triumph was won, to read in the upturned faces of the combatants how the fight goes, and who needs their aid! I sometimes think that the saints look only when they are called by name, but that the Blessed Mother looks always. It is the mother who goes after the child who forgets, and watches over it while it sleeps.”

The flocks of sparrows that had fled at their approach, weary of waiting for them to go away, after peeping and reconnoitring the situation, began to come back and flutter in under the foliage again. For a few minutes the trees stirred all through with them, as if with a breeze; then the little heads were tucked under the tired wings, and they all went to sleep, and, perhaps, dreamed.

The family smiled and hushed themselves, not to disturb their rest. Each heart was softly touched by the nearness of so many tiny sleepers. Peace seemed to float silently out from under the thronged branches and laden twigs of those motionless trees, in which no passer-by would have detected a sign of life.

“I think,” the Signora said softly after a while, “that when the priest comes next Holy Saturday to bless my house, I would like to have him bless these trees too, that no net or trap may be thrown over them by night, and no rifle be fired into them by day. The trees and their tenants belong to my household.”

“Your house is blessed every year?” Mr. Vane asked.

“Yes. On Holy Saturday the priest goes round through every parish, a little boy with him bearing holy water, and blesses all the houses, if the people desire it. The custom is, too, to have ready on a table a dish of boiled eggs, an ornamented loaf of cake, and a plate of sausages. These are blessed, to be eaten Easter Sunday. I am not sure, but I fancy that the custom is a remnant of times when the Lenten fast was, perhaps, more strictly and universally observed than now. Now, whether from a deterioration of health or of faith, very few persons consider themselves strong enough to observe the regulations perfectly. Modern civilization seems to be very weakening in every way.”

“I am inclined to think that good comes, or will come, out of all these changes and seeming failures,” Mr. Vane observed. “If the races have become weaker physically, their passions have also become weaker; and it may be that, in order to tame them, it was necessary to reduce their physical strength. We do so sometimes with wild animals. Perhaps when we shall have learned better how to live, and, after running the circle of follies, grown soberer and wiser, the increasing vitality will go more in the intellectual and spiritual ways than it did before. I am hopeful of the human race, from the very fact that it is so uneasy about itself. The audacious boldness of some nations seems to me to spring from desperation rather than confidence. There is no confidence anywhere. Fear rules the world. Everywhere strong, or even desperate, remedies are proposed, and philanthropic doctors abound.

“Malgré les tyrans,

Tout réussira,”

sing the communists; and I believe that things will come out right in spite of every difficulty, and be more secure because of the difficulties past. When we shall have looked about in vain in every other direction, we shall at last learn to look upward for the solution. But excuse me for talking so long in this beautiful silence. Your Easter eggs were not meant to hatch such a sermon, Signora.“

They rose, presently, to go into the house, and, as they loitered slowly along the passages, Mr. Vane remarked to the Signora: “I observe that the natural direction of your eyes is upward.”

“Is it?” she asked. “Come to think of it, I believe you are right. It is always cramping for me to look down. I recollect that, when I was a child, if I dropped my eyes on being a little embarrassed, it was almost an impossibility for me to raise them again.”

Going in past the kitchen, they found Adriano in chase of a cockroach that had dared to show itself there, and they stopped to learn the result, feeling that it interested them. It was not successful, and the man rose from his knees very much vexed.

“These bagarozzi don’t know what Ascension day is nowadays, or they would hide themselves,” he said.

Mr. Vane asked what connection there was between bagarozzi and Ascension day, and the servant-man, albeit a little ashamed of having committed himself to tell a story, explained:

“When I was young, it was a custom among the Roman boys, on the vigil of the Ascension, to go down into our cellars, or those of our neighbors, and catch as many bagarozzi as we could. When evening came, we fixed to the back of each one a bit of wax taper, melting the end to make it stick. Half an hour or so after Ave Maria we marshalled our bugs, lighted the tapers on their backs, and sent them off in a procession. While they went we sang a song we had. It was a pretty sight to see the little tapers scampering off through the dark.”

“Why! I should think it would have scorched them!” Bianca exclaimed with surprise.

The man laughed at her simplicity. “Who knows?” he said, with a shrug. “They never came back to tell us.”

Isabel inquired what the song was to which this novel procession marched.

The man laughed again and repeated the doggerel:

“'Corri, corri, bagarone;

Che dimane è l’Ascensione;

L’Ascension delle pagnotte:

Corri, corri, bagarozzi.’”

Which might be rendered: “Run, run, my noble roach; for to-morrow is Ascension day—Ascension day of the little loaves. Run, roach, run.”

“What demons of cruelty children can be!” remarked Isabel as the family went on.

Adriano laughed as he looked after them. “How queer these forestieri are!” he said. “They want to see everything and know the name of everything. The signorine here ask me the name of every tree and flower in the garden, and every bird and bug that moves. How should I know? My niece, Giovannina, says there’s an English-woman going about getting the poor old women to tell her fables, and ghost-stories, and all sorts of nonsense; and they say that she prints it in a book. They must be in great need of books to read. Then the padrona will stand and look at the moon as if she never saw nor heard of it before, and expected it to drop down into the garden and break into golden scudi. I saw her one day this spring, on Monte Cavallo, stand half an hour and stare at the sky, just because it was red where the sun went down. The sky is always red when the sun sets in clouds. Two or three signori thought she was stopping to be noticed, and they walked about her, and one of them leaned on the railing close to her, staring at her all the time, and by and by spoke to her. I went up behind her, but she didn’t know I was there. She hadn’t seen any one till she heard the man say good-evening to her. You should have seen the way she looked at him. Then she caught sight of me. 'Adriano,’ she said, 'I’ll give you a hundred lire to fling that fellow over the terrace head first.’ I told her that it would cost me more than a hundred lire to do it. She put out her lips—I suppose she thought I was a coward—and muttered a word in English. Then she said to me, as she turned her back on the man, loud enough for him to hear: 'How dare such rascals come up when the sun shines!’ But she wouldn’t let me walk beside her, but made me follow her all the way home. And she was so mad that, when I started to say something as we reached the door, she stopped me. 'When I want you to speak, I shall ask you a question,’ she said.”

“The Signora is very kind,” Annunciata said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” the man replied dogmatically. “But it doesn’t become ladies to go into the street alone, nor to stop to look at anything, nor to glance about them.”

The girl did not reply. She had been trained in the same opinions, and did not know how to combat them. But sometimes it seemed to her that the streets and the public places were for women as well as for men to see, and that a woman should not be a prisoner because she had not a carriage or a servant to attend her. Moreover, she sympathized, in her simple way, with many of the Signora’s tastes. To her the song of the birds they fed with crumbs from the windows was a sort of thanks, and she regarded them as little Christians; and now and then, when she looked at the sky, something stirred in her for which she had not words—a pleasure and a pain, and a sense of being cramped into a place too small for her. She could not express it all, and did not quite understand it. But there was just enough consciousness to make Adriano’s pronunciamiento rankle a little. The inner ferment lasted while she polished the knives and her companion blacked carefully a pair of boots; then she burst forth with an expression of opinion which astonished even herself, for it sprang into speech before she had well seen its meaning—an involuntary assertion of nature. “I believe that women should settle their own business, and men settle theirs,” she said. “I haven’t seen the man yet that knows enough to teach the Signora how she ought to behave nor what she ought to do; and many’s the man she could teach. Men are poor creatures. Women can’t do anything with them without lying to ’em. That’s what gives them such a great opinion of themselves, because most women flatter them when they want to get anything out of them.”

“Ma, che!—well, to be sure!” exclaimed Adriano. It wasn’t worth arguing about. He merely laughed.

Meantime, gathered in the sala, the family made plans for the coming days while they waited for supper. Bianca, seated at the piano, was trying to recall a fragment of melody she had heard a soprano of the papal choir sing at a festa not long before. “The cadence was so sweet,” she said. “It was common—a slow falling from five and sharp four to four natural—but the singer put in two grace-notes that I never heard there before. He touched the four natural lightly, then sharped it, then touched the third and slid to the fourth. It was exquisite, and very gracefully done. His voice was pure and true, and the intervals quite distinct.”

“I asked his name,” Isabel said, “and was disgusted to hear a very common one, which I have forgotten. A beautiful singer ought to have a beautiful, birdy-sounding name.”

“He can make his own name sound 'birdy,’ if you give him time,” Mr. Vane said. “Take Longfellow as an example. There couldn’t be a more absurd name. Yet the poetry and fame of the man have flowed around it so that to pronounce the name, Longfellow, now is as though you should say hexameter.”

And then what were they to do, and where were they to go to-morrow, and the day after, and the day after? They ran over their life like a picture-book which was so full of beauties they knew not which to look at first. All felt that they were laying up sunny memories for the years to come—memories to be talked over by winter evening fires in their country across the sea; memories to amuse and instruct young and old, and to enrich their own minds. And not only were they furnishing for themselves and their friends this immense picture-gallery and library of interesting facts and experiences, but they were expanding and vivifying their faith. They were making the personal acquaintance, as it were, of the saints, and seeing as live human beings those of whom they had read in stories so dry as to make them seem rather skeletons than men and women. To enter the chamber where a saint had prayed, had slept, had eaten, had yielded up his last breath; to stand in some spot and think: “Here he stood, on these very stones, and saw faces of heaven lean over him, and heard mouths of heaven speak to him; or here, when such temptations came as we weakly yield to or weakly resist, he fought with prayer, and lash, and fasting”; to look at a hedge of rose-bushes, and be told: “Here, when he was tempted, a man, weak as other men, flung himself headlong among the thorns”—this was to waken faith and courage, and make their religion, not an affair of holidays and spectacles, and communions of once a year, but of every day, and of private hours as well as of public.

“Half our Roman holiday is gone,” Mr. Vane said, “and for at least four weeks of the other half the heat will allow us to do little or nothing. I recommend you girls to treasure all your little pleasures, and keep an exact account of them. The more fully you write everything out, the better. These diaries of yours will probably be the most interesting books you could have after a few years.”

“I am trying to forget all about America,” Isabel said, “to fancy that I have always lived here, and always shall live here, and to steep myself as much as possible in Italian life, so that, when I go back, I may see my own country as others see it, but more wisely. It seems to me that a country could be best judged so by one who knows it well, yet has been so long withdrawn from it, and so familiar with other modes of life, as to see its outlines and features clearly.“

“You are right,” Marion said.

“I never knew how beautiful, how more than beautiful, American nature is till I had seen the famous scenes of Europe. One-half the superiority is association, and half the other half is because attention has been called to them by voices to which people listened. Our very climate is richer. Here nobody knows how beautiful the skies can be. They like sunshine, and rainy weather is for them always brutto tempo. The grandeur of a storm, the exquisite beauty of showery summer weather and of falling and fallen snow, they know nothing about. They endure the rainy season for the sake of the crops, scolding and shivering all the time. To watch with pleasure a direct, pelting, powerful rain would never enter their minds; and if they see you gazing at the most glorious clouds imaginable, it would be to them nothing but curioso. We do not need to go abroad for natural beauty.”

It was getting late and time to say good-night. A silence fell on them, and a sense of waiting. Then Mr. Vane said: “We have made a Novena together for the communion of this morning. May we not once more say our prayers together in thanksgiving?”

No one replied in words; but the Signora brought a prayer-book and arranged the lamp beside Mr. Vane. He obeyed her mute request, and for the first time, as head of the family, led the family devotions. Then they took a silent leave of each other.

NATALIE NARISCHKIN.[8]

The name of Narischkin is in Russia like the name of Bourbon in France, Plantagenet or Stuart in Great Britain. The mother of Peter the Great was a Narischkin, and her baptismal name was Natalie. The family have always esteemed themselves too noble to accept even the highest titles, regarding their patronymic as a designation more honorable than that of prince. Madame Craven has just added to the list of her charming and extremely popular works a new one, which is a companion to the Sister’s Story, by writing the biography of a lady of the Narischkin family who was a Catholic and a Sister of Charity. Natalie was a friend of Alexandrine and Olga de la Ferronays. The narrative of her early life retraces the ground, familiar to so many, over which we have delightfully wandered in company with the fascinating group of elect souls, whose passage over the drear desert of our age has been like the waving of angels’ wings in a troubled atmosphere.

It seems scarcely correct to call Natalie Narischkin a convert. Her parents belonged to the Russian Church, and of course she was taught to regard herself as a member of the same. They resided, however, always in Italy, and Natalie was accustomed, in her childhood and youth, to associate freely with Catholic children and young people, and to accompany them to the churches and convents where they were wont to resort. Russian children receive infant communion, beginning with the day of their baptism, several times a year until they attain a proper age for confession, when there is a careful preparation and a solemn ceremony for the first adult communion, as with us. They are confirmed immediately after baptism. We are not told anything about Natalie’s receiving either infant or adult communion, but it is to be presumed that she was made to follow the usual practice, since there are Greek churches in Venice and other Italian cities. Her early associations were much more numerous, strong, and tender with the church of Italy and France than with the estranged church of her own nation. There was no difference in faith between herself and her Italian and French companions to make her sensible that the religion in which she was bred was different from the one in whose sacred rites she was continually taking part, at whose altars and shrines she frequently and devoutly worshipped. Even the peculiar ceremonies and forms of the Sclavonic and Greek rites were less familiar to her than those of the Latin rite. The only barrier between herself and her Catholic companions which could make Natalie sensibly feel a separation between them was her exclusion from participating in the sacraments administered by Catholic priests. This separation between priests and people professing the same faith, offering the same Sacrifice, administering and receiving the same sacraments, could only puzzle and surprise the mind of a child; but it requires a more mature understanding and complete knowledge to appreciate the obligation of renouncing all communion with a schismatical sect, however similar it may be to the true church. While Natalie was a child some of the little boys and girls with whom she played, particularly one little boy who became afterwards a martyr in China, used to assail her with controversy. Her older friends were more judicious, and waited patiently until her ripening intelligence and expanding spiritual life should prepare her for a more complete work of grace and a more perfect understanding of Catholic doctrine. In the instance of Madame Swetchine we see how much study and thought are necessary to produce in the mind of one who has grown up to maturity under the influences of the Russian Church a firm intellectual conviction that organic unity under the supremacy of the Roman See is essential to the being of the Catholic Church, and not merely the condition of its well-being and perfection. In Madame Elizabeth Gallitzin we discern how, in another way, national prejudice, and traditional hostility to what is regarded as anti-Russian, caused in her bosom a violent struggle against reason and conscience, even though the Catholic religion was that of her own mother. The case was wholly different with Natalie Narischkin. She did not think about the question of controversy at all, and was free from the national prejudices of a Russian. Her mother took no pains to instil them into her mind, or to place any obstacle in the way of the Catholic influences around her. She grew up, therefore, a Catholic, with only an external barrier between her inward sentiments and their full outward profession. The interior cravings of her spiritual life were the chief and real motive prompting her to pass over this barrier and find in the true church that which the broken, withered branch could not give. The requisite theological instruction in the grounds of the sentence of excision by which the Russian hierarchy is cut off from Catholic communion was a subsequent matter, and not at all difficult to one who was, like Natalie, intelligent, candid, and full of the spirit of the purest Catholic piety. There was really nothing in the way except the authority of her mother, whose chief motive of opposition was the fear of the emperor’s displeasure. When this obstacle was removed, Natalie easily and without an effort leaped over what was left of the external barrier.

We have anticipated, however, what belongs to a later period of her history. And going back to the time of her childhood, we will let Madame Craven herself describe the situation in which she was placed while she was growing up into womanhood. It will be noticed that Madame Craven speaks in the plural number, indicating that Natalie is not the only young Russian to whom her remarks apply. This will be understood when we explain that her sister Catharine sympathized with her in all her religious feelings, though she delayed, on account of her dread to encounter the opposition of her family, until a much later period her own formal abjuration.

“The entire childhood of these young girls had been passed at Naples, and they had been there environed by impressions which nothing in their Greek faith, no matter how lively it might have been, could counteract. The adoration of Jesus Christ, the veneration of the Holy Virgin and the saints, faith in the power of absolution and the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament, were the grand and fundamental doctrines which they had imbibed with their mother’s milk. Brought up at a distance from their own country, they might almost have believed themselves to be in the centre of their own religion, living as they were within the bounds of that great church which possesses all the gifts claimed by their own, with the added power of distributing and communicating them to all, without distinction of place, language, nation, or race. It is difficult to comprehend how any Russian whose soul is imbued with piety, on returning to his own country after having been brought up abroad, can find himself at ease in the bosom of Greek orthodoxy. In truth, it appears to us that the limits of a national church must seem very suffocating to any one who has felt, even for an instant, the pulsation of that universal life in the heart of the Catholic Church which is unconfined by mountains, rivers, or seas, which is contained within no barriers of any kind whatever, and bears the name of no particular nation, because it is the mother of all nations collectively. Therefore no one ever has been or ever will be able to fasten any denomination of this sort upon the only church who dares affirm that she alone possesses the truth in all its completeness. At the first view one would say that every church ought to make this claim under the penalty of being deprived of any reason for its existence. It is nevertheless true that only one loudly proclaims it; and those who hate as well as those who love the Catholic Church alike declare that she is a church in this respect singular among all others. Thus has she preserved through all ages a designation expressive of the idea realized in herself, and will preserve the same for all coming time! A multitude of her children have separated themselves from her, yet none of them have succeeded in despoiling her of the glorious title which suffices to make her recognized everywhere and by all. As for other churches or sects, when it is not the name of some man or nation which they substitute for her name, it is some kind of term or epithet which, even when it aims at giving a semblance of antiquity, betrays novelty in the very fact that it is necessary to employ it in order to be understood; and this is true in our own day just as much as it was in the time of St. Augustine. The overwhelming force of good sense and all the laws of human language determine that words express what they designate! At this day, as well as at that earlier period, neither friends nor enemies will ever give this grand name of CATHOLICS to any except those to whom it really belongs, and the same good sense proclaims as an indubitable fact which is that church whose children these are.

“Natalie had remained a long time without paying any attention to this controversy. She belonged all the while to the Catholic Church by all her pious habitudes, by all her childlike affections, finally and chiefly by the bond of the true sacraments which the Greek Church has had the infinite privilege of preserving, and which form a tie between ourselves and the Greeks whose value cannot be too highly estimated—a tie so powerful that even in one case where it is only imagined to have a real existence (i.e., with those Anglicans who persuade themselves that a chain wanting a multitude of links has not been broken) it has served in our days more than ever before to awaken in their hearts a sentiment inclining them to a nearer sympathy with our own. Belief in the truth of the words of Jesus Christ and in his real presence on the altar, the adoration and love of our Lord, the search after those who have possessed in the highest degree this faith and love, have opened the way by which a great number of souls have come to prostrate themselves before the tabernacles of the Catholic Church who had been previously outside of her visible fold, and had belonged to her only by virtue of their good faith and love of truth.

“With how much greater reason must one who belonged to the Greek Church have felt herself closely united to those whose faith was professed and whose practices were approved in respect to such a great number of points by her own church, which has even ventured to adopt the counsels of perfection and to speak of the 'spiritual life’ and of 'Christian perfection,’ after the manner of Catholics!

“But it is just here that she betrays her weakness; for when it is a practical question of undertaking and nourishing this spiritual life, where can she go to seek the living words, the sermons, the books, the apostolic men whom she requires? Where and from what source can one draw the vital force of this true and daily life, of this living life, if I may hazard the expression, always similar to itself, yet unceasingly renovated like the seasons of the year? Where can this vivifying influence be found, except in that same Catholic Church which, although it makes the mind bend under the necessary and salutary yoke of authority, never permits uniformity to engender tediousness, and possesses in its completeness that deposit a part of which the Greek Church suffered to escape on the day when it broke the bond of unity? Since then, although apparently rich, she has remained empty-handed; and while the Basils, the Athanasiuses, the Gregories, the Chrysostoms, and the numerous other holy and immortal doctors have had immortal successors in the Occident, the church of the Orient, once queen of eloquence and science, has become mute; and her children know not to-day whether she can speak or even write, since it is not given to them to hear her any more break silence; and, if they would warm up their piety by holy reading, and give their minds the sustenance they require, they are forced to have recourse to the Catholic Church, since it is there alone they can find their necessary aliment. Truly, we cannot help thinking that if the barrier which separates Greeks from Catholics were not upheld by hatred, it must fall down in an instant. This hatred is something which has no argument whatever in its justification, and which accepts, in behalf of the church which it covers as a shield of defence, the very conditions of death, immobility and silence, in lieu of a living existence.

“However this may be, and whatever more might be said on this vast and interesting subject, it cannot in any case be disputed that the divergences existing between us and the great Greek Church have nothing in common with those which separate us from Protestantism. Protestantism has tampered with and altered all our articles of faith, demolished the Christian mysteries most sacred to belief and dear to affection. It has retained neither the intercession of the saints, the worship of the Blessed Virgin, the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharist, nor the veneration of holy images. In fine, apart from the belief in the merits of our Saviour, of which every manifestation is severely restrained, there is nothing in common between Protestants and ourselves.[9] On the contrary, we may say, in respect to the Greeks, that for the simple faithful the difference between them and ourselves is invisible, because they have retained so many things which assimilate their religion to ours, as affecting the mind, the heart, and even the senses. Therefore, for many among them, the barrier does not become sensible until they find themselves disposed to pass over it in order to satisfy the inward need which they experience of participating in the riches of that other church, which seems so like their own, yet differs from it in possessing really what the other offers in a vain semblance.

“What, then, must be the sentiments of a sincere, fervent, simple, and upright soul, already bathed in the light which radiates from the great mysteries of the faith, and touched by the infinite love of Jesus Christ revealed in them, when it discovers the nature of the obstacles which lie in her path?

“She finds all the articles of her faith more solemnly affirmed; all the practices which her piety demands more numerous and accessible; confession, absolution, communion—all is there; and must she refrain from satisfying her thirst for them?

“Is it credible that a soul thus thirsty for truth, faith, and love should be much disposed to recoil from the difficulty of accepting one word more in the confession of faith,[10] or of recognizing the head of the universal church as the head of the church in the East as well as of that in the West? Again, is it credible that she will shrink back from the political obstacle, the greatest and most formidable of all—the only one, in fact, which she will find pain in overcoming and need courage to surmount?

“Such were the thoughts which importuned the mind of Natalie when she left Brussels, at the end of February, 1843, in order to return with her sisters to Paris, having resolved to ask the consent of her mother to her becoming a Catholic, and fully expecting that this permission would not be withheld.“

Natalie’s father died when she was fifteen years old. Evidently he had not felt any hostility to the Catholic Church, for he was a great admirer of the Jesuits. Madame Narischkin was not prejudiced, as is shown by the fact that she never at any time was averse to the perpetual intercourse kept up by her family, and especially by Natalie, with the most cultivated and devoted Catholics of Europe, such as the La Ferronays family, and never hindered her daughters from attending all kinds of services in Catholic churches. She undoubtedly looked on the Greek and Catholic churches as essentially identical with each other, and therefore could not see any reason for passing from the communion of the one to that of the other. She supposed that her daughter’s reasons were rather sentimental than conscientious. She naturally felt unwilling to have her take a step which would prevent her from ever again receiving communion at the same altar with the other members of the family. And she was, moreover, decidedly opposed to any act which would expose the family to the emperor’s displeasure. It is not to be wondered at, then, that she positively refused permission to Natalie to be received into the Catholic Church. Natalie was at this time twenty-three years of age, perfectly well educated, and fully instructed in the grounds of the distinctive, exclusive claim which is made by the Roman Church upon the obedience and submission of all baptized Christians. She was competent to decide for herself, and in possession of a complete right to act according to her conscience. It was thought proper, therefore, by the priest who was her spiritual director, and by her friends of the La Ferronays family, that she should be privately received into the church at Paris. An accident frustrated their plan, and Natalie was obliged to leave Paris with her mother without having accomplished her intention. The nuncio and other priests of high position at Paris, when they were informed about the matter, disapproved of the course which M. Aladel had advised, and reproved severely the ladies who had been concerned in the unsuccessful attempt to put it in execution.

Natalie accompanied her mother and sisters to Stuttgart, and a few months afterward to Venice. At her mother’s desire she had several conferences with a Greek priest, which served only to strengthen her in her well-formed and solid convictions. Nevertheless, she delayed her formal reception into the Catholic Church, waiting for a more favorable opportunity to accomplish this great desire of her heart. This opportunity came very soon, but in a way which was unexpected and, to her affectionate heart, most painful. During the summer of 1844 her mother was suddenly taken ill and died. The marriage of her two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth—both of whom had been some time before betrothed, the first to M. de Valois, the second to the Baron de Petz—was delayed for a year on account of this sad event, and the whole family was invited by M. Narischkin’s elder brother Alexis to return to Moscow and reside during the year of mourning in his house. Under these circumstances, Natalie resolved to act for herself, and she was accordingly received into the Catholic Church on the 15th of August, although none of her family were made acquainted with the fact. She accompanied her brother and sisters to Moscow, where they met with the most affectionate reception from their uncle and their other relatives. Nothing occurred to make any disclosure on her part necessary, until the time came for all the members of the family to make their Easter communion. In Russia this religious act, and all the preparations for it, are performed with so much publicity that it was impossible for Natalie to escape from it without observation. All the members of the family received the communion together at the same Mass, with the single exception of Natalie, who was nevertheless, as usual, present with the others, and observed the sad and serious look with which her uncle regarded her, as she remained in her place while all the rest of his family approached the altar to receive the sacrament. She now felt that the time had come when concealment was no longer possible, and naturally feared that a severe trial awaited her. It turned out, however, quite differently from what she had expected.

After their return from Mass her uncle sent for her, and in a most kind and paternal manner remonstrated with her on her omission of so grave and sacred a duty as the fulfilment of the precept of Paschal communion, which he attributed to indifference and tepidity, demanding of her, in a most affectionate manner, the reason which had induced her to abstain from communion. He added, at the same time, that he would much rather see her a Roman Catholic than indifferent to the obligations of religion. Natalie had listened to him with downcast eyes, in silence and trepidation. At these last words—prompted, perhaps, by some secret suspicion that her residence abroad had actually been the occasion of a change in her religion, and spoken with evident emotion and sadness—she opened her heart, and gave her venerable uncle a full and unreserved account of her conversion and of all the motives which led her to leave the communion of the Greek Church. When she looked up timidly, at the close of her recital to await her uncle’s answer, she saw his eyes filled with tears and fixed upon her with an expression of tenderness which banished all fear from her heart, and left upon it an indelible impression of love and gratitude. He opened his arms to embrace her affectionately, and assured her of his protection and unalterable kindness. Her maternal uncle, Count Strogonoff, a man whose religious character was both ardent and severe, and who was a thorough Russian of the old type in all his principles and sentiments, when he was informed of the truth, acted towards her in precisely the same manner, and even took pains to distinguish her from her sisters by special marks of affection. All her nearest relatives were informed of what had occurred, but the strictest secrecy was enjoined in respect to all others, for reasons which are obvious without any explanation. The only great trial which Natalie had to encounter, now that she was relieved of the pain and anxiety of keeping her secret from her nearest relatives, was the privation of all opportunity of going to Catholic churches and receiving the sacraments. Under the circumstances this was a privation she was compelled to endure patiently, and during the year she passed at Moscow she was only able to make one short visit, in company with some young friends, to the French chapel, on Holy Thursday, which was three days after the memorable interview with her uncle.

At the expiration of the year of mourning the young Narischkins returned to Italy for the nuptials of Mary and Elizabeth, and Natalie’s uncle arranged for her permanent residence with the latter, in order that she might be free to practise her religion without any embarrassment to herself or her family. She accordingly bade a final farewell to Russia, and with her temporary sojourn in her native country the great trial of her life was also terminated. We can easily imagine with what joy she again revisited Italy, which had been the home of her childhood; and on the occasion of this return Madame Craven’s genius has inspired her to write one of her happiest and most beautiful passages, which we cannot refrain from translating, although without any hope of preserving the delicate aroma of the original.

“We do not believe there is a person in the world who has once lived in Italy who does not cherish in his inmost soul the desire of returning there once more, or feel, when he again looks upon its beautiful sky, that wherever his native land may be, he has really come back to his own true country. For its beauty belongs to us as much as to those whose eyes behold it from the day when they are first opened to the light in infancy. It is no more their peculiar possession than it is our own; for to both alike it is only an irradiation from that supreme and essential beauty which is our common heritage and assured patrimony. This is doubtless the reason why we can never see the faintest reflection of this splendor of the eternal beauty without experiencing a sensation which causes the heart to dilate with joy and at the same time to repose in the tranquil security of possession. It seems to us that attentive reflection on what passes within us will show that, whatever degree of admiration any object of this world may awaken in our minds, even if it approaches to ecstasy, it is very rarely the case that we feel a positive surprise. Even if one who had never seen the glorious light and splendor of a happy clime were suddenly transported from the icy regions of the polar circle to the charming shores of the Bay of Naples, there is a latent image in the depths of the human heart, the original of which external things are the copy, whose presence makes one feel, even at the first glance on the sublime spectacle of the outward world, that all belongs to him and exists within his soul.

“This reflection suggests another. We shall doubtless experience something similar to this when we escape from this sphere of shadows and images and emerge into the region of eternal reality. Certainly our hearts will then be opened to receive those unknown enjoyments 'which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.’ Nevertheless, I think it is allowable to suppose that, as we shall see the poor human form clothed in Jesus Christ with all the glory of the divinity, so we shall also find the reality of all those shadows which in this lower world charm our eyes and fascinate our hearts. Happy will it then be for those who have not suffered themselves to be captivated by these shadows, when they are able to exclaim in a transport of ineffable happiness: 'Behold at last those objects too beautiful and too transitory to be loved on the earth by our souls, because they must either suffer the loss of these or be lost themselves! Here they are—real, substantial, enduring, transfigured, unfading! We have found all those things which we desired and sought for, and amid all these possessions is our eternal abode!’”

Natalie found a very pleasant home with her brother-in-law, the Baron de Petz, during the next three years. It does not appear from the narrative whether he was a Catholic or a Greek in religion. He was certainly a most kind and affectionate brother, and her sisters were always loving and considerate, so that no alienation ever separated the hearts of her near relatives from her own so long as they lived. We shall see presently how noble and tender was the conduct of her brother Alexander. And we anticipate the regular order of events in order to mention in this connection another near relative, Prince Demidoff, whose affection for Natalie was extraordinary, and who acted with singular and admirable generosity not only toward herself, after she had become a Sister of Charity, but also to other members of the same congregation. While he was residing in Italy he established a spacious hospital at his own expense, which he confided to the care of these religious. At Paris he authorized Sister Natalie to draw on him without limit, at her own discretion, for charitable purposes. It is extremely delightful to witness and record actions of this kind, so honorable to human nature, and showing what a high degree of intellectual and moral refinement, as well as how much of a truly Christian and Catholic spirit, is to be found among a certain class of the ancient Russian nobility. And what a contrast do they present to the ignoble persecutions, the mean and petty defamations, to which so many even of those who attempt to assume the guise of Catholics have descended in respect to converts in England and the United States. We do not forget, however, that there are many instances among ourselves of a similar conduct to that of the Narischkins, as there are doubtless others of an opposite kind in Russian families under similar circumstances.

Natalie Narischkin, in the midst of the splendors, gayeties, and most refined enjoyments of the world, during the period of her peaceful, happy youth, ere the severe trials of life had cast their shadow upon her spirit, had been pious, reserved, pearl-like in her purity of character, always aspiring after Christian perfection. After she had begun to participate in all the spiritual advantages thrown open to her by her Catholic profession, her distaste for the world and attraction for the spiritual life increased rapidly, and an inclination toward the religious state gradually matured into a certain and settled vocation. Her friends made some opposition for a time, though not so much as is frequently encountered in the bosom of pious Catholic families. Her brother Alexander examined carefully her reasons and motives, and, being convinced that she was acting with prudence and deliberation, gave his free consent and the promise of his assistance in carrying out her intention, accompanied by the singular request that she would leave the choice of an order to his decision. She had made no choice herself, and when her brother selected the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, she was quite satisfied. In fact, she had a predilection for the Convent of the Rue de Bac in Paris, which had been one of her places of favorite resort in former years. Her brother discussed the whole matter with M. Aladel, a Lazarist priest of Paris, and Natalie conferred not only with him but with several other experienced directors, who concurred in approving her vocation as a Sister of Charity. Here, accordingly, she entered, in her twenty-eighth year, and here she worked and suffered, as one saint among a thousand others, in an institute where heroism is as common as the ordinary virtues are elsewhere, and sanctity is the universal rule. During her religious life, which had twenty-six years of duration, she was first the secretary of the superior-general, and afterwards the superior of a small community in the Faubourg St. Germain. She died in 1874.

The narrative of Natalie’s religious life, enriched as it is with copious extracts from her letters and numerous personal anecdotes, is interesting and edifying as it is presented in the pages of Madame Craven’s biography. No doubt an English translation will soon place it within the reach of all our readers; and as it is precisely just one of those histories which is spoiled by condensation, we will not attempt to give it in an abridged form. Leaving aside, therefore, all further personal details, we shall confine our attention to that one aspect of our subject which has the most general interest and importance—viz., the position and attitude of the members of the national church of Russia in reference to the Catholic Church. As an illustration of this topic we have presented the history of the conversion of a Russian lady of high birth and education—one specimen of a number of equally choice souls whom the Russian Church has produced but has not been able to retain, and who are, we trust, the precursors of all the people of their nation in returning to the bosom of Catholic unity. Although Natalie Narischkin had lived so very little in her own country, she was nevertheless an ardent and patriotic Russian in her sentiments, and of course, as a well-instructed and devout Catholic, had very much at heart the religious welfare of her own nation. Among all the illustrious Russian converts, Count Schouvaloff, who became a Barnabite monk, was the most zealous in promoting the great work of the reconciliation of the Russian Church to the Holy See. Madame Craven tells us how enthusiastic Natalie was in her interest in the cause which this good man consecrated by the oblation of his own life as a sacrifice for its success—a sacrifice which he offered in obedience to the counsel of Pius IX., and which was accepted by God.

“When Father Schouvaloff—who, like herself, was a Russian, a convert, and devoted to the religious life—had given a definite form to this desire, and had founded an association of prayers in aid of this object which all Catholics were invited to join, there was not a single person in the world who responded more fervently to this appeal than Sister Natalie. The desire of propagating the truth, natural in the case of all who have embraced it, is particularly strong in those who have come from the Greek Church. To see the fatal barrier which separates the Eastern from the Western Church fall down, and to hear henceforth these two communions designated only by one common name: The Church!—no one else can comprehend the ardor of this desire in the hearts of those Russians who are animated both by the love of the truth and the love of their country.

“While we are on this topic we cannot help remarking how surprising are the tentative advances toward union between the Greek Church and Protestantism which we have recently witnessed. Such an alliance the clear mind of Natalie, even before her conversion, rejected with repugnance as impossible and absurd. Does not, in fact, the most simple reflection suffice to demonstrate that by uniting herself to the Catholic Church the Greek Church would preserve the traditions of her venerable antiquity together with the august dogmas which she holds, and would, at the same time, in ceasing to be local and becoming universal, recover the power of expansion and evangelization which she has lost by her schismatical isolation? In this case she might be compared to a princess of high lineage regaining, by a return to the bosom of the family to which she belonged, the royal rank from which she had fallen. But, in truth, to make a union with Protestantism would be for her the worst of misalliances, for she would then resemble a princess marrying a parvenu and with the utmost levity renouncing all the rights of her high birth and illustrious descent.”

Some of our readers may find it difficult to understand the anomalous position in which the Russian Church stands, so completely different from that of any of our Western sects, and requiring only the one act necessary for its corporate reunion to the Catholic body for its rectification, and yet so completely severed from the true church in its actual state that it is not a branch, a limb, or any kind of part or member of the same, but only a sect, completely outside of the universal church. Some Catholics may suppose the Russian Church in a worse condition than it is in reality. They may not understand that its priesthood and sacraments are any better than those of the English or Scandinavian churches, which have an outward form of episcopal constitution. Or, if better informed on this head, they may ascribe to it heresy, and regard some of its differences of rite and discipline as vitiating essentially the Catholic order. On the other hand, these misapprehensions being set aside, and the likeness of the Russian Church to the Catholic Church clearly understood, they might find it difficult to perceive that essential difference which, as Madame Craven remarks with truth, is to most of the Russian laity invisible. Still more will a Protestant having a tincture of Catholic opinions and sentiments fail to see why a member of the Russian Church should be convinced of the imperative obligation of abjuring the Greek schism and passing over to the communion of the Roman Church.

The question of heresy is easily settled by the way of authority. We have only to inquire, therefore, whether the Holy See has ever condemned the adherents of the schism begun by Photius and renewed by Michael Cerularius, of heresy as well as schism, and whether the standard authors in theology consider them as heretics in view of their ecclesiastical position and in virtue of general principles, although no formal judgment has been pronounced by the Holy See. It is certain that no such formal sentence has ever been pronounced by the Holy See. The Nestorian and Monophysite sects of the East have been formally condemned as heretical. But the soi-disant Orthodox Church likewise condemns these and all other heretical sects condemned by the Roman Church before the time of the schism. At the Council of Florence the Greeks were not judged to have professed any heresy, the Council of Trent was specially careful to abstain from any such condemnation, and the Council of the Vatican equally refrained from it. The same is true of all the official pronouncements of the popes. In the exercise of practical discipline, when it is a question of reconciling Greeks, whether they are in holy orders or laymen, they are treated as schismatics, but not as heretics. Theologians also, in treating of the doctrine of the several national churches in communion with the schismatical patriarchate of Constantinople, which they hold in common as their profession of faith, regard it as orthodox, conformed to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and consequently free from any mixture of heresy. The only doctrines in regard to which any one could suppose the Greek Church to be heretical are the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, and the supreme, infallible authority of the Pope. The Greek Church has never, by any solemn, synodical act, denied the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. The omission of the Filio-que from the Creed is not in itself equivalent to such a denial, and the Roman Church has never required the Orientals to insert it as a condition of communion. Neither has the Greek Church ever by any solemn act denied the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope. The liturgical books, and specifically those of the Russian Church, contain abundant testimonies to the Catholic doctrine on this head. The heretical doctrines of individuals, whether prelates, priests, or laymen, are therefore their own personal heresies, and not the doctrine of the public formularies of faith, which remain just what they were at the time of the separation. The only conciliar decrees of a dogmatic character which have been enacted since that time by a synod which could be regarded as representing the so-called Orthodox Church are those of the Synod of Bethlehem, in which the principal heresies of Protestantism are condemned. There is only one essential vice, therefore, in the constitution of the Russo-Greek Church which needs to be healed, and that is its state of rebellion against the See of Peter. The one act of abjuring the schism implies and involves in it the recognition of all the decrees of the Holy See and of œcumenical councils during the period which has elapsed since the rebellion of Photius, by virtue of the doctrine of the infallibility of the Catholic Church which the Greek Church professes.

Any Catholic can understand from this explanation how completely different is the position of the people of Russia who belong to their national church from that of the Protestants of Western Europe and the United States. They have the Catholic faith explicitly taught to them, and believed as firmly as it is by ourselves in all those things which relate to the great mysteries of religion and its practical duties and devotions. They hold implicitly, so long as they are in good faith, all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches, although they are ignorant of the full and complete doctrine of the centre of unity and chief source of authority in the church. They have bishops and priests whose ordination is valid, the sacrifice of the Mass, the seven sacraments, the fasts, feasts, ceremonies, and outward forms of worship which they had before the schism. In fact, as Mrs. Craven remarks, the difference between their church and the Catholic is invisible to the eyes of the majority, and, if they were to-day to be restored to their ancient union with the universal church, there would be no perceptible change in their customs. There are differences in discipline and ritual between the Latin and the various Oriental rites, but it is a fixed maxim of the Roman Church not to require the Eastern Christians to adopt the discipline and ritual of the Western church in matters which are not essential, when they are received into her communion.

These things being as they are, it becomes naturally somewhat difficult to those who have not carefully studied the question to understand why it is a strict obligation, and necessary to salvation, for a member of the Greek Church who discovers that it is in a state of schism to abjure its communion. We can see, in the case of Anglicans believing in nearly all Catholic doctrine so far as even to acknowledge the primacy of the pope and desire a corporate reunion with the Catholic Church, that, so long as they believe in the validity of their own orders and other sacraments, it is very hard for them to realize that they are not in the communion of the true church. They generally find their ground of security give way under their feet by their loss of confidence in the validity of their ordinations. But it is not easy to convince them that, apart from this essential defect in their church, and apart even from the question of its heretical doctrine, the mere fact of schism makes an ecclesiastical society, no matter how much it resembles a church in outward appearance, as really a mere sect as amputation makes the most perfect and beautiful hand a mere piece of dead matter. A mere collection of bishops, priests, and baptized persons, professing the true faith, administering and receiving the true sacraments, is not a portion of the Catholic Church, if the organic, constitutive principle of lawful mission and jurisdiction is wanting, which gives pastoral authority to the persons who possess the episcopal and sacerdotal character, and thus makes the collection of people under their rule a lawful society, under lawful pastors, and under the supreme rule of the Chief Pastor, who is the Vicar of Christ. It is not enough, therefore, for a person to profess the faith and receive the sacraments in order to keep fully the law of Christ. It is necessary to profess the faith in the external communion of the lawful pastors, and to receive from them, or priests whom they have authorized to minister within their jurisdiction, the sacraments. Bishops and priests who exercise their functions in a manner contrary to the law sin by doing so, and those who communicate in their unlawful acts also sin, and thus both parties profane the sacraments and incur the censures of the church. Nevertheless, if they act in invincible ignorance and good faith, they are excused from sin and escape the censure. And, in case of necessity, the church even dispenses from her ordinary laws. Any priest is authorized to administer sacraments in any place, to any person not manifestly unworthy, in case of necessity. So, also, one may receive the sacraments in a similar case from any priest, if there is nothing in the act which implies a direct or tacit participation in heresy, schism, or manifest profanation of sacred things.

The Russian clergy and people, we must suppose, are generally in good faith, and therefore innocent of any sin in respect to the schism of the national church. There is, therefore, no reason why they should not administer and receive the sacraments worthily, so as to receive their full spiritual benefit, and thus sustain and increase the living communion with the soul of the church and with Christ which was begun in them by baptism. The external irregularity of their ecclesiastical position cannot injure them spiritually when there is no sin in the inward disposition or intention. Moreover, it is morally and physically impossible for the Russian clergy and people, generally, to alter their position. They are, therefore, really placed in a necessity of administering and receiving the sacraments without any further and more direct authority from the Holy See than that which is virtually conceded to them on account of the necessities of their position. Since the church always exercises her power, even in inflicting censures and punishments, for edification and not for destruction, we may suppose that she tolerates the irregular and disorderly state into which they have been brought by the fault of their chief rulers, so long as it is out of their power to escape from it, and are not even aware that the irregularity exists.

It is plain, however, that every one who knows that the Russian hierarchy is destitute of ordinary and legitimate authority, and has the opportunity of resorting to the ministry of lawful Catholic pastors, is bound, under pain of incurring mortal sin and excommunication, to comply with this obligation. The excuse of ignorance and good faith is no more available after the law is made known. The reason of necessity ceases as soon as recourse is open to the authority which has a claim on obedience. The censures pronounced on the authors and wilful adherents of schism take effect as soon as one knowingly and wilfully participates in and sustains or countenances rebellion against the supreme authority of the Catholic Church.

The position of the Russian Church is utterly self-contradictory and untenable. By a special mercy of divine Providence it has been kept from coming to a general and clear consciousness of the fundamental heresy, which lies latent in the Byzantine pretence of equality to the Roman Church, from which the schism took its rise. The immobility which has characterized it, and to which the privation of all authority independent of the state has greatly contributed, has kept it from committing itself to any formal heresy. It has broken its connection, but it has not run off the track or fallen through a bridge. We cannot suppose that it will long remain stationary on the great road along which the march of events, the progress of history, is proceeding. It seems to be awaiting the propitious moment when, reunited to the source of spiritual power, it shall again move on in the line of true progress. When this event takes place, we may safely predict that the name of Natalie Narischkin will be honored in Russia together with that of Alexander Newski, the special patron of the imperial family; and that the empire will be filled with convents of the Daughters of Charity, the countrywomen and imitators of her who, more illustrious by her virtue than by her descent, was appropriately named “The Pearl of the Order.”

UP THE NILE.
III.

We had a letter of introduction to the Governor of Assouan from a person we had never seen. It came about in this way: Ali Murad, our consul at Thebes, sent by Ahmud a letter to his friend, the governor of Edfoo, asking him to give us a letter to his excellency at Assouan. This letter, worded in the usual extravagant style of the Orient, stated that the dahabeeáh Sitta Mariam contained a party of distinguished travellers who were in high favor at Cairo, and should everywhere be received with the greatest kindness and attention. His excellency was a fine-looking negro, well dressed in European style, patent-leather boots, fancy cane. I looked at first for eye-glasses, but on second thought concluded that this was too much to expect from him. He came on board to visit us, accompanied by his secretaries and servants, very pompous and haughty in his bearing towards the crew, polite—nay, almost obsequious—to us. Head sheik of the cataracts is on board; a deal of talking by every one at the same time; no one listening; a lull; governor lights a fresh cigar; secretaries, servants, and crew roll cigarettes; Reis Mohammed appears with the certificate of tonnage. There is no fear of obliteration or erasure in this; no danger of wearing out or the characters fading by lapse of time. It might have belonged to the pleasure barge of antiquity-hidden Menes or one of the corn-boats of the Hyksos. It was a bar of solid iron three inches wide, four long, and half an inch in thickness. Deeply-cut figures showed the boat to be of 380 ardebs burden. An agreement was finally entered into: Ahmud was to pay the sheik nine pounds and ten shillings to take the boat up and down the cataracts, exclusive of backsheesh. Out of this the governor received two pounds and ten shillings as his commission. This making arrangements for ascending the cataracts is the most serious drawback to the pleasure of a Nile voyage. True, the dragoman undertakes this, but the howadjii are present and witnesses of the altercations, the loud talking, and the great noise and confusion attendant upon it. We being such distinguished travellers on paper, and the governor being impressed with that fact, our contract was entered into with less confusion than is usually incident to this arrangement. Four sheiks or chiefs of the cataract control the proceedings. This office is hereditary, and formerly they were despotic in the exercise of their power. Twenty English or American sailors could take a boat up the cataract in one-third the time it took nearly two hundred natives to perform that office for us. But no dragoman would dare incur the enmity of these powerful sheiks by attempting the ascent without their permission. Their power is somewhat curtailed now by orders from the viceroy, so that instead of, as heretofore, extorting as much as possible from the frightened dragoman, their prices are regulated by a fixed tariff—so much for every hundred ardebs.

We are now fairly started on the ascent; it is early in the morning, and a light breeze is blowing from the north. The head sheik is on board. What an appropriate name he has! Surely his father was a prophet and foresaw the future life of his son—Mohammed Nogood! Not the slightest particle of good did he do. He squatted on a mat, smoked his pipe, and took no heed of what passed around him. Old Nogood, as we called him, was with us for three days, and during that time he never opened his mouth unless to grumble, and never raised his hand except to remove the pipe from his mouth, being too lazy even to light it; a sailor performed that onerous duty for him.

We sailed through narrow, tortuous channels against a rapid stream to the island of Sheyál at the foot of the first bab or gate. The first cataract, as it is termed, is a series of five short rapids on the eastern shore, where the ascent is made, and one long and one short one on the western shore. These rapids are called gates. We stopped at the foot of the first. Three finely-built Nubians, in puris naturalibus, save turbans on their heads, came sailing down the turbulent and surging waters astride of logs. Borne on with great velocity, they seize hold of our boat as they reach it, in a moment are on deck, their heads bare, the turbans girded around their loins. “Backsheesh, howadjii!” They deserve it for this feat. It made the howadjii shudder to see them in these raging waters. An impromptu row now springs up between our pilot and old Nogood. The boat is aground, and more help is needed to push it off. Here is the dialogue, as translated by Ahmud:

Pilot (old man with gray whiskers, costume soiled and tattered coffee-bag): “O Mohammed Nogood! send some of your people to move the boat.”

Old Nogood: “O pilot, you jack-ass! why do you not attend to the helm and mind your business?”

Intense excitement on board, during which the pilot swears by Allah and the Prophet that he will not stay on the boat after such an insult, and goes off in high dudgeon. The howadjii, having locked up everything portable below stairs, are seated on the quarter-deck enjoying the scene in a mild manner, and waiting to see what will come next. The prospects of being kept here for an indefinite time are delightful. The head sheik is angry and the pilot has disappeared. But the silver lining of the dark cloud soon shines out. The second sheik takes command, and Nogood’s son comes aboard as pilot—very unlike his father, a hard worker and a quiet sort of man. We are ready to start now, but where are the men to pull us up? None can be seen. The river is here filled with broken and disjointed rocks—small islets. A great fall was here once, no doubt; hence the rapids now. The sheik throws two handfuls of sand in the air. Immediately from all sides, like the warriors of Roderick Dhu, rise the Shellallee. From behind every rock come forth a score or more. Three long ropes are made fast to the boat. A hundred men take hold of two; the third is turned two or three times around a rock, the end being held by a dozen men. This rope is gradually tightened as the boat moves up, to hold it in case the others should break. By the united help of the wind and this struggling mass of naked humanity we move slowly up the first gate, not ten yards long. In the same manner we pass the second and third gates. Our friends the log-riders are useful to us now. Plunging into the boiling, seething waters, that rush with such force it seems impossible for man to struggle against them, they make ropes fast to this rock; now they detach them, and, taking the end between their teeth, swim to another and make fast again. Picture to yourself such a scene, if you can. I cannot describe it satisfactorily to myself. Hear, if you can, nearly two hundred men all shouting at the same time, giving orders, suggesting means, no one listening, no one obeying, each acting for himself—Old Nogood alone seated quietly on the deck smoking his pipe; our boat possessed by four score of these black Shellallee, half-naked, running to and fro, shouting and yelling, but doing nothing to help us. Pandemonium itself could scarce furnish such a scene of confusion. Babel was a tower of silence compared with this discord. After passing the third gate we sailed into a quiet haven and moored there for the night. It was only three P.M. But they are five-hour men here, commencing work at ten and stopping at three. We were kept waiting all the next day, as two other boats were ahead of us, and they took them up first. On the third morning we left our moorings and sailed under a fresh breeze about one hundred yards up the stream to the fourth gate. The fourth and fifth are in reality but one continuous rapid; but as a stoppage is made when half-way up to readjust the ropes, the natives divide it into two gates. The water rushes here with great rapidity—more so than in the other gates, as these are narrower. A stout rope was made fast to the cross-beams of the deck on the starboard bow, and the other end carried around a rock some distance off. Owing to some mistake there was no rope on the port side. The men were pulling on a rope carried directly ahead, when it suddenly parted; the boat swung around to starboard and struck a rock with great force, knocking off several planks six inches thick and seven feet long. They were picked up by the felluka, which floated around promiscuously, manned by five small boys. These planks were carved in scroll-work, and painted in bright colors. Reis Mohammed had carefully bound straw around them before starting, so that they might not even be scratched. He clenched his teeth and swore like a trooper; the only words intelligible to us were “Allah,” “Merkeb,” “Mohammed.” Reis Mohammed Hassan, Nogood’s successor, was standing on the awning piled up on the front of the quarter-deck. Every one else began to shout, gesticulate, and run around to no purpose; but he, shouting while he undressed, threw off his gown and turban, and, with his drawers on, jumped overboard, swam to a rock on the port side, and made fast a rope. A Nubian, attired in a girdle, now waded out into the rapid as far as he was able, and a rope was thrown him from the rock against which the boat rested. After three attempts he caught it and made it fast some distance ahead. A fourth rope was carried ashore and seized hold of by sixty men. We were then pulled into a narrow pass, through which the water dashed like a mill-race, and so narrow that the boat grazed the rocks on either side. For a moment we remained stationary; the next the strong wind and the efforts of the men overcame the force of the current, and we moved slowly on. Shortly after we reached the head of the rapids, the ropes were withdrawn, the Nubians left us, and we sailed gallantly up to Philæ the beautiful.

We are now in Nubia, among a different race of people. We have passed the cataract. Hear the concise account given by the father of travellers concerning this ascent: “I went as far as Elephantine,” he says, “and beyond that obtained information from hearsay. As one ascends the river above the city of Elephantine the country is steep; here, therefore, it is necessary to attach a rope on both sides of a boat as one does with an ox in a plough, and so proceed; but if the rope should happen to break, the boat is carried away by the force of the stream.” This land of Cosh is very different in appearance from the one we have just left. The hills are mostly of granite and sandstone, and they approach nearer the river. In some parts the mere sloping bank, not more than ten feet, can be cultivated in a perfectly straight line; on its top the golden sands meet the growing crops. The river is filled with sunken rocks. Had we struck here, it might have been serious, unlike running on the sand-banks in the lower country. Reis Dab, our new pilot, knew the river well and kept a sharp lookout; so on we sailed day after day without stopping. There are no printed newspapers along the Nile, but the natives have a cheap, primitive method of journalism. They need no expensive press, no reporters to search far and wide for news. As soon as another boat appears in sight all is excitement on board. When we come within hailing distance the journals are exchanged as follows: Far away over the waters comes a voice from the approaching boat: “How are you all? Who are you? All well?”

“We are dahabeeáh Sitta Mariam, Father H—— and party on board. Who are you?”

“How is Mohammed? Fatima has a sore foot. Ali has gone up the river on a corn-boat.” And thus they go on telling all the news. “How many boats up the river? What is going on further down?” The shouting is kept up until the boat passes out of hearing. When we reached Syria, in April, our dragoman there, who had never been in Egypt, knew all about our movements on the Nile. They were communicated from one to another simply by word of mouth, and finally reached his ears.

It is a bright, beautiful moonlight evening. The glittering constellations are reflected deep down in the calm waters beneath us, so distinctly that they seem to have fallen there. Not a ripple disturbs the surface of the water, scarce a breath the stillness of the air. It is a gala night. Ahmud has distributed candles and hasheesh to the crew. They have illuminated the deck and are playing, singing, and dancing. Reis Ahmud, with a sober face, beats the drum, his whole soul seemingly concerned in his occupation. Abiad has the tamborine, a pretty one, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He has been smoking hasheesh—his favorite pastime. His eyes are closed, his head sways backwards and forwards as he sings; he seems to pour out his very life’s spirit in the song. The rest of the crew group around, squatted on the deck, joining in the chorus. Reis Mohammed sits apart; he is fishing. Ahmud, Ali, Ibrahim, and the Nubian pilot look on. Now they become excited; the hasheesh is working on them. Louder, still louder the singing. Abiad surely will not live long; he must be in Paradise now. His soul is going out piece by piece from his lips. The funny little old cook jumps up, puts a wooden spoon in his belt for a pistol, some sugar-cane stalks for swords and daggers. He is a Bedouin. More uproarious the shouting, intermingled with catcalls. He dances the war-dance of the nomadic sons of the desert. The howadjii have come out now; they are interested in this strange, picturesque scene. The excitement is at its height. A lighted candle is placed upon a small stick and put in the river; the current carries it down still burning. There is not wind enough to blow out the flame, and as it floats onward it looks like some will-o’-the-wisp or fairy spirit of the waters reposing serenely on their bosom. The second stage of the hasheesh now comes on; one by one they quiet down. Soon Abiad falls asleep; some of the others follow; a strange stillness succeeds this hilarious uproar. To-morrow will come the reaction, and for a few days they will do but little work.

We have had great trouble to keep our birds. We have now preserved some seventy specimens, from the small black chat to the large crane. The rats will carry them off. So now we suspend them from the centre of the ceiling. The same rat never carries away two birds. I cannot identify each particular rat, and yet I am morally certain of the truth of the above proposition. The skin, when taken off the bird, is covered on the inside with a heavy coating of arsenical soap containing a large amount of arsenic, enough to cut short the career of at least one rat. So if they did carry off our birds, we had the satisfaction of knowing that the birds carried them off in turn. We have been very anxious to kill a crocodile; they are very scarce below the first cataract, but as soon as we passed Philæ we promulgated the following general offer: To the first man who points out a crocodile to any of the howadjii we will give a half-sovereign. If the pilot, or any one in his stead, brings us within reasonable shooting distance, we will present him with one pound; if we kill and secure the crocodile, we will make presents all around. This offer kept them on the alert. Every eye was strained to see the first crocodile—and it takes a practised eye to discern one; for to the uninitiated they appear to be logs of wood lying on the sand. Early on the morning of January 15 the pilot came to us with eyes aglow and pointed out a timsah (crocodile). We were tied up on the west bank, and the reptile was lying on a sand-bank near the eastern shore. There was considerable difference of opinion among the crew, many of them insisting that it was not a timsah. “But,” asks the pilot, “what is it, then? There are no rocks on the sand-banks; it can scarcely be a log, for these are rarely met with in this part of the river.” A council of war was held, and a plan of attack was determined on. Mr. S—— and I, with Ali, the pilot, and four sailors, crossed the river to the sand-bank about half a mile below the spot where slept the timsah in blissful unconsciousness of the fate awaiting him. Bent almost to the ground, we crawled cautiously along. When we had proceeded about a quarter of a mile we found, to our disgust, that the bank upon which we were was separated from the bank on which lay the timsah by twenty yards of water of some depth. The pilot now asked us to fire, but the distance was too great, and we began to be suspicious. The timsah did not move; it was almost too quiet to be real. Mr. S—— and I placed ourselves in the bow of the boat, covered the object with our double-barrelled guns, and ordered the sailors to pull directly towards it. For a few moments the excitement was intense. At the first movement of the timsah four bullets would have shot forth on their death-errand. Nearer and nearer we came. A moment more, and Abiad jumps from the boat, and with a loud shout rushes up the bank and catches hold of the supposed timsah. “Come here, O Reis Dab!” cried he, “and skin your timsah. Stop, I will do it for you.” And he holds up to our astonished eyes a sheepskin. How crestfallen was the pilot, and how the others joked him! It was a chicken-coop covered with a sheepskin, containing three putrid chickens, which had fallen from some dahabeeáh, and, carried by the current on the bank, became embedded there, and was left high and dry when the waters receded.

We have a number of pets on board: a live turtle, a soft-shelled fellow, in color like the mud of its own Nile; a hawk who does not reciprocate our friendship, and snaps at us when we go near him; six chameleons—what strange creatures these are! We have had some twenty of them at different times. As far as we could observe, they ate nothing, and yet throve well as long as we were in their own latitudes. As we returned towards the north they died one after the other. The chameleon is formed somewhat like a lizard, about eight inches in length. Their feet look like a mittened hand—that is to say, a large toe corresponds to the thumb, and the rest of the foot, being solid, appears like the hand enclosed in a mitten. They have very large heads compared with their bodies, and eyes like a frog. They change their color, and, under my own observation, made the changes from light green to yellow, black, brown, blue, and dark green. We would tease them sometimes, and, when irritated, yellow spots would appear over their bodies, and they would try to bite us as we placed our fingers in their large mouths. Their favorite pastime was to climb to the top of a palm branch fastened in the deck; here the first one would remain. The second would hang from the tail of the first, and the third support himself from the second in the same manner. In this position they would remain for hours. If another one wanted to reach the top of the branch, he would crawl deliberately up the backs of the others, who regarded this conversion of themselves into public highways with perfect indifference. Sometimes one of them would roam away and be lost for a day or two, and then be accidentally found in the centre of a basket of tomatoes or on the summit of the main-yard.

On January 17 I strolled into a small village. The houses consisted of four walls of sun-dried clay with a small opening for a doorway; some few had palm branches stretched from wall to wall—apologies for roofs. As I walked on I met a group of young girls; one was reclining on the ground, while the others were dressing her hair. This operation is a very tedious one, and is not repeated oftener than once a month. The hair, which falls to the shoulders, is twisted into numerous braids, the ends of which are fastened with small balls of mud; and to complete the toilet oil is poured over the head. The hair being black and coarse, and the oil giving it a glossy appearance, it presents the effect of braided black tape. Although many of these girls had beautiful eyes and handsome features, yet the howadjii never cared to approach too near them; for the oil runs down in little streams from the crown of their heads to their feet, and their faces appear as if polished with the best French varnish. Our young Nubian cook left us here. This is his home, and he will remain here until we return. He is only twenty years of age, and has not seen his wife for three years. So he takes out of the hold some bracelets, a dozen or two made of buffalo horn, all for his wife, and she will wear them all at the same time, half on each arm. How her eyes will brighten when she sees those bright tin pots and those robes, green, yellow, blue! Surely Suleymán must love his dark-eyed, oily-faced wife. From Assouan to Wady Sabooa, about one hundred miles, no Arabic is spoken. Thence to Wady Halfa it is spoken in many towns. When we pass through a town the whole population turn out en masse, preceded by a leader, who carries on his shoulder the town gun, an old flint-lock musket, generally marked Dublin Castle, carried, mayhap, at Yorktown or Brandywine. A barrel of great length is secured to the stock by six or seven brass bands. Powder is scarce, and the first demand—the gun being put forward to show the need—is always the same: “Barood ta howadjii” (Powder, O howadjii!) We used cartridges altogether, and sometimes, when they were particularly green, we imposed upon them in this way:

Scene, the river-bank. Howadjii has just fired and brought down a bird. Large numbers of Nubians surround him. Gunman comes forward: “Barood ta howadjii.” “Mafish barood ta Wallud” (I have no powder, O boy!) “See these green boxes” (showing cartridges). Wallud looks attentively at them. “Inside each is an afreet [spirit or devil]; we put this in the end of the gun, point it at the bird, 'Imshee y afreet’ (Go, O spirit!), then off he flies and kills the bird.” This ruse was successful two or three times; they looked with awe upon the green boxes, and made no further demands. Often, however, a shout of derision followed this recital. They knew what cartridges were as well as we did. Reis Ahmud pointed out the first real timsah, and received the promised half-sovereign.

On January 19, 1874, at three P.M., we made fast beneath the ever-open eyes of the giant guardians of rock-hewn Ipsamboul. To my mind Ipsamboul, or Aboo-Simbel, is the most interesting temple on the Nile, not even excepting majestic Karnak; for most of the other temples are built in the same manner in which the edifices of the world have been constructed from the earliest ages down to the present time, by stones cut and squared, placed one upon another and held together by clamps, cement, or other means. True, the style and shape in which these stones are cut and arranged differ very much in Egypt and in Greece, in ancient and in modern times; but the taking of numbers of small pieces, and, by joining them together, forming a whole, is common to them all. Aboo-Simbel is not constructed in this way. The side of the mountain facing the river was cut to form a right angle with the surface of the plain, and made smooth and even as a wall, save some projections purposely left at regular distances, and which afterwards were shaped into gigantic figures of victorious Rameses; a small hole was pierced into this surface a few feet above the ground; it was made larger, and carried in further and further full two hundred feet, its roof seemingly upheld by Osiride columns. A similar gallery was cut on either side of this main one. Transverse galleries crossed these, leading to rooms ten in number, and all this cut out of the solid rock, no cement, no clamps, not a joint anywhere—a huge monolithic temple. The inside of the roof is perfectly regular in its lines, with a smooth, even surface; the outside is the rugged mountain top. Surely this was the way to build for immortality.

This style of building, although rare, is not confined to Egypt alone, but was most probably copied from it. I have since seen it in the Brahmin caves of Elephanta in Bombay harbor, and on a small scale in the tombs of the Valley of Josaphat. The temple faces the river and stands close to the bank. As we approach we are struck by the magnitude of the four colossal figures of Rameses II. They are seated on thrones, and the faces that remain are quite expressive. The height without the pedestal is sixty-six feet; the forefinger is three feet in length. Father H——, Madam, and I seated ourselves comfortably on the big toe, and, as I looked upwards into that gigantic face, I thought of the myriads of events, marking epochs of time, that had happened in the great world outside since first the sculptor’s hand had changed the rugged mountain side into these semblances of their warrior-king. The overturner of his dynasty, the illustrious Sesac, had led the victorious Egyptians into the very heart of the Holy City, and carried off from the Temple the golden shields which Solomon had there hung up. Cambyses had marched with thundering tread, laying waste on every hand with fire and sword from Pelusium to Thebes, making this once mighty kingdom a province of far-off Persia. Greece rose from a handful of half-savage shepherds to be the focus of intellect, art, and science, around which clustered the shining lights of the world. Alexander overran the whole of Western Asia, and established in the Delta his mighty race of Macedonian emperors. Rome was founded, sat on her seven hills the proud mistress of the world, fell, and was swallowed up in the rush of succeeding generations. Christianity, starting from its humble Judean home, spread from sea to sea, from the peasant’s hut to the royal palace, revolutionized the world, civilized nations, and, encircling the globe, led back its proselytes to unfold its sacred truths to the descendants of its apostles. Mohammedanism carried its bloody and relentless arms over the vast plains of Asia, through the fruitful valley of the Nile, to the centre of Continental Europe, and was driven back, tottering and gradually receding, to its Eastern cradle. The great republics of the middle ages lived their short span of power, and were lost in the mighty empires that absorbed them. A new world was discovered, and new governments founded therein. And during all this, unshaken by war or tempest, unmoved by change or revolution, these giant figures gazed with never-closing eye upon the swift-flowing river at their feet. Those who give themselves the trouble to inform the world that a perfectly unknown person has visited a monument, and that that unknown person has mutilated it by inscribing his name thereon—a reprehensible practice unfortunately so common in Egypt—may study here the earliest known inscription of this kind. On the leg of one of the figures is cut in rude characters the following inscription in Greek: “King Psamatichus having come to Elephantine, those that were with Psamatichus, the son of Theocles, wrote this. They sailed and came to above Kerkis, to where the river rises ... the Egyptian Amasis. The writer was Damearchon, the son of Amoebichus, and Pelephus, the son of Udamus.” This was written at least six hundred and fifty years before Christ, and the scribblers, desirous of cheap notoriety, are as unknown as their numerous followers who now disfigure the monuments of the world.

Over the entrance is a statue of the god Ra (Sun), to whom Rameses offers a figure of truth. We enter a grand hall supported by eight Osiride pillars, pass through it to a second of four square pillars which leads to the adytum. A number of small chambers are found on both sides of the main hall, and the interior of the walls is covered with intaglio figures and hieroglyphics. At the end of the adytum are four figures in high relief. There is but one opening to the temple—the entrance door—through which alone light can enter. As the first rays of the morning sun were peeping over the Arabian hills, we climbed the steep bank and entered the temple. A flood of golden light poured in, searching every corner, lighting up the figures at the end of the adytum full two hundred feet from the entrance. It seemed as though mighty Ra, as each morn he rose to shower his beneficence upon the world, looked first with soul-melting tenderness upon the home where he would love to linger; slowly he moves on, and with a last fond, longing look he leaves it in darkness till he return next morn. Bats swarm now in its gloomy chambers, and dispute the right of entrance with the howadjii. Alongside the large temple is a smaller one of the same description. A night or two after this we had an altercation on board wherein Reis Mohammed met his match. It was about nine o’clock on a beautiful moonlight night. We were sailing before a light breeze, when suddenly the boat struck a rock. Reis Mohammed winced as though it were himself grating on the rock, and, rushing up to the Nubian pilot who was at the helm, swore by Allah that he would beat him with a stick. The pilot was not at all intimidated. He said in a quiet way that he was sorry, but reminded the irate captain that he was now in his—the pilot’s—country, and that if he struck him he would call out to his people on the bank, who would come aboard and kill the captain. This ended the affair. On January 22 Ahmud brought a beautiful little gazelle on board, for Madam to play with, as he said. She named it Saiida, and it soon became a great favorite with us all. At four P.M. of the same day we reached our destination and tied up at Wady Halfa, a long-stretched-out line of mud-built houses on the east bank. We had travelled seven hundred and ninety-eight miles in forty-one days, including stoppages. A two hours’ donkey-ride over the sands of the desert, and we reached the Ultima Thule of Nile travellers—the rock of Abooseer, overlooking the second cataract. This is much more wild, rapid, and turbulent than the first, and, excepting when the Nile is at its greatest height, is impassable. Almost every traveller who has been here has left his mark upon this rock—a custom which is to be approved here; for no beauty is defaced, but a register of travellers is kept which possesses interest to their friends who may subsequently visit this place. There were six dahabeeáhs there on our arrival, four of them flying the United States flag. We made our presents to the men. They brought us in safety up the Nile; will they do the same going down? So we gave Reis Mohammed one pound, Reis Ahmud ten shillings, one pound each to Ali, Ibrahim, and the cook; and two pounds and ten shillings to be divided among the crew. While we were lying at Wady Halfa the crew prepared the boat for the downward voyage. They took down the trinkeet or large yard from the foremast, and placed in its stead the smaller one from the stern. There are three modes of progression in descending. If there be no wind at all, the men row, five oars on each side; but when the surface of the stream is ruffled by the slightest breath of wind, the men immediately stop rowing, and the boat drifts down with the current. If the wind blow from the south—which is very unusual during the winter—we sail, using, however, only the small balakoom, swung, as I have said, from the mainmast. Some of the planks of the deck are taken up, and an inclined plane made by resting one end of a plank against the cross-beams on a level with the floor of the deck, and the other touching the bottom of the hold. In rowing the men start from the top of this inclined plane, and, walking backwards down it, make five distinct movements in each stroke. As their feet touch the hold they sit down and pull out the stroke.

On January 25, at one in the morning, we left Wady Halfa on the homeward voyage. Ahmud requested us to permit him to bring a slave on the boat. He told us that he had no children, and that he had seen a very fine little boy of nine years whom he could purchase for seventy dollars. His request was refused. We spent an hour or more one beautiful moonlight night seated on the sand beneath the colossi of Aboo-Simbel. We engaged a celebrated hunter to assist us in crocodile-hunting—Abd-el-Kerim, slave of the god, a Nubian with a huge flat nose. The dress of this man of prowess was not elaborate, consisting of a skull-cap and a pair of drawers. He carried the flint-lock musket which I have before described. The lock was carefully bound up in a piece of cloth. We moored the dahabeeáh on the west bank about four miles below Aboo-Simbel. We then rowed about a mile up the river in the small boat, and landed on a sand-bank. Abd-el-Kerim constructed a crocodile of sand—head, tail, legs, and all. We had laid a systematic plan of attack. At sunrise the next morning we were to conceal ourselves behind the sand timsah and wait the coming of the natural ones, thinking that they would take our sand-constructed reptile for one of the family, and go quietly asleep alongside of it. I rose before the sun the next morning, but Kerim did not make his appearance until eight o’clock—he called it sunrise—when the sun was pretty well up in the heavens, and the day began to grow warm. As I stood on the forecastle waiting for him, two Polish dahabeeáhs hove in sight. I knew the party on board; they were distinguished naturalists who were collecting specimens for the museum at Warsaw. They hunted in the most thoroughly systematic manner. The young count, who was not as deeply engaged in the study of natural history as the others, spent an evening with us a week or two afterward, and told us a very amusing story about the rest of the party. They were anxious to secure a certain species of bird. After consulting their books and putting together the general knowledge they possessed concerning the habits of this bird, they established as a positive fact that the said bird would appear on the banks of the Nile at ten o’clock to perform his morning ablutions. So at half-past nine they went out to meet him, but, to their intense astonishment, he did not appear until half-past eleven—overslept himself, no doubt, not being aware of the distinguished company awaiting him. They have been in a great state of excitement ever since, said our young friend, endeavoring to study out the cause of this strange proceeding, as they termed it, of the bird being one hour and a half behind time. As I watched the boats came on, and our sand timsah caught the eye of their dragoman. He rushed down-stairs, woke up the howadjii, who soon appeared on deck. Telescopes were levelled, and, having satisfied themselves that it was a crocodile, they jumped into the small boat and made straight for it. Two of them were in the bow with their rifles cocked covering the timsah. The greatest care and caution were observed. Only a small portion of the heads of the men were visible above the gunwale, and occasionally I could see the dragoman wave his hand as a signal of caution. Finally they stepped on the bank, cautiously approached, saw the deception, and in quick haste retired in evident disgust. I enjoyed this scene all the more as it partially recompensed me for the failure of my first attempt at shooting a crocodile.

About half-past eight Kerim and I concealed ourselves behind the sand timsah, lying flat on our backs. Besides his old flint-lock, which would do good service, we had two double-barrelled guns loaded with heavy balls, and a six-barrelled revolver. I lay in this position for two hours, not even daring to indulge in a cough, which I was sorely tried to repress, and even breathing as quietly as possible. Kerim touched me and told me to peep over the back of the timsah; I did so, and saw ten crocodiles, some swimming in the water and others on the banks, but none near enough to shoot at. I then turned on my face and lay down again. Almost immediately an enormous crocodile stepped out of the water on the bank where we were, within ten feet of us, but seemed to be frightened at something and immediately plunged in again. About two o’clock Kerim turned over, and in so doing spied a flask protruding from my pocket. He took it out, offered it to me, and said, “Take a drink!”—a delicate hint that he wanted some himself. He did not refuse when I offered it, but, filling the cup with twice as much as an ordinary drink, he swallowed it down, rolled his eyes, and ejaculated, “Taib” (good). We found it would be of no avail to wait longer here, so we called the felluka and rowed very quietly a short distance down the stream to a bank upon which two timsahs were lying asleep; at the other end were some rocks. We crept over the rocks until we reached the one nearest the reptiles. At least one hundred yards still separated us from them. Resting my gun on a rock, I took careful aim, fired, and saw the ball strike the side of one of the crocodiles; but its only effect was to hurry him into the river, otherwise he paid no attention to it. We concluded to give up crocodile-hunting now, so we sailed on. At one point a little below this I counted thirty-eight sawagi in sight at one time. These sawagi (singular sagéar) are to Nubia what the shawadeefs are to Egypt. They are of Persian origin, and consist of an endless chain, to which are attached buckets made of burnt clay. The chain passes over a wheel at the top, which is made to revolve by another wheel driven around by buffaloes. These wheels are of wood and never greased. Their creaking and straining are music to the owner’s ears, who in some instances will travel many thousand miles riding the buffaloes round the well-worn circle of their own loved sagéar.

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.
FROM THE FRENCH.

July 28, 1869.

Lord William is in England, and baby Emmanuel in vain asks for “papa.” What a beautiful child he is! My Guy is very handsome also, and I am proud of him. Johanna yields up to me all her prerogatives, and, were it not that he resembles Paul, I could persuade myself that he is quite my own, my dear godson.

Berthe intends to go to Lourdes, to obtain from Mary Immaculate the cure of her daughter. Poor mother! she deceives herself; the child cannot remain in this world, and the day approaches when we shall say, Yesterday the bird was in the cage, but is now flown hence! This morning Anna and the sick girl were leaning over my balcony, looking at the blue sky, over which light clouds were flying. “How beautiful the sky is!” said Anna. “Very sweet, very beautiful, very good,” answered Picciola, joining her hands. “The beauties of nature are admirable, but—” “Kiss me, dear, and don’t look up to heaven in that way; one would think you were going there!” “The truth is that I shall go soon; dear Anna, pray God to comfort my mother!” Anna flew into the room: “Madame, O madame! is this true that Madeleine is telling me?” And she was sobbing. Picciola covered her with kisses, saying: “Why will no one listen when I speak of my happiness?” When Anna was more calm I sent her to her mother, and said to my darling: “Then let us talk about heaven together.” “But, aunt, it grieves you also. Yet I, although the pain of those I love goes to my heart—I feel in myself an indescribable gladness. Oh! if you knew how I thirst for heaven.” “And who tells you that you are going to leave us, dear child? Our Lady of Lourdes will cure you.” “If you love me, do not ask me this; I must not be cured,” she murmured, with a sort of prayerful expression. What do you think about this child, dear Kate?

Our thoughts are much taken up, as you may imagine, with the Council and with Ireland. Adrien has read to us from a goodly folio, come from the Thebaid of our saint, the most sinister predictions with reference to the present time.

Good-by for a little while; I slip this note into Margaret’s envelope.

August 1, 1869.

St. Francis of Sales used to say: “People ask for secrets that they may advance in perfection; for my own part, I know of only one: to love God above all things, and my neighbor as myself.” And Bossuet, that other great master of the spiritual life, said: “Give all to God, search to the very depths, empty your heart for God; he will know very well how to employ and to fill it.” This is what Gertrude has done, who just now quoted these two thoughts to console me. Alas! yes, I cannot resign myself to see her depart, this enchanting soul, so worthy of love. “Remember,” Gertrude said to me, “that God undertakes to give back everything to those who have given him all. I perceive many sacrifices for you, dear Georgina; be worthy of God’s favors, for suffering is one of these.” And she quitted me. She lives so near to God that every word she utters seems to me an oracle, and now I am afraid. O poor soul!—a reed bending to every wind.

“Turn thee to Him who comforts and who heals.” Help me, dear Kate! René, Margaret, and Marcella agree in diverting my attention, but the blow has been given! O my God! If a whole family might but enter heaven all at the same time! if there were no tears of departure! I communicated this morning, and promised our adorable Jesus in the Blessed Eucharist to sacrifice my heart to him.

Berthe, Raoul, and Picciola set out to-morrow for Lourdes; we have not ventured to dissuade the poor mother from this idea. I had a foolish longing to follow them, but I saw in this a first sacrifice, and offered it to obtain courage. If, however, Mary would be pleased to cure her! They will make a novena there, and not return until the 16th. What a long time without seeing her!

Our country neighbor has installed himself, and yesterday paid us his first visit. My mother gave him a more than amiable reception. We all thanked him for the care with which he had attended Anna, who threw her arms round his neck with the greatest simplicity. Marcella replied gracefully to the civilities of the good doctor, who accepted an invitation to dinner. My mother finds him very well bred. He is fifty years of age, very tall, with an open and expressive countenance, most extensive learning, skill, wit, fortune, and above all faith; he is thus in every way worthy of my friend. René has explained this to me, and has ended by requesting me to favor this marriage.

Margaret, on leaving me this evening, whispered in my ear: “Dear, will our fair Roman be insensible? The aspirant belongs to the very first quality of nature’s noblemen.”

Good-by, dear Kate; pray much!

August 6, 1869.

Picciola is at this moment at the miraculous Grotto. Impossible to turn my thoughts away from this child; I see her everywhere. Nevertheless, I cannot complain of any want of distractions; we are out continually. Three days ago M. de Verlhiac (the doctor) gave us a princely reception in his divor. What life! what gayety! Marcella is very pensive and seeks to be alone. Margaret raves about the doctor, and will have him at all our parties; Anna can no longer do without him, my mother likes his conversation, the gentlemen seize upon the slightest pretext for going to the Blue Nest—the name given by Margaret to the dismantled manor of M. de V. You see, dear Kate, all is for the best. Your advice is not, however, useless to me. Oh! how well you have realized what Marcella is to me. But I am not so selfish as to place my affection in the way of her happiness, and I shall know how to make the sacrifice. M. de V. requested an interview with me yesterday. I had remained alone with my mother, who feared to take so long a drive, and it was in her presence that I received our new neighbor. He appeared greatly embarrassed—he, who is so fearless! At last, after a great deal of circumlocution, he related how he had become acquainted with our dear Italians; how much he felt interested in the pretty invalid, whom he had attended with truly paternal solicitude; how the desire had arisen in his heart to become the father of this attractive young creature; and how we had unknowingly destroyed the fragile edifice of his dreams by carrying away from him Mme. de Clissey and her daughter. Their sojourn of last winter had convinced him that without this union he could not be happy. Marcella had answered his proposal by a refusal, which he does not know how to explain.

My mother looked at me, and M. de V. continued: “I know not, madame, whether I am mistaken, but I am persuaded that you have some influence on this determination which crushes my life. Madame de C. does not wish to separate from you.” I was much moved by this confidence, and so much the more because my mother, who had formerly been acquainted with the mother of the good doctor, had told me that morning that she looked forward to this union with pleasure. I promised to do my duty. This conversation lasted three hours. M. de V. is really a remarkable man, and I cannot understand Marcella’s singular behavior. Margaret advises me to speak to her about it; but I think it more prudent to wait. The pretty little Anna unconsciously enlightened me somewhat. This morning, in my room, she was caressing her mother and saying: “Why, then, are you so cold to this good doctor, who likes you so much and who is so like papa? If you knew how affectionately he kisses me!” Marcella blushed and spoke of something else.

Dear Kate, my heart is full; M. de V. has only one dream after that of marrying my friend, which is to settle at Naples. It would then be a permanent separation! “You are in your spring-time, my daughter,” my mother said to me; “beware of the autumn! The lightest breath then carries away by degrees our happiness and our hopes.”

God guard you, dearest!

August 9, 1869.

The doctor has become our habitual companion. He loves poetry, “this choice language, dear to youth and to those whose hearts have remained young”—another connecting link with Marcella. “But they are made for each other,” says Margaret. This southerner shivers at the most delicate breeze of the north. “Good friend, what will you do in winter?” exclaims Anna on seeing him hermetically enfolded in a mantle lined with fur when he arrives of an evening. “Dear, I shall do as the swallows do.” “Bah! you will not go to Athens.” “And why not, if you will go with me?” “Oh! I do not travel without my mother.”

This fragment of conversation shows you that M. de V. is always driving at the same point. Every one rivals the other in extolling the loyalty, the learning, the distinction of the doctor. He must be immensely rich, for he throws gold with open hands among our poor, builds up cottages, gives work to all. Gertrude says: “There is in this man an apostle and a Sister of Charity.” Marcella never utters a word about our dear neighbor, but appears to suffer when others speak of him. Yesterday Margaret wanted to get my mother to promise that we should spend the summer of 1870 in England. “Will you not come also, monsieur?” The handsome countenance of the doctor darkened, and he answered briefly: “Who can promise?” “Oh! do promise, good friend,” exclaimed Anna; “you told me you wished not to leave me!” “Anna, will you water my verbenas?” tranquilly asked Marcella. The child bounded into the garden.

Berthe writes to me every day. The horizon is dark there; the poor mother perceives the full truth.

A Dieu, Kate; may he alone be all to us!

August 16, 1869.

René has written to you, dear sister; thus you know how my time has been occupied. Oh! what a beautiful procession. What singing! What decorations! A corner of Italy in Brittany, to believe the good doctor, who has valiantly paid with his person.

Picciola is here. I have just been to kiss her under her curtains. This pilgrimage has produced a double benefit: it gave the poor parents a few days of hope, and the Immaculate Virgin has caused them to understand all. “She belongs to God before she belongs to us.” Are not these truly Christian words the acceptance of the sacrifice? And Picciola: “How sweet it would have been to die there, dear aunt! But I am very happy to see you again.” O my God!

Margaret is expecting Lord William. Can you picture to yourself the aspect of our colony—our numbers, the noise and movement, the joyous voices calling and answering each other, the animation, the eagerness, of this human hive? Our Bretons say they wish we were here always.

Edith writes often. Lizzy is somewhat silent; the saintly Isa is too much detached from earth to think of us in any way except in her prayers. My letters to Betsy have produced an unexpected effect, thanks to your prayers; this good and charming friend assures me that going to holy Mass and visiting the poor help her marvellously, and that now the days appear too short.

Yesterday we were talking on the terrace—talking about all sorts of things. The word ideal was pronounced. “Who, then, can attain his ideal?” exclaimed M. de Verlhiac. “Life almost always passes away in its pursuit; an intangible phantom, it escapes us precisely at the moment when it seems within our grasp.” “It is, perhaps, because the ideal does not in reality exist on earth,” said Gertrude. “The Christian’s ideal is in heaven!” Whereupon the meditative Anna cried out: “Oh! if only the good God would make haste to put us into his beautiful heaven all together, the south and the north! You would not feel cold up there, good friend!” “Then will the angels place us thus by families?” asked Alix timidly. “Hem! hem! the house is large,” said the doctor; “and, for my part, I see no inconvenience that this 'corner of Italy in Brittany’ would suffer by arranging itself commodiously there on high.”

At this moment Adrien took up a newspaper and read us a fulmination in verse against the centenary of Napoleon, by a writer whose independent pen “is unequalled in freedom and boldness,” according to the ideas of some. M. de V. disapproves strongly: “Cannot a man be of one party without throwing mud at the other? May not the sufferings on St. Helena, the torture more terrible than that of the Prometheus of antiquity, have been accepted by God as an expiation? How far preferable would a little Christian moderation be to all this gall so uselessly poured out into the public prints! And what do they attain, republicans or royalists, after so many words and so much trouble? Great social revolutions arrive only at the hour marked by Providence.” “At all events,” said Johanna, “it is this much-boasted printing which enables us to read so much that is good and so much that is hurtful.” “O madame! Writing, printing! What favors granted to man! What feasts for the understanding and the heart! The genius of evil has known how to draw from these admirable sources the means of perdition; what is it that man has not turned against God? But the divine mercy is greater than our offences, and the Christian’s life ought to be a perpetual Te Deum. Providence pours out in floods before us joys, favors, enjoyments without number, as he scatters flowers in the meadows, birds in the air, angels in space; he has given us poetry, this eternal charm of the earth:

“'Langue qui vient du Ciel, toute limpide et belle,

Et que le monde entend, mais qu’il ne parle pas.’”[11]

You perceive, dear Kate, that I want to make you acquainted with the doctor. But good-night.

August 22, 1869.

Well, dearest, the marriage is arranged. Let me, however, first speak to you about Picciola. She is an angel! She invariably forgets herself, and thinks only of the happiness of others. It is she who organizes our festivities. Dear, delicious child! Thérèse and Anna know not how to show her tenderness enough. I forget what day it was that Marcella said to me: “I think that now I need not be any longer uneasy about my child’s health; there has been no change since that beneficial winter.” Picciola was by me. I looked at her; her eyes shone with a singular brightness, and she said almost involuntarily, and so low that I alone heard her: “Oh! she will be no longer ill.“ Marianne was right: there is a mystery in this, and I want to know what it is. I shall question Mad; she will not resist me. I have entreated the doctor to cure her, and his answer was: “Who can arrest the flight of the bird?“ Thus all is in vain; and yet, in spite of myself, I have moments of wild hope. What a large place this child has taken possession of in my heart!

M. de V. had placed his interests in my hands; it was therefore your Georgina herself who renewed his proposal. At the first word Marcella, much moved, formally refused, begging me to speak to her of something else. Then we had a long explanation. This dear and excellent friend did not want to separate herself from us, out of gratitude! And she was sacrificing her heart; for the devotedness and high character of M. de V. inspire her with as much sympathy as respect. It needed all my eloquence to convince her. In accepting she secures her daughter a protector; the increase of her fortune will allow her still more latitude for the exercise of her benevolence. I know that she loves Italy, and dreams of seeing it again, which would be impossible were she to remain with us; by refusing she crushes out the life of M. de V., etc., etc.

By way of conclusion I drew her into my mother’s room, where we also found René and Edouard, and all four of us together succeeded in obtaining her consent. All, then, is well as regards this matter. Anna is in a state of incomparable joy, as the old books say. We are all happy at the turn affairs have taken, but each in our different degrees. And you, dear Kate? Ah! news of Ireland and again of Edith: Mary is not well. Poor Edith! Good-by, dearest; René calls me, and I must send to the post.

August 25, 1869.

Yesterday’s fête was admirable, according to the doctor, who is a good judge. How impatient he is to carry off Marcella from us! The wedding is fixed for the 20th of September, and the same day the happy couple are to start for Italy. Thus I have not even a month in which to enjoy the society of this delightful friend, so truly the sister of my soul, whom God gave me almost on the grave of Ellen. I busy myself with her about the preparations. Gertrude, the austere Gertrude, sets out to-morrow for Paris with Adrien and M. de V., whom she will direct in the choice of the corbeille. Don’t you admire that? Marcella is calm, serious, but also, she owns to me, profoundly happy.

There will be no more meeting again, I foresee plainly; they will cast anchor down there, but our spirits will be always united before God. Margaret greatly rejoices in the happiness of our dear Roman. Lord William arrived yesterday, and joyous parties are going on. The little angel of the good God is always on the point of taking her flight.

Ah! mon âme voudrait se suspendre à ses ailes

Et la garder encore![12]

René procures me the most agreeable surprises. There has never yet been the least shadow of a cloud between us. You say well, dearest, that with him I shall have happiness everywhere; why, then, should I have hesitated to procure a like happiness for Marcella? I did not tell you that about a year ago this dear friend lost nearly the whole of her fortune, which was in the hands of a banker? Happily, we were the first to hear of it, and have concealed the disaster. Gertrude desired to join us in this hidden good work, and I have with all my heart paid the half of the amount. I am still more glad now to have done so. Hitherto the interest has been sufficient, but, lest the secret should be discovered, Gertrude undertook to arrange the matter with her banker. As it is a considerable sum, we are selling our carriages and one of René’s farms, lest it should make too much difference to our poor; my mother is surprised, but asks no questions. We shall try to live without carriages—so many people live happily, and yet always go on foot! I am certain that you will approve of this, dear Kate. Marcella is too proud to consent to marry M. de V. without any fortune of her own. René is delighted with this arrangement; I believe that he also is in love with the poverty of St. Francis. Oh! how good God is to us! All my kisses to you.

August 28, 1869.

Read yesterday some pretty things on Montaigne. The author of the Essays loved “with a particular affection” poetry, “in which it is not allowable to play the simpleton.” Marcella presented me with a charming poem on Friendship. Oh! I know very well that her warm affection is mine. Listen to this passage taken from a dramatic story which has come into Brittany: “There are redeeming souls, born for salvation. In the path of the divine Crucified One walk silent groups whose mission is to suffer for those who enjoy all the good things of life, to weep for those who sing at feasts, to pray for those who never open their lips in prayer. A large number of these mysterious flowers which perfume the King’s House are even unconscious of their destiny. They follow it, without asking what end is answered by their solitude, and to what purpose are their tears.”

You write to me too deliciously, dear Kate! It is very kind of you to ask after the two adopted little girls. They have been claimed by a relation, and left us after having remained a week. This fresh eclogue could not have had a better ending. The dear children write to Picciola. They are happy; their relative gave us a most favorable impression.

Yesterday a long walk with Margaret, who loves our heaths, our fields of broom, our reedy places, our customs, and who is always ready when there is a good work to be done. My mother is not well—“The effect of old age,” she says. Would that I could keep away all pain from that dear head! Mme. Swetchine says: “All the joys of earth would not assuage our thirst for happiness, and one single sorrow suffices to fold life in a sombre veil, to strike it throughout with nothingness.” How true this is!

St. Augustine is one of René’s patrons; you may imagine whether we have not prayed to him very much. Gertrude writes to me: “Here are some lines which I commend to your meditations: 'All passes, all vanishes away, all is carried away by the river of Eternity. The most sacred and sweet affections we see broken, some by absence—that sleep of the heart—others by a culpable inconstancy; many, alas! by death. The days of our childhood, the years of our youth, the friendships begun in the cradle, the more serious attachments of riper age, the affections of home, the bonds formed at the altar—all are touched, withered, annihilated by the inexorable hand of time.’ Dear Georgina,” continues Gertrude, “all lives again, all arises from its tomb, all becomes again resplendent with God! Hope, then! Excelsior.”

Lord William has brought us a most interesting book—Our Life in the Highlands, by Queen Victoria. What soul! What heart! Why is she not a Catholic? My poor Ireland, when wilt thou recover thy freedom? O Ireland! patria mia!

Thérèse regrets Anna’s approaching departure, but she is courageous. The babies do not take it in the same way, and Marguérite told Anna plainly: “All that you may say to me is of no use. I know Italian, mademoiselle: Chi sta bene, non si muove.”[13] I had to preach for an hour before I could persuade Marguérite to consent to apologize to the dear little Italian, who cried so much at being accused of inconstancy. These little people!

Good-by, dear Kate; Picciola sends you a kiss.

August 30, 1869.

I have just been telling the children the beautiful story of St. Felix and St. Adauctus, as the charming imagination of Margaret had arranged it at the convent. How they listened to me. On turning round I was taken by surprise: René was there! You know that I like to be alone when fulfilling the functions of professor—a title which I usurp from the good abbé, whose charity frequently takes him from home. “Are you displeased?” asked my brother. Displeased! But he and I are altogether one—one and the same soul. Picciola makes profound observations thereupon. Margaret tells me that she said to her: “The soul ought in this world to be with God as Uncle René is with Aunt Georgina, and as you and Lord William.” Margaret was delighted with this comparison.

Letter from the saintly Isa; one might call it a song of heaven. “O charming felicities which I find in this paradise of intelligence and friendship, incomparable joys of the religious affections, delights of the sensible presence of Him who is my all, how dear are you to me!”

Picciola is sleeping in an easy-chair two steps from me. She seems to have scarcely a breath of life left. I questioned her as discreetly as possible; she understood immediately: “Later, aunt, I will tell you.”

What! have I not told you about my six children? The eldest has been taken as femme de chambre by Margaret, the second occupies the same post for Anna, and Thérèse claims the third. The youngest go to school. Johanna wished to take charge of them, but I said, “No, thank you”; she has a family and I am free. René wants to talk business to you. I give up my sheet of paper to him. May God be with us!

September 5.

Only a fortnight more to enjoy the presence of Marcella! The travellers are home again. The corbeille is splendid; but the pious projects of M. de V. are still more so. Did I tell you that he had been connected with M. de Clissey, in a journey the latter took to Naples? M. de C. loved Marcella then, and spoke only of her. He was on the eve of a dangerous expedition. “Promise me,” he said to M. de V., “that in case of my death you will marry her!” M. de V. promised. This is like the tales of knight-errantry. M. de Verlhiac was unable to be present at his friend’s marriage, and, as he was at that time of an adventurous turn of mind, he went away to New York and had no news of the De Clisseys. It was only on Marcella’s account that he settled temporarily at Hyères. You see, this is altogether a romance, but in the best taste possible. M. de V. told us all this after his proposal had been accepted.

All France is interested in the Council; we are praying for this intention. What times we live in, dear Kate! The church is on the eve of terrible trials, say the seers.

Picciola wishes to write to you; but will her poor little hand have the strength to do so? Oh! how touching she is in her serenity. She communicates with great fervor twice a week.

Lizzy, the happy Lizzy! has a son! Gaudete et lætare! I rejoice in her joy! Edith is ill; Mistress Annah says seriously so. Always a shadow!

Farewell, dearest. I have quantities of things to attend to. A thousand kisses.

September 10, 1869.

M. de Verlhiac overwhelms us with presents—no means of refusing them. Marcella appears very happy, although as the time of departure approaches there is an occasional shade upon her brow. The health of M. de V. cannot accommodate itself to Brittany, and the Blue Nest was only a pretext. My mother is purchasing this well-named habitation, to sell it when an opportunity offers. Since we have launched out so strongly in good works, no one allows superfluities.

Gertrude saw Karl, who sighs for the day when he shall offer up at the altar the true and spotless Victim. I love what you tell me of your thoughts on seeing our sister. Ah! dearest, all that God does he does well; great sacrifices suit great souls.

My mother gives fêtes—to us, you understand. But what fêtes! What a large share is left for the poor! What a still larger part given to God! Lucy, the amiable Lucy, gives herself unheard-of trouble for our pleasures. Gertrude gracefully lends herself to our passing follies, to which her dark toilet makes a contrast. I asked her two days ago if she did not sometimes regret the luxuries to which she was accustomed. “Regret, Georgina! Listen to Ludolph the Chartreux: 'The Christian is happy, for, whatever may be his poverty, he has always in himself wherewith to buy the pearl and the treasure; no other price is asked but himself.'”

Sarah is in Spain, whence she sends me magnificent descriptions of the Pyrenees. “When will you come and gather roses on the banks of the Mancanares?” asks my lively friend.

Picciola is asking for me. You would be uneasy. May God have you in his keeping!

September 18, 1869.

René has replaced me in my assiduous correspondence—I have so much to do! Will these words make you smile? Nothing, however, is more true; in our hive every bee has its share of work. M. de V. can no longer keep himself quiet; Marcella weeps at the thought of going away for ever. René mentions the possibility of our again visiting Hyères, and I want to persuade the future couple to give their solemn promise to go thither. It seems as if a part of my heart were going to leave me.

The Bishop of —— will bless the marriage. Oh! would that I could put off this date. It is so sweet to have them here, these dear friends and the charming little Anna! Good-by, Homer! Good-by, our studious hours, our intimate conversations, our so perfect friendship! Her room will remain furnished just as it now is; I shall make it a museum of souvenirs. You know that I have taken the portraits of all three. They wished for copies; so you see why I was too busy to write to you. Only two days more—two days: what is that?

My mother is very thoughtful on my account. For my sake she dreads this departure, this great void; but René is at hand, so ingeniously good and devoted, so attentive, so fraternal! Dearest, pray that they may be happy!

September 21, 1869.

She is gone! These two days have passed away like a dream. I cannot bring myself to realize this idea. Oh! what difference there is between the apprehension and the reality, from the expectation of sorrow to sorrow itself! But she will be happy! How beautiful she was; Anna so graceful, and all three so affectionate! I am now counting the hours until I receive a letter. I am going to occupy myself—study with René, pray with Picciola, meditate with Gertrude. And Margaret—oh! I must make up to her all the time given to Marcella, whom she regrets almost as much as I do.

Picciola occupies me, and very much. She has felt this separation exceedingly, being very fond of Anna. Good-by till to-morrow, dear Kate; I feel myself incapable of writing.

22d.—A word from Mme. de Verlhiac—a greeting written yesterday morning in the carriage. They go farther and farther away. How could I flatter myself that I should be able to keep for myself alone these two Italian flowers? Gertrude has asked me to aid her in a singular operation: the accounts of all her farmers have to be clearly arranged. Adrien does not like these commonplace details. He found yesterday in the woods a little fellow of six years old, roguish as an elf, his hair a tangled bush, his face, hands, and feet alarmingly dirty. “Will you take charge of this child for an hour?” René asked me, as he had letters to write to his brother. What trouble I had to make the little savage clean! Margaret acted as currier; I was quite alone, dreaming of the past. This awoke me, I can assure you. When he was white, I went to find Johanna, who gave me a whole suit of clothes. This little wilding was the torment of his mother; we are going to tame him. As a beginning I have put him to school. He is enchanted to see himself so fine, and looks at himself as if he were a relic. At the same time he is greedy, untruthful, obstinate, lazy—all vices in miniature.

We are going to-morrow to the town; this always amuses the babies. Happy age, when every little change is a festivity! If you knew what a strange sensation I experienced this morning on entering the drawing-room and not finding the two dear faces so long visible there! I thought I should have wept or cried out—it would have done me good—but Gertrude began to converse with me, and the feeling passed away.

I never talk to you now either about my godson or the beautiful Emmanuel; it is very remiss. Both are charming and do not make much noise. Dear little beings! And the day will come when they will be our protectors, these two little nestlings whose warblings are so charming a harmony to our ears. I wish you could hear Margaret say, “My son!” This word has in her mouth such a penetrating sweetness!

Dear Kate, may God be with us!

September 28, 1869.

Can it possibly be true? Père Hyacinthe quits his convent and in some sort separates himself from the Roman Catholic Church. The bad newspapers vie with each other in their applauses, while the good ones groan. Louis Veuillot energetically blames. Pride has much to do with this great fall. Let us pray that he may come back, this apostle who has lost his way! Another star fallen!

Picciola daily grows weaker, and I now know, alas! why she is dying. I would fain give the account with her touching simplicity, but this charm belongs to her alone.

This morning I was in her room; she has not got up since the 22d. “Are you alone, aunt?” “Yes, dearest.” “Because I have something to say to you. I have to ask your pardon.” Poor angel! “My life was my own, was it not, aunt? I could give it away?” “And why, then, did you give it away, my child?” “Aunt, do not be so distressed. You love Mme. Marcella very much, and Anna also. Well! last year, at Orleans, during the winter, Anna had the fever. The doctor came; he examined her a long time, and it was I who conducted him to the door. I asked him if my little friend was very ill. 'She is consumptive, this beautiful child, and will not be cured without a miracle.’ I was very much struck, but did not show it in any way, and from that day I offered all my prayers for her recovery. The day of my First Communion, O aunt! I was so happy. The good God had given me everything. I tried to find a sacrifice to offer to him, and I had nothing but my life; so I asked him to take this in exchange for that of Anna. I felt at the same moment that I was heard, that my prayer would be fully granted. Oh! how happy I was. But, my poor dear aunt, I see you so sad that I am almost sorry; but then you have other nieces, and Mme. Marcella has only one daughter. Do you forgive me?”

My God! my God! Can you understand, Kate, what I felt? “My mother must not know of this,” continued the gentle victim, after a long effort. “You will comfort her, dear aunt! Oh! it is so consoling to die for others. I have a confidence that I shall go to heaven. Monsieur le Curé has told me not to be afraid. I have always suffered ever since my First Communion; but my cross was not heavy like that of our Lord! Oh! I long so for heaven. On earth it is so difficult to keep one’s self always in the presence of God; we shall see him on high. Aunt, what joy it is to die!”

Berthe came into the room, from which I hastened precipitately to hide my tears. I felt thoroughly overcome. What self-devotion! What angelic desires! I told all to René, who had already his suspicions: Anna had so delicate a chest, while our Mad’s constitution was so strong. God has accepted the exchange. Poor Berthe! When she received Marcella with so sisterly a welcome, how little she imagined that with her death entered our dwelling! I am proud of Picciola—but I weep!

Ah! dear Kate, let us bless God for all.

September 30, 1869.

I live as in another world since this revelation. “The holy angels will come and take me,” said Picciola. Margaret, Berthe, Thérèse, Gertrude, and I succeed each other in watching by her. “All my body is broken!” she exclaimed in her delirium; otherwise, never a complaint. She prays, and likes to hear singing; she is full of tenderness. I have no news of Edith. Anna has written from Lyons.

Pray for those who remain, dear Kate!

October 1, 1869.

She has received the last sacraments; her room exhales the perfume of incense. We are all there, whispering prayers.

2d October.—She is in heaven! “Dear angels, thanks, I come!” And her soul fled away. Oh! how I suffer. I loved her too much! I write to you near to her—near to her who is no longer there. I could have wished to follow her when the abbé said: “Go forth from this world, Christian soul!”

Did you know her well, this flower of heaven whose fragrance was so sweet; this soul, open to every noble sentiment; this exceptional understanding, which assimilated everything and was ever advancing?

My mother is well-nigh broken down; Berthe is kneeling, and still kissing this brow so pure, these eyes whose gaze we shall behold no more.

Raoul and Thérèse weep together; Gertrude occupies herself in attending to the sad details; and as for me, I would pour upon this paper all the desolation of my heart.

Shall I have the courage to paint her thus—inanimate—dead? O my God! it is, then, true? That caressing arm will never again pass itself round my neck. That beloved voice will no longer resound in my ears. That aërial footstep will no more reveal her presence. She is gone! She was full of life, and freely, voluntarily she has accepted death and has left us alone.

Kate, how shall I pray, how shall I bless God? If you knew how I loved her!

October 12, 1869.

I am beginning to rise up. For ten days I have been in a state of delirium. I saw Madeleine constantly by me, spoke to her, told her to wait for me—that I did not wish to live without her. René was in despair; but his prayers and yours have been heard. A strange calm has succeeded to the disorder of my thoughts; I have the certainty that Picciola and Edith have entered into everlasting rest. Yes, Edith! How did I learn that she was dead? I do not know, but René saw that I knew it and no longer sought to hide it from me. Adrien leaves us to-day to go and bring hither Mary and Ellen, and also Mistress Annah, who is wanted by Margaret. They compel me to stop. I love you.

October 20, 1869.

I am still weak, dear Kate, but my soul is strengthened. Let us love God, let us love God! I went at noon to the cemetery, to the beloved grave. René accompanied me. Oh! how he also loved her. How sweet she was when she spoke of him! Raoul has taken Berthe and Thérèse into Normandy for a fortnight; their intense grief made him anxious. It is all like a dream; but, alas! she is no longer here. Let us so live that we may rejoin her!

A friend of René’s gave Edith the comfort of embracing her son; our dear friend’s will is addressed to me. René is utterly opposed to the young girls being brought up with us, and we shall no doubt place them at the Sacred Heart. René is right: no one could ever take the place of Picciola in my heart.

Margaret and Gertrude have been angels of consolation to me. How shall I ever repay their tenderness! Ah! it is good to be so loved. Let us always love each other in Jesus, dear Kate!

October 25.

The orphans are come, very touching in their mourning garments. The good Mistress Annah has grown ten years older. Edith died the death of a saint! How painfully this word death sounds in my heart!

My mother does not wish that Berthe should see them here; the generous Adrien offers to accompany them, but Margaret solicits this privilege, with the secret intention, we believe, of paying the first year’s expenses. Kind Margaret! I should like to have kept these children, but in every point of view it is impossible. René fears that I may love them too much—and you also, dear Kate. Thus it is decided that they are to leave us on the 5th.

I send you the journal of the last days of Edith; Mistress Annah wished to give me this consolation, sweet and bitter at the same time. Dear old friend! what good care we are going to take of her. I should like to have her here. Karl will be made a priest on Christmas Eve; we shall therefore be in Paris towards the 10th of December. For how long? I do not yet know. My mother has changed very much since our angel is no longer here. O Christ! O Saviour! O Sovereign Friend of our souls! take compassion on our sorrows.

Johanna is here, by me, with my beautiful godson on her knees, smiling and playing with him in a thousand ways. Oh! how sweet was Picciola in this same place. Alix and Marguérite come every minute to talk to me, to amuse me. Margaret occupies herself in reading to me serious and absorbing things; but—I constantly see her, my little dove that is flown away.

Marcella is at Naples; the letter of mourning reached her there. She does not know what her daughter’s life has cost us, nor will she ever know it. Ah my God! who would have believed that?

Send me your good angel, dear, beloved sister!

TO BE CONTINUED.

PRESBYTERIAN INFIDELITY IN SCOTLAND.

The people of England, as his Eminence Cardinal Manning is fond of saying, never abandoned the Catholic faith; it was torn from them by violence. The people of Ireland were made of sterner stuff; they clung to the faith, successfully resisting the pitiless persecutions to which they were subjected. But the people of Scotland joyfully received the new gospel and took it into their hearts with zealous ardor. In England the sovereign imposed the new religion upon the people, and they submitted to it; in Ireland the whole authority of the civil power, exercised in the most cruel forms, was exhausted in vain attempts to compel the apostasy of the people. In Scotland the people apostatized by their own motion and the Reformation there was essentially a popular movement. The late Archbishop Spalding, in his History of the Protestant Reformation, says that the Reformation in Scotland spread from low to high; that it “worked its way up from the people, through the aid of the nobles, through political combinations and civil commotions, to the foot of the throne itself, and, after having gained the supreme civil power and deposed first the queen-regent and then the queen, it dictated its own terms to the new regent and the new sovereign; and thus, by the strong arm, it firmly established itself on the ruins of the old religion of the country.” The true explanation of the fact that the Reformation in Scotland was a popular movement is to be found in the words of a Protestant writer[14] quoted by Archbishop Spalding: “Scotland, from her local situation, had been less exposed to disturbance from the encroaching ambition, vexatious exactions, and fulminating anathemas of the Vatican court” than other countries; that is to say, the authority of the Holy See for a long time prior to the Reformation had been scarcely felt in Scotland; the wise and wholesome provisions of the canon law had fallen into disuse; the civil power had thrust its own creatures into benefices and bishoprics; and the people had become disgusted by “the scandalous lives, ostentatious pomp, and occasional exactions of the unworthy men who had been thus unlawfully foisted into the bishoprics and abbeys.”

In England and Ireland the influence and authority of the popes had not been thus disregarded; the church there had been kept tolerably pure, and the affection of the people had not been alienated by the faults and crimes of prelates and priests. In Ireland to-day, after three hundred and thirty-six years of Protestant assaults upon the faith, Catholic truth remains as firmly as ever rooted in the hearts and exemplified in the lives of the people. In England the effects of the retention of Catholic tradition are still to be seen: some of the great fasts and festivals of the church are observed as legal holidays; marriages are not solemnized at a later hour than that which formerly was fixed for the celebration of the nuptial Mass; and respectable Protestants, belonging to the Nonconformist societies as well as to the Established Church, abstain from marrying or giving in marriage during Lent.[15] But in Scotland the “blessed Reformation” swept away all these “rags of Popery”; it had full course to run and be glorified; and it made such thorough work that, for example, only within the past few years has even the most modest recognition of Christmas day as a festival been permitted. The Scottish Reformers, having burned the religious houses, stripped and disfigured the churches, and driven the priests from the land, set up the Bible as their fetich, and ordained that it should be worshipped in conformity with the precepts embodied in certain creeds and confessions of faith which they framed to suit themselves. For three hundred years the Scottish Presbyterians have been the most ardent Protestants in the world, and have boasted most loudly of their devotion to, and their implicit faith in, the written Word of God. This, and this alone, contained in itself all that was necessary for salvation; and it were better that a man should never have been born rather than that he should take away from, or add one word to, what was written in this book. God had not on the day of Pentecost called into being, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a body commissioned “to teach all whatsoever he had commanded until the consummation of the world”; he had simply caused a book to be written. “In the books of the Old and New Testaments,” they declared in their “Standards,” “the revelation of God and the declaration of his will are committed wholly unto writing ... and they are all given by inspiration of God to be the only rule of faith and life.” This has been the nominal faith of the Scotch Presbyterians ever since the dawn of the Reformation, and it is their nominal faith to-day. It has long been difficult, however, for the admirers of Scotch Presbyterianism to reconcile the fact that they were at once “the most Bible-loving and whiskey-loving people on the face of the earth”; that their sexual immorality was threefold that of the English, and tenfold that of the Catholic Irish; and that marriage among them had become divested of every form of religious sanction. Close observers of what was going on in Scotland had, indeed, from time to time perceived evidences of the existence and extension of a curious phase of scepticism among the people—a hypocritical and speculative scepticism. The leading journal of the country had for many years, with great skill and with the evident approbation of its constantly-increasing circle of readers, devoted itself to the stealthy inculcation of rationalism and of secularism in education. In private, and sometimes in public, leading members of the various branches of the Presbyterian Church had indulged in covert sneers at this or that article of faith, and every attempt to reprove or punish these heresies by the discipline of the church resulted in failure. Events have now occurred which reveal in a startling manner the extent to which infidelity has made conquest of the Scotch Presbyterian ministers, and which show that those among them who still care to profess their adherence to their standards of faith are unwilling or afraid to attempt either the correction or the expulsion of their atheistic brethren.

A new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica has lately been published, the article “Angels” and the article “Bible” in which work were written by Professor W. R. Smith, of the Free Church College of Aberdeen. Both these articles contained statements which, in the moderate language of the official report before us, and from which we shall quote, “awakened anxiety in the minds of ministers and members of the church.” The affairs of this college are managed by a committee, who are authorized to “originate and prosecute before the church courts processes against any of the professors for heresy or immorality, according to the present laws of the church.” On the 17th of May last this committee “had their attention called” to these writings of Professor Smith; on the 19th of September they appointed seven of their number—Mr. Laughton, Principal Rainy, Principal Douglas, Sir Henry Moncreiff, Professor Smeaton, Dr. Gould, and Professor Candlish—to consider the two articles, and to report to the committee what action, if any, should be taken upon them. On the 17th of October the sub-committee, two members dissenting, reported that they did not find it necessary to say anything about Professor Smith’s views concerning “angels,” but that it would be advisable in the first instance to ask the professor if he had any explanation or apology to offer respecting his article upon the Bible. On the 14th of November the committee received a communication from Professor Smith not at all in the nature of an apology; and on the 17th of January—eight months having been taken for consideration of the matter from the commencement—the committee made their report, which is addressed to the General Assembly of the church. They state that “after carefully examining the article 'Bible,’ and considering with attention the explanations which Professor Smith has been good enough to furnish,” they have not found in the article sufficient ground “to support a process for heresy”—a conclusion from which one member of the committee, Dr. Smeaton, dissents, as will appear, with good reason. It is true, the committee go on to say, that Professor Smith’s statements relating to “the date, authorship, and literary history” of certain books and portions of books in the Bible not only “differ from the opinions which have been most usually maintained in our churches,” but are “such as have been maintained by writers who treat the Scriptures as merely human compositions.” But the committee magnanimously decline to “assume that this circumstance is of itself a ground either of suspicion or complaint,” inasmuch as “much liberty of judgment should be maintained.” They confess, again, that they “have observed with regret that the article does not adequately indicate that the professor holds the divine inspiration” of the Bible, and that he does not “adequately state the view of the Bible taken by the Christian church as a whole.” “A clear note on this point” was much needed, but the professor would not give it, and “the committee are compelled to regard this feature of the case with disapprobation,” since it would have been so easy for the professor, by “a single sentence or clause of a sentence, at successive stages of his argument,” to have “prevented the injurious effect which the committee deprecate.” The professor gave “decided opinions in favor of some of the critical positions maintained by theologians of the destructive school,” and he consistently refrained from blowing hot and cold, as the committee wished him to do, “by showing decisively that he did not agree with their destructive inferences.” But since, in his communication to the committee, Professor Smith “admits direct prediction of the Messias in the Old Testament,” and receives three of the four gospels as “authentic and inspired,” the committee—Professor Smeaton again dissenting—did not think it wise to prosecute him for heresy on these points. They stumbled sadly, however, in their attempts to explain why they resolved to acquit him of flagrant heresy in the expressions of his views “with respect to portions of the Pentateuch, and more particularly to the Book of Deuteronomy.” It would be bad enough, they say, had Professor Smith contented himself with maintaining that the Book of Deuteronomy in its present form could not have been written, for philological reasons, until eight hundred years after the death of Moses. But this would not necessarily prove that the author of the book was not inspired and did not faithfully record the history as it occurred. Professor Smith did worse than this; for he affirmed “that instructions and laws which, in the Book of Deuteronomy, appear as uttered by Moses, are certainly post-Mosaic, and so could not, as a matter of fact, have been uttered by him.” Professor Smith, say the committee, holds:

“1. That various portions of the Levitical institutions, to which a Mosaic authorship is assigned in the Pentateuch, are of later date, having come into the form in which they are exhibited only by degrees, and in days long subsequent to the age of Moses. This is held to be established by discrepancies between different parts of Scripture, which are held to arise when the Mosaic origin is assumed.

“2. In particular, the Book of Deuteronomy, in portions of it which, ex facie, bear to be the record of utterances by Moses, makes reference to institutions and arrangements much later than his time.

“3. This is to be accounted for by assuming that some prophetic person, in later times, threw into this form a series of oracles, embracing at once Mosaic revelations, and modifications, or adaptations which were of later development; all together being thrown into the form of a declaration and testimony of Moses.

“4. That, viewed especially with reference to the literary conceptions and habits of that time and people, the method thus employed was legitimate, and was such as the divine Spirit might sanction and employ. It was designed to teach that the whole body of laws delivered were the fruit of the same seed, had received the same sanction, and were alike inspired by the Spirit which spake by Moses.

“5. The sub-committee do not understand the professor to mean that this involved any fraud upon those to whom the book was delivered. It was given and taken for what it was; however, it may subsequently have been misunderstood, in the professor’s view, in so far as it came to be believed to be an ordinary historical record of actual Mosaic utterances.”

The committee found themselves “obliged to regard this position with grave concern.” They did not feel willing to admit the force of the evidence which Professor Smith relied upon as establishing the non-Mosaic character of some of the Deuteronomic laws; and “the hypothesis of inspired personation applied to such a book as Deuteronomy” appeared to them “highly questionable in itself and in its consequences.” This is stating the case very mildly, especially as they go on to say that the so-called “explanations produced by Professor Smith in his statement have not relieved the apprehensions of the committee,” but, on the contrary, have rather served “to make more evident the stumbling-block for readers of the Bible arising from a theory which represents a book of Scripture as putting into the mouth of Moses regulations that are at variance with institutions which the same theory supposes him to have actually sanctioned.” This theory is “liable to objection and is fitted to create apprehension.” It ascribes to the author of the book “the use of a device which appears unworthy and inadmissible in connection with the divine inspiration and divine authority of such a book as Deuteronomy.”... “The admissions that the statements of the book regarding Moses are not true in the obvious sense will operate in the way of unsettling belief.” The committee are compelled to admit that the article is “of a dangerous and unsettling tendency.” Nevertheless, they declare that they cannot and will not exercise the rights and discharge the duties of their office by instituting a process against Professor Smith for heresy. He has written a most heretical, dangerous, and really blasphemous article, and has caused it to be published in a book of the highest character and of the most extensive circulation. But they have “a cordial sense of his great learning,” and he has been good enough to say that although he has proved that the Holy Spirit lied in certain portions of Deuteronomy, and lent himself to the perpetration of a fraud in other portions, still he can accept the book “as part of the inspired record of revelation, on the witness of our Lord and the testimonium Spiritus Sancti”—the testimony of the same Holy Spirit to whom he has imputed the crimes of falsehood and of fraud! Therefore they declare that they find no fault in Professor Smith other than that of being a little too free in the utterance of his opinions, and, accordingly, they decide to let him go.

From this free and easy deliverance four members of the committee dissented, but on different grounds. One of them thought that Professor Smith’s views respecting angels were as “destructive” and as full of “negations” as were his statements concerning the Bible, and that he should have been arraigned for heresy on this ground. Another—Professor Candlish—was of the opinion that there was no “ground in the articles for concern about Professor Smith’s views”; and a third—Mr. Whyte—insisted that, instead of indulging in “timid and cautious” blame, the committee should have expressed their real feelings of approbation, and given utterance to “a hearty and grateful acknowledgment of the goodness of God to their church in the succession of eminent theologians and teachers he was raising up among them,” and of whom Professor Smith was the chief! The fourth dissentient was Dr. Smeaton, of whom we have already spoken, and who, save the member who was distressed about Professor Smith’s opinions respecting angels, seems to have been the only orthodox person upon the committee. An appendix to the report sets forth the reasons for his dissent at great length, but their purport may be given in a few words. The finding of the committee was “wholly inadequate to the gravity of the offence”; Professor Smith had offered no retractation of his heresies, and he should have been arraigned at the bar of the church. It is absurd for the committee to avow “regret and grave concern” at the expression of heresy by a luminary of the church, and then to “accept a mere profession of loyalty as a sufficient reason for abstaining from further action.” He exposes the inconsistency of the committee’s statement that the professor’s views, while “injurious,” “destructive,” and “naturalistic,” are still compatible with the belief that the book which he declares to be a forgery was inspired by the Holy Ghost.

“I hold,” says Dr. Smeaton, “that the doctrine of inspiration and Professor Smith’s views are irreconcilable, and that this will be evident if, for example, we take account of his theory of Deuteronomy or of his conception of the Song of Solomon. The view which he propounds as to the origin of Deuteronomy is that it is a fictitious personation of Moses by another man, in the unspeakably solemn position of professing to receive and communicate a divine revelation, and that the book was not composed until many centuries after Moses’ death. The point at issue is not alone the age and Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy, but whether this book of Scripture is supposititious, and whether it was after a great interval of time composed and put into the mouth of Moses by another. This fraudulent personation-theory is the lowest depth of criticism; for, as has often been said, the mythical criticism had still this redeeming point, that it did not impute to the writers conscious fabrication. The supposititious or personation-theory, on the contrary, is not in keeping with the character of an honest man, and wholly inconsistent with that of an ambassador from God; and the attempt to exculpate the writer who is said to have put his words into the mouth of Moses, on the supposition that it was well known at the time, only widens the sphere of the fraudulent deception, and makes the receivers of the book act in collusion with the writer in his crime. This theory, which I never expected to encounter in Scotland, overlooks the important fact that, in the very book to which such an origin is ascribed, we find the repeated condemnation of false prophets, of false testimony, and of adding to, or diminishing from, the Word of God; and we must therefore suppose the writer practising deception while exposing falsehood in every form. Professor Smith must make his choice between the reception of the book as an inspired revelation, with all that it purports to be, as written in the time of Moses, and as the work of Moses, or reject it altogether as a fraud and entitled to no respect. There is no middle way. He cannot maintain its fictitious origin, and yet assert its inspiration. However convenient it may be for a speculative theologian to oscillate between the two ideas, as the necessities of a daring criticism may suggest, the notion of a fabricated prophetic programme or of an inspired forgery will be regarded by the general community, as it has always been regarded by me, as no better than the very quintessence of absurdity. The robust common sense of mankind scouts the possibility of the combination. For my part, I could not stultify myself before the church and the world by allowing such an incoherent and self-contradictory juxtaposition of terms. But such a theory, if it could be endured for a moment, would, it is evident, render inspiration incapable of vindication or defence. And the enemies of revelation, I believe, could desire no more effective weapon in their warfare than the power to proclaim that a Christian church permitted a theological teacher to represent any one book of Scripture as an inspired fabrication. But the question forces itself on our minds: If one book may be so described, what is to be the limit of this license, and how far is the concession to be extended in the way of giving a chartered right to similar caricatures of the sacred oracles? I am obliged to add that, in my judgment, Professor Smith’s treatment of the Book of Deuteronomy is tantamount to dropping it from the inspired canon. And the same thing may be said of his mode of representing the scope and purport of the Song of Solomon, to which he denies the spiritual sense, and all that allusion to the communion between the Bridegroom and the Bride which the church of all ages—notwithstanding the wayward tendencies of a few individual writers—has always regarded as immediately connected with its divine origin; for no reason can be shown for its inspiration and canonical rank if it is to be interpreted on the low exegetical conception that it is an earthly love-poem. It will not do to say that this is a dispute about the authorship of a book, and that the authorship of a book is of small moment. I have already stated how much more is involved. But the references to the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy, not only by Peter and Paul (Acts iii. 22; Rom x. 6; x. 19), but by the Lord Jesus Christ himself (Matt. xix. 8), are so express and definite that the denial of that one accredited fact tends to shake the inspiration of many other books of Scripture which explicitly assert or imply it. In conclusion, I regret that the committee, fettered by the interpretation which they have put upon their functions, have not sent up with their report a strong recommendation to the Assembly to deal effectually with the negative and destructive opinions brought to light in Professor Smith’s articles as wholly inconsistent with our recognized doctrines, and contrary to the genius of every Reformed Presbyterian church. This is the first instance that has occurred in any Scottish church of an attack on the genuineness of any book of Scripture on the part of an office-bearer within the church. And the question now raised, and which must be decided one way or other, is whether the negative criticism, with the rationalistic theology which uniformly goes along with it, is to claim a legitimate position within the pale of the Free Church of Scotland? To that I cannot consent. The Continental churches, having neither our spiritual independence nor our Scriptural discipline, can be no guide to us in this matter. Under the control of the state, they are obliged to allow all manner of latitudinarian opinions, and have ceased to put forth any ecclesiastical testimony on great questions. We have what they want, and are bound to call the spiritual independence and Scriptural discipline, which are our distinctive privilege, into active exercise or the side of the divine authority of Scripture. Unfaithfulness or weak concession at this juncture would allow two classes of professors, students, and preachers antagonistic to each other, and end in the long run, as all such false alliances must end, in an ultimate separation between the rationalistic and evangelical elements, as incapable of existing together. Any man of long views, or who has looked into the history of the church, must see this; and, therefore, in the exercise of that inherent authority which we possess, the church must at once nip these opinions in the bud, and do so effectually. On one point I have not the shadow of a doubt. An attack on the genuineness and authority of Scripture, whether dignified by the title of the higher criticism or prompted by the lower scepticism, ought never to be permitted within the church on the part of any office-bearer. We can keep criticism within its proper limits, and this occasion may have been permitted to occur that we may show to other churches how we can act in the exercise of our independent jurisdiction.”

These bold and true words of Dr. Smeaton had no effect upon the decision of the committee; and, so far as that decision goes, it must now be taken for granted that it is not heresy for a minister of the Presbyterian Church to teach that portions of the Holy Scriptures are fictitious, supposititious, fraudulent, and deceptive. By the same decision the Free Church of Scotland has “rendered inspiration incapable of vindication or defence,” and has placed it within the power of the enemies of revelation to say that a Christian church permits a theological teacher to represent Scripture as an inspired fabrication. It might have been expected, however, that this decision would have been received with horror and consternation by the Bible-loving laity of Scotland. The very contrary has proved to be the case, and the only reproof which the committee seems to have received is in the nature of a reproach for their weak affectation of disapproval of Professor Smith’s heresies while really sympathizing with them. The ministers of the Free Church of Scotland are wholly dependent upon the laity for their support, and the control of the laity over them is far-reaching, if it be not absolute. The decision in the case of Professor Smith would have been different had not the laity of the church long since ceased, in a great measure, to cherish that reverence for the written Word which distinguished their ancestors. The Edinburgh Scotsman expresses its belief that there will be “very extensive satisfaction” at the decision of the committee, and confidently assumes that “it will ultimately become the collective judgment of the Free Church.” Dr. Smeaton, it says, is the one member of the committee belonging to the old orthodox party in the church—“a party whose diminishing numbers entirely preclude the possibility of any view springing out of their turn of mind successfully asserting itself against the influence of the majority that has enjoyed so long and mollifying an experience in turning closed into open questions.” Open questions! The inspiration and authenticity of the Bible have become an open question among the Scotch Presbyterians, with the probability that it will soon be decided by a verdict against the book. The Scotsman ridicules the committee for pretending to regard Professor Smith’s position with “grave concern” while they themselves “substantially sympathize with him,” or else know that so many of the people agree with him that to prosecute him for heresy would be dangerous.

Nor is it the Free Church of Scotland alone which has thus, to all appearance, lost its faith in the Scriptures and in the “Standards.” The Rev. David Macrae, of Gourock, one of the most talented and popular ministers of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, declared recently in the presbytery of that body that he and very many—almost all—of his fellow-ministers had ceased to believe, and in some cases to preach, the traditional creed of the church. He, for one, was henceforth resolved to be honest, and was determined no longer to profess what he had ceased to believe, but the majority of his brethren, he thought, would continue for some time to be hypocrites. “The relation of the clergy to the Standards was not an honest one,” he said; “the professed was not the actual creed of the church; our church is professing one creed while holding, and to a large extent preaching, another. I am determined to strike a blow, even though it should be my last, to liberate the church I love from the tyranny of a narrow creed and the hypocrisy of a professed adherence to it.”

The lapse of the Scotch Presbyterians into infidelity may seem to be a startling event, but it was inevitable. If the Bible could have saved them, they would have been safe; but the Bible in itself never yet saved any one, for God did not ordain that it should be written and preserved for that purpose. The Bible, indeed, points out the way to salvation; it is a finger-post directing men to the gate of heaven, but it is not that gate itself, nor even the key which opens it. All non-Catholic sects are certain, sooner or later, to lead their adherents to that pit of perdition on the brink of which the Scotch Presbyterians now seem to be standing—the blind lead the blind, and both fall into the ditch. The Catholic Church in Scotland is small and weak; it is only within a very few years that her growth there has been at all perceptible, and the hierarchy has not been re-established there since it was swept away by the Reformation. But the rapid decline of Scotch Protestantism into practical infidelity may have a favorable effect upon the interests of the church. The really pious of the people—and there are many such—may now begin to turn their eyes towards the living Teacher of God’s word, and listen to her unerring voice; and when they enter her fold they can say that they have abandoned the church of their fathers in order to return to the church of their forefathers.

HOW PERCY BINGHAM CAUGHT HIS TROUT.

One lovely evening towards the end of the month of June, 187-, an outside car jingled into the picturesque little village of Ballynacushla. The sun had set in a flood of golden glory; purple shadows wooed midsummer-night dreams on crested hill and in hooded hollow; a perfumed stillness slept upon the tranquil waters of the Killeries, that wild but beauteous child of the Atlantic, broken only by the shrill note of the curlew seeking its billow-rocked nest, or the tinkle of the sheep-bell on the heather-clad heights of Carrignagolliogue. Lights like truant stars commenced to twinkle in lonely dwellings perched like eyries in the mountain clefts, and night prepared to don her lightest mourning in memory of the departed day.

The rickety vehicle which broke upon the stillness was occupied by two persons—a handsome, aristocratic-looking young man attired in fashionable tourist costume, and the driver, whose general “get-up” would have won the heart of Mr. Boucicault at a single glance.

“That’s a nate finish, yer honner,” he exclaimed, as, bringing a wheel into collision with a huge boulder which lay in the roadway, he decanted the traveller upon the steps of the “Bodkin Arms” at the imminent risk of breaking his neck.

The “Bodkin Arms,” conscious of its whitewash and glowing amber thatch, stood proudly isolated. Its proprietor had been “own man” to Lord Clanricarde, and scandal whispered that a portion of the contents of “the lord’s” cellar was to be found in Tom Burke’s snuggery behind the bottle-bristling bar.

The occupant of the car was flung into the arms of an expectant waiter, who, true to the instincts of that remarkable race, had scented his prey from afar, and calmly awaited its approach. This Ganymede was attired in a cast-off evening dress-coat frescoed in grease; a shirt bearing traces of the despairing grasp of a frantic washerwoman; a necktie of the dimensions of a window-curtain, of faded brocade; and waistcoat with continuations of new corduroy, which wheezed and chirruped with every motion of his lanky frame. His nose and hair vied in richness of ruby, and his eyes mutely implored every object upon which they rested for a sleep—or a drink.

“You got my note?” said the traveller interrogatively.

“Yes, sir, of course, sir.” Of course they had it. The post in the west of Ireland is an eccentric institution, which disgorges letters just as it suits itself, and without any particular scruple as to dates.

“Have you a table d’hôte here?”

This was a strange sound, but the waiter was a bold man.

“Yes, sir, of course, sir! Would you like it hot, sir?”

“Hot! Certainly.”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir! With a taste of lemon in it?”

“I said—Pshaw! Is dinner ready?” said the traveller impatiently.

“Yes, sir, of course, sir; it’s on the fire, sir,” joyously responded the relieved servitor, although the fowls which were to furnish it were engaged in picking up a precarious subsistence at his very feet, and the cabbage to “poultice” the bacon flabbily flourishing in the adjoining garden.

“Get in my traps and rods”—the car was laden with fishing-tackle of the most elaborate description. “Have you good fishing here?”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir—the finest in Ireland. Trouts lepping into the fryin’-pan out of the lake foreninst ye. The marquis took twoscore between where yer standing and Fin Ma Coole’s Rock last Thursday; and Mr. Blake, of Town Hill—more power to him!—hooked six elegant salmon in the pool over, under Kilgobbin Head.”

“I want change of a sovereign.”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir—change for a hundred pound, sir. This way, sir. Mind yer head in regard of that flitch of bacon. It gave Captain Burke a black eye on Friday, and the county inspector got a wallop in the jaw that made his teeth ring like the bell in the middle o’ Mass.” And he led the way into the hotel.

The charioteer, after a prolonged and exciting chase through several interstices in his outer garment, succeeded in fishing up a weather-beaten black pipe, which he proceeded to “ready” with a care and gravity befitting the operation.

“Have ye got a taste o’ fire, Lanty Kerrigan?” addressing a diminutive personage, the remains of whose swallow-tailed frieze coat were connected with his frame through the medium of a hay-rope, and whose general appearance bore a stronger resemblance to that of a scarecrow than a man and a brother. “I’m lost intirely for a shough. The forriner [the stranger] wudn’t stand smokin’, as he sed the tobaccy was infayrior, but never an offer he med me av betther.”

“Howld a minnit, an’ I’ll get ye a hot sod.” And in less than the time specified Lanty returned with a glowing sod of turf snatched from a neighboring fire.

“More power, Lanty!” exclaimed the car-driver, proceeding to utilize the burning brand. “Don’t stan’ too nigh the baste, avic, or she’ll be afther aiting yer waistband and lavin’ ye in yer buff.”

“What soart av a fare have ye, Misther Malone?” asked Lanty, now at a respectful distance from the mare.

“Wan av th’ army—curse o’ Crummle an thim!—from the barrack beyant at Westpoort.”

“Is it a good tack?”

“I’ve me doubts,” shaking his head gravely and taking several wicked whiffs of his dhudheen. “He’s afther axin’ for change, an’ that luks like a naygur.”

“Thrue for ye, Misther Malone! Did ye rouse him at all?” asked the other in an anxious tone. He expected the return of the “forriner” and was taking soundings.

“Rouse him! Begorra, ye might as well be endayvorin’ to rouse a griddle. I’m heart scalded wud him. I soothered him wud stories av the good people, leprechauns, an’ banshees until I was as dhry as a cuckoo.”

“Musha, thin, he must be only fit for wakin’ whin you cudn’t rouse him, Mickey Malone.”

“I’d as lieve have a sack o’ pitaties on me car as—” He stopped short and plunged the pipe into his pocket, as the object of the discussion suddenly appeared upon the steps.

“Here is a sovereign for the car and half a sovereign for yourself,” exclaimed the young officer, tossing the coins to the expectant Malone.

“Shure you won’t forget the little mare, Captain?”

“Forget her? Not likely, or you either, Patsey.”

“Ye’ll throw her a half a crown for to dhrink yer helth, Major?”

“Drink my health? What do you mean?”

“Begorra, she’d take a glass o’ sperrits wud a gauger, Curnil; an’ if she wudn’t I wud. Me an’ her is wan, an’ I’ve dacent manners on my side, so I’ll drink yer honner’s helth an’ that ye may never die till yer fit.”

“That sentiment is worth the money,” laughed the traveller, tossing the half-crown in the air and disappearing into the hotel.

“Well, be the mortial frost, Misther Malone,” cried Lanty Kerrigan in an enthusiastic burst of admiration, “but yer the shupayriorest man in Connemara.”

Percy Bingham, of the —th Regiment of the Line, found Westport even more dreary than the Curragh of Kildare. From the latter he could run up to Dublin in the evening, and return next morning for parade, even if he had to turn into bed afterwards; from Westport there was nothing to be done but the summit of Croagh Patrick or a risky cruise amongst the three hundred little islands dotting Clew Bay. “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” was written upon the entrance to the town. All was dreariness, dulness, and desolation, empty quays, ruined warehouses, and squalid misery. The gentry, with few exceptions, were absentees, and those whom interest or necessity detained in the country spent “the season” in London or Dublin, returning, with weary hearts and empty pockets, to the exile of their homes, there to vegetate until spring and the March rents, wrung from an oppressed tenantry, would enable them to flit citywards once more. To Bingham, to whom London was the capital of the world, and the United Service Club the capital of London, this phase in his military career was a horrid nightmare. Born and bred an Englishman, he had been educated to regard Ireland as little better than a Fiji island, and considerably worse than a West African station; and, filled to the brim with Saxon prejudice, he took up his Irish quarters with mingled feelings of disgust and despair. An ardent disciple of Izaak Walton, he clung to the safety-valve of rod and reel, avenging his exclusion from May Fair and Belgravia by a wicked raid upon every trout-stream within a ten-mile radius of the barracks, and, having obtained a few days’ leave of absence, arrived at Ballynacushla for the purpose of “wetting his line” in the saucy little rivers that joyously leap into the placid bosom of the land-locked Killeries.

“So my dinner is ready at last,” exclaimed Bingham pettishly. A good digestion had waited two mortal hours on appetite.

“Yes, sir, of course, sir!” replied the waiter. “A little derangement of the cabbage, sir, lost a few minutes, but” cheerily “we’re safe and snug now anyway. There’s darling chickens, sir! Look at the lovely bacon, sir! Survey the proportions of the cabbage, sir!” And rubbing his napkin across his perspiring brow, he gazed at the viands, and from the viands to the guest, in alternate glances of admiration and respect.

“Have you a carte?”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir—two of them; likewise a shay and a covered car.”

“A wine carte, I mean.”

“No, sir; we get the wine from Dublin in hampers.”

Percy Bingham forgot that he was not in an English inn where the waiters discuss vintages and prescribe peculiar brands of dry champagne.

“What wines have you?”

“We’ve port wine, sir, and sherry wine, sir, and claret wine, sir, and Mayderial wine, sir,” was the reply, run off with the utmost rapidity.

“Get me a bottle of sherry!”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir.”

In a few minutes the gory-headed factotum returned with the wine, and, uncorking it with a tremendous flourish of arm, napkin, head, and hair, deliberately poured out an overflowing glassful of the amber-colored fluid, and drained it off.

“What the mischief do you mean?” demanded the young officer angrily. “I wanted for to make certain that your honner was getting the right wine.” And placing the bottle at Percy Bingham’s elbow, he somewhat hastily withdrew.

The gallant warrior enjoyed his chicken and bacon and “wisp of cabbage.” The waiter had made his peace by concocting with cunning hand a tumbler of whiskey-punch, hot, strong, and sweet, which Bingham proceeded to sip between the whiffs of a Sabean-odored Lopez. Who fails to build castles upon the creamy smoke, as it fades imperceptibly into space, wafting upwards aspirations, wishes, hopes, dreams—rare and roseate shadows, begotten of bright-eyed fancy? Not Percy Bingham, surely, seated by the open casement, lulled by the murmuring plash of the toying tide, gazing forth into the silent sadness of the gray-hooded summer night. He had lived a butterfly life, and his thoughts were of gay parterres and brilliant flowers. “Of hair-breadth 'scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach” he knew nothing. His game of war was played in the boudoir and drawing-room; his castle was built in May Fair, his châtelaine an ideal. The chain of his meditation was somewhat rudely snapped asunder by an animated dialogue which had commenced in some remote region of the hotel, and which was now being continued beneath the window whereat he reclined. The waiter had evidently been engaged in expostulating with Lanty Kerrigan.

“Don’t run yer head against a stone wall, Lanty avic. Be off to Knockshin, and don’t let the grass grow under yer feet!”

“Faix, it’s little ould Joyce wud think av me feet; it’s me back he’d be lukkin for, an’ a slip av a stick. Sorra a step I’ll go.”

“Miss Mary must get her parcel anyhow.”

“Let her sind for it, thin, av she’s in sich a hurry.”

“An’ so she did. Get a lind av a horse, Lanty.”

“Sorra a horse there’s in the place, barrin’ an ass.”

“Wirra! wirra! She’ll take the tatch off the roof; the blood of the Joyces is cruel hot.”

“Hot or cowld, I’m not goin’ three mile acrass the bogs—-”

“You could coax it into two be manes av a sup, Lanty.”

“Sorra a coax, thin. Coax it yerself, sence yer so onaisy.”

“What’s the row?” asked Percy Bingham from the window.

“It’s in regard to a parcel for Miss Joyce, yer honner,” replied Lanty, stepping forward.

“And who is Miss Joyce?” said Percy, intensely amused.

“O mother o’ Moses! he doesn’t know the beautifullest craythur in the intire cunthry,” exclaimed Lanty, hastily adding: “She’s the faymale daughther av ould Miles Joyce, of Knockshin beyant, wan av the rale owld anshient families that kep’ up Connemara sence the times av Julius Saysar.”

“And you have a parcel for her?”

“Troth, thin, I have, bad cess to it! It kem up Lough Corrib, an’ round be Cong, insted of takin’ the car to Clifden, all the ways from Dublin, in a box as big as a turf creel. It’s a gownd—no less—for a grate party to-night; an’, begorra, while it’s lyin’ here they’re goin’ to stay at Frinchpark.”

“It’s too bad,” thought Bingham, “to have the poor girl sold on account of the laziness of this idle rascal. Her heart may be set upon this dress. A new ball-dress is an epoch in a young girl’s existence, and a ball dress in this out-of-the way place is a fairy gift. Hinc illæ lachrymæ! How many hopes cruelly blasted, how many anticipated victories turned into humiliating defeat. If it were not so late—By Jove! it shall not be.” And yielding to a sudden impulse, Percy Bingham ordered Kerrigan to start for Knockshin.

“It’s five mile, yer honner, an’—”

“There is sixpence a mile for you. Go!” And in another instant the parcel-laden Lanty had taken to the bog like a snipe.

Percy Bingham attacked his breakfast upon the following morning with a gusto hitherto unknown to him. “I wonder did that girl”—he had forgotten her name—“get the dress in time? I hope so. How fresh these eggs are! I wonder if she’s as pretty as that ragamuffin described her? These salmon cutlets are perfection. I must have a look at her, at all events. 'Pon my life! those kidneys are devilled to a grain of pepper. This ought to be a good trout day. One more rasher. By George! if the colonel saw me perform this breakfast, he’d make me exchange into the heavies.”

Lighting a cigar and seating himself upon a granite boulder by the edge of the inlet, the purple mountains shutting him in from the world, he proceeded to assort his flies and to “put up” his casts.

“Musha, but yer honor has the hoighth av decoys!” observed Lanty Kerrigan, touching the dilapidated brim of his caubeen, and seating himself beside him. There is a masonry amongst the gentle craft which levels rank, and “a big fish” will bring peer and peasant cheek by jowl on terms of the most familiar intercourse.

“Yes, that’s a good book,” said Percy, with a justifiable pride in his tone. The colors of the rainbow, the ornithology of the habitable globe, were represented within its parchment folds. “This ought to be a good day, Lanty.”

“Shure enough,” looking up at the sky. “More betoken, I seen Finnegan’s throut as I come acrass the steppin’-stones there below.”

“Finnegan’s trout! What sort of a trout is that?” asked the officer.

“Pether Finnegan was a great fisher in these parts, yer honor. Nothin’ cud bate him. He’d ketch a fish as shure as he wetted a line, an’ no matther how cute or cunnin’, he’d hav thim out av the wather before they cud cry murther. But there was wan ould throut of shupayrior knowledge that was well fed on the hoighth av wurrums an’ flies, an’ he knew Pether Finnegan, an’, begorra, Pether knew him. They used for to stand foreninst wan another for days an’ days, Pether flappin’ the wather, an’ th’ ould throut flappin’ his tail. 'I’ll hav ye, me man,’ sez Pether. 'I’ll have ye, av I was to ketch ye in me arms like a new born babe', sez he. 'I never was bet be a man yet,’ sez he, 'an’ be the mortial I’m not goin’ for to be bet be a fish.’ So he ups, yer honor, an’, puttin’ a cupple o’ quarts o’ whiskey in his pockets for to keep up his heart, he ups an’ begins for to fish in airnest an’ for the bare life. First he thried flies, an’ thin he thried wurrums, an’ thin he thried all soarts av combusticles; but th’ ould throut turned up his nose at the entirety, an’ Pether seen him colloguerin’ wud the other throuts, an’ puttin’ his comether on thim for to take it aisy an’ lave Pether’s decoys alone. Well, sir, Pether Finnegan was a hot man an’ aisy riz—the heavens be his bed!—an’ whin he seen the conspiracy for to defraud him, an’ the young throuts laffin’ at him, he boiled over like a kittle, an’ shoutin’, 'I’ll spile yer divarshin,’ med a dart into the river. His body was got, the bottles was safe in his pockets, but, be the mortial frost, th’ ould throut got at the whiskey an’ dhrank it every dhrop.”

“I must endeavor to catch him,” laughed Percy Bingham.

“Ketch him!” exclaimed Lanty indignantly. “Wisha, you wudn’t ketch him, nor all the fusileers an’ bombardiers in th’ army wudn’t ketch him, nor th’ ould boy himself—the Lord be betune us an’ harm!—wudn’t ketch him. He’s as cute as the say-sarpint or the whale that swallied Juno.”

“What do the trout take best here?” asked Bingham, whose preparations were nearly completed, his rod being set up and festoons of casting-lines encircling his white felt hat.

“Wurrums is choice afther a flood; dough is shupayrior whin they’re leppin’ lively; but av all the baits that ever consaled a hook there’s non aiquail to corbait—it’s the choicest decoy goin’. A throut wud make a grab at a corbait av the rattles was in his troath an’ a pike grippin’ him be the tail.”

Lanty Kerrigan was told off as cicerone, guide, philosopher, and friend.

“I suppose I am safe in fishing these rivers. No bailiff or hinderance?” asked Percy Bingham of the landlord of the “Bodkin Arms.”

“There’s no wan to hinder you, sir; so a good take to you,” was the reply. “I hope ye won’t come across old Miles Joyce, for if ye do there’ll be wigs on the green,” he added under his breath as he turned into the bar.

A cook it was her station,

The first in the Irish nation.

Wud carvin’ blade she’d slash away to the company’s admiration,

sang Lanty Kerrigan, prolonging the last syllable—a custom with his class—into a kind of wail, as he merrily led the way through a narrow mountain pass, inaccessible save to pedestrians, in the direction of the fishing-ground. It was a sombre morning. Nature was in a meditative mood, and forbade the prying glances of the sun. The white mists hung like bridal veils over hill and dale, mellowing the dark green of the pine-trees and the blue of the distant Atlantic, occasionally visible as they pursued their zigzag, upward course. A light breeze—“the angler’s luck”—gently fanned the cheek, and the sprouting gorse and tender ferns were telling their rosaries on glittering beads of diamond dew.

“This is Lough Cruagh, yer honor, an’ there’s the boat; av ye don’t ketch the full av her, it’s a quare thing.” The lake, a pool of dark-brown water, lay in the lap of an amphitheatre of verdureless, grim, gaunt-looking mountains. It was a desolate place. No living thing broke upon the solitude, and the silence was as complete as if the barren crags had whispered the single word “hush” and awaited the awful approach of thunder. A road ran by the edge of the lake, but it was grass-grown and showed no sign of traffic, not even the imprint of a horse’s foot.

“Now she’s aff,” cried Lanty, seizing the oars. “Out wud yer flies, an’ more power to yer elbow.”

The sport was splendid. No sooner had his tail-fly touched the water than an enormous trout plunged at it with a splash like that of a small boy taking a header, and away went the line off the reel as though it were being uncoiled by machinery—up the lake, down the lake, across the lake; now winding in, now giving the rod until it bent like a whip; now catching a glimpse of the fish, now fearing for the line on the bottom rocks.

“If the gut howlds ye’ll bate him, brave as he is,” exclaimed Lanty Kerrigan in an ecstasy of apprehension.

The fish was taking it quietly—il faut reculer pour mieux sauter—preparing for another effort. Percy Bingham wiped the perspiration from his brow; his work was cut out for him.

“Now’s the time for a dart o’ sperrits,” said Kerrigan, dexterously shipping his oars and unfastening the lid of the hamper. “Ye won’t, yer honner?”—Bingham had expressed dissent. “Well, begorra, here’s luck, an’ that it may be good,” pouring out a dropsied glassful and tossing it off. “That’s shupayrior,” with a smack; “its warmin’ me stomick like a bonfire! Whisht!” he added in an alarmed whisper, “who the dickens is this is comin’ along the road?”

A mail phaeton, attached to a pair of spanking grays, came swiftly and silently along the grass-grown causeway. An elderly, aristocratic-looking man was driving, and beside him sat a young and beautiful girl. “Be the hokey! we’re bet; it’s ould Miles Joyce himself,” cried Lanty Kerrigan.

“Is that Miss Joyce, the young lady to whom you took the box last night?” asked Percy somewhat eagerly.

“Och wirra! wirra! to be shure it is, an’ that same box is our only chance now.”

“Pull nearer shore, Lanty,” said the young officer, who was very anxious for a stare. “Good style,” he muttered. “Tight head, delicious plaits, Regent Street hat—ma foi! who would think of meeting anything like this in a devil’s punchbowl? Pull into shore, man,” he testily cried.

“Shure I’m pullin’ me level best.”

“Not that shore, you idiot. Pull for the carriage.” Lanty was straining in the opposite direction.

“Are ye mad, sir?” whispered Kerrigan. “I wudn’t face ould Joyce this blessed minit for a crock o’ goold.”

The carriage drew up, and the driver in an authoritative voice shouted: “Bring that boat here.”

“We’re bet; I tould you so,” gasped Lanty, reluctantly heading the boat in the direction of the carriage. A few strokes brought them to the beach.

Percy Bingham raked up his eye-glass and gazed ardently at Mary Joyce, who returned the stare with compound interest. Irish gray eyes with black, sweeping lashes, hawthorn-blossoms on her brow, apple-blossoms on her cheeks, rose-buds on her lips, purple blood in her veins, youth and grace and modesty hovering about her like a delicious perfume.

“May I ask by whose authority you are fishing here?” Mr. Joyce was pale, and suppressed anger scintillated in his eyes. There are a great many things to be done with impunity in Connemara, but poaching is the seven deadly sins rolled into one. “Thou shalt not fish” is the eleventh commandment. Bingham felt the awkwardness of his position at a glance, and met it like a gentleman.

“I cannot say that I am here by any person’s authority. I am stopping at the 'Bodkin Arms’—”

“Och murther! murther! howld your whisht,” interposed Lanty in a hoarse whisper.

“Silence, fellow!” cried Bingham. “I am stopping at the 'Bodkin Arms,’ and, upon asking the proprietor if there was any hinderance to my fishing, he replied that there was none. I ought, perhaps, to have been more explicit with him.”

“Av coorse ye shud,” interrupted Lanty.

“And I can only say”—here he stared very hard at Mary Joyce—“that it mortifies me more than I can possibly express to you to be placed in this extremely painful position.”

“Do not say one word about it,” said Mr. Joyce in a courteous tone. “With the proprietor of the 'Bodkin Arms’ I know how to deal, and with you too, Lanty Kerrigan.” Lanty wriggled in the boat till it rocked again. “But as for you, sir, all I can say is that I regret to have disturbed your fishing, and I wish you very good sport.” And he bowed with haughty politeness.

“I thank you very much for your courtesy,” bowed Bingham, who had by this time landed from the boat, “but I shall no longer continue an intruder.” And seizing his rod, he snapped it thrice across his knee and flung it into the lake.

It was Mary Joyce’s bright eyes that led him to this folly—he wanted to be set right with her.

“Oh! how stupid,” she exclaimed, starting to her feet.

“Thrue for ye, miss,” added Lanty—“two-pound tin gone like a dhrink, an’ an illigant throut into the bargain.”

“A wilful man must have his way,” said Mr. Joyce; “but I hope, sir, that you will afford me an opportunity of enabling you to enjoy a day’s sport in better waters than these.” And lifting his hat, he waved an adieu as the fiery grays plunged onwards and out of sight.

And Mary Joyce! Yes, that charming little head bent to him, those sweeping lashes lifted themselves that the glory of her gray eyes might be revealed to him, the rose-bud lips had dropped three perfumed petals, three insignificant little words, “Oh! how stupid”; and these were the first words in the first chapter of Percy Bingham’s first love.

He found the following note awaiting him at the hotel:

“Knockshin, June 28.

“Mr. Joyce will be happy if Mr. Bingham will take a day on Shauraunthurga—Monday, if possible—as Mr. J. intends fishing upon that day. A salmon rod and flies are at Mr. Bingham’s disposal.

“—— Bingham, Esq.”

Percy Bingham sent a polite acknowledgment and acceptance, and wished for the Monday. It was very late that night when the warrior returned to his quarters. He had been mooning around Mary Joyce’s bower at Knockshin.

“What Masses have you here, Foxey?” asked Bingham of the waiter, whose real name was Redmond, but to whom this appellation was given on account of the color of his hair.

“The last Mass is first Mass now, sir. Father James is sick, and Father Luke, a missioner, is doing duty for the whole barony.”

“Is Mr. Joyce, of Knockshin, a Catholic?” This in some trepidation.

“Yes, sir, of course, sir—wan of the ould stock, sir; and Miss Mary, his daughter, sir, plays the harmonicum, sir, elegant.”

“What hour does Mass commence?”

“That’s the first bell, sir, but they ring two first bells always.”

Percy Bingham belonged to a family that had held to the faith when the tide of the Reformation was sweeping lands, titles, and honors before it. He fought for the Catholic cause when it became necessary to strike a blow; and as he was the only “popish” officer in the regiment, his good example developed into a duty.

Just as he arrived at the church door the Joyce carriage drew up. Mr. Joyce handed out his daughter. The gray eyes encountered those of the young officer, who lifted his hat. Such a smile!—a sunbeam on the first primrose of spring.

“I was glad to get your note, Mr. Bingham. Could you manage to come over to breakfast? Military men don’t mind a short march.” And Mr. Joyce shook hands with him.

“Am I to have the pleasure of hearing Miss Joyce’s harmonium to-day?” asked Percy.

“No; Miss Joyce’s harmonium has a sore throat.”

Poor Bingham struggled hard to say his prayers, to collect his wandering thoughts. He was badly hit; the ruddy archer had sent his arrow home to the very feathers. He humbly waited for a glance as Miss Joyce drove away after Mass, and he got it. He was supremely happy and supremely miserable.

The “missioner,” a young Dominican, very tall and very distinguished-looking, crossed the chapel yard, followed by exclamations of praise and admiration from voteens who still knelt about in picturesque attitudes: “God be good to him!” “The heavens open to him!” “May the saints warm him to glory!” while one old woman, who succeeded in catching the hem of his robe, exclaimed enthusiastically:

“Och, thin, but it’s yerself that knows how to spake the word o’ God; it’s yerself that’s the darlint fine man. Shure we never knew what sin was till ye come amongst us.”

Percy Bingham found Knockshin a square-built, stone mansion, with a “disinheriting countenance” of many windows, surrounded by huge elms containing an unusually uproarious rookery. A huge “free classic” porch surmounted a set of massive steps, supported by granite griffins grasping shields with the Joyce arms quartered thereon. A lily-laden pond, encircled by closely-shaven grass sacred to croquet, stood opposite the house, and a pretentious conservatory of modern construction ran along the greater portion of one wing.

The gallant warrior, regretting certain London-built garments reposing at Westport, arrayed himself in his “Sunday best,” and, being somewhat vain of his calves, appeared in all the woollen bravery of Knickerbockers and Highland stockings.

Miss Joyce did the honors of the breakfast-table in white muslin and sunny smiles. Possessing the air of a high-born dame, there was an Irish softness, like the mist on the mountains, that imparted an indescribable charm to all her movements, whilst a slight touch of the brogue only added to the music of a voice ever soft, gentle, and low.

Percy, who could have talked like a sewing-machine to Lady Clara Vere de Vere, found his ideas dry up, and, when violently spurred, merely develop themselves in monosyllables. He had rehearsed several bright little nothings which were to have been laid like bonbons at her feet. Where were they now?

She knew some men in the service—Mr. Poynter in the Rifles. Did he know Mr. Poynter, who danced so well, talked so charmingly, and was so handsome? Yes, he knew Poynter, and hated him from that moment. Did he know Captain Wyberts of the Bays, the Victoria Cross man whom she had met at the Galway Hunt Ball? He knew Wyberts, and cursed the luck that placed no decoration upon his tunic but a silken sash.

“By the way, you must be the gentleman who interested himself in my toilet on Friday night. Lanty Kerrigan spoke burning words in your favor, if you are the preux chevalier. Are you?”

“I assure you, Miss Joyce, I didn’t know who you were at the time, when the blackguards seemed lazy about your parcel.”

“If you had known me, would that have made any difference, Mr. Bingham?” she asked laughingly.

“It would.”

“In what way?”

“I would have thrashed Lanty Kerrigan and have brought the parcel myself.” He threw so much earnestness into this that the red blood flushed up to the roots of Mary Joyce’s rich brown hair. “I must see to my tackle,” she said in a confused way.

“Are you an angler, Miss Joyce?”

“Look at my boots”—a pair of dainty, dumpy little things such as Cinderella must have worn on sloppy days when walking with the prince, with roguish little nails all over the soles crying, “Stamp on us; we like it,” and creamy laces fit for tying up bride-cake.

“By Jove!” exclaimed Percy Bingham, and that was all he was able to reach at that particular moment. He thought afterwards of all he could have said and—didn’t.

A walk of half a mile brought them to the Shauraunthurga, or “Boiling Caldron,” whose seething waters dashed from rock to rock, and boiled in many whirlpools as it rushed madly onwards to the wild Atlantic.

What did Bingham care about the fishing? Not a dump. He stood by her side, set up her cast, sorted her flies, spliced the top joint of her rod, and watched with feverish anxiety the eccentric movement of her gorgeous decoy, as it whirled hither and thither, now on the peat-brown waters, now in the soap-suds-like foam.

“Bravissima! Splendidly struck!” he cried with enthusiastic delight—he felt inclined to pat her on the back—as the young Galway girl, with “sweet and cunning” hand, hooked her fish with the aplomb and dexterity of a Highland gillie. “Give him line, plenty of rope, and mind your footing!”

“A long hour by Shrewsbury clock” did Mary Joyce play that salmon. Her gloves were torn to shreds, her hat became a victim to the Shauraunthurga, her sheeny hair fell down her shoulders long below her waist, her boasted boots indicated eruptive tendencies, but the plucky girl still held on. “Let me alone, please,” she would cry as her father or Bingham tendered their services; “I’m not half-tired yet.” The color in her cheeks, the fire in her eye, the delicate nostril expanded, the undulating form—the British subaltern saw all this, and almost envied the fish, inasmuch as it was her centre point of interest.

“The landing-net! Quickly! I have him now!”

Percy Bingham darted forward, caught his foot in the gnarled root of a tree, and plunged headforemost into the boiling waters. An expert swimmer, he soon reappeared and swam towards the bank, still grasping the net. Finding his right arm powerless, and having succeeded in gaining footing, he placed the net beneath the fish, which with a bound sprang clear, and, breaking the line that Miss Joyce had slackened in her anxiety for the safety of her guest, was, in an exhausted condition, floundering down the stream, when Percy, by a supreme effort, clasped it fiercely in his left arm and flung himself on to the bank.

“Your fish after all. But you look ill, Mr. Bingham—dreadfully ill,” cried the agitated girl. “Your arm—”

“Is broken,” he said.

Assisted by Mr. Joyce and his daughter, and with the fractured limb in a sling constructed of handkerchiefs and fishing-line, poor Bingham returned to the house. He fought bravely against the pain, and attempted one or two mournful jokes upon the subject of his mishap; but every step was mortal anguish, and he expected to feel the serrated edges of the bones sawing out through his coat-sleeve.

“I must insist upon being permitted to return to my hotel, Mr. Joyce,” said Percy Bingham when they had arrived.

“If you want every bone in your body broken, you’ll repeat that again, Bingham. Here is a room ready for you, and here, in the nick of time, is Doctor Fogarty.”

“I cotch him at the crass-roads,” panted the breathless messenger whom Mr. Joyce had despatched in quest of the bone-setter.

“A broken arm, pooh hoo! And so it is—an elegant fracture, pooh hoo! You did it well when you went about it. Lend me your scissors, Miss Mary, and tear up a sheet into bandages. I’ll soon set it for him, pooh hoo! Ay, wince away, ma bouchal; roar murdher, and it will do you good, pooh hoo! Some splints now. Fell into the river, pooh hoo! After a salmon. You landed him like a child in arms. I forgive you, pooh hoo! I’ve room for the fish in me gig, and broiled salmon is—pooh hoo! That’s it; the arm this way, as if ye were goin’ to hit me. Well done, pooh hoo! Ars longa est; so is your arm—an elegant biceps, pooh hoo! Now, sir, tell me if there’s a surgeon-major in the whole British army, horse, foot, and dragoon, that could set your arm in less time, pooh hoo?” and the doctor regarded the swathed and bandaged limb with looks of the profoundest admiration.

“I shall want to get to barracks—”

“Ne’er a barracks will ye see this side of Lady Day; so make your mind easy on that score, pooh hoo! Keep in bed till I see you again, pooh hoo! I’ll order you something to take about bed-time, but it won’t be whiskey-punch, pooh hoo!” And the genial practitioner pooh-hoo’d out of the apartment.

How delightful is convalescence—that dreamy condition in which the thoughts float upwards and the earthly tenement is all but etherealized! Percy Bingham, as he reclined upon a sofa at an open window, through which the perfume of flowers, the hum of summer, with the murmur of the rolling Shauraunthurga, stole like strains of melody, lay like one entranced, languidly sipping the intoxicating sweets of the hour, forgetful of the past, unmindful of the future. The events of the last few days seemed like a vision. Could it be possible that he would suddenly awake and find himself in the dismal walls of his quarters at Westport, far, far away from chintz and lace and from her? No; this was her book which lay upon his lap; that bouquet was culled by her fair hands; the spirited sketch of a man taking a header spread-eagle fashion was from her pencil and must be sent to Punch. She was in everything, everywhere, and, most of all, in the inner sanctuary of his heart.

He had not seen much of her—a visit in the morning like a gleam of sunlight; a chat in the gloaming, sweet as vesper-bell; occasional badinage from the garden to his window, and that was all. How could he hope to win her, this peerless girl, this heiress of the “Joyce country,” whose gray eyes rested upon mead and mountain, lake and valley, her rightful dower? He sickened at the thought. Had she been poor, he would woo, and perhaps—It was not to be. He had tarried till it was too late; he had cut down the bridge behind him, burned his boats, and he must now ford the river of his lost peace of mind as best he might.

Days flew by, and still the young officer lingered at Knockshin. Like the fairy prince in the enchanted wood, he could discover no exit. Croquet had developed into short strolls, short strolls into long walks, long walks into excursions. His arm was getting strong again. Mr. Joyce talked “soldier” with him. He had been in the Connaught Rangers, and went through pipe-clay and the orderly book with the freshness of a “sub” of six weeks’ standing. Mary—what did she speak about? Anything, everything, nothing. Latterly she had been eloquently silent, while Percy Bingham, if he did not actually, might have fairly, counted the beatings of his heart as it bumped against his ribs. They spoke more at than to each other, and when their eyes met the glance was withdrawn by both with electrical rapidity. It was the old, old story. Why repeat it here?

“Mary, Jack Bodkin, your old sweetheart, is coming over for a few days’ fishing,” exclaimed Mr. Joyce one morning upon the arrival of the letter-bag.

Miss Joyce blushed scarlet—a blush that will not be put off; a blush that plunges into the hair, comes out on the eyelids, and sets the ears upon fire—and Percy Bingham, as she grew red, became deadly white. The knell had rung, the hour had come.

“This is from the colonel,” extending a letter as he spoke, the words choking him, “and—and I must say good-by.”

“Sorry for it, Bingham, but duty is duty. No chance of an extension?” asked Joyce.

“None, sir.”

And she said not a word. There was crushing bitterness in this. Mr. Bodkin’s arrival blotted out his departure. Would that he had never seen Knockshin or Mary! No, he could not think that, and, now that he was about to leave her, he felt what that severance would cost him.

The car was waiting with his impedimenta, and he sought her to say farewell. She was not in the conservatory or drawing-room, and as a last chance he tried the library. Entering noiselessly, he found Mary Joyce leaning her head upon her hands, her hands upon the mantel-piece and sobbing as if her heart would break.

“I beg your pardon!” he stammered. “Is—is—anything the—”

“A bad toothache,” she burst in passionately, without looking up.

What could he do? What could he say?

“I—I—do not know how to apologize for—for—intruding upon your anguish”—the words came very slowly, swelling, too, in his throat—“but I cannot, cannot leave without wishing you good-by and thanking you for the sunniest hours of my life.”

“You—you are g-going, then?” without looking round.

“I go to—to make room for Mr. Bodkin.”

She faced him. Her eyes were red and swollen, but down, down in their liquid depths he beheld—something that young men find once in a lifetime. He never remembered what he did, he never recollected what he said, but the truth came out as such truths will come out.

“And to think that you first learned of my existence through the medium of a pitiful ball-dress!” she said, glowing with beautiful happiness.

“I shall not require the car,” said Percy Bingham an hour later, throwing Lanty Kerrigan a sovereign.

“Bedad, ye needn’t have tould me,” exclaimed Lanty with a broad grin. “I seen yez coortin’ through the windy.”

PROF. YOUMANS v. DR. W. M. TAYLOR ON EVOLUTION AND THE COPERNICAN THEORY.

The Popular Science Monthly, conducted by Mr. E. L. Youmans, labors hard (December, 1876) to support the assertion made by Professor Huxley that evolution is already as well demonstrated as the Copernican theory. This assertion had been refuted by the Rev. Dr. William M. Taylor in a letter to the New York Tribune, and it is against a portion of this letter that Mr. Youmans strives to defend Mr. Huxley’s evolutionary views. We ourselves have given a short refutation of Professor Huxley’s lectures on evolution,[16] and we had no intention to revert to the same subject; but since opposite writers are unwilling to acknowledge defeat, but pretend, on the contrary, that their opponents do not make a right use of logic, it may be both instructive and interesting to inquire what kind of logic is actually used in this controversy by the evolutionists themselves.

“It is significant,” says Mr. Youmans, “that nearly all the divines who have spoken in reply to Prof. Huxley commit themselves to some form of the doctrine of evolution.” This statement is not correct. Divines admit, as they have ever admitted, the development of varieties within the same species; but the pretended evolution of one species from another they have never admitted, and they do not look upon it as admissible, even now. There may be some exception, for divines are still human and may be imposed upon by false science; but the truth is that those among them who have replied to Prof. Huxley never meant to “commit themselves” to any form of the doctrine of evolution as presented by him. They admit, as Mr. Youmans remarks, “that there is some truth in it”—which is by no means strange, as false theories have often been evolved from undeniable facts; but they raise “a common protest against the idea that it contains much truth,” which shows that these divines were quite unwilling to commit themselves to the doctrine. Hence it is plain that, if the conduct of these divines is “significant,” it does not signify a yielding disposition, but the contrary.

Prof. Huxley had said that the evidence for the theory of evolution is demonstrative, and that it is as well based in its proofs as the Copernican theory of astronomy. “This,” says Mr. Youmans, “is thought to be quite absurd. It is said that Huxley may know a great deal about animals and fossils, but that obviously he knows very little about logic. His facts being admitted, a great deal of effort has been expended to show that he does not understand how to reason from them.” We agree with the critics here alluded to, that Prof. Huxley’s assertion concerning the demonstrative character of his proofs is “quite absurd.” As to his knowledge of logic, there might perhaps be two opinions; for a man may know logic, and make a wilful abuse of it; but it is more charitable to assume that his illogical conclusions proceed from ignorance rather than malice. After all, we are not concerned with the person of the professor, but with his lectures; and, whatever logic he may know, his lectures are certainly not a model of logical reasoning. The passage which Mr. Youmans extracts from Dr. Taylor’s letter, and which he vainly endeavors to refute, is as follows:

“Indeed, to affirm, as he [Prof. Huxley] did, that evolution stands exactly on the same basis as the Copernican theory of the motions of the heavenly bodies, is an assertion so astounding that we can only 'stand by and admire’ the marvellous effrontery with which it was made. That theory rests on facts presently occurring before our eyes, and treated in the manner of mathematical precision. It is not an inference made by somebody from a record of facts existing in far-off and pre-historic, possibly also pre-human, ages. It is verified every day by occurrences which happen according to its laws. But where do we see evolution going on to-day? If evolution rests upon a basis as sure as astronomy, why do we not see one species passing into another now, even as we see the motions of the planets through the heavens?... We know that astronomy is true, because we are verifying its conclusions every day of our lives on land and on sea. We set our clocks according to its conclusions, and navigate our ships in accordance with its predictions; but where have we anything approaching even infinitesimally to this, with evolution?”

Mr. Youmans remarks that the author of this passage is said to be a man of eminence and ability. “That may be,” he adds, “but he certainly has not won his distinction either in the fields of logic, astronomy, or biology.” To prove this, he makes the following argument:

“When a man undertakes to state the evidence of a theory, and gives us proofs that equally sustain an opposite theory, we naturally conclude that he does not know what he is talking about. This is very much Dr. Taylor’s predicament. In trying to contrast the evidence for evolution with the demonstrative proofs of the Copernican theory, he cites facts that are not only as good, but far better, to prove the truth of its antagonist, the Ptolemaic theory.”

Our readers will probably ask how it is possible to prove that a thing is black by the very facts which prove, even better, that the thing is white? That certain facts may be insufficient to prove either the one or the other of two opposite theories every one will admit; but that facts which are good to prove the movement of the earth are even better to prove its immobility, is what Mr. Youmans alone has the privilege of understanding.

Dr. Taylor, in his argument against Prof. Huxley, assumed the truth of the modern astronomical theory, and said that this theory was proved by facts presently occurring before our eyes; which is not the case with the hypothesis of evolution. But, as he did not mention in particular those facts which are considered to constitute the most irrefragable proof of the theory, his silence about them is interpreted by Mr. Youmans as an effect of ignorance. It is not our affair to defend Dr. Taylor; but we think that this interpretation is unfair. The reverend doctor was not writing a treatise of astronomy; he was simply stating a known doctrine, of which it was not his duty to make the demonstration. On the other hand, even if we admitted that the reverend doctor knows but little of astronomy, we do not see that this would weaken his argument; for, whether he knows much or nothing in this branch of science, it remains true that the Copernican theory is proved “by facts presently occurring before our eyes”—which is not the case with the hypothesis of evolution. It is to this truth that Mr. Youmans should have given his attention, if he desired “to win any distinction in the field of logic”; but his peculiar logic shrank from this duty, and prompted him to prefer a gratuitous denunciation of his opponent.

Mr. Youmans pretends that Dr. Taylor “talks as if the Copernican theory is something that anybody can see by looking up in the sky.” Dr. Taylor’s words do not admit of such a nonsensical construction. The Copernican theory, he says, “rests on facts presently occurring before our eyes, and treated in the manner of mathematical precision.” This obviously means that the Copernican theory is based on both observation and calculation. Now, surely Mr. Youmans will not maintain that we can find mathematical formulas and make astronomical calculations by simply “looking up in the sky.”

He goes on to say that the Ptolemaic theory was the fundamental conception of astronomy; that it guided its scientific development for two thousand years; that it was based on extensive, prolonged, and accurate observations; that it was elucidated and confirmed by mathematics; that it was verified by confirming the power of astronomical prevision; and that the planetary motions were traced and resolved on this theory with great skill and correctness, elaborate tables being constructed, which represented their irregularities and inequalities, so that their future positions could be foretold, and conjunctions, oppositions, and eclipses predicted.

These and similar remarks of the scientific editor would tend to prove that the Congregation of the Holy Office had very good and substantial grounds for condemning the heliocentric theory, and that Galileo was a visionary; for the theory which he impugned was “confirmed by mathematics,” and “verified by confirming the power of astronomical prevision.” We are quite sure, however, that this is not what Mr. Youmans intended to prove; and yet it does not appear why he should fill a column of his magazine with such a panegyric of a defunct theory. We concede—and the fact has never been disputed—that astronomy owes an immense debt to the ante-Copernican investigators for their careful observations and laborious calculations; but we do not see how this has anything to do with Dr. Taylor’s criticism. Had the reverend doctor denied that there was any real knowledge of astronomy before Copernicus, his critic might have been justified in trying to enlighten him about the merits of the Ptolemaic astronomers; but Dr. Taylor had not committed himself on this point, and therefore had no apparent need of being enlightened on the subject. The information, consequently, which Mr. Youmans volunteers to offer him is superfluous, not to say impertinent, and, inasmuch as it professes to be an argument, is a complete failure; for it aims at proving what no one has ever denied.

But the scientific editor in giving his needless information commits another blunder, which we could hardly expect from a man of science, by affirming that the Ptolemaic theory “was elucidated and confirmed by mathematics.” Mathematics confirmed nothing but the order and quality of the phenomena, and the law of their succession. Before Kepler and Newton no mathematics could decide whether the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun. Astronomical phenomena were known, but this knowledge was a knowledge of facts, not of their explanation. The Ptolemaic hypothesis was not inconsistent with the facts then observed, but it was assumed, not verified. If such a theory had been verified, its truth would be still recognized, and the Copernican theory would have had no chance of admission. But evidently it is not the theory that has been verified, but only the apparent movements of celestial bodies. Thus “the elaborate tables” by which the future positions of the planets could be foretold prove indeed the accuracy of ancient astronomical observations and calculations, but they are no evidence that the geocentric theory was correct.

Mr. Youmans informs us, also, that “Copernicus did not abolish, but rather revised, the old astronomy.” If the words “old astronomy” are taken to express merely the knowledge of celestial phenomena, we have nothing to reply; but if those words be understood to mean the Ptolemaic theory, the assertion is ridiculous. Indeed, Copernicus, as Mr. Youmans says, “simply recentred the solar system”; that is, he simply put the sun, instead of the earth, in the centre of the planetary orbits. Nothing but that. But who does not see that to give a new centre to the solar system was to suppress the old centre, and therefore to abolish the geocentric theory? Why Mr. Youmans should labor to insinuate the contrary we cannot really understand. Dr. Taylor, against whom he writes, had said nothing concerning either the personal views of Copernicus or the old system of astronomy, but had simply maintained that the so-called Copernican theory, as mentioned by Prof. Huxley, and as understood by all—that is, as perfected by Kepler, Newton, and others—stands to-day on such a basis of undeniable facts that we can no longer hesitate about its truth. This statement might have been contradicted two centuries ago; but we fancy that it ought not to give rise to the least controversy on the part of a modern cultivator of science, however much determined to find fault with his opponent.

Dr. Taylor had said, as we have noticed, that the Copernican theory “rests on facts presently occurring before our eyes.” Mr. Youmans answers: “So does the Ptolemaic theory; and not only that, but, if the test is what occurs before our eyes, then the Ptolemaic theory is a thousand times stronger than the Copernican.” If this answer expresses the real opinion of Mr. Youmans, we must conclude that he alone, among physicists, is ignorant of the fact that terrestrial gravitation is modified by the centrifugal force due to the rotation of the earth, and that this fact is established by experiments which “occur before our eyes” when we make use of the pendulum in different latitudes. What shall we say of the aberration of light? Is not this phenomenon a proof of the movement of the earth? Or does it not “occur before our eyes”? Mr. Youmans may say that these facts do not occur before all eyes, but only before the eyes of scientific men. But Dr. Taylor had not maintained that all the facts connected with the Copernican theory occur before all eyes; and, on the other hand, Foucault’s pendulum, even though oscillating before unscientific eyes, makes visible to the dullest observer the shifting of the horizontal plane from its position at a rate proportional to the sine of the latitude of the place, thus showing to the eye the actual movement of our planet. It is true, therefore, that the Copernican theory “rests on facts presently occurring before our eyes.”

But, if the Copernican theory is so obvious, “why,” asks Mr. Youmans, “did the astronomers of twenty centuries fail to discern it? Why could not the divines of Copernicus’ time see it when it was pointed out to them? And why could not Lord Bacon admit it a hundred years after Copernicus?” The why is well known. The Copernican theory was at first nothing more than a hypothesis; and its truth, even after Kepler and Newton, was still in need of experimental confirmation. Had Lord Bacon or the divines of Copernicus’ time seen what we see with our eyes in Foucault’s experiment, there is little doubt that they would have recognized at last the truth of the new theory. But let this suffice about the certitude of the Copernican theory.

The second part of Mr. Youmans’ article regards the theory of evolution. This theory assumes that the immense diversity of living forms now scattered over the earth has arisen from gelatinous matter through a long process of gradual unfolding and derivation within the order of nature (that is, without supernatural interference) and by the operation of natural laws. Mr. Youmans says that this theory “is built upon a series of demonstrated truths.” This assertion would have some weight, if such a building had not been raised in defiance of logic; but we have already shown that Prof. Huxley’s Three Lectures on Evolution teem with fallacies most fatal to the cause he desired to uphold. Hence, while we admit that “demonstrated truth” is a very solid ground to build upon, we maintain that not a single demonstrated truth can be logically alleged in support of the theory of evolution. But let Mr. Youmans speak for himself:

“It is a fact accordant with all observation, and to which there never has been known a solitary exception, that the succession of generations of living things upon earth is by reproduction and genetic connection in the regular order of nature. The stream of generations flows on by this process, which is as much a part of the settled, continuous economy of the world as the steady action of gravity or heat. It is demonstrated that living forms are liable to variations which accumulate through inheritance; that the ratio of multiplication in the living world is out of all proportion to the means of subsistence, so that only comparatively few germs mature, while myriads are destroyed; that, in the struggles of life, the fittest to the conditions survive, and those least adapted perish. It is a demonstrated fact that life has existed on the globe during periods of time so vast as to be incalculable; that there has been an order in its succession by which the lowest appeared first, and the highest have come last, while the intermediate forms disclose a rising gradation. It is a demonstrated truth of nature that matter is indestructible, and that, therefore, all the material changes and transformations of the world consist in using over and over the same stock of materials, new forms being perpetually derived from old ones; and it is a fact now also held to be established that force obeys the same laws. All these great truths harmonize with each other; they agree with all we know of the constitution of nature; and they demonstrate evolution as a fact, and go far toward opening to us the secondary question of its method.”

These are, according to Mr. Youmans, the “demonstrated truths” on which the theory of evolution has been built, and which, according to the same writer, “demonstrate evolution as a fact.” We think, on the contrary, that the only fact demonstrated by this passage is the blindness (voluntary or not) of a certain class of scientists. A cursory examination of it will suffice to convince all unprejudiced men that such is the case.

That the stream of generations flows on “by reproduction and genetic connection in the regular order of nature” is indeed a fact accordant with all observation, and to which there never has been known a solitary exception; but all observation proves that the regular order of nature in generation is confined within the limits of the species to which parents belong. This precludes the possibility of drawing from this fact any conclusion in favor of evolution.

That living forms “are liable to variations, which accumulate through inheritance,” is not a demonstrated fact. We see, on the contrary, that all such accidental variations, instead of accumulating, tend to disappear within a few generations, whenever they cease to be under the influence of the agencies to which they owe their origin. But let us admit, for the sake of argument, that all living forms are liable to variations which accumulate through inheritance; then we ask whether all such variations are confined within the limit of each species, or some of them overstep that limit. If they are confined within that limit, the fact proves nothing in favor of the evolution of species. If, on the contrary, any one says that they overstep that limit, then the fact itself needs demonstration; for it has never been observed. Therefore to argue from this fact in favor of evolution is to beg the question. We have no need of dwelling on Mr. Youmans’ statement that the ratio of multiplication in the living world is out of all proportion to the means of subsistence, so that only comparatively few germs mature, while myriads are destroyed. The statement is true; but it has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. That, in the struggles of life, the fittest to the conditions survive, is another fact which does not in the least bear out the theory. For the fittest among animals are those which enjoy the plenitude of their specific properties, and which, therefore, are best apt to transfuse them into their offspring whole, unmixed, and unimpaired.

We are told, also, that life has existed during periods of time so vast as to be incalculable. This we admit. But then, in the succession of life, there has been an order, “by which the lowest appeared first, and the highest have come last, while intermediate forms disclose a rising gradation.” This, too, we may admit, though not without reservations; for Prof. Huxley himself confesses that numerous intermediate forms do not occur in the order in which they ought to occur if they really had formed steps in the progression from one species to another; for we find these intermediate forms mixed up with the higher and the lower ones “in contemporaneous deposits.” But, even supposing that the lowest forms precede the highest, what evidence would this be in favor of evolution? The order of succession may indeed prove that the lower forms existed before the higher forms were created; but it does not show that the lower forms are the parents of the higher. This is merely assumed by the evolutionists as a convenient substitute for proof; that is, they first assume that evolution is a fact, and then conclude that the fact of evolution is established.

Lastly, that matter is indestructible, and that therefore all the material changes and transformations of the world consist in using over and over the same stock of materials, is a doctrine which has no special bearing on the question. When a new individual of any living species is generated, its organism is indeed formed out of old matter; but this had no need of demonstration. What our evolutionists ought to show is that new individuals of a certain species have been generated by individuals of some other species; and this surely cannot be shown by a recourse to the indestructibility of matter. That matter is indestructible is, however, a groundless assertion. For though natural forces cannot destroy it, God, who has created it, and who keeps it in existence, can always withdraw his action, and let it fall into its primitive nothingness. And as to the so-called “fact” now also held to be established, that “force obeys the same laws”—that is, that force is indestructible, and that new forms of force are perpetually derived from old ones—we need only remark that the theory of transformation of forces, as held and explained by our advanced scientists, is but a travesty of truth, and an impotent effort to upset the principle of causality. Neither statical nor dynamical forces are ever transformed. Indeed, they have no form attached to them. What our modern physicists call “transformation of force” is nothing but the change of one kinetic phenomenon into another—that is, a succession of modes of movement of various kinds. Now, modes of movement are modes of being, not of force, though they are the measure of the dynamical forces by which they have been produced. The force with which any element of matter is endowed is constantly the same, both as to quality and as to quantity. Its exertion alone, owing to a difference of conditions, admits of a higher and a lower degree of intensity. As we do not intend at present to write a treatise on forces, we will only add that the forces of matter are exercised on other matter by transient action, but cannot perform immanent acts calculated to modify their own matter. If they could do this, matter would not be inert. Hence animal life, which requires immanent acts, cannot be accounted for by the forces of matter. And therefore, whatever our scientists may say about the conservation of energy and the transformation of forces, they have no right to infer that animal life can be evolved out of matter alone; and they have still less right to pretend that such is “the fact.”

What shall we say, then, of Mr. Youmans’ assertion that the alleged reasons “demonstrate evolution as a fact”? We must say, applying Dr. Taylor’s words to the case, that the assertion is “so astounding that we can only 'stand by and admire’ the marvellous effrontery with which it has been made.” A man of Mr. Youmans’ ability can scarcely be so ignorant of logic as not to see that his reasons demonstrate evolution neither as a fact nor as a probability, and not even as a possibility; but when a man succeeds in blinding himself to the existence of a personal God, and substitutes nature in the place of her Creator, we need not be surprised if his logic turns out to be a clumsy attempt at imposition.

Dr. Taylor had asked why we do not see one species passing into another, even as we see the motions of the planets through the heavens. The question was pertinent; for Prof. Huxley had maintained that “evolution rests on a basis as sure as astronomy.” Mr. Youmans answers: “To this foolish question, which has nevertheless been asked a dozen times by clerical critics of Huxley, the obvious answer is that what requires a very long time to produce cannot be seen in a very short time.” We think that the question was not foolish, and that the answer of Mr. Youmans is a mere evasion. For, if evolution is a fact, we must find numerous traces of it not only in the fossil remains, but also in the actual economy of nature. If the bird is evolved from the lizard, there must be actually among living creatures a numerous class of intermediate forms, some more, others less developed, exhibiting all the stages of transformation through which the lizard is gradually developed into a bird. Thus, because the acorn develops into the stately oak, we find in nature oaks of all the intermediate sizes; and because babyhood develops into manhood, we find in nature individuals of all intermediate ages. In like manner, if the evolution of one species from another is not a fable, we must find in nature specimens of all the intermediate forms. Dr. Taylor’s question was, therefore, most judicious. That Mr. Youmans’ reply to it is a mere evasion a little reflection will show; for the length of time required for the process of transformation would only prove that the intermediate forms must remain longer in existence; whilst the fact is that such forms do not exist at all.

“There has been much complaint,” says Mr. Youmans, “that Prof. Huxley undertook to put the demonstrative evidence of evolution on so narrow a basis as the establishment of the genealogy of the horse; but this rather enhances than detracts from his merit as a scientific thinker.” Here the case is misstated. Had Prof. Huxley really demonstrated evolution by the genealogy of the horse, no one would have complained that the basis was too narrow; but as it became manifest that the basis was not only narrow but questionable, and that it afforded no evidence whatever of evolution, it was thought that it required a “marvellous effrontery” on the part of Prof. Huxley to maintain before the American public that the genealogy of the horse gave “demonstrative evidence” of evolution. This is the reason why there has been so much complaint. Prof. Huxley simply insulted his audience when he asked them to believe that evolution was a demonstrated fact.

Mr. Youmans tells us that the vital point between Prof. Huxley and his antagonists is the question of the validity of the conception of order and uniformity in nature. “Prof. Huxley holds to it as a first principle, a truth demonstrated by all science, and just as fixed in biology as in astronomy. His antagonists hold that the inflexible order of nature may be asserted perhaps in astronomy, but they deny it in biology. They here invoke supernatural intervention.” This statement is utterly false. There is no question about the order and uniformity of nature; and it is not to Prof. Huxley or to modern science that we are indebted for the knowledge of this uniformity either in astronomy or in biology; the world has ever been in possession of this indisputable truth. The real question between Prof. Huxley and his antagonists is that nature, according to the professor, is independent in its being and in its working, and has an inherent power of fostering into existence a series of beings of higher and higher specific perfection, from the speck of gelatinous matter even to man; whereas nature, according to the professor’s antagonists, and according to science, revelation, and common sense, is not independent either in its being or in its working, and has no inherent power of forming either a plant without a seed or an animal without an ovum of the same species. If Prof. Huxley had had any knowledge of that part of philosophy which we call metaphysics, and which our advanced scientists affect so much to despise because they cannot cope with it, he would have seen the absurdity of his assumption; and if Mr. Youmans had consulted the rules of logic, he would not have said that the “uniformity of nature” was with Prof. Huxley a “first principle”; it being evident that uniformity clashes with evolution, which is a change of forms.

The last argument of the editor of the Popular Science Monthly in behalf of evolution is as follows:

“Obviously there are but two hypotheses upon the subject—that of genetic derivation of existing species through the operation of natural law, and that of creation by miraculous interference with the course of nature. If we assume the orderly course of nature, development is inevitable: it is evolution or nothing. If the order of nature is put aside and special creation appealed to, we have a right to ask, On what evidence?... There is no evidence. There is not a scintilla of proof that can have a feather’s weight with any scientific mind.... Has anybody ever seen a special creation?”

We answer, first, that even if it were true that “there is no evidence” in support of the creation, it would not follow that there is any evidence, either scientific or of any other kind, in support of the evolution of one species from another. Indeed, in spite of all the efforts of “advanced” thinkers, we have not yet been furnished with “a scintilla of proof that can have a feather’s weight” with a philosophical mind; on the contrary, we have been informed by no less an authority than Mr. Huxley that “no connecting link between the crocodile and the lizard, or between the lizard and the snake, or between the snake and the crocodile, or between any two of these groups,” has yet been found—a fact which, if not destroyed by further discoveries, is “a strong and weighty argument against evolution,” as the professor confesses. Hence it is evident that the existing palæontological specimens, far from proving the theory, form a strong and weighty objection against it. The consequence is that, even if we had no evidence of the creation of species, it would yet be more reasonable to accept creation, against which no objection can be found, than to accept evolution.

But we are far from conceding that the creation of species is unsupported by evidence of a proper kind. Mr. Youmans may laugh at the Bible; but we maintain that the Biblical record constitutes historical evidence. He may also laugh at philosophical reasoning, for his mind is too “scientific” to care for philosophy; but we believe that philosophical evidence is as good, at least, as any which can be met with in the Popular Science Monthly. Animals have a soul, which elicits immanent acts; they know, they feel, they have passions; and, if we listen to some modern thinkers, they have even intelligence and reason. Now, matter is essentially inert, and therefore cannot elicit immanent acts. Hence animals are not mere organized matter; and accordingly they cannot be evolved from matter alone. Their soul must come from a higher source; it must be created. Science has nothing to say against this; it can only state its ignorance by asking: “Has anybody ever seen a special creation?” Of course nobody has; but there are things which are seen by reason with as great a clearness as anything visible to the eye; and this is just the case with creation. On the other hand, why should Mr. Youmans pretend that creation must be seen to be admitted, when he admits evolution, though he has never seen it? If seeing is a condition for believing, why did he treat as foolish Dr. Taylor’s question concerning the passing of one species into another? Why did he ask: “Has the writer ever seen the production of a geological formation?” Surely, if evolution were proved to be a fact, we would admit it, without having seen it; but, since it is creation, not evolution, that has been shown to be a fact, we are compelled to admit it, even though nobody has had the privilege of seeing the event.

When Mr. Youmans declares that “there is not a scintilla of proof” (in favor of special creations) “that can have a feather’s weight with any scientific mind,” he evidently assumes that no scientific mind has existed before our time; which is more than even Huxley or Darwin would maintain. But infidel science is equally blind to the scientific merit of its antagonists, and to the blunders which it is itself daily committing. Thus Mr. Youmans, no doubt to show that he has a “scientific mind,” speaks of the derivation of species “through the operation of natural law”—a phrase which has no meaning; for law is an abstraction, and abstractions do not operate. Nor is it more “scientific” to assume that the creation of species was “a miraculous interference with the course of nature”; for the course of nature required the creation of species, just as it now requires the creation of human souls for the continuance of humanity; and God cannot be said to have interfered with the course of nature by doing what nature required but could not do. Is it any more “scientific” to write Nature with a capital letter? Of course, if there is no God, nature is all, and atheists may write it Nature. Mr. Youmans does not tell us clearly that there is no God; but he shows clearly enough that to his mind Nature is everything; which is, in fact, a virtual denial of a personal God. If we were to inform him that nature is only a servant of God, he would perhaps ask, “On what evidence?” And because we would be unable to point out a chemical residuum or a geologic formation wherein God could be made visible to him, he would conclude that “there is no scintilla of proof that can have a feather’s weight with a scientific mind.” He then assumes that in the orderly course of nature the evolution of species is “inevitable.” It did not occur to his scientific mind that before making such an assertion, it was necessary to examine how far the powers of nature extend; for he might have discovered that matter is inert, and that it was a great blunder to assume that inert matter produced animal life.

He further supposes that when special creations are appealed to, “the order of nature is put aside.” He therefore pretends that the order of nature would not allow of the creation of plants and animals, evidently because it was nature’s duty to perform without extrinsic intervention all those wonderful works which we attribute to the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator. We maybe unscientific; but we defy Mr. Youmans to show, either scientifically or otherwise, the truth of his assumption. To tell us that the evolution of life from dead matter was within the order of nature, without even attempting to prove that nature had a power adequate to the task, is just as plausible as to tell us that Prof. Huxley has created the Niagara Falls or that Mr. Darwin has painted the moon. And yet the author of such loose statements airs his scientific pretensions and speaks of “scientific minds”!

We have no need to follow Mr. Youmans any further; for what he adds consists of assumptions cognate to those we have already refuted. “Genetic derivation,” he says, “is in the field as a real and undeniable cause”—which is an open untruth. “Has anybody seen a special creation?” This is irrelevant. “Do those who believe in a special creation represent to themselves any possibility of how it could have occurred?” Probably they do, if they have read the first chapter of Genesis. “Milton attempted to form an image of the way the thing was done, and says that the animals burst up full-formed and perfect like plants out of the ground—'the grassy clods now calved.’ But clods can only calve miraculously.” Quite so; but we must not be afraid of miracles, when we cannot deny them without falling into absurdities. “Nature does not bring animals into the world now by this method, and science certainly can know nothing of it.” Yes; but there are many other things of which infidel science is ignorant. And yet we fancy that, when animals have been once created, even infidel science might have discerned that their procreation no longer required “the grassy clods to calve.”

But enough. We conclude that, so far from being possible, so far from being probable, so far from being proved, the hypothesis of the origin of animal forms by evolution is simply unthinkable; it is a violation not only of the order of nature, but of the very condition of thought and of the first principle of science, which is the principle of causality. When will our scientific men understand that there is no science without philosophy?

A WAIF FROM THE GREAT EXHIBITION, PHILADELPHIA, 1876

“Their store-houses full, flowing out of this into that.

“They have called the people happy that hath these things: but happy is that people whose God is
the Lord.”—Ps. cxliii.

I.

With face storm-lined and bronzed, no longer young,

That seemed as if its soul’s dim life had grown

On lonely farm, in rugged inland town
Lying, a narrow world, bleak hills among,
A stranger gazed amid the wealth and glare
Of all the nations’ gathered industry
Where rose the light, symmetric tracery
Of Munich’s altars worked in colors fair;
Where good St. Joseph with the lilies stood;
And soft-eyed martyr with her branch of palm,
And full, sweet lips smiling with happy calm,
Seemed beaming witness 'mid the multitude

Of glittering toys and earth’s huge, unworked store,

Of nobler purpose man’s life resting o’er.

II.

Here stretched its naked arms the blessèd Rood,

Whose desolation eloquent below
God’s Mother sat in soundless deeps of woe,
Her sad knees holding all her earthly good.
Here stood the stranger with a look intent
Wherein no light of recognition woke,
As if he read in some strange-lettered book.

Then, asking what these unguessed figures meant,

An answer came: “Our Lord, dead 'neath the Cross.”

“Ah! yes, and that is Mary, I suppose—

The Mother.” Ah! what wondering thoughts uprose

To die in silence, winning so some loss,
Perchance, unto two lives. Sweet Mother, pray
That soul accuse not mine on judgment day!

III.

So strange and sad the simple question seemed;

As if on those far hills God’s voice had built,

Upon those souls for whom his blood was spilt

Some shadow rested, amid which scarce gleamed

The mournful splendor by his dark Cross thrown:

As if stern life grew but more hard and bare,
Missing the presence of the Maiden rare
Whose God made her unstained flesh his own;
Who held him on her arms a helpless child,
With love no mother ever knew before;

Holding, when Calvary’s dread hours were o’er,

The Man of Sorrows where her Babe had smiled—

Her arms the cradle of the Almighty One,

Her arms His spotless shroud, life’s labor done.

IV.

Alas! such faith to men denied who grope

Half in a fear begotten not of love,

Half in cold doubt, seeking all things to prove,

To none hold fast, with whom divinest hope

Holds naught more excellent than earth’s to-days;

For whom in vain doth Israel’s lily bloom,

With its white sunshine lighting hours of gloom,

Shining 'mid thorns that seek to crush its grace—

So dimming the broad rays of love divine

With earthly shadow cast on earthly things

That folded keep their gift of heavenly wings,

Lest, soaring, they lose sight of lesser shrine

Lest, heart so kindling with the Spirit’s fire,

Feet lowly tread that eyes be lifted higher.

V.

Slow turning through the glimmering aisles to range,

Amid the hum the loitering footsteps wrought

I lost the questioning face, but not the thought

Of that dim life, to which the night seemed strange

Of Calvary’s God, to whom all life is owed—

That clouded life wherein Faith’s pure sunshine

Casts faintest gleam of its strong light divine

That strengthens soul, makes fair the daily load.

Far down the hall full notes of organ poured,
And broke in song strong voices manifold;
Glad alleluias all exultant rolled,
As if proclaiming on each soaring chord:
“Happy the people of this wealth possessed!”

Nay, Happy they whom God the Lord hath blessed.

ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND.

II.

The present condition of a people is the latest phase of a life that has run through centuries, in all the events of which there may be traced the relation of cause and effect, and whose continuity has never been interrupted, though at times the current may seem to leave its channel, or even to disappear. The past never dies, but with each succeeding moment receives a fuller existence, survives as a curse or a blessing. The passion which urges the human mind back to ages more and more remote, until the gathering darkness shuts out even the faintest glimmer of light, is not mere curiosity, nor even the inborn craving for knowledge; rather is it the consciousness that those ancient times and far-off deeds still live in us, mould us, and shape our ends. We were with Adam when he plucked and ate the forbidden fruit, and that his act should work in us yet, like a taint in the blood, seems to be a postulate of reason not less than a truth of tradition or revelation. The cherishing of great names, the clinging to noble memories, the use of poetry, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, or any art, to give form and vividness to glories, heroisms, martyrdoms, are but the expression of this consciousness that the present is only the fuller and more living past. No vanity, much less scorn or hate, should prompt any one to lift into the light the glory or the shame of a people’s history. As we tread reverently on the ground where human passions have contended for the mastery, we should approach with religious awe the facts which have made the world what it is.

There are many persons, who certainly have no prejudices against the Irish people, many true and loyal Irishmen even, who strongly object to the prominence given to the sorrows and sufferings of Ireland. They would have us forget the past and turn, with a countenance fresh and hopeful as that of youth, to the future. Sydney Smith, full of English prepossessions but an honest lover of liberty, who labored as earnestly and fearlessly as any man of his generation in behalf of the wronged and defenceless, could not restrain his impatience when he thought of the fondness with which Irishmen cling to old memories and sacred associations. In his opinion the object of all government is roast mutton, potatoes, claret, a stout constable, an honest justice, a clear highway, and a free chapel. “What trash,” he exclaimed, “to be bawling in the streets about the Green Isle, the Isle of the Ocean, the bold anthem of Erin go bragh! A far better anthem would be, Erin go bread and cheese, Erin go cabins that will keep out the rain, Erin go pantaloons without holes in them.”

This may be very well, but we are persuaded that there is not an abuse or an evil in Ireland to-day which has not its roots in the remote past, or which can be understood or remedied without a knowledge of Irish history.

The bold anthem of Erin go bragh, which so provoked Sidney Smith, is the thread that leads us through the labyrinth. It is because the Irish are not English that England is neither able nor willing to treat them justly; and if she has rendered herself guilty of the greatest social crime in all history, it is because she has clung for centuries with terrible obstinacy to a policy which left the people of Ireland no alternative between denationalization and extermination. When in England the national spirit dominated and absorbed the religious spirit, the Irish, who had so long maintained their separate nationality, adhered with invincible firmness to the old faith. This was imputed to them as a crime, and became the pretext for still more grievous persecutions. If they were resolved to be Irish and Catholic, England was not less resolved that they should be outlaws and beggars. They were to have no bread or potatoes, or cabins that would keep out the rain, so long as they persisted in singing the bold anthem and acknowledging the supremacy of the pope. The history of Ireland is in great part the history of her wrongs; for a long time to come, doubtless, it will be a history of suffering; and if those who write of her find that they are placing before their readers pictures of death, exile, persecution, beggary, famine, desolation, violence, oppression, and of every form of human misery, they are but describing the state to which her conquerors have reduced her.

But there are special reasons for dwelling upon the wrongs of Ireland. For three hundred years the Irish people themselves and their faith have been held responsible, wherever the English language is spoken, for the crimes of England. The backwardness of Irish industry, and the seeming want of energy of the people in improving their condition, are habitually imputed by statesmen and public instructors to a peculiar indolence and recklessness in the Celtic race, fostered and encouraged by what is supposed to be the necessary influence of the Catholic religion.

The Irish are probably not more Celtic than the French, who assuredly are not excelled in thrift and industry by any other people. There is no country more Catholic than Belgium, nor is there anywhere a more prosperous or laborious people. Irishmen themselves, it is universally admitted, are hard workers in England, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia—wherever, in a word, the motives which incite men to labor are not taken from them; and yet the popular prejudice on this subject is so flattering to Anglo-Saxon and Protestant pride that it remains in the public mind like a superstition, which no amount of evidence can affect. In a former article we have attempted to trace some of the causes to which the poverty and misery of Ireland must be attributed, and we shall now continue the investigation. During the three centuries immediately following the Conquest the country was wasted by wars, massacres, and feuds, carried on by the two armed nations, which fiercely contended for the possession of the soil. The Anglo-Norman colony, entrenched within the Pale, and receiving constant supplies of men and money from the mother-country, formed a kind of standing army, ever ready to invade and lay waste the territories still held by the native population. The Irish people, in self-defence, and also with the hope of driving the invader from their shores, turned their whole attention to war. All the pursuits of peace were forgotten, and the island became a camp of soldiers, who, when not battling with the common enemy, turned their swords against one another. In such a state of society no progress was possible. Then came three centuries of religious wars to add more savage fierceness to the war of races. Under Elizabeth, James I., Cromwell, and William of Orange the whole country was confiscated. The Catholics were driven from their lands, hunted down, their churches and monasteries were burned or turned over to Protestants, their priests were martyred or exiled, their schools closed, their teachers banished, their nobles impoverished; and to make this state of things perpetual the Penal Code was enacted. To this point there was complete harmony between the home government and the English colony in Ireland. But England has rarely poured out her treasure or her blood for other than selfish and mercenary motives. She therefore demanded, as the price of her assistance in crushing the Irish Catholics, that the commerce and industry of Ireland should be sacrificed to her own interests. The House of Commons declared the importation of Irish cattle a public nuisance. They were then slaughtered and salted, but the government refused to permit the sale of the meat. The hides were tanned. The importation of leather was forbidden. The Irish Protestants began to export their wool; England refused to buy it. They began to manufacture it; an export duty, equivalent to prohibition, was put on all Irish woollen goods. They grew flax and made linens; England put a bounty on Scotch and English linens, and levied a duty on Irish linens. Ireland was not allowed to build or own a ship—her forests were felled and the timber sent to England. The English colonies were forbidden to trade with her; even the fisheries were carried on with English boats manned by Englishmen. By these and similar measures Irish commerce and industry were destroyed. Nothing remained for the people to do but to till the soil. In this lay the only hope of escaping starvation. But they no longer owned the land; it was in the hands of an alien aristocracy, English in origin and sympathy, Protestant in religion. The Catholic people, without civil existence, were at the mercy of an oligarchy by whom they were both hated and despised. These nobles owed their titles, wealth, and power to the violence of conquest, and, instead of seeking to heal the wounds, they were resolved to keep them open. In France and in England the Northmen were gradually fused with the original population. They lost their language, customs, almost the memory of their cradle-land. Even in Ireland a considerable portion of the Norman conquerors became Irish—Hibernis hiberniores. But this partial assimilation of the two races was effected in spite of England, who made use of strong measures both to prevent and punish this degeneracy, as it was termed. Had the union between the Irish and the Normans not been prevented by this violent and interested policy, a homogeneous people would have been formed in Ireland as in England, and the frightful wrongs and crimes of the last seven hundred years would not have been committed.

But the interests of England demanded that Ireland should be kept weak and helpless by internal discord; and she therefore used every means to prevent the fusion of the two races. The “Irish enemy,” ever ready to break in upon the settlements of the Pale, was the surest warrant of the loyalty of the English colony to the mother-country, whose assistance might at any moment become essential to its very existence. The native population, on the other hand, was held in check by the foreigner encamped in the land. Had the Irish and the English in Ireland united, they would have had little trouble in throwing off the yoke of England. It was all-important, therefore, that they should remain, distinct and inimical races. All intercourse between them was forbidden. Their inter-marriage was made high treason. It was a crime for an Englishman to speak Irish, or for an Irishman to speak English. The ancient laws and customs of the Irish were destroyed, and they were denied the benefits of English law. As yet the English and the Irish professed the same religious faith; but now even this powerful bond of union was broken. Enemies on earth, they looked to no common hope beyond this life. Three centuries of persecution and outrage followed, during which the Catholic Irish were reduced to such a state of misery and beggary that the only thing which remained in common between them and their tyrants was hate.

Here we have come upon the well-spring of all the bitter waters that have deluged Ireland. The country is owned and governed by a few men who have never loved the country and have always hated the people. Throughout the rest of Europe, even in the worst times, the interests of the lords and the peasants were to some extent identical. They were one in race and religion, rendered mutual services, gloried in a common country, and shared their miseries. The noble spent at least a part of the year on his estates, surrounded by his dependants. Kind offices were interchanged. The great lady visited the peasant woman in her sickness, and the humanities of life were not ignored. Elsewhere in Europe the great land-owners, whether lay or ecclesiastical, were, with rare exceptions, kind to the poor, indulgent to their debtors, willing to encourage industry, to advance capital for the improvement of the land, and thus to promote their own interests by promoting those of their tenants. The privileged classes were not wholly independent of the people. If they were not restrained from wrong-doing by love, they were often held in check by a salutary fear.

But nothing of all this was found in Ireland, where the landlords were in the unfortunate position of having nothing to fear and nothing to hope from the people. They lacked all the essential conditions of a native aristocracy. Their titles were Irish, but all their interests and sympathies were English. They were the hired servants of England, and they were not paid to work for the good of Ireland. They drew their revenues from a country to which they rendered no service; they were supported by the labors of the people whom they oppressed and hated; and they rarely saw the land from which they derived their wealth and titles, but lived in England, where they found a more congenial society, and were not afflicted by the sight of sufferings and miseries of which they knew themselves to be the authors. If the people, maddened by oppression or hunger, revolted, the Irish landlords were not disturbed; for an English army was at hand to crush the rebellion, which was never attributed to its true cause, but to the supposed insubordination and lawlessness of the Irish character. In England there existed a middle class, which bridged over the chasm that separated the nobles from the peasants, and which rendered the aristocracy liberal and progressive by opening its ranks to superior merit wherever found; but in Ireland there were only two classes of society, divided the one from the other as by a wall of brass. The authority of the Protestant oligarchy over the Catholic population was absolute, and they contracted the vices by which the exercise of uncontrolled power is always punished. To the narrowness and ignorance of a rural gentry were added the brutality and coarseness of tyrants. The social organization prevented the infusion of new blood which had saved the English aristocracy from decay and impotence, and the general stagnation of political and commercial life in Ireland had the effect of helping on the degeneracy of the ruling caste. Everything, in a word, tended to make the Irish landlords the worst aristocracy with which a nation was ever cursed; and, by the most cruel of fates, this worst of all aristocracies was made the sole arbiter of the destinies of the Irish people, of whose pitiable condition under this rule we have already given some account.

We turn now to consider the causes which have brought a certain measure of relief to the people of Ireland; and we must seek for them, not in the good-will or sense of justice of Irish or English Protestants, but in circumstances which took from them the power of continuing without some mitigation a policy which, if ruinous to the Irish people, was also full of peril to England.

It is pleasant to us, as Americans, to know that the voice which proclaimed our freedom and independence was heard in Ireland, as it has since been heard throughout the earth, rousing the nations to high thoughts of liberty, ringing as the loud battle-cry of wronged and oppressed peoples. The great discussions which the struggle of the American colonies awoke in the British Parliament, and in which the very spirit of liberty spoke from the lips of the sublimest orators, sent a thrill of hope through Irish hearts, while the Declaration of Independence filled their oppressors with dismay. In 1776 we declared our separate existence, and in 1778 already some of the most odious features of the Penal Code were abolished. “A voice from America,” said Flood, “shouted to Liberty.” Henceforward Catholics were permitted to take long leases, though not to possess in fee simple; the son, by turning Protestant, was no longer permitted to rob his father, and the laws of inheritance which prevented the accumulation of property in the hands of Catholics were abrogated. This was little enough, indeed, but it was of inestimable value, for it marked the turning-point in the history of Ireland. A beginning had been made, a breach had been opened in the enemy’s citadel. But this was not all that the American Revolution did for Ireland.

The sympathies of the Presbyterians of the North went out to their brethren who were struggling on the other side of the Atlantic. They also had grievances compared with which those of the colonies were slight; their cause was identical, and the success of the Americans would be a victory for Ireland; if England triumphed beyond the seas, there would be no hope for those who, being nearer, were held with a more certain grasp. Hence, in spite of the bitter hate which in Ireland separated the Protestants from the Catholics, they were drawn together by a common interest and sympathy in the cause of American independence. England’s wars, both in Europe and in her transatlantic colonies, were a constant drain upon her resources, and it became necessary to supply the armies in America with the troops which were kept in Ireland to hold that country in subjection. General Howe asked that Irish papists should not be sent as recruits to him, for they would desert to the enemy. The best men were therefore picked from the English regiments and sent to America; Ireland was denuded of troops; the defences of her harbors were in ruins; and she was exposed to the attacks of privateers. Something had to be done, and Parliament agreed to allow the Irish militia to be called out. As an inducement to Catholics to enlist, they were promised indulgences in the exercise of their religion, but this promise aroused Protestant bigotry, ever ready to break forth. The plan was abandoned, and the defence of the country was committed to the Volunteers.

In the meanwhile Burgoyne had surrendered to the Americans at Saratoga, France had entered into alliance with the colonies, and French and American privateers began to swarm in the Irish Channel. The English Parliament, now thoroughly alarmed, and eager to make peace with the rebels, passed an act renouncing the right of taxing the colonies, and even offered seats in the House of Commons to their representatives. These concessions, which came too late to propitiate the Americans, served only to embolden the Irish in their demands for the redress of their grievances. The Americans were rebels, and were treated with the greatest indulgence; the Irish were loyal, and were still held in the vilest bondage. This was intolerable. To add to the distress, one of the periodical visitations of famine which have marked English rule in Ireland fell upon the country, and the highways were filled with crowds of half-naked and starving people.

Thirty thousand merchants and mechanics in Dublin were living on alms; the taxes could not be collected, and in the general collapse of trade the customs yielded almost nothing. The country was unprotected, and there was no money in the treasury with which to raise an army. Nothing remained in this extremity but to allow the Volunteers to assemble; for the summer was at hand, and every day the privateers might be expected to appear in the Channel. Company after company was organized, and in a very short time large bodies of men were in arms. The Catholics also took advantage of the general excitement. If the Protestants were in arms, why should they remain defenceless?

Never before had there been such an opportunity of extorting from England the measures of relief which she would never willingly consent to grant. The threatening danger, however, had no effect upon the British Parliament.

The Irish Parliament met in 1779, and the patriots, strong in the support of the Volunteers who lined the streets of Dublin, demanded free trade. The city was in an uproar; a mob paraded before the Parliament House, and with threats called upon the members to redress the wrongs of Ireland. Cannon were trailed round the statue of King William, with the inscription,“Free trade or this,” and on the flags were emblazoned menacing mottoes—“The Volunteers of Ireland,” “Fifty thousand of us ready to die for our country.”

“Talk not to me of peace,” exclaimed Hussey Burgh, one of the leading patriots. “Ireland is not at peace; it is smothered war. England has sown her laws as dragon’s teeth, and they have sprung up as armed men.” All Ireland was aroused. The Irish, said Burke in the English House of Commons, had learned that justice was to be had from England only when demanded at the point of the sword. They were now in arms; their cause was just; and they would have redress or end the connection between the two countries. The obnoxious laws restricting trade were repealed and in the greatest haste sent over to Ireland to calm the tempest that was brewing there.

The effect went even beyond expectation. Dublin was illuminated, congratulatory addresses were sent over to England, and people imagined that Ireland’s millennium had arrived. But the consequences of centuries of crime and oppression do not disappear as by the enchanter’s wand; and one of the evils of tyranny is the curse it leaves after it has ceased to exist. In the wildness of their joy the people exaggerated the boon which they had wrenched from England; the sober second thought turned their attention to what still remained to be done.

In 1780 Grattan brought forward the famous resolution which declared that “the king, with the consent of the Parliament of Ireland, was alone competent to enact laws to bind Ireland.” The time could not have been more opportune. The American colonies were in full revolt; Spain and France were assisting them; England had been forced into war with Holland, and her Indian Empire was threatening to take advantage of her distress to rebel. In the midst of so many wars and dangers it would have been madness to have provoked Ireland to armed resistance, and Grattan felt that the hour had come when the Irish people should stand forth as one of the nations of the earth; when all differences of race and creed might be merged into a common patriotism, and Celt and Saxon, Catholic and Protestant, present an unbroken front to the English tyrant. “The Penal Code,” he said, “is the shell in which the Protestant power has been hatched. It has become a bird. It must burst the shell or perish in it. Indulgence to Catholics cannot injure the Protestant religion.”

The Volunteers were, with few exceptions, Protestants, and their attitude of defiance made the English government willing to place the Catholics against them as a counterpoise; and it therefore offered no opposition to measures tending to relieve them of their disabilities. But, under Grattan’s influence, the Volunteers themselves pronounced in favor of the Catholics by passing the famous Dungannon resolution: “That we, [the Volunteers] hold the right of private judgment in matters of religion to be equally sacred in others as in ourselves; that we rejoice in the relaxation of the penal laws against our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects; and that we conceive these measures to be fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of the inhabitants of Ireland.”

In February, 1782, Grattan again brought forward a motion to declare the independence of the Irish Legislature, and again it was thrown out. The Dungannon resolution was then introduced, and it was proposed to abolish all distinctions between Protestants and Catholics. But to this the most serious objections were raised, and it was found necessary to make concessions to Protestant bigotry. The Catholics were permitted to acquire freehold property, to buy and sell, bequeath and inherit; but the penal laws which bore upon their religion, and their right to educate their children at home or abroad, as well as those which excluded them from political life, were left on the statute-book. Fanaticism was stronger than patriotism, and the enthusiastic love of liberty was again found to be compatible with the love of persecution and oppression. But this injustice in no way dampened the ardor of the Catholics for the national independence; and when, on the 16th of April, 1782, Grattan moved a Declaration of Rights, inspired probably by our own Declaration of Independence, he was greeted with as wild a tumult of applause by the Catholics as by his Protestant countrymen. “I found Ireland,” he said, “on her knees. I watched over her with an eternal solicitude. I have traced her progress from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift, spirit of Molyneux, your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a nation. In that new character I hail her, and, bowing to her august presence, I say, Esto Perpetua!”

The overwhelming popular enthusiasm bore everything with it, and opposition was useless. “It is no longer,” wrote the Duke of Portland, the viceroy, “the Parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to; it is the whole of this country.”

In England the Whigs, who were in power, felt how hopeless would be any efforts to stem the torrent, and they therefore yielded with grace. Fox admitted that Ireland had a right to distrust British legislation “because it had hitherto been employed only to oppress and distress her.” Ireland had been wronged, and it was but just that concessions should now be made to her. The day of deliverance had come, and, amidst an outburst of universal enthusiasm, Ireland’s independence was proclaimed.

The Catholics were the first to feel the benefits of this victory. The two Relief Bills, introduced into Parliament in their favor, were carried. They were permitted to open schools and educate their own children; their stables were no longer subject to inspection, or their horses above the value of five pounds liable to be seized by the government or taken from them by Protestant informers; and their right to freedom of religious worship was fully recognized. They recovered, in a word, their civil rights; but the law still excluded them from any participation in the political life of the country, and they were still forbidden to possess arms. Nevertheless, another step towards Catholic emancipation had been taken. Two other laws, beneficial to all classes of citizens, but especially favorable to the poor and oppressed Catholics, date from this time: the Habeas Corpus Act was granted to Ireland, and the tenure of judges was placed on the English level.

Unfortunately, the social condition of the country was so deplorable that this improvement in the laws conferred few or no benefits upon the impoverished and downtrodden people. But at least there was some gain; for if good laws do not necessarily make a people prosperous, bad laws necessarily keep them in misery. The landed gentry and Protestant clergy continued without shame to neglect all the duties which they owed to their tenants, whose wretchedness increased as the fortunes of Ireland seemed to rise. To maintain the Volunteers the rents were raised, and the poor peasants, already sinking beneath an intolerable burden, were yet more heavily laden. The proprietors of the soil spent their time in riot and debauch while the people were starving. They were the magistrates and at the same time the most notorious violators of the law. “The justices of the peace,” says Arthur Young, “are the very worst class in the kingdom.”

The clergy of the Established Church were little better. Like the landlords, they were generally absentees, and employed agents to raise their tithes, in the North from the Presbyterians, and in other parts of the island from the Catholics. “As the absentee landlord,” says Froude, “had his middleman, the absentee incumbent had his tithe farmer and tithe proctor—perhaps of all the carrion who were preying on the carcase of the Irish peasantry the vilest and most accursed. As the century waned and life grew more extravagant, the tithe proctor, like his neighbors, grew more grasping and avaricious. He exacted from the peasants the full pound of flesh. His trade was dangerous, and therefore he required to be highly paid. He handed to his employer perhaps half what he collected. He fleeced the flock and he fleeced their shepherd.” “The use of the tithe farmer,” said Grattan, “is to get from the parishioners what the clergyman would be ashamed to demand, and to enable the clergyman to absent himself from duty. His livelihood is extortion. He is a wolf left by the shepherd to take care of the flock in his absence.”[17]

In the midst of the general excitement the Catholic peasants grew restless under this horrible system of organized plunder and extortion. They banded together and took an oath to pay only a specified sum to the clergyman or his agent. The movement spread, and occasional acts of violence were committed. All Munster was organized, and a regular war with the tithe proctors was begun. In the popular fury crimes were perpetrated and the innocent were often made to suffer with the guilty. Yet so glaring were the wrongs and so frightful the abuses from which the peasants were suffering that they everywhere met with sympathy. The true cause of these disorders was social and not political. Misery, and not partisan zeal, had driven the Catholics to take up arms. The cry of hungry women and children for bread resounded louder in their ears than the shouts of the patriots. They were without food or raiment, and in despair they sought to wreak vengeance upon the inhuman tyrants who had reduced them to starvation. Even Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, was forced to admit that the Munster peasants were in a state of oppression, abject poverty, and misery not to be equalled in the world, and that the landlords and their agents were responsible for the degradation of these unfortunate beings.

Ireland was still a prey to agitations, hopes, and sufferings when the French Revolution of 1789 burst upon Europe. The cry of Liberty, equality, fraternity sounded as revelation to the struggling patriots. Hitherto they had contended for freedom, in the English and feudal sense, as a privilege and a concession; they now demanded it as an imprescriptible right of man. The American Declaration had indeed proclaimed that all men were free and equal, or of right ought to be; but this was merely a pretty phrase, a graceful preamble, in a charter which consecrated slavery and inequality. In America there were no privileged classes, and the people had not groaned beneath the tyranny of heartless and effete aristocracies; the evils of which their leaders complained, compared with those which weighed down the European populations, were slight, almost imaginary. But in France Liberty and Equality was the fierce and savage yell of men who hated the whole social order as it existed around them, and who, indeed, had no reason to love it. The spirit of feudalism was dead, and its lifeless form remained to impest the earth. The nobles, sunk in debauch and sloth, continued their exactions, upheld their privileges, and yet rendered no service to the state. Corruption, extravagance, maladministration, infidelity, and licentiousness pervaded the whole social system. France was prostrate with the foot of a harlot on her neck, and the people were starving. Little wonder, when the torch was applied, that the lurid glare of burning thrones and altars, the crash of falling palaces and cathedrals, should affright and strike dumb the nations of the earth—for God’s judgment was there; little wonder that Ireland, sitting by the melancholy sea, chained and weeping, should lift her head when the God of the patient and the humble was shattering the whitened sepulchres which enshrined the world’s rottenness.

In Belfast the taking of the Bastile was celebrated by processions and banquets amid the wildest enthusiasm, and the name of Mirabeau called forth the most deafening applause. The eyes of Ireland were fastened on France; the cause of the Revolution was believed to be that of all oppressed peoples who seek to break the bonds of slavery. “Right or wrong,” wrote an Irish patriot, “success to the French! They are fighting our battles, and, if they fail, adieu to liberty in Ireland for one century.”[18] Even the manners and phraseology of the Revolution became popular in Ireland. The Dublin Volunteers were called the National Guard, the liberty-cap was substituted for the harp, and Irishmen saluted one another with the title of citizen.

Out of this French enthusiasm grew the Society of “United Irishmen,” which soon superseded the Volunteers. The United Irishmen made no concealment of their revolutionary principles. They demanded a radical reform in the administration of Ireland, and threatened, if this was denied, to break the bond which held them united with England. They openly proclaimed their intention of stamping out “the vile and odious aristocracy,” which was an insuperable obstacle to the progress of the Irish people; and to accomplish this they invited the French to invade Ireland. The landlords, they said, show no mercy; they deserve to receive none.

However little sympathy the Catholics might feel with men who entertained such violent opinions, they were their natural allies; and the English government, following its old policy of doing what is right only under compulsion, hastened to make concessions. From June, 1792, Catholics were admitted as barristers; they were allowed to keep more than two apprentices; and the prohibition of their marriage with Protestants was withdrawn. In 1793, when France had declared war against England, still further concessions were made. The penalties for non-attendance at Protestant worship were abolished. “On the eve of a desperate war,” said Sir Lawrence Parsons in the House of Commons, “it was unsafe to maintain any longer the principles of entire exclusion.” The Catholics were admitted to the franchise, but were not made eligible to Parliament; they were at the same time declared capable of holding offices, civil and military, and places of trust, without taking the oath or receiving the sacrament. This is the third emancipation of the Catholics of Ireland. The American Revolution brought about the first, and the independence of the Irish Parliament the second.

In the meantime the crimes and excesses of the French Republicans had cooled the zeal of the Irish patriots. The Catholics grew suspicious of leaders who applauded the assassins of priests and the profaners of all sacred things. A reaction had set in, and the English government seized the opportunity to order the people to lay down their arms; and this order was intentionally executed with such cruelty as to provoke insurrections, which, in the lack of leaders and of any plan of action, were easily suppressed. The agents of the United Irishmen had, however, succeeded in interesting the French Republic in the cause of Ireland, and in December, 1796, General Hoche set sail for Bantry Bay with fifteen thousand men; but the fleet, scattered by a storm, was unable to effect a landing. In August, 1798, General Humbert disembarked in Killala Bay at the head of fifteen hundred men who had been drawn from the armies of Italy and the Rhine, but he found the Irish people completely disarmed, and the country in the possession of a powerful English army. He nevertheless pushed forward into the interior of the island, routed an army of four thousand men, and finally, when his force had been reduced to eight hundred, capitulated to Lord Cornwallis at the head of thirty thousand. A third expedition, sent out in the month of September of the same year, met with no better success. The Rebellion of '98 had blazed forth and had been quenched in blood. That it was not unprovoked even Mr. Froude confesses.

“The long era of misgovernment,” he says, “had ripened at last for the harvest. Rarely since the inhabitants of the earth have formed themselves into civilized communities had any country suffered from such a complication of neglect and ill-usage. The Irish people clamored against Government, and their real wrong, from first to last, had been that there was no government over them; that, under changing forms, the universal rule among them for four centuries had been the tyranny of the strong over the weak; that from the catalogue of virtues demanded of those who exercised authority over their fellow-men the word justice had been blotted out. Anarchy had borne its fruits.”[19]

During the violence of the conflict, and in the heat of passion, both the rebels and the British soldiers committed crimes for which no excuse can be offered; but the horrible and deliberate brutality of the English after the suppression of the outbreak has never been surpassed by them even in Ireland. When at length the appetite for torture, mutilation, and hanging palled, the British ministry resolved to suppress the Irish Parliament. Nothing was to be feared from the people, for their spirit had been crushed; the lavish expenditure of money in open and shameless bribery overcame the scruples of their Protestant representatives; and thus, after a struggle of six hundred and thirty-one years (1169-1800), corruption triumphed where every other means had failed. The Union was declared to exist; but Ireland was permitted to retain its name, its institutions, laws, and customs, subject, however, to the pleasure of the imperial Parliament.

The Rebellion of 1803, which accomplished nothing, and that of 1848, which met with no better fate, close the fateful list of Ireland’s wars.

Men have never fought in a juster cause, and, had they triumphed, their names would live for ever in the scroll of the world’s heroes. They have not bled in vain, if Irishmen will but learn the lesson which their failures teach. Not by arms, but by the force of the holiest of causes, is Ireland to obtain the full redress of her wrongs. They only who are her enemies or who are ignorant of her history would wish to excite her people to rebellion. That England will grant nothing which she thinks herself able to withhold we know; but these periodical outbreaks have invariably given her an opportunity of strengthening the grasp which political agitation had forced her to relax. Wars which lead only to butcheries are criminal, and they destroy the faith of patriots in their country’s triumph; while defeat brings divisions and feuds among those who had stood shoulder to shoulder on the field of battle.

After the Union Ireland relapsed into a period of lethargic indifference which might have been mistaken for healthful repose. The Protestant ascendency entered again upon the beaten paths of tyranny and oppression, and the Catholics suffered in silence.

The obstinate bigotry of George III. had prevented Pitt from fulfilling the promise, made at the time of the union of the two kingdoms, to relieve them of their civil disabilities, and the prime minister, whose intentions were honest, withdrew from the cabinet. But this step, however it might exonerate him from further responsibility in the matter, brought no relief to the Catholics; and as the sad experience of the past had taught them the hopelessness of resorting to violent measures, they entered upon the course of peaceful agitation which, under the wise and skilful direction of O’Connell, compelled the British Parliament, in April, 1829, to concede to them the rights which had been so long and so cruelly withheld.

“The Duke of Wellington,” said Lord Palmerston, “found that he could not carry on the government of the country without yielding the Catholic question, and he immediately surrendered that point”; and George IV. signed the act of Catholic Emancipation with a shudder.

This great victory, important in itself and its immediate results, was yet more important as an evidence of a radical change in the policy henceforward to be followed in seeking redress of Irish grievances.

For seven hundred years England had been busy in efforts to form a government for Ireland, and the result was the most disgraceful failure known in history. For seven hundred years Ireland had rebelled, plotted, invoked foreign aid, in the hope of throwing off the galling yoke; and after centuries of bloodshed she found herself more strongly bound to England. In the presence of this great historical teaching both nations seemed prepared to pause and deliberately to examine their mutual relations, and both seemed to feel that the special objects at which each had been aiming were unattainable. The geographical position of the two countries renders their union inevitable so long as either is able to subjugate and hold the other in the bonds of a common government. Had Ireland been in condition to maintain her independence, England, surrounded by enemies, could never have risen to the position which she has held for centuries. The national aspirations for power and dominion could not be realized while Ireland was permitted to retain her separate existence, and her conquest was therefore inevitable the moment England felt herself strong enough to undertake it; nor can the wildest visionary seriously believe that there is the faintest hope that the connection between them will ever be dissolved except in their common ruin. So long as England’s power remains, so long will she hold Ireland with the unerring instinct with which a vigorous people clings to its national life; and should England’s downfall come, there is no good reason for thinking that it would not be the knell of Ireland’s doom. They have the same language, the same fundamental principles of government, the same commercial and political interests; and under these common influences the differences and antagonisms which still exist are likely to become more and more inactive. The English people are not without their own grievances, which, in some respects, are more serious than those of the Irish—the consequences of feudalism, which in England has been able to resist more successfully than elsewhere the social movements of modern times. Henceforward Ireland is the natural and necessary ally of the more liberal and fair-minded portion of the English people, and she will co-operate most efficiently in helping them to bring about the reforms which are so much needed.

For the perfect religious liberty which can exist only after the disestablishment of the Anglican Church England will be indebted to Ireland, whose people have already compelled the British Parliament to admit principles and adopt measures which will inevitably lead to the dissolution of the union between church and state throughout the whole extent of the empire. The Irish land system must be sacrificed as the Irish Church has been sacrificed; and this will be the first step towards a complete revolution in the system of land tenure throughout Great Britain. The growing influence and increasing number of English Catholics will help greatly to create a more cordial and genuine religious sympathy between the two races of these sister islands; and this sympathy will be still further strengthened when the church in England, through the disestablishment and disintegration of Anglicanism, shall have gained a position and power which will give to her special weight in forming public opinion. As the community of interests of the two countries becomes more manifest, political parties will cease to be influenced by national or religious prejudice, and will be constituted upon principles which relate to the social interests of the people. England has already confessed the radical error of her Irish policy, and her leading statesmen have admitted that the cause of its failure lay in its viciousness—in the fact that it wantonly violated the rights and interests of the people because they belonged to a different race and held a different religious faith. Her legislation was unjust because it was narrow and exclusive—favored a class and a creed, and, in order to favor these, repressed and crushed the national energies. The government believed, whether truly or falsely, that it could rule Ireland only by fostering divisions and feuds among her people; and to do this it sought by every means to intensify and embitter the prejudice which separated the English from the Irish, the Protestant from the Catholic. With this view Scotch and English colonies of Protestants were planted in Ireland, and, lest the intercourse and amenities of life should soften the asperity of religious bigotry, the government took special care to encourage the hatred which kept them aloof from the natives, first by local separations, and afterwards by the social distinctions which arose from the enforced poverty and ignorance of the Catholic population. The American Revolution taught England, if not the iniquity, the folly of this conduct; and from 1778 to the present day she has been slowly receding from a course in which she had grown old. She has receded unwillingly, too, and with hesitation, and has thus often increased the discontent which she sought to allay. Nations, like individuals, find that it is hard to recover from inveterate habits of wrong-doing. The wages of sin must be paid; repentance can save from death, but not from humiliation and punishment. Nor has England repented, but she has entered in the way of penitence; she has made some reparation, but has not by any means done all that must be done before Ireland can be content. For nearly half a century now—that is, since 1829—there has been, we believe, a sincere desire to govern Ireland fairly, chiefly, no doubt, because English statesmen had come to see that it was not possible to govern her in any other way; but these good intentions have been thwarted by the constitutional repugnance of the English people to apply strong and efficacious remedies to social disorders. Nowhere else among civilized nations are ancient abuses guarded and protected with such superstitious veneration. Hence the government thought to satisfy Ireland by half-measures of redress, and these it took so ungraciously that they seemed to be wrung from it, and not conceded with good-will. Men are not grateful for favors which are granted because they can no longer be withheld.

Englishmen still forget that Ireland has the right to be treated by them not merely with justice, but with generous indulgence. So long as the root of the evil is left untouched little will be accomplished by pruning the branches. Ireland’s curse is the system of land tenure, founded on confiscation and organized to perpetuate a fatal antagonism between the proprietors and the tillers of the soil. Irishmen will be disaffected and rebellious so long as the national prosperity is blighted by a state of things which leaves their country in the hands of men who are happy only when they are away from it.

Parliament has passed several land acts, but it would seem that they had been purposely so framed as to produce no good results. That it is possible to change the land system of Ireland radically, without doing injustice to any one, is admitted, and various projects by which this might be done have been laid before Parliament. This is not a question of tenant-rights; it lies far deeper. Nor is there any parity in this respect between England and Ireland. In England the land is owned by the people’s natural leaders; in Ireland it is owned by the people’s natural enemies. This land question is far more important than any question of Home Rule; and if Parliament will but give a proper solution to this problem, Home Rule will no longer be seriously thought of.

When landlordism vanishes from Ireland, the day of final reconciliation will be at hand. With it will disappear the filibusters, revolutionists, and Fenians, whose disturbing influence in Irish politics is made possible by the wrongs which the English government has not the will or the courage to redress. There are other grievances than the land system, but it will not be difficult to do away with them when the country shall have been given back to the people. With a free press, free speech, and an organized public agitation sustained and increased by the sympathies and interests of the masses of the people of England, it will be found impossible to withhold much longer from Ireland full and complete justice; and nothing less will satisfy her people.

TENNYSON AS A DRAMATIST.[20]

Alfred Tennyson is to-day one of the household gods of English-speaking peoples. He has a place in every library, a niche in every memory, an echo in every heart. He has unquestionably added a new and brilliant page to the great book of English literature. He has set there something that was not there before, and that is not likely to fade away with time. Doubtless there are men who would deny this. There are literary Gorgons who would, if they could, stare every man into stone. There are critics whose nature seems to distil venom, and who find no sweetness save in their own gall. To men of this class the very fact of a man being praised is in itself sufficient cause for condemnation. Over and above these there are probably some who honestly dislike or do not care for Tennyson. For such we do not speak, but for the great mass of English readers in whose estimation Tennyson occupies a very conspicuous, if somewhat undefinable, position. By them he is liked, and liked better than any living poet; and, indeed, he has given excellent reasons for being so liked.

That there have been greater English poets, even his most enthusiastic admirers must allow; that there have been few sweeter, all who have read him and others will admit. Indeed, sweetness, with its twin-sister purity, is one of the marked characteristics of Tennyson’s verse. No man ever mistook Tennyson for a Pythoness, a Cassandra, a Jeremiah. He is not heroic like Homer. Much of the idyllic grace, but little of the real massiveness, of Virgil he has. He cannot scoff like Horace, or Byron, or Shelley. He cannot scourge like Dante, observe with the luminous philosophy, the high inspiration of Shakspere, or build up a mighty edifice like Milton. He can do none of these things. In some respects he is perhaps less than the least of these poets. He is a sweet singer, made for sunshine and peace and harmony; the poet of the happy household over whose threshold passes from time to time the sad shadow of a quiet sorrow; not the poet of despair, of wrath, of agony, of the fiercer passions or tumultuous joys, whose very excess is pain.

True it is that, as he sang in his earlier days,

“The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.”

But he is not such a poet. Never has he given voice to the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, or to that of which both of these are born—the love of love. Whenever he has attempted it he has failed. He is too retiring, too domestic. “With an inner voice” his river runs, and we have to listen with ears nicely attuned to catch its whisper and its meaning. So inner is it, indeed, that it is often obscure and quite escapes the dull hearing of ordinary men. His first volume, published in 1830, is almost fulsomely dedicated to Queen Victoria, who is certainly not a heroic figure, whatever else she may be. It is a picture gallery filled with Claribels and Lilians, and Isabels and Madelines, and Marianas and Adelines—all very sweet and delicate and dainty, but not inspiring. He sings to “the owl,” he dedicates odes “to memory,” he lingers by “the deserted house,” chants the dirge of “the dying swan,” and so on. In 1832 he enlarges his gallery by the addition of the lovely “Lady of Shalott,” “Mariana in the South,” “Eleänore,” and we come nearer to the poet’s heart in “The Miller’s Daughter,” whom he evidently prefers to the haughty and much-abused “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” Something, too, of his more marked peculiarities show here in the “Palace of Art” and that dreamy, delicious poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” He is intensely English—an admirable quality, be it remarked sotto voce, in an English poet laureate. He closes the volume with some strong verses:

“You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas?

“It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;

“A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom broadens slowly down
From precedent to precedent....”

The intense difference between the spirit here expressed and that of his more immediate and brilliant predecessors and countrymen, Byron and Shelley and Keats, may possibly account in some degree for the hold which Tennyson has taken on the English heart. He was a man, too, who felt the throbbings of the age and touched with skilful fingers the pulse of Time. Though anxious for the future, he was troubled with no “Dreams of Darkness,” or hollow-eyed despair, or morbid imaginings. He realizes change; he has hopes for a world over which he sees a God ruling. He sings boldly of “immortal souls,” and knows no “first dark day of nothingness.” He warns the intelligence of his countrymen to—

“... pamper not a hasty time,
Nor feed with crude imaginings
The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings,
That every sophister can lime.

“Deliver not the tasks of might
To weakness, neither hide the ray
From those, not blind, who wait for day
Tho’ sitting girt with doubtful light.

“Make knowledge circle with the winds;
But let her herald, Reverence, fly
Before her to whatever sky
Bear seed of men and growth of minds.”

These lines are noble, true, and Christian; and again:

“Meet is it changes should control

Our being, lest we rust in ease.

We all are changed by still degrees,

All but the basis of the soul.

“So let the change which comes be free
To ingroove itself with that which flies,
And work, a joint of state, that plies
Its office, moved with sympathy.

“A saying, hard to shape in act;
For all the past of Time reveals
A bridal dawn of thunder-peals,
Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact.

“Ev’n now we hear with inward strife
A motion toiling in the gloom—
The Spirit of the years to come
Yearning to mix himself with Life.

“A slow-develop’d strength awaits
Completion in a painful school;
Phantoms of other forms of rule,
New Majesties of mighty States—

“The warders of the growing hour,
But vague in vapor, hard to mark;
And round them sea and air are dark
With great contrivances of Power.”

This was published in 1832, a period when agitations about the suffrage, and the Corn Laws, and Catholic Emancipation—questions that shook England to its foundations, only to fix them deeper than before—were rife or looming up like awful spectres in the dim mist of the future. Tennyson did not dread them, though he realized their vastness and importance. Most certainly the verses just quoted stamp him as a close observer of events in those days and a man of right moral balance, to whom might with some measure of truth be applied his own words:

“He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill,

He saw thro’ his own soul.
The marvel of the everlasting will,
An open scroll,

Before him lay....”

Still, these nobler passages are only fragments. He prefers his quiet mood. In 1842 appeared the first of his idyls, the “Morte d’Arthur.” Here again the better nature of the poet—a nature that we are grieved to see apparently soured and crossed, not softened and made more venerable, by the hand of Time—breaks forth in the grand prayer of the dying king:

“If thou shouldst never see my face again,

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”

It was the Catholic instinct breaking through the wall of prejudice and false teaching which, in centuries of separation from the truth, have grown up around the English heart, that gave voice to this beautiful conception. Many are the instances where non-Catholic poets have leaped up to truths of this kind which the whole force of their training and education ran counter to. It is, as it were, the flash of inspiration coming on them in spite of themselves and issuing in music. The divinity of their art has lifted them above all prejudice into the sun-bright heaven. Thus Byron sings to the Blessed Virgin in strains that a saint might envy. Unfortunately, the instances are many also where men lifted up on the heights of inspiration, or by the deep yearnings of their own soul, have, as it were, glanced into heaven and seen the face of Truth, only to fall back again to their lower level, dazed and blinded by the very glimpse that was revealed to them. And we find them deny with their own lips and actions what their greater selves had announced.

It is not our purpose to enter into an elaborate criticism of Tennyson. That task has been done time and again, and by pens infinitely better fitted for it than ours. We are only taking touches here and there to bring out the poet in his truest colors, in his best and his worst lights, in order to add point to the main purport of this article, which is to show that Tennyson has mistaken himself and his powers in the rôle which he has thought fit to assume in his later years. In his earlier dreams he is full of high thoughts and large aspirations. “My faith is large in Time, and that which shapes it to some perfect end,” he tells us. He looks forward longingly to “the golden year.” He is possessed with the spirit of Christian purity, and gives constant expression to it, notably in “St. Agnes” and “Sir Galahad.” In “The Two Voices” he argues down atheism. He lays bare the grinning savagery of a wasted intellect and debauched life, only to punish it with the power of a man who knows what virtue is and feels it in his soul. He sometimes catches those inarticulate murmurs of the heart which breathe in feelings rather than in words, where feeling is too deep for words, and they well out in song, as in the

“Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!”

while in the “In Memoriam” the poet, stricken to the heart, has given voice to that sorrow, and the effect it has on our life, which most of us have felt when some bright intelligence has been taken from our side, whose young years were blossoming fair with promise of a great and good future.

In all this he is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed; in all that is sad, or sweet, or picturesque, or naïvely joyous our hearts are with him. He stands alone in his dainty pictures of scenery, of women, of certain men. He touches the commonplaces of the time with a magic pencil. He beguiled the hard and stubborn Saxon, which yielded reluctantly even to the greatest masters of English verse, into a music it had never known before. He built up fairy castles, and galleries and cities of old time, and peopled them with a fair array of Arthurs and Launcelots, of Guineveres and Elaines, of Merlins and Gawains, whose very names were music, and whose deeds were just such as befitted scenes of witchery. He is, moreover, a man of marked personality and nationality in his writings. He is an Englishman and nothing else. He does not care to be anything else or more; for he can see nothing greater. All his scenery is English; his characters are English; his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations English. Byron’s corsairs and giaours and Childe Harolds would fight as fiercely, frown as darkly, sin as deeply, in any civilized language as in English—in warmer languages even better, perhaps; Shakspere’s profound observations and reading of character would have reached the world through any other channel as surely as, perhaps more readily than, through the English; some would doubt whether Milton ever wrote English at all. But all Tennyson is English or nothing. His dawns, his gloamings, his sunrises, his sunsets, his landscapes, his fens, his fogs, his smoke, his moonlight and moonlight effects, his winds, his birds, his flowers, his reeds and rushes, his trees, his brooklets, his seas, his cliffs, his coloring, his ruins, his graveyards, his walks and rides, his love of good cheer, his hums of great cities, his profound respect for the respectable, are all English. He has the sturdy English common sense and no small share, as will be seen, of English prejudice; and, though he feels something of the movements of the outer world, he has all the English narrowness of vision. So that, while his works will probably never become a part of any other literature than the English—for they would not be understood elsewhere—they have won their way into the English heart for their very homeliness, if for no higher reason. So long as this English poet was content to sing to us, we were content to listen, were his lay sad or gay. He had been singing all our life, and we were not weary of his music, even though the music was all pitched in much the same key. We never tire of a familiar voice that we love. But when we would be roused and wrought up by some martial strain, by some great event, by one of those movements that catch the heart of a people and sway it and hold it captive, by the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” Tennyson fails. Surely, for such an Englishman as he, the death of the Duke of Wellington ought to have proved an inspiring theme. It is true that as the years went on, and the memory of Waterloo faded, and the hero of Waterloo moved about and took his part in civic affairs, people (and people are ever ready to weary of their gods, if their gods are too near them and live too long) began to clip and cut down the gigantic proportions of the Iron Duke’s colossal figure. Indeed, before he died it is safe to say that half England regarded England’s hero as rather an ordinary sort of person and a worthy but extremely fortunate soldier. Still, death generally brings back the liveliest memories of deeds that are, or are thought to be, great and good, and a true poet’s song who believed all of Wellington that Tennyson’s poem expresses might well have been tipped with fire when Wellington died. Yet Tennyson’s funeral ode is poor, tame; where not tame, forced; and, like all such compositions, indefinitely strung out. All his readers know the opening:

“Bury the Great Duke
With an empire’s lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke,

To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation,

Mourning when their leaders fall,
Warriors carry the warrior’s pall
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall!”

It is plain from the start that he is writing for a public. This great duke needs a capital G and a capital D to impress duly that public, the British (which is always ready to be awed by capitals attached to titles), with the great duke’s immensity. There is something of the heavy English undertaker about this—a display, a forced solemnity, a measured tread, a sense of sham. The great duke is lost sight of in the funereal trappings, the crowd, and accompaniment. See how Byron seizes on the very heart of an event, and in a few lines pictures for us the whole, the before and after. He is describing the greater man by whose fall the great duke rose to fame:

“Tis done—but yesterday a king!

And arm’d with kings to strive—

And now thou art a nameless thing:

So abject—yet alive!

Is this the man of thousand thrones,

Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones,

And can he thus survive?

Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star,

Nor man nor fiend has fallen so far.”

This indeed is “the scorn of scorn,” and the entire ode is replete with it. Byron, who had been a great admirer of Napoleon, could not consent to his idol lowering himself so far as to receive his life from England. He could not forgive himself for yielding to

“That spell upon the minds of men

That led them to adore
Those Pagod things of sabre-sway,
With fronts of brass, and feet of clay.”

“O civic muse,” cries Tennyson,

“To such a name,
To such a name for ages long,
To such a name
Preserve a broad approach of fame,
And ever-ringing avenues of song.”

Here lies the whole secret of the ode’s comparative poverty. Tennyson is by position, if not by profession, “a civic muse,” and the civic muse is never heroic or great. It is more apt, like Turveydrop, to be “a model of deportment,” especially when it follows the advice of Mrs. Chick and “makes an effort.” This, for instance, is eminently civic:

“Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?

Here, in streaming London’s central roar.

Let the sound of those he wrought for,

And the feet of those he fought for,

Echo round his bones for evermore.

“Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,
As fits an universal woe,
Let the long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low.”

We hope that Wellington was not “the last great Englishman.” If so, English greatness must indeed be “low.” But the thought is irresistible: Is not the undertaker’s hand again visible in all this? How different is it from the sad, simple, manly beauty of the lament of a poet, whose name scarcely stands in the list of English authors, for one of those soldiers who gloriously failed! Here is how Wolfe sings of the burial of Sir John Moore:

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

“We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the glimmering moonbeam’s fitful light
And the camp-fires dimly burning.”

Again, is this a worthy echo of “a people’s voice”?

“And thro’ the centuries let a people’s voice
In full acclaim,
A people’s voice,
The proof and echo of all human fame,
A people’s voice, when they rejoice
At civic revel and pomp and game,
Attest their great commander’s claim
With honor, honor, honor to him,
Eternal honor to his name.”

What wearisome and forced repetition, what commonplace allusions! This is not Tennyson. The very verse is burdened with its vulgar prose, and halts and stumbles in clumsy confusion meant for art. And here is his description in the same poem of the battle of Waterloo:

“Dash’d on every rocky square

Their surging chargers foam’d themselves away;

Last, the Prussian trumpet blew;
Thro’ the long-tormented air
Heaven flash’d a sudden jubilant ray,
And down we swept and charged and overthrew.
So great a soldier taught us there,
What long-enduring hearts could do
In that world’s earthquake, Waterloo!”

The best expression in it, the last, is borrowed from Byron’s wonderful description of the same battle:

“Stop! for thy tread is on an Empire’s dust!

An Earthquake’s spoil is sepulchred below!”

Again in Byron these two lines tell the whole story, as does that other,

“The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo!”

So with Tennyson’s “War Songs” and “National Songs,” published in the edition of 1830 and wisely omitted in later editions. They are not much above the level of many fledglings’ performances in a like strain. They fall dull on the heart:

“There standeth our ancient enemy,
Hark! he shouteth—the ancient enemy!
On the ridge of the hill his banners rise;
They stream like fire in the skies;
Hold up the Lion of England on high
Till it dazzle and blind his eyes.

Chorus: Shout for England!

Ho! for England!

George for England!

Merry England!

England for aye!”

Here are the chorus and full chorus of his “National Song”:

“For the French, the Pope may shrive ’em.

For the devil a whit we heed ’em:

As for the French, God speed ’em

Unto their heart’s desire,

And the merry devil drive ’em

Through the water and fire.

Our glory is our freedom,

We lord it o’er the sea;

We are the sons of freedom.

We are free.”

As Mr. Tennyson has been wise enough—for shame’s sake, presumably—to omit these and similar sorry pieces from his later editions, it may seem unfair to quote them against him now. We quote them, however, intentionally, to show that there is a strong streak of English narrowness and Protestant bigotry in his nature which we were happy to think dead, until within the last few years it has cropped out again. In 1852 there were probabilities of war between England and France, then under Louis Napoleon. Tennyson thought to rouse his countrymen, and the strongest appeal he can make is to religious bigotry:

“Rise, Britons, rise, if manhood be not dead;
The world’s last tempest darkens overhead;
The Pope has bless’d him;
The Church caress’d him;
He triumphs; may be we shall stand alone.
Britons, guard your own.

“His ruthless host is bought with plunder’d gold,

By lying priests the peasants’ votes controll’d.

All freedom vanish’d,

The true men banish’d, etc.

“Rome’s dearest daughter now is captive France,

The Jesuit laughs, and reckoning on his chance,

Would unrelenting,

Kill all dissenting,

Till we were left to fight for truth alone.

Britons, guard your own.”

And this is the gentle Tennyson! But we forbear from comment other than the verses themselves suggest, and turn at last to our more immediate object.

Whatever fault may be found here and there with Tennyson, one thing is certain: his renown was great and his fame established chiefly by his earlier and better works and by the peculiar characteristics which we have attempted to point out. The poet, however, seems not to have been satisfied. He was weary of the graceful path by which he ambled gently up to fame, and would seek by a new and rugged road a higher place than he already occupied in that temple where are gathered the mighty men who have wrought with the pen monuments more enduring than marble. In an evil hour he tempted fate, and fate gave him a severe warning. Weary of the minstrel's lute which had charmed the world, he would be what the poets of old were thought to be—a vates, an inspired prophet-and his vaticination was Queen Mary.

As that drama has been dealt with in these pages by another pen, we shall not touch on it here more than to say that never were the minds of Tennyson’s countrymen better prepared to receive and applaud a work intended, as this plainly was, to be an outcry against Rome and a picture of one of the fierce struggles between England and Rome. Mr. Gladstone had prepared the way and set all the world warring on “Vaticanism.” Tennyson could not have chosen a better time for the publication of his drama, and, were it a work of power and passion, it could not have failed to catch the heart of the people. Never, on the other hand, could he have chosen a better time for a higher duty: that of, in the words of his great master, still in his right hand carrying gentle peace “to silence envious tongues.” If the drama failed, it failed in the face of every incentive to success.

Fail it did. It was plain, even to friendly critics, that the author of Queen Mary was not a dramatist, and so it was hinted generally in the mildest possible terms. What was the reason of the failure?

We have shown, we believe sufficiently, that Tennyson failed wherever he attempted to yoke the passions. His hand was too weak to curb them. His genius is reflective, introspective, descriptive. It has not the flash, the white heat of inspiration. It is always Tennyson who is singing, talking to, arguing with us, describing for us. He is a person, not a voice—a very pleasing, scholarly, refined, and in the main right-minded person—but he is for ever giving utterance to his own peculiar thoughts in his own peculiar style. The highest form of poetry, as of oratory, is not this. It is that undefinable and truest expression of feeling, of hope, of agony, of despair, of wrath, of courage, of any of the passions that lie dormant in the human breast, which at once elicits a responsive echo from the heart of humanity, so that we do not say, How sweet, how tender, how strong is this man, but, How true to nature is this thought! Thus it is that the greatest poets are the voices of all the world; their works the inheritance of all the world. In their highest heights they belong to humanity, and to no nation.

The dramatic we believe to be the highest form of poetry, because it alone attempts to portray life itself, life in action; it is not a description, however magnificently done, of life. There lies between it and all other forms of poetry the difference that exists between the painting of a hero and the hero himself. The one is the man, thinking, living, moving, breathing, speaking his thoughts, doing his deeds; the other after all is only an image, more or less vivid, of him on canvas. It may catch the color of the eye, the expression of the countenance, the texture of the dress, the shape, the form; but at the very best it is a picture, no more, infinitely removed from the reality.

If this be a right conception of the difference between dramatic and all other kinds of poetry—and it seems to us to be, although it might need more elaboration to impress it upon the reader’s mind—it will be plain that the dramatic poet needs nothing short of the highest inspiration in order to make him catch the very breathings of men’s souls and throw them into living forms, as truly as the master actor loses his own personality and lets it sink or become absorbed utterly in the various characters he portrays. No mere change of costume will effect the metamorphosis needed to impress the spectator with the reality of the change in character. In the same way no clipping of a poem into acts and scenes, and no allotting of certain lines to certain different names, will convert a descriptive poem into a drama. All the world will at once detect the fraud or the inherent defect.

A not uncommon phase of an exasperated mind is to refuse to recognize failure. Tennyson tried again, rather hastily, and in the same direction, with the satisfactory result of making a more disastrous failure than before. The blunder of Queen Mary has been emphasized in Harold. The first named may have left some minds in doubt whether or not its author could construct a drama; the production of the second has effectually set all such doubts at rest. The critics who in the first instance were kind are in the second cruel. We have rarely seen a more general and resolutely contemptuous dealing with the pretensions of any writer at all than in the treatment which Harold has received at the hands of critics of every shade of opinion, English as well as American.

Harold is simply narrative throughout—spoken narrative, indeed. A drama must be act. Scenes prior to and leading up to the Norman Conquest of England are depicted with more or less beauty of limning, but they are loose, shifting, independent of each other. There is no secret thread to link the whole and give it a unity of purpose and of plan, without which there is no drama. There are five acts. There might have been fifty, or only two, or only one, so far as the slow working of the whole up to the catastrophe at the conclusion goes. The first act opens in London at King Edward’s palace. Almost the first twenty pages are occupied by various characters in discussing the appearance, meaning, and portent of a comet. This is, of course, the old stage trick used to knit the coming horror with troubles in the air. Shakspere uses it often, notably in Julius Cæsar, but with him the troubled elements obey the magic wand of Prospero and minister to man, and are but the accompaniment of great events. Tennyson’s comet is too much for his characters. They puzzle themselves about it until we grow tired of it and its three tails.

After the comet has run its course, the characters being brought together to discuss it, Harold intimates to the king his intention to go to Normandy; the king warns him not to go; then follows a lively discussion on personal matters between the queen, Harold, and his brothers, which almost ends in a fight; the comet or “grisly star” is introduced again, and the scene ends apropos of nothing in particular, unless a hint of a coming plot on the part of Aldwyth. The second scene, the best in the drama, is a very sweet piece of love-making between Harold and Edith, upon which Aldwyth again throws her shadow, and the act ends. The second act wrecks Harold at Ponthieu, whence his transition to the power of Count William of Normandy—or Duke William, as we are more in the habit of calling him—is easy. Indeed, to a dramatist there was no reason whatever for the first scene of this act, as the story of Harold’s capture might, if it were necessary, have been told in a line or two while Harold was actually in the power of William. The rest of this long act is taken up with William’s compelling Harold to swear, on the relics of the saints, to help him to the crown of England. The third act presents the death of King Edward, who wills the crown to Harold. The second scene gives another piece of love-making between Harold and Edith, not so happy as the first, and announces the invasion of Northumbria by Tostig and Harold Hardrada. The fourth act opens in Northumbria. In the first scene of it the factions of the rival chieftains are put an end to by the marriage of Harold with Aldwyth, and thus the only attempt at a shadow even of a plot is summarily disposed of. The other scenes are before and after the battle of Stamford Bridge, and the act closes with news of the landing of the Normans. The fifth act opens on the field of Senlac. Harold has a dream in his tent, too like that of Richard III. in conception. Stigand describes the battle of Hastings to Edith, and the death of Harold. Here the drama should have closed. Anything after it on the stage would certainly come tamely. But Tennyson cannot resist the temptation to search for the body of Harold, and with the finding of it, the death of Edith on it, and what in ordinary parlance would be called William’s directions for the funeral arrangements, the play closes.

Such is Harold—narrative, narrative, narrative throughout; very excellent narrative some of it, but no drama, no centre of interest around which the whole is made to turn. The misfortune about all historical plays is that the reader begins with a full knowledge of all the circumstances, and to make them dramatically interesting needs a most skilful adaptation of plot and counterplot, a slow unfolding of events from some necessary cause, a development of character, a silent Fate, so to say, moving in and out, and, in spite of all things, shaping events to one great end, so that, while we feel the consummation impending, we yet know not how, or when, or where, or by what instrumentality it will come. There is nothing of this in Harold.

It has been seen that Tennyson has no great love for the Pope. Indeed, if some of the lines quoted represent the man, he has, of late years at least, the heartiest hatred for the Catholic Church. We cannot help that, however much we may regret it. We must take men as they are, and, if Tennyson hates the Pope, why let him hate him and be happy. The Pope can exist and rule the Catholic Church, and be obeyed, revered, loved, and honored by intellects as bright at least as Mr. Tennyson’s, for all that gentleman’s hate. A true dramatist, however, sinks, or at least disguises, all his private personal feelings in depicting known characters or types of character. This is only to be true to nature, to art, and to history. Where there is question regarding the right reading of a character or a period, a writer is of course at liberty, after having consulted respectable authorities, to form his own estimate. Men who lived in the eleventh century must be true to their time. To make such men think, argue, reflect, question, doubt on most matters, particularly on matters of faith, just as do men of the nineteenth century, is a gross solecism. It is absurd and self-condemnatory on the face of it. To make eleventh-century Catholics speak of the Catholic faith, and Rome, and the pope after the fashion of the average Protestant or infidel journalist in these days, is absurd, not to characterize such practice by a harsher expression. This is what Tennyson has gone out of his way to do in Harold; and the only impression with which we rise from its perusal is that the writer detests Normans and Catholics. Between the Vere de Veres and the Pope Tennyson has lost his temper and his right hand has forgotten its cunning.

The drama presents no character of any special interest. Harold, Edward the Confessor, and William of Normandy, the three principal personages, are much the same first as last. In stage terms, William may be set down as the “heavy villain” of the piece, and a very heavy villain he is; Edward the Confessor as the “first old man”; and Harold as the “walking gentleman.” Edward is made—unintentionally too, it would seem—one of the silliest old men that ever walked the boards. As for his sanctity, imagine a saint speaking of himself in this style:

“And I say it
For the last time, perchance, before I go
To find the sweet refreshment of the Saints.”

Saints, in the Catholic Church at least, are not, as a rule, quite so sure about finding “the sweet refreshment of the saints.” Indeed, they have far graver doubts on this point often than sinners. But lest some of his courtiers might feel tempted to doubt the rapid transit to heaven of a man so thoroughly sure of his place beforehand, the king informs them:

“I have lived a life of utter purity:

I have builded the great church of holy Peter:

I have wrought miracles.”

True, every word of it. But it might have occurred to Mr. Tennyson that Edward the Confessor was mindful, at least, of that admonition: “Let not thine own mouth, but another’s, praise thee.” There never was a saint, to our knowledge, so fond of talking about himself, his miracles, his good deeds, his place here and hereafter. Listen to this again:

“And miracles will in my name be wrought
Hereafter. I have fought the fight and go—
I see the flashing of the gates of pearl—
And it is well with me, tho’ some of you
Have scorn’d me—ay—but after I am gone
Woe, woe to England! I have had a vision:
The seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus
Have turn’d from right to left.”

The whole thing is incongruous. It smacks rather of a converted “brother” giving his “experiences” and how he “got religion” before a highly-wrought meeting of “Christian workers.” Had the “devil’s advocate” only caught scent of any such expressions in the life of the real Edward, it is to be feared he would never have been canonized. Saints are not in the habit of canonizing themselves. The only thing that occurs to us as on a par with Mr. Tennyson’s picture of a saint is one by Mr. William Cullen Bryant in a short and remarkably silly poem recently published by him. It is entitled “A Legend of St. Martin,” and the saint, while still in the flesh, speaks as follows:

“Thus spake the saint: 'We part to-night;
I am St. Martin, and I give you here
The means to make your fortunes.’”

The author’s favorite churchman is Stigand, who, whether Catholic or heretic, no man who had read the history of the time carefully and honestly could by any possibility hold up for admiration. Mr. Tennyson, however, may consider himself excused on points of historical accuracy, inasmuch as he informs us in his dedication that “after Old-World records—such as the Bayeux tapestry and the Roman de Rou—Edward Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest,” and Bulwer Lytton’s historical romance treating of the same times, “have been mainly helpful” to him “in writing this drama.” But he cannot be excused for such culpable negligence in searching out authorities when attempting to depict in a truthful manner a most important historical epoch. Had he taken the easy pains of going a little deeper into history and authorities, it would probably have been better for himself and his drama, or perhaps, with his evident bias, he would not have written it at all. He loves Stigand, a thoroughly bad prelate, simply because Stigand was against the pope. If Tennyson selects his Catholic heroes from all men who have been against the pope, he will find his hands full of very queer characters, some of them worse than Stigand. Imagine even Stigand saying, in the exact tone of a modern unbeliever:

“... In our windy world

What’s up is faith, what’s down is heresy.”

Certain modern Anglican prelates and ministers, or any man who acknowledges no unchangeable deposit of divine truth, might speak in just such a strain. The words, if they mean anything, mean simply that there is no such thing at all as real faith or doctrine. Stigand knew better than that. His peculiar vice was a very English one—an overdue and unscrupulous regard for this world’s goods. This Catholic prelate tells Harold of a sum of money which he keeps concealed at the other’s service, to be asked for at his “most need,” in the following eloquent style:

“Red gold—a hundred purses—yea, and more!
If thou canst make a wholesome use of these
To chink against the Norman, I do believe

My old crook’d spine would bud out two young wings

To fly to heaven straight with.”

Tennyson doubtless considers this very English and spirited. Stigand may have disliked the Normans, and doubtless did. With all our hearts! But this mode of expressing his dislike is, in the mouth of a Catholic and a prelate, surely not in character.

Again he asks:

“... Be there no saints of England

To help us from their brethren yonder?”

As though a Catholic or Christian could dream of the saints warring in heaven or of affixing nationality to sanctity! Tennyson’s Edward, with a solitary gleam of intelligence, rebukes him thus:

“Prelate,

The Saints are one, ...”

yet immediately falls into the absurd blunder he rebukes by adding:

“But those (Saints) of Normanland

Are mightier than our own.”

While witnessing the battle of Hastings Stigand cries out in an ecstasy of admiration at Harold’s prowess: “War-woodman of old Woden!” Could any Christian man, Catholic or non-Catholic, couple a Christian warrior’s name with the detestable deity of the pagan North?

The character of Harold, too, is incongruous. He is represented as a most brave, wise, and honorable man, incapable of fear or falsehood: “broad and honest, breathing an easy gladness.” He weakens in many places. We cannot here go into a historical inquiry respecting the alleged oath of Harold on the relics of saints to help William to the crown of England. Much is made of it by Tennyson; so let us take all the facts for granted. A man such as Harold is here represented to be would rather have died than taken the oath, if he never meant to keep it. On the other hand, once taken, and knowing it to be false, we doubt whether the resolute Saxon soldier would have troubled himself much about the matter. He acts as a coward throughout while in William’s power. A strong man would not rail in secret at William for forcing him to take an oath which the swearer knew to be a lie. He would take it or not take it with the best grace possible. “Horrible!” exclaims Harold when the relics on which he has sworn are exposed. Harold was sufficiently man of the world—a man who had passed his life in camp and court—to have uttered no such weak cry. In the first place, if he swore falsely, such an exclamation showed at once that he never intended to keep his promise. In the second place, it would have been perfectly plain to William that he could place no reliance on the oath of such a poltroon. The same failure to apprehend the character of the man is apparent in the womanish tirade into which Harold breaks after William has left him: “Juggler and bastard—bastard: he hates that most—William the tanner’s bastard! Would he heard me!” A moment before he might have heard him, but Harold dared not speak his thoughts. Certainly the man who never lost a battle save the one in which he lost all—the man who conquered Wales, crushed the terrible invasion of Harold Hardrada and Tostig, braved his own sovereign, seized on the English throne with a grasp that only death could shake off, and died so gloriously on Hastings—never “played the woman with his eyes and the braggart with his tongue” in this poor fashion. Here again speaks the reader of modern infidel literature in the mouth of the unspeculative soldier of the eleventh century:

“I cannot help it, but at times
They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths
Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye
Saw them sufficient.”

“All the faiths!” We wonder how many “faiths” Harold knew of or contemplated. Indeed, it seems to us that Mr. Tennyson here speaks for himself, and in a manner that causes some suspicion of his having lost something of his own earlier and more robust belief. Harold continues:

“But a little light!—
And on it falls the shadow of the priest;
Heaven yield us more! for better Woden, all

Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla,

Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace;
The Holiest of our Holiest one should be
This William’s fellow-tricksters; better die
Than credit this, for death is death, or else
Lifts us beyond the lie.”

Which is heathenism and atheism beautifully combined. He goes on, still in his atheistic vein, when Edith bids him listen to the nightingales:

“Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!

Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross

Their billings ere they nest.”

And again, when Gurth brings news of the pope’s favoring William’s cause, Harold laughs and says of it:

“This was old human laughter in old Rome

Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d

Call’d itself God—a kingly rendering

Of 'Render unto Cæsar.’”

Harold must have lately risen from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet on Vaticanism when he spoke thus, so we pardon his aberration. That pamphlet is too strong for weak intellects.

“The Lord was God and came as man—the Pope

Is man and comes as God,”

he continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Edith that love “remains beyond all chances and all churches”—a dictum and doctrine that would be strange even in a Protestant Harold. “I ever hated monks,” he says in another place, which may account for his having founded Waltham Abbey. He grows more and more Protestant towards the end, and the saintly relics over which he was so terrified at having sworn a false oath he terms the “gilded ark of mummy-saints.” And here is his final legacy to England:

“... And this to England,

My legacy of war against the Pope

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

This is Tennyson’s legacy, not Harold’s. It seems strange that it should have fallen into careless hands; not ours, but those of the poet’s coreligionists. The fact is that the world is growing weary of little anti-papal tooters. Great enemies of the papacy it applauds and tries to excuse; but at the mouthings of the little people it yawns. If Tennyson has shown anything in this as in his other anti-Catholic effusions, it is that when moved by rancor he can descend to all the small bitterness of a common and weak order of mind. We cannot go further into an examination of Harold, and, indeed, the task is not worth while. He has failed in the one character which, to a true dramatic genius, offered magnificent opportunities—William of Normandy, who was perhaps the greatest and the wisest sovereign that England has as yet known. A gallant soldier; a wary yet bold and successful general; an astute statesman; a lover of learning; a resolute if severe ruler; a man who could bide his opportunity, then move on it with the flash and fatality of the lightning, yet withal a man of almost ungovernable passions, with the old taint running in his blood and through all his successful life—this was a character that it is as great a pity Shakspere did not draw as that Tennyson should have been rash enough to attempt to draw. In what ought to be the chief scene of the play, the battle of Hastings, there is no battle at all. The weak device is resorted to of setting a description of it as it proceeds in the mouth of Stigand, who watches the field from “a tent on a mound.” Norman and Saxon, Harold and William, are not brought together for the final death-grip. Shakspere's battle-scenes are more vivid than those of any painter. They illuminate history and print themselves indelibly on the mind. Cut the battle-scenes out of King John, Henry IV., Henry V., Macbeth, Julius Cæsar, Henry VI., and you mutilate the plays. Stigand’s description of the battle of Hastings might be dropped from Harold and not missed. Why should not Harold die as Hotspur dies, or as Macbeth, or Brutus, or any of the others—his face to the victorious foe, the fitting ending of the tragedy? Mr. Tennyson was not equal to the task, either in this scene or at Stamford Bridge. The last clash and conflict of human passion he can only look at from afar off and reflect upon when it is over. He cannot take it in hand and present it. He would do well to retire from the field where empires, and men and events that make or unmake empires, are the subjects of song, and go back to the pretty scenery, the calm truth, and the graceful verse that have made his name dearly loved and justly honored.

ANGLICANISM IN 1877,
AS AFFECTED BY THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

We should feel inclined to apologize to our readers for again introducing the English Establishment to their notice, were it not that since, a year ago, we considered Anglicanism in connection with the “Old Catholic” conference at Bonn, the increasing agitation within the state church cannot but have continued to attract the thoughtful attention of those who, from the bark of Peter, watch the weary tossing of the Anglican craft and the mutinous condition of a portion of her crew.

Since the period to which we allude, the fact that the whole tendency of the Alt-Catholic movement is rationalistic and anti-Christian is beginning to be understood by all really religious Protestants, and we now see the better part of them holding aloof from the movement, and even the Ritualist journals condemning whatever advances were made towards it. The cause is now advocated only by the Broad-Church party, which distinguished itself by its emphatic encouragement of the apostate Loyson, one of the apostles of the new sect, who went last summer to London to enlighten the English public on ecclesiastical questions. On the other hand, the High-Church movement is, if anything, in the direction of the Catholic Church, while Alt-Catholicism is a distinct counter-agitation, and thus anything like a cordial fraternization between the two is impossible. The attempts of the High-Church party to obtain at least as much as a recognition of the validity of their orders from the Orientals—attempts which were renewed at the Bonn conference—have again signally failed. One of the “Unionist” leaders himself laments that “the Oriental Church stands entirely aloof from the Church of England, sweepingly and roundly condemns all its members, denies the validity of their baptisms and ordinations, and practically refuses to aid them in any shape or form.”

There is no doubt that at the present moment a tremendous struggle has arisen in the Establishment between the would-be Catholic and the Protestant elements; the latter not only pleading its three centuries’ possession, but also, and truly, declaring itself to be the very basis and raison d’être of the schism. This claim is urged at the present time with a vehemence and jealous irritation aimed ostensibly at the “Romanizing practices” of their brethren, but the venom of which betrays itself to be especially called forth by the ceaseless, active, self-denying energy of these incorrigible early risers—an irritation not difficult to comprehend on the part of those who, with all their professions of Evangelical piety, have, generally speaking, an exceeding shyness of hard work, detest the Counsels of Perfection in general and the practice of self-denial in particular, take up the pen much more readily than the cross, and prefer bridling their neighbor’s tongue rather than their own. Nevertheless, with regard to a certain class among the Evangelicals, and these the more earnest, it is only just to say that their condemnation of Ritualists and their practices is sincerely a matter of principle. They regard the one as the guides and the other as the direct means to “idolatry”—a term which they have all their lives been taught to consider as synonymous with the Catholic religion.

When St. Edward the Confessor lay on his death-bed in the palace of Westminster, he foretold to his queen, St. Edith, and to Stigand that, in punishment for the sins of the land, God would permit the enemy of mankind to send a mission of wicked spirits into it, who should sever the Green Tree of Old England from its root, and lay it apart for the space of three furlongs; but that the tree should after a due time return to its root and revive, without the help of any man’s hand. The traditional interpretation of this prophecy has been that the English Church would be cut off for the space of three centuries from its parent stem, but that, after that time, the severed church should return to its ancient allegiance.

And what do we now see? Movement, awakening, and life where for three centuries have reigned the gloom and chillness of the tomb.

From the time of Elizabeth downwards not only the teaching but the general aspect of what is called the Church of England was intensely anti-Catholic. A brighter day first dawned for England when she hospitably received and succored the exiled priests of France. The precious leaven of their holy teaching and example never has been lost. Later, in 1829, the emancipation of the Catholics of the British Empire, under George IV., marked a fresh epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in England. The discussions which attended the passing of this act helped to increase a knowledge of her tenets, and prepared the way for their better appreciation; besides which, the restoration of some of the most illustrious families of the realm to their ancient and hereditary seats in the House of Lords, together with the admission of Catholics into the Lower House, tended further to the removal of many prejudices. Since Newman and Pusey, in 1833, recalled their brethren to the study of the Fathers of the church, many steps have been taken in the Establishment in the direction of the ancient paths—steps which Catholics have noted with interest and hope, though they perceive that but too often men who have been attracted towards the truth rest apparently contented with a bad imitation of its external manifestations and a garbled or “adapted” representation of its doctrines, forgetting that truth distorted ceases to be truth, and often is a lie. They marvel also that the invariable opposition of the pseudo-episcopate does not help these men, who are the present life of their system, to see that their imaginary “Catholicity” is wholly unauthorized and unrecognized by their ecclesiastical superiors, and that the hierarchy of their church is as consistently and persistently anti-Catholic as the constitution of that body itself. They are resisted and condemned by their bishops, and from their bishops they have no appeal except to a lay tribunal whose interference in sacris they repudiate.

By the terms of a new Appellate Jurisdiction Act, recently passed in both Houses of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council has been transferred to a new Court of Appeal. It was then provided that episcopal assessors should in future sit on the bench with the lay judges; and though it is by the latter that the judgment is pronounced, the bishops are allowed to make remarks on what is passing. They are to sit in rotation in the new court. The two archbishops and the Bishop of London are also to sit in turn, ex officio, and the rest in quarternions, beginning with the junior four (Chichester, St. Asaph, Ely, and St. David’s). It is impossible to say what may be the results of this equivocal assessorship, with regard to which the London Morning Post disrespectfully observes that “the plan offers no security whatever that the assessors shall be fit for their office beyond the fact that they are bishops”; calmly adding that “since the purpose for which their presence is required is the imparting to the judges of a certain kind and quality of information when desired, it is a serious defect to the scheme that it provides no guarantee that the prelates who sit shall possess any proper aptitude for their position.”[21]

Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business? In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by Presbyter Anglicanus that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before three—according to the statutes of the ancient canons.” Again: “It was a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”

The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church, described, just before his conversion, the present condition of ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining, absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the Anglican communion.

Nor is this all; not only is it now the case that secular law courts decide what may or may not be taught and practised in the Anglican Church, but they also claim to decide who shall and who shall not be admitted to its rites and sacraments. Lawyers are thus not only the doctors and ceremoniarii of Anglicanism, suspending or depriving ecclesiastics at pleasure, but they are also to be, in the last resort, the stewards of Anglican sacraments.

A case was lately pending before the Judicial Committee in which the action of a “priest” in refusing communion was reviewed and judged by the court. A parishioner of a Ritualist pastor having declared that he did not find in the Bible sufficient evidence for the existence of evil spirits to incline him to believe in the devil, the clergyman prohibited his coming for communion until he did believe in the devil. The parishioner wrote a complaint to the bishop, and the latter took his part against his parish “priest” and for the devil. The matter being referred to the Judicial Committee, the bishop’s verdict was confirmed in favor of the sceptical parishioner and of his Infernal Majesty.

Nor can any individual cases of this kind be matter of surprise when we reflect to what the doctrinal decisions of the supreme courts of the Anglican Establishment have, with the consent of her entire episcopate, as expressed in their famous “allocution” on the Public Worship Act, pledged her clergy. According to the final and irreversible authority acknowledged by that episcopate, the Church of England holds, 1, that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is an open question; 2, that it is an open question whether every part of every book of Scripture is inspired; 3, that there is no “distinct declaration” in the formularies of that church on the subject of everlasting punishment, and that the words “everlasting death” in the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer given in the catechism “cannot be taken as necessarily declaring anything touching the eternity of punishment after the resurrection”; 4, that Anglican bishops are the creatures of English law and dependent on that law for their existence, rights, and attributes.[22]

“The Church of England,” said Dr. Stanley, the Protestant Dean of Westminster, in a sermon recently preached at Battersea, “is what she is by the goodness of Almighty God and of his servant Queen Elizabeth.” If he had said, “of Henry VIII. and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth,” we could have agreed with him, particularly as the riper years of the Establishment continue so suitably to fulfil the promise of such parentage; but to Catholics there is a revolting profanity in classing together the goodness of God with that of one of the most implacable persecutors of his church—a persecutor, not from conviction of the justice, but the iniquity, of her cause, and from a persistent determination to extinguish in her realm the ancient faith, whose very existence was a condemnation of the state religion arranged by her father and Cranmer, improved by her brother and his Genevese assistants, and re-fashioned to her own liking by herself. The sentence pronounced by the Protestant historian Chalmers upon this powerful and unprincipled queen is that “she was a woman without chastity, a princess without honor, and a sovereign without faith”; and, as if by way of a satanic parody on the vision of the Immaculate Virgin in the Book of Revelations, we see Elizabeth, the offspring of an adulterous union, trampling under her despotic foot the Bride of Christ.

“The Church of England,” continued the dean, “was, it is true, a compromise,” and “he was not a true son thereof who used it as a weapon for promoting this or that doctrine, but, after the example of Elizabeth, and for the interests of the nation, used it as a broad shield under which he might work for good,”[23] etc., etc. The sense of which, in plain English, appears to be that the said church prefers general indifference to doctrinal truth, the “interests of the nation” to the glory of God, and the “example of Elizabeth” to purity of faith and life.

But Dean Stanley represents one only of the four principal sections into which the Church of England has divided itself; and however complacently the “Broad” and even “Moderate High” Churchmen may regard the marshy nature of the ground in which the foundations of their faith, if faith it can be called, are laid, and congratulate themselves on the fact that it is neither land nor water, but something of both, there are earnest men who have no fancy for being amphibious, and who spare no pains and toil to drain away the stagnant waters from their morass, in the sincere conviction that beneath the miasma-breeding mosses there lies, for those who dig deep enough to find it, the imperishable rock.

Of this number seems to be the Rev. Arthur Tooth, vicar of St. James’, Hatcham, who is now in prison because he chooses to act upon the principle of “no compromise.” We honor a man who is willing to suffer for conscience’ sake, and to uphold the right of the church to decide in ecclesiastical causes, but at the same time we cannot but feel that Mr. Tooth is more conscientious than logical, and that by his present opposition he is breaking the solemn promise and oath which, as a clergyman of the state church, he took, at his ordination, to a state-church bishop.

Mr. Tooth, on account of certain ritualistic practices—i.e., the use of “Catholic” vestments, conducting the communion service so as to make it resemble as much as possible Holy Mass, having “a crucifix in the chancel, little winged figures on the communion-table, lighted candles on a ledge where he had been ordered not to place them, etc., etc.—was, by order of Lord Penzance and with the approval of his own bishop, Dr. Claughton of Rochester, interdicted from officiating again in the diocese. The writ of inhibition was served him on a Sunday morning before the commencement of the service; he not only took no notice of the writ, but also on the following (Christmas) day publicly resisted his substitute. Canon Gee had been appointed by the bishop to read the service in the place of Mr. Tooth, but, on his arriving at the church, the latter gentleman, backed by about forty of his male parishioners, met him at the door and refused to allow him to enter, upon which Canon Gee, after protesting against this insubordinate proceeding on the part of his refractory brother, was forced to retire. Having thus disposed of the episcopal delegate, the vicar proceeded to display an unusual pomp in the ceremonial. Six splendid banners were carried in procession, on one of which was embroidered the monogram of Our Blessed Lady, surrounded by the words, Sancta Dei Genitrix.” The church was crowded to suffocation, partly with worshippers, and also very largely by people who had come from curiosity, as was evident by their behavior no less than by their murmured expressions of ridicule or indignation; a crowd, not only of “roughs,” but numbering many well-dressed people, had assembled outside. On one occasion, the 14th of January, in particular, the scenes both within and without were disgraceful. “Inside,” we are told, “there was a good deal of fighting and scuffling, especially at the lower end,” while outside the crowd, besides breaking down the fences, shouting “No popery,” yelling, and in various ways demonstrating their inclination to break the laws as well as the parson did, had they not been kept in some abeyance by a strong body of three hundred police, joined in singing loudly the national anthem, vociferating with especial emphasis and vigor the line “Confound their knavish tricks”—improved by some to “popish tricks” in honor of the occasion. Some time after the service was over, so as to give the mob time to thin, the sight of Mr. Tooth issuing from the church under the protection of “twenty stout policemen of the F Division” had in it something almost ludicrous to those who reflected that all this commotion arose from the fact of his having spurned the “secular arm.”

When, on the 20th of January, the Rev. R. Chambers, who has been appointed curate in charge of the parish of Hatcham by the Bishop of Rochester, went, accompanied by the bishop’s apparitor, and, producing his license, requested Mr. Tooth to hand over to him through the church-wardens the possession of the church, the vicar replied that he refused to take any notice of the document or the application. He was therefore committed for contempt of court, and is now lodged in Horsemonger Lane jail.

It is not necessary to give more than two portions of the very temperate explanations with which Lord Penzance has accompanied his judgment—namely, those portions which are aimed at the delusions supposed to be most important in the controversy. These delusions are, in brief, 1st, that the new Public Worship Act was an innovation upon Anglican custom, and an invasion of its rights; 2d, that obedience should be rendered to an ecclesiastical and not to a lay superior. The answers of Lord Penzance to these assumptions are, substantially, as follows:

“1. It would be well if those who maintain these propositions were to read the statutes by which the ritual of the Church of England at the time of the Reformation was enforced—I mean the statutes establishing the two successive prayer-books of King Edward VI. and the prayer-book of Queen Elizabeth, which regulated the ritual of the reformed church for the first hundred years after its establishment. They would there find that a clergyman departing in the performance of divine service from the ritual prescribed in the prayer-book was liable to be tried at the assizes by a judge and jury (the bishop, if he pleased, assisting the judges), and, if convicted three times, was liable to be imprisoned for life. The intervention, therefore, of a temporal court to enforce obedience in matters of ritual is at least no novelty; the novelty, as far as the Church of England is concerned, is rather in the claim to be exempt from it.

“2. But suppose this claim, for the sake of argument, to be admitted; what, then, are the ecclesiastical courts to whose judgment the Ritualists would be willing to defer? Unless every clergyman is to settle the form of worship for himself, and there are to be as many forms of worship as there are parishes in the land, who is it that, in his opinion, is to determine what the rubrics of the prayer-book enjoin?—for we suppose him to consider himself bound by the directions of the prayer-book. What is the court to which he is willing to render obedience? Is it the court of his bishop? If so, he must surely be aware that by the ecclesiastical law of this country, as well before the Reformation as since, an appeal from the bishop’s court lies, and has always lain, to the court of the archbishop, this Court of Arches, whose jurisdiction he now denies. What question, therefore, is there of a secular court, or an invasion of the rights of the Church of England?[24]” And the judgment passed by Lord Penzance was contained in the following words: “Applying these powers as I am bound to do, I have no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Tooth to be contumacious, and in contempt for disobeying the inhibition pronounced by this court, and I direct the same to be signified to the queen in chancery, with a view to his imprisonment.”

And now the strife of tongues which preceded this climax was comparative calm to that which at present rages. All the winds of Æolus, each trying which can blow the hardest, seem let loose at once in the distracted Establishment. By the Ritualist party the confessor for disobedience in Horsemonger Lane jail is already dubbed “the martyr, Tooth”; while another party rejoices that, by the contumacy of this “parson in revolt,” the state church is “forced into a clear, practical assertion of her old and hitherto unquestioned right to restrain and punish disobedient and delinquent 'clerks.’” Further, the London Times, dilating after its own infallible fashion upon Mr. Tooth and “his pranks,” dares to aver that “to parade a banner calling the Virgin Mary the 'Mother of God’ is little less than sheer blasphemy.”

At a large meeting of the “English Church Union” it became evident that the changes in law procedure produced by the Public Worship Regulation Act are producing a murmur in favor of “disestablishment” within the Church of England herself. One of the reverend speakers at this meeting said that “the issue had now merged from one about the color of a stole to a question of church and state,” and the honorable chairman agreed that “establishment might cost too dear.” Archdeacon Denison declared that this case of “dear Arthur Tooth” would prove to be “a life-and-death struggle with Protestantism,” thus making the old mistake of putting mere ritualism in the place of the Catholic Church. Canon Carter moved that “the Church Union denies that the secular power has authority in matters purely spiritual,” upon which a journal reminds him that, from the days of the Reformation, it has been one of the conditions on which the state church enjoyed the emoluments and privileges of establishment that her clergy should perform certain duties in a way laid down by law. Whether, as in the case of Mr. Tooth, they have or have not done so is a matter which the law leaves a particular court to decide. If Mr. Tooth does not relish the action of these tribunals, two courses are open to him, and only two. Either he may give up those practices which they declare obnoxious within the pale of the Established Church, or he may leave the Establishment and continue them elsewhere. The latter step would entail the sacrifice of the endowment, or, as the Ritualists would say, it would involve the guilt of schism; in which case the whole matter resolves itself into a choice of sins: the clergyman must either commit the sin of obeying Lord Penzance, and so retain the endowment, or he must commit the sin of “schism” and fling the endowment away. Thus the Church Unionists are by no means logical in comparing their present position to that of Chalmers, Buchanan, Guthrie, Cunningham, and other leaders of the Free Kirk of Scotland previously to 1843; for these men gave up all thought of state endowment, or even of ministering in buildings dependent on the state, and purchased the independence of their ministrations at the cost of all state temporalities. This is a very different matter from attempting to have the temporalities and the independence together.[25]

Another observation made by Canon Carter was, though not in itself more true, yet, for him, much more to the point—namely, that “the only persecution now carried on in England is against the High-Church party.” It is on this fact that the Ritualists stand triumphant. They can honestly plead that they, the High-Church party, have done more than all the other parties put together for the revival of faith and devotion in England. They can also plead that they are men of education, of courage and energy and self-denying zeal, and that to them is due whatever residuum is left of Catholic sentiment and tradition in the Establishment. The marvel is that any of these really earnest men should continue so blind to their anomalous position.

On the same day that the English Church Union held its assembly a meeting of the ultra-Protestant school took place at the Wellington Hall, Islington, where about one hundred and twenty clergymen and laymen partook of breakfast, after which they proceeded to deliver themselves of a large amount of the peculiar and incoherent insipidities with which the readers of the Rock must be painfully familiar. One specimen will suffice, which, as our readers will perceive, is not lacking in the unctuous accusations in which the “Evangelicals” are apt to excel: “As in Germany,” they said, “the Jesuits devoted all their self-denying energies to opposing the spread of the true doctrines, so here in England there was an able and resolute body of men who opposed themselves to the true principles of religion, and who, by services rendered attractive to the eye and ear, appealed by the senses to the understanding. Many of these men were no doubt sincere, and were thus unconsciously doing the work of Satan. This was the powerful opposing force with which the Evangelical body of the Church of England had to contend.”

Now, we must beg leave to observe that for these “Evangelical” gentlemen to talk of Ritualists as unconsciously doing the work of Satan is simply absurd. Did not the “beam in their own eye” blind them, we would ask them to take a glance backward and think of forty years ago, when, through the length and breadth of the land, they locked up their churches from Sunday afternoon to the following Sunday morning, and sometimes even longer; for the writer can recall three villages (there may or may not have been many more) in Leicestershire alone where, less than forty years ago, there was only one service on the Sunday, and that alternately in the morning and afternoon. We have heard of the wag who chalked on the church door of an Evangelical rector, “Le Bon Dieu est sorti: Il ne reviendra que dimanche prochain.” And truly, if the good God did come back, it would not be, in many instances, to find his house “swept and garnished.”

Forty years ago! Sitting in the old family pew in the chancel of A ... stone church, through the long, monotonous sermons of the worthy rector, whose favorite subjects were “saving faith” and abuse of popery, what a help it was to patient endurance to watch the merry, loud-voiced sparrows fluttering in and out of the broken diamond panes of the chancel windows, through which long sprays of ivy crept and clung lovingly up the poor old walls, bare of everything but whitewash, of the once Catholic church—walls that the damp of many an autumn and winter had dyed with streaks of green, deeper and brighter in hue than the faded, ink-stained rag of moth-eaten green baize that covered the rickety wooden table standing where, in old days, the most holy Sacrifice had been offered upon a Catholic altar. Childhood, before opportunities for comparison have been afforded, is not hard to please, and we used to think that that verdant chancel might have been in the mind of the sweet Psalmist of Israel when he sang, “The sparrow hath found her a house, and the swallow a nest, where she may lay her young: even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts!” And yet our worthy rector (a rich pluralist with a large family) was a kind-hearted, easy, amiable man, and not in any way addicted to the hunting and drinking practices of certain of his clerical neighbors; his house was the perfection of refined not overloaded luxury, and the well-kept gardens of that most pleasant of rectories were a paradise of smooth lawns, gay parterres, and shady shrubberies sloping down to the banks of the winding Soar. The rector led a mildly studious life when in the country (for half his year was spent in London), visited much among the “county families,” and shyly and rarely entered the cottages of the village; but religion in that village was well-nigh dead. If amiable clergymen of this stamp are not “unconsciously doing the work of Satan” themselves, they at any rate give Satan plenty of time and opportunity to do his own work himself among their flock, and to do it very effectually, too.

Yet it is the descendants of men like these who are foremost in groaning down and persecuting the self-denying, hard-working clergy who are always at their posts! The preachers of sentiment are furious against the upholders of the necessity of dogmatic truth. The idlers in family and social circles are desperate against enthusiasts who at least try to hear confessions and to be priests. We cannot admire the consistency of the Ritualists—for unhappily it does not exist—but the inconsistency of their “Evangelical” accusers is simply “the impeachment of energy by twaddle.”

A correspondent of the London Times calls attention to the fact that while Mr. Tooth, who is perfectly orthodox as regards the creeds of the church, is prosecuted for extremes in ritual, a brother clergyman is allowed to preach open infidelity from the pulpit unmolested. “The Public Worship Bill,” he writes, “has been passed to repress crimes so grave as over-magnificence in the services, but does not deign to meddle in so small a matter as that of vindicating the Divinity of our Saviour, which is fearlessly impugned in a pulpit which the Bishop of London himself has condescended to occupy.”

It is much to be doubted whether the Anglican bishops, when they obtained from Parliament the Public Worship Regulation Act, had the remotest idea of the tempest which, Prospero-like, they were summoning around them, but which, unlike Shakspere’s magician, they would be powerless to allay. And if this is the result obtained by the act just mentioned, a still more recent one, the “Scotch Church Patronage Act,” another measure intended by Lord Beaconsfield as an additional buttress to ecclesiastical establishments, has produced similar storms in the North. It has led to proceedings in connection with the “settlement” of a parish clergyman at New Deer in Aberdeenshire which recall the furious battles between the “intrusion” and non-intrusion parties that split the Established Church of Scotland into fragments thirty-four years ago, and has besides almost succeeded in uniting three-fourths of Scotland into a solid disestablishment phalanx. The Presbyterian Kirk, moreover, in addition to subjects of contention presented from without, has certain characteristic squabbles of its own. A question having recently arisen on the subject of unfermented wines in the celebration of what is called communion, the session has maintained that it “has a right to change the elements of communion, and in so doing is discharging its proper functions.” Why not? If local churches can make their own doctrines, what, we should like to know, is to hinder them from making their own sacraments as well?

Our object in this article has been merely to sketch the present condition of affairs in the English Establishment; but as we have in concluding taken a momentary glance at Scotland also, we cannot leave unnamed the Green Isle of the West, whose centuries of suffering and oppression have at last, we earnestly trust, given place to times of peace and long prosperity.

Should the reviving hopes of many hearts be realized, and the Green Tree of England’s ancient church again spread its vigorous branches over the land that was once “Our Lady’s Dowry”; and should the grand old northern abbeys, Melrose, Jedburgh, Paisley, and even, it may be, Iona, receive again as in past ages their cowled and consecrated sons, still England and Scotland will have but returned to the faith which Ireland has never lost, and which no human or Satanic power has been able to wrench from her. No! For, rather than let the cross be torn from her bleeding embrace, she suffered herself to be nailed upon it.

THE ASHES OF THE PALMS.

The Disciple.

“Are ashes scarce that palms must burn,
Those sweet memorials of the only day
Of triumph that thou hadst, my Prince,
Upon this woeful earth?”

The Master.

“All glory unto ashes, child, must turn,

Of which this deathly world can make display.

These ashes on proud heads convince

Proud hearts of glory’s worth.”

The Disciple.

“If palms to ashes must,
So be 't. I still will live to praise,
Though glory’s gage should burn.”

The Master.

“E’en thou art naught but dust.

The mark thy forehead bears betrays

To what thou shalt return.”

Ash Wednesday

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

An Old World as Seen through Young Eyes; or, Travels Around the World. By Ellen H. Walworth. New York: Sadlier & Co. 1877.

Every school-girl who reads this book will wish that she had an uncle who would send for her one day, while she is dreaming over her lesson-book, and invite her to accompany him around the world. This is what happened to Miss Ellen Walworth in June, 1873, and the volume before us is composed of the letters which she wrote home during her tour, and which were published as they were received in an Albany newspaper, attracting at the time considerable attention. They are the production of a school-girl of fifteen, but slightly altered from their original form, and this makes their peculiarity and their special interest. The course of her travels was through Scotland, Ireland, England, Belgium, the country of the Rhine, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, China, Japan, and home by way of San Francisco. The letters are just what they should be—natural, lively, juvenile descriptions of the little incidents of travel and the scenes witnessed, with the freshness and vividness of letters written at the time and on the spot to which each one successively belongs. Two extremely interesting letters of Father Walworth, written with his well-known charm of style and minute accuracy of statement, are included in the collection. One of these contains a description of the Coptic rite, the other an account of the present state of the mission in Japan, with many interesting historical particulars. Our young folk will find this a very entertaining volume, and older people may read it with pleasure. It is a book very creditable to the young author, and also an evidence of the kind of culture which is given to young girls by the accomplished ladies at Kenwood. We subjoin one specimen of the style in which the letters are written, not at all childish, although suffused with a childlike gayety:

“I remember what dispute arose among the passengers the day we went down Lake Zurich. There were mountains all around us, but from the end of the lake towards which we were steering rose quite a high range. Over their summits the clouds extended up some distance, and, strange to say, a succession of peaks were to be seen above the clouds, suspended, as it were, in the sky, and having no connection with the peaks below, except a close resemblance in form. Their outlines were distinctly marked against the clear blue sky, but they had a strange, chalky, light appearance, as if they could be blown away by a breath. Some of the passengers said they were merely unusual forms taken by the clouds; others insisted that they were a reflection of the peaks below—a species of Fata Morgana. A few old Alp frequenters, among them our friend of the gravel acquaintance, ventured to assert that they were real mountains, but their idea was laughed down as ridiculous. While the dispute was the hottest, the wind, by a strange freak, dispersed the clouds almost in an instant, and we had before us one of the mighty ranges of Switzerland, beside which our mountains of the lake shore were mere hillocks.

“From the foot of Lake Zurich we took the railroad carriages for Ragatz and Chur. This journey is among my most vivid recollections of Switzerland: for we were following the courses of the valleys and streams through that wonderful range of mountains that we had seen from the lake. We twisted ourselves into every possible position to see the snow-capped summits directly above us, and our fellow-travellers—English, French, and Germans—became so excited over the scenery that they would call out to each other—for, though the language might not be understood, the gestures were unmistakable—and they would rush from one side of the cars to the other, even dropping down on the floor, to get a sight from the car-windows of the very tip-top of the mountains. The enthusiasm seemed contagious; there were haughty Englishmen, stolid Germans, fashionable young ladies, and confirmed dandies equally forgetful of appearances. Indeed, as we passed peak after peak, now clustered together, now opening and showing beautiful valleys between, or dark, shaded chasms, the jagged rocks taking new shapes and hues every instant, it was like watching a grand and ever-varying kaleidoscope.”

Musica Ecclesiastica. A collection of Masses, Vespers, Hymns, Motets, etc., for the service of the Catholic Church. New York: J. Fischer & Bro.

Of this publication the Part 16 sent us, containing motets for singing at the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, is a collection well suited for use at that function. But we must object to the title of the general work, as neither this nor any figured music can be sung by ecclesiastics, as such, officiating in any service of the Catholic Church. The only melody properly styled musica ecclesiastica is the Gregorian chant. Definitions are always of grave moment. Suppose that some one of our enterprising publishers should present the public with a manual of prayers such as the St. John’s Manual, the Key of Heaven, or the Mission Book under the title of “Manual for the Clergy, consisting of prayers, litanies, hymns, and other devotions for the service of the Catholic Church”; it is plain that it would not receive the imprimatur of a Catholic school-boy.

Under a proper title we give our hearty encouragement to the work which our German Catholic brethren abroad and here in the United States have within the last few years pursued with such praiseworthy zeal in the composition of music for the use of our choirs, which, if we do not think it to be the most suitable and most consistent in tone with the letter and spirit of the Catholic ritual, is decidedly a vast improvement upon the sensual, operatic style of music whose melodies and harmonies have emasculated the devotion and vitiated the taste of, we regret to say, almost the majority of Catholics in modern times.

The Comprehensive Geography. Nos. 1, 2, and 3. New York: P. O’Shea, 37 Barclay St. 1876.

We are inclined to think that this series is the best of the many which have of late years been presented to the public, and certainly do not know of any which are superior to it in any respect except in the department of physical geography; and it is as complete even in this as it could well be without an additional volume specially devoted to that subject.

The feature which should particularly recommend it to Catholics is the prominence which it gives to facts connected with religion. There is no branch of study for the young in which it is so important that religion should be prominent as geography, with the exception, of course, of history. Even the best text-books hitherto published are perhaps a little too reticent in this respect. The desire to accomplish this object has in the present work led to the introduction of some rather unnecessary details; but this is a fault on the right side.

We hope that this series will become popular, as it deserves to be, in Catholic schools.

The Complete Office of Holy Week according to the Roman Missal and Breviary. In Latin and English. New edition. Revised and enlarged. 18mo, pp. 563. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

This edition of Holy Week is a new and corrected one; it is printed from large type on good paper, and is well and substantially bound. Moreover, it is complete, containing all the offices of the church from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, inclusive. This edition is the only correct one now published in this country. It has been carefully read by persons competent to guarantee against the gross blunders that are apt to disfigure Catholic works of the greatest importance. The price is so low that the book is within the reach of every one, thus enabling them to follow easily the services of the church during Holy Week.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 146.—MAY, 1877.

THE PRUSSIAN CHANCELLOR.[26]

M. Julian Klaczko is by birth a Polish Jew and is a convert to the Catholic Christian faith. He was for a time employed in the office of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was afterwards a member of the imperial parliament. He has, however, generally been a resident in France, where his numerous essays on political topics have been published, all of which have attracted much attention and won for their author a high reputation. We have already, in our number for last March, made some observations on the career and policy of one of the two chancellors, whose lives and public actions, so far as they had progressed at the time of its publication, were sketched in the work whose title is given below. This work is one of the most interesting political brochures of our time, and we propose to continue in the present article the review of it commenced in our previous one, confining our attention chiefly to the chancellor of the German Empire.

Prince Bismarck has been characterized by M. Thiers as “a savage full of genius.” He is one of Carlyle’s “heroes”—an expression synonymous with that of the clever French statesman, and denoting a giant in whom is embodied intellectual and physical force, irrespective of any moral direction. To this native strength, which has remained through life to a great extent rude and uncultivated, and not in any way to a regular and careful education, Otto von Bismarck is indebted for the success he has achieved. His studies were finished on his entrance at the university, and never resumed. It is doubtful whether he ever passed the legal examination required before entering the civil service in Prussia. Nevertheless, such a man is always a sort of extraordinary professor to himself. He has read literature and studied men and events. It is absurd to call such a man uneducated; and, although he does not possess the art of speaking or writing according to rule, he is able to use both his tongue and pen with an original power which sometimes rises to the highest level of eloquence, and to coin expressions which, once uttered, can never be forgotten. We have quoted one in our former article, about the “iron dice of destiny,” and we will give one more, which we think is unsurpassed in the annals of modern speech:

“One of his most happy, most memorable inspirations he suddenly drew one day from the libretto of the Freischütz.

“In this opera of Weber, Max, the good and unfortunate hunter, borrows a cartridge from Robin, the evil spirit, and immediately kills an eagle, one of whose feathers he proudly sticks in his cap. He then asks for some more cartridges, but Robin tells him that they are 'enchanted balls,’ and that, in order to obtain them, he must surrender himself to the infernal spirits and deliver his soul to them. Max draws back, and then Robin, sneering, tells him that he hesitates in vain, that the bargain is made, and that he has already committed himself by the ball he made use of: 'Do you think, then, that this eagle was a free gift?’ Well! when in 1849 the young orator of the Mark of Brandenburg had to implore the Prussian chamber not to accept for the King of Prussia the imperial crown which the parliament of Frankfort offered him, he ended by crying out: 'It is radicalism which offers this gift to the king. Sooner or later this radicalism will stand upright before the king, will demand of him its recompense, and, pointing to the emblem of the eagle on that new imperial flag, it will say: Did you think, then, that this eagle was a free gift?’”

The suggestion will doubtless present itself immediately to the minds of many of our readers that the poetic myth of the Freischütz is likely to be fulfilled in sober, actual reality when the German imperial drama is played out, and that Bismarck will prove to have been the Robin of William I. But this is an anticipation, and we return to our sheep and our young wolf. An equally marked and well-known trait of Bismarck’s style in speech and writing is a cold, biting, ironical humor, which often assumes the outward guise of frankness, sometimes ferocious, sometimes farcical, but always dangerous and often deadly when the master of the weapon is wielding it in a real fight. The general tone of his disposition is contemptuous and misanthropical, as of one who alternately sneers and laughs at mankind in general, on the whole despising the game of life, yet going in for deep play with all his soul when the chance presents itself, for mere occupation and amusement; just as he plunged into the Burschen-life in his youth and hunted bears at a later period in Russia. There is no trace of philanthropy in his character; as an enemy he is relentless, and no gentle or noble sentiments hamper his progress in the way of his policy of “blood and iron.” Yet there is a most tender and devoted affection manifested in his letters to his sister, Malvina von Arnim—“Maldewinchen”; so far as we know he has been a kind husband and father; there seems really to be something genuine in his long friendship for Prince Gortchakoff; and all the world knows that he risked his life to rescue a servant from drowning. The impression we have received from all we have ever read or heard about him is, that his natural disposition, like that of Napoleon, is generous and noble, but, like his, has been perverted by ambition.

His early life did not promise any great achievements. He went by the name of “Mad Bismarck,” and was always restless, unsettled, without steady application to any definite aim. What his real inward convictions are or have been, in religion, philosophy, and the higher sphere of political ethics, is very difficult to determine, at least for us who are at a distance; or even to decide how far he has ever formed and cherished any deep and settled convictions at all. Practically, he has been a Pyrrhonist and Epicurean, a heathen and a materialist, using all things and all ideas as so many counters of no value except for his own game. The opinions which he professed at the outset of his political career were those of “the party of the cross,” that old-Prussian, religious, monarchical, conservative party represented by the illustrious Baron von Gerlach, which has been in opposition to the administration of the chancellor, and is now in a quasi-alliance with the Catholic party.

“'I belong—' such was the defiant declaration of Herr von Bismarck in one of his first speeches in the chamber—'I belong to an opinion which glories in the reproaches of obscurantism and of tendencies of the middle age; I belong to that great multitude which is compared with disdain to the most intelligent party of the nation.’ He wanted a Christian state. 'Without a religious basis,’ said he, 'a state is nothing but a fortuitous aggregation of interests, a sort of bastion in a war of all against all; without this religious basis, all legislation, instead of regenerating itself at the living sources of eternal truth, is only tossed about by human ideas as vague as changeable.’”

What can be finer or truer than this statement, in which the whole of his own policy as chancellor of the German Empire is condemned in advance out of his own mouth? In every important respect his avowed opinions and political action were diametrically opposite to those of a later date. In fact, his bold and even extravagant advocacy of the cause of the house of Hapsburg, at a moment when (1850) the attitude of Prussia towards Austria was most humiliating, was the first occasion of launching him into the career of foreign affairs. He was sent, with much misgiving on the part of the king and his minister, as Prussian plenipotentiary to the Diet of Frankfort; and here he began to go to school to Prince Gortchakoff, now commenced that world-renowned friendship between these two statesmen which has altered the course of history and for whose dénoûement we are at this moment intently watching.

It would be idle to suppose that these two men traced out beforehand the common policy which they have since pursued in concert. It was impossible for any human sagacity to foresee the conjunctures which have since arisen, and have furnished to Bismarck the opportunities of which his genius has availed itself to destroy and to upbuild great political fabrics. They could only plan, in general, the aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia, by the breaking down of the traditional policy of coalition and balance among the European powers. All that we can see clearly respecting the incipient working of Bismarck’s mind at this period is, that he contracted an aversion for Austria, a contempt for the German confederation, and a mean opinion in general of the diplomats who had the management of the European state-craft. The idea of a new era of absolutism in a few great, conquering nations—an absolutism “tinged with popular passions,” or, according to his favorite expression,“spotted with red”—dawned on his mind and became gradually more distinct. Some extravagant projects were at times bubbling in his restless brain, and he often threatened to abandon the career of regular diplomatic service and go into politics “in his swimming-drawers.” But when the Prussian administration proposed to him to go to Russia as resident ambassador, with a view, as he expressed it, of “putting him on ice” to cool him down, he consented to don a “bear-skin” instead of the aforesaid habiliments of a sans-culottes.

On the 1st of April, his birth-day, 1859, Herr von Bismarck arrived in the capital of the Russian Empire, of which his former colleague at Frankfort was already the chancellor. Among the Russians he was extremely popular; for he took extraordinary pains to make himself agreeable to them, and seemed to have turned himself into a Russian, for the time being, in donning the bear-skin. Notwithstanding his outward hilariousness, he was inwardly morose, dissatisfied with the course which Prussian and European politics were following, and feeling himself condemned to honorable exile and inaction. He was once so severely ill through chagrin that his life was in danger. He said on his recovery that he had gone “half-way to a better world,” and expressed regret that he had not completed the journey. He thought of abandoning politics altogether, and with difficulty overcame his impatience sufficiently to bide his time a little longer. Gortchakoff said that Russia “did not sulk, but meditated.” Bismarck sulked and meditated. But meanwhile the course of events was preparing for him his opportunity. The strange and mixed drama in which Napoleon III., destined to be its principal victim, was the chief actor—whose critical moments were Sebastopol, Solferino, Sadowa, Sedan—was going on. This great actor, once regarded as a sphinx of political wisdom, but now designated by no more honorable title than the “dreamer of Ham,” holds a conspicuous place in the group of those apparently and temporarily great men to whom belongs the epitaph sadly composed for himself by the expiring Joseph II., Emperor of Austria: “Here lies the man who failed in all his undertakings.” More than this, he is a signal instance of that blind fatuity by which those men who set themselves to counteract the order of divine Providence are seduced, as the King of Israel was by the “lying spirit” in the mouth of his prophets, to ruin themselves and become the executioners of divine vengeance on their own persons.

If Louis Napoleon had had good sense and moral principle enough to imitate Charlemagne, he might have confirmed his dynasty, established France in solid power and prosperity, and earned true glory as a benefactor of Christendom. But he was not “of the seed of those men by whom salvation was brought to Israel.” He aspired to imitate Cæsar and Napoleon without possessing their genius. He imitated the profligacy of Cæsar in his youth, the perfidy of Napoleon in his old age. His early vices avenged themselves in the pain and disease which unmanned and incapacitated him for action in the last eventful crisis of his career. His criminal alliance with Carbonari and conspirators in his youth entangled him afterwards in a mesh which he had not courage, even if he had the wish, to break. By his alliance with the Turk he prepared an enemy in Russia, who became one principal cause of his final downfall and the humiliation of France, while he gained nothing beyond a momentary prestige of glory for his army. By his Italian campaign, and his subsequent support of Prussia against Austria, he weakened the power which would otherwise have befriended France in her dire distress; and he built up a kingdom which abandoned and betrayed him, at the cost of incurring the malediction which falls on all betrayers and oppressors of the Holy See.

By his greed of territory in annexing Savoy he alienated for ever his former ally, England. By the war above alluded to and his miserable Mexican fiasco he used up the splendid army of France, and was found minus habens when the day of destiny came on him unprepared. He deliberately fostered the military and political increase of Prussia, and then madly dragged down upon France that terrible power which, having first outwitted, in the second place crushed him.

We have read of some one who drew an enigmatical figure, in which a crowned serpent is represented twining from his tail upward through a combination of four letters S, and strangled by the upper crook of the topmost letter. In this figure is strikingly symbolized the course of events in Europe from the Crimean war to the Prussian conquest. During Bismarck’s residence in Russia, which followed Sebastopol, came the day of Solferino. The immediate effect of this battle was an attempt to mobilize the Prussian army, which disclosed to the crown-prince, now Emperor of Germany, its miserable condition, and suggested to him the plan of its entire reformation. This plan he afterwards carried out, accomplishing it with unprecedented rapidity and skill by the aid of Von Moltke and Von Roon, against the violent opposition of the parliament and the whole people. Thus was Bismarck’s great instrument of making force bring right under subjection prepared for him in advance, without his concurrence. The connivance and concurrence of Russia were already secured, most cordially so far as further designs on Austria were concerned, and at least conditionally and passively in respect to ulterior projects of improving Prussia’s position.

The “Iron Count” is now about to try the strength of his Thor’s hammer on the head of the sphinx. Bismarck is about to become the head of the Prussian state, and try his craft and strength in a contest for supremacy with Louis Napoleon. He was called home toward the end of 1861 for consultation and to assist at the coronation of King William, and returned to St. Petersburg only to close up the affairs of his mission and take farewell. In May, 1862, he was at Berlin, and evidently destined for the post of Chief Minister. He was, however, ad interim sent on the mission to Paris, to take the measure of Louis Napoleon and study more nearly the position of European affairs, which all centred at that time in the Tuileries. We should rather say that he went to Paris to complete these studies and observations. Already, in 1858, he had sounded the French emperor in respect to his sentiments towards Prussia, and found them most encouraging. During the same year Louis Napoleon had sent this singular message by Count Pepoli to the court of Berlin: “In Germany Austria represents the past, Prussia represents the future; in linking itself to Austria Prussia condemns itself to immobility; it cannot be thus contented; it is called to a higher fortune; it should accomplish in Germany the great destinies which await it, and which Germany awaits from it.” Consider this language, and then think of the prison of Wilhelmshöhe and of the reflections which must have passed through the mind of the unfortunate dreamer so rudely awakened by the thunder of Von Moltke’s guns! King William had had an interview with Louis Napoleon at Compiègne, for which Bismarck had aided him in preparing, and it was partly the result of this interview which had determined him to call the bold cavalier of the Mark to his side. The dreamer’s vague and scheming mind revolved vast projects of Pan-Latin, Pan-German, Pan-Sclavonian combinations, uniting the three great races and the three great churches, with their respective centres at Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, in a triple alliance of universal monarchies, to dominate the world, to inaugurate a new era, to bring on the millennium of civilization, and to place the name of Louis Napoleon at least on a par with those of Moses, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Constantine, and Charlemagne.

We have read in the autobiography of some German philosopher that in his youth he was ravished with ecstasy in thinking of “the wheels of the eternal essences”! The visionary projects of this unfortunate imperial seer remind us forcibly of this boyish philosopher. While he was letting France drift on towards the Où allons nous? of Mgr. Dupanloup, he was driving his imaginary chariot, on the “wheels of the eternal essences,” through airy regions, casting an occasional undecided glance on Belgium and the frontiers of the Rhine. Bismarck was not long in taking his measure, and it appears that Prince Gortchakoff had long since learned the passes by which he could magnetize him at pleasure. With his own peculiar, knavish frankness, Bismarck avowed his own objective aim—the rectification of the Prussian frontiers—and found it easy to amuse the decaying emperor with vague hints of compensation to France by allowing the annexation of Belgium and the territory on the left bank of the Rhine. As for the opinion which was formed respecting Bismarck himself, at this time and during the first period of his administration, by the emperor and the diplomats, it appears now strangely comical. They could not bring themselves to regard him as serious, and were thrown completely off their guard by his consummate acting. As late as 1865, when he visited the French emperor at Biarritz, the latter, while listening to his harangues during the promenades which they took together on the beach, would slyly press the arm of Prosper Merimée, and even whispered once in his ear: “He is crazy.” M. Benedetti in the following year told General Govone that he considered Bismarck to be “a maniacal diplomat,” adding that he had long known his man, and had followed him up for fifteen years. There is something grimly amusing in this play of the cat and the mice, notwithstanding its tragical results and the pity we must feel for the victims who thought themselves so extremely astute, but were lured on by one deeper in craft than they were, as easily as the meditative, solemn bruin was enticed by Reynard the fox to go after honey.

Bismarck left Paris, convinced of three things as the result of his studies: First, that Louis Napoleon was a “great unrecognized incapacity.” Second, that “liberalism is only nonsense which it is easy to bring to reason; but revolution is a force which it is necessary to know how to use.” Third, “that England need not enter into his calculations.” He returned to Berlin to assume the office of Minister of Foreign Affairs and commence the work of rounding off Prussia. Austria was the one decided antagonist whom he had to meet in the critical struggle for supremacy in Germany. He was not afraid of her single power unaided by allies, but he was anxious to make doubly sure of the neutrality of France and Russia. Circumstances favored him most remarkably in producing an alienation between these two powers, which was an efficacious preventive of any amicable concord between the two to check his plans, and in persuading each one more decisively to connive at them. The Polish insurrection, encouraged by France and Austria, embroiled Alexander II. with Louis Napoleon, and renewed all the former rancor of St. Petersburg against Vienna. Bismarck was cunning enough to make secret preparations for taking advantage of the insurrection, if it proved too strong for Russia to quell, by occupying Poland with Prussian troops, and securing the final disposition of the whole Polish question for himself. At the same time he so managed as to strengthen the bond between himself and Gortchakoff, and, in the actual event, to bind Russia and Prussia closely together by an open common policy in respect to Poland. Favored by fortunate circumstances, by the co-operation of military chiefs who showed a genius in organizing and leading the Prussian army which astonished the world, by a fatuity in Louis Napoleon and a complaisance in the Russian chancellor beyond his most sanguine expectations, he played during the next four years, like a Paul Morphy of politics, four or five games at once with masterly skill. King William of Prussia and all the other rulers and statesmen of Europe were but pieces or pawns to be played with, taken, or checkmated; and on the day after the battle of Sadowa he was really master of the situation.

The objective point at which Bismarck aimed in the year 1862 was to make Prussia the most powerful state in Europe and completely independent of every other state or coalition of states. For this end it was necessary to destroy the German Bund, to deprive Austria of all power in Germany, to increase the Prussian territory, and to establish its hegemony in Germany. All this was accomplished, before the close of the year 1866, by means of the imbroglio of the Schleswig-Holstein succession. When Christian IX. succeeded to the throne of Denmark, his right to the succession in the duchies was disputed, because it came through a female line debarred from inheriting by the ancient law of Schleswig and Holstein. The designs of Prussia upon these duchies were, however, of a much earlier origin, and had their birth from the liberal party and its revolutionary movements in 1848. In a speech delivered in the Prussian chambers, April 21, 1849, Herr von Bismarck declared that the war provoked in the duchies of the Elbe was “an undertaking eminently iniquitous, frivolous, disastrous, and revolutionary.” We will not pretend to determine the question of the validity of King Christian’s title, as between himself and the people of the duchies. It is evident enough, however, that the matter was one which interested all Europe, and ought to have been calmly, justly determined, in a manner consonant with the interests of the kingdom of Denmark, of the people of the duchies, of the confederated states of the German Bund, and of Europe. In fact, the doubt respecting Christian’s title was seized upon by Bismarck as a mere pretext for absorbing the disputed territory, with its fine Baltic sea-port of Kiel, into Prussia. The Prince of Augustenberg, the chief claimant against Christian, had been induced, a short time before the accession of the latter to the Danish throne, by the influence of Bismarck himself, to sell his claim on Holstein to the government of Copenhagen. No sooner was the old king dead than Bismarck declared that this same prince was the rightful duke. At a later period he brought forward several other claimants, that these rival claims might neutralize each other. How he cheated Lord John Russell; how he used the German Bund as a tool for his own purposes and then scornfully pushed it aside; how he drew Austria into a war against Denmark, followed by a joint occupation of the duchies, and then commenced a quarrel against her for their sole possession; and how England, the declared protector of Denmark, looked tamely on while it was despoiled and maimed, we have not time to relate in detail. It was a great blunder in France, England, and Russia to permit what they could easily have prevented. On the part of Austria it was a stupendous and suicidal folly to make itself an accomplice in a conspiracy for destroying the bulwarks of its own power. This was soon made manifest, but too late to escape the consequences of a fatal blunder. Prussia being ready for action, the Bund and the claimants of the duchies were summarily shoved aside. The question of the right of succession in the duchies was referred to a high Prussian court for adjudication. It was decided that the King of Denmark alone had possessed the right of sovereignty in Schleswig and Holstein, and that, by the cession which he had been forced to make after being conquered in war, this right was now vested in Prussia and Austria. Austria was politely requested to sell her share to Prussia, which she declined to do, and the next step was to wrest it from her by force.

The dark intrigues—at the time so hidden from sight and so almost desperate, even in the view of the “maniacal diplomat” who held their threads in his hand and wove them into a mesh around his victim—by which Bismarck planned the ruin of Austria, have since been fully disclosed. With the government of Victor Emanuel a strict and secret treaty was contracted. At the same time, and for several years after, a correspondence was kept up with Mazzini, looking to the overthrow of Victor Emanuel in case of any action on his part unfavorable to the schemes of the arch-conspirators. Arrangements were made for fomenting an insurrection in Hungary under the leadership of Garibaldi. The neutrality and connivance of Louis Napoleon were secured by playing upon his Italian sympathies and holding before him vague expectations of compensation for France.

Prince Gortchakoff lent an underhand but most valuable help to his friend all through, beginning with the attack on Denmark. It was Louis Napoleon, whose incapacity and weakness were not yet fully revealed even to Bismarck’s keen eye, who was most feared and distrusted. Enfeebled as he was in respect to whatever capacity he had really possessed in his prime, and weakened as was the power of France, yet, with the help of the statesmen and soldiers who were at his disposal, he still retained the power of determining the main issue in the politics of Europe, and Bismarck knew it. He would not stir in any decisive action until well assured that he had mastered the French emperor by his superior craft. He had less difficulty in this than he anticipated. Louis Napoleon, like most other European observers, overrated the military strength of Austria, and underrated the new Prussian army with its almost untried leaders, Von Roon and Von Moltke; which even Bismarck himself somewhat distrusted up to the last moment. The French emperor desired and hoped for the liberation of Venetia. But he expected the defeat of the Prussian army in Germany, and for himself the rôle of a mediator, an umpire, a general referee for settling all things on the basis of a new treaty of peace. He let Bismarck play his game out, with what result is known to the world. Although victorious in Italy, Austria nevertheless ceded Venetia to Louis Napoleon, who handed it over to Victor Emanuel. The victory of Sadowa agreeably surprised the victor, brought despair to the vanquished, and astonished the world. If all the other great powers had not been alienated from each other, and under a fatal spell of the arch-fiend, Robin’s master, whose enchanted balls had brought down the Austrian eagle, they might have intervened to prevent the grave ulterior consequences of this fatal day of Sadowa. If Louis Napoleon had not been paralyzed and demoralized to the extent of utter imbecility, he might have interfered alone, and successfully, in this his last opportunity for saving his dynasty and saving France. Nobody interfered. There was a weak show of negotiations, but Bismarck had his own way in everything. Before the end of the year 1866 his spoils were all gathered in and safely garnered, and the centre was shifted from Paris to Berlin.

The area of Prussia had been increased, by the annexation of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Frankfort, and the duchies of the Elbe, from 108,000 to 135,000 English square miles, and its population from 19,000,000 to 23,000,000. It was, moreover, the head of a North German Confederation, and practically had control of the South German States, with the certainty of having all Germany outside of Austria to co-operate with it and follow its lead in case of hostilities with France. These were the “moral conquests of Prussia in Germany” which the king, as prince-regent, had announced to the nation when he assumed the reins of government. This was the fulfilment of “the federal obligations toward the Emperor Francis Joseph,” so much talked of at Potsdam, while the future chancellor was hunting bears in Russia. Such was the sequel of the protest of Berlin against the Piedmontese annexation. The prophecy of Cavour was fulfilled: that “Prussia would one day, thanks to Piedmont, profit by the example which had been given to it.”

The “Piedmontese mission of Prussia,” vaunted by the French democratic press, was well inaugurated and pretty near fulfilment. Louis Napoleon’s oracular sayings about the “great destinies of Prussia” proved to have something else in them than “the stuff which dreams are made of.” He had no longer to utter the philanthropic complaint: “The geographical position of Prussia is badly defined.” It was perhaps not quite perfect in the opinion of Bismarck, but it was certainly vastly improved, and destined to a still further rectification which had probably not been revealed to the imperial dreamer.

Having disposed of his first accomplice in the great scheme, gradually matured during his sulky meditations at Frankfort and St. Petersburg under the tuition of his master in diplomacy, Prince Gortchakoff—namely, having put down Austria—Bismarck proceeded with his next plot: against his accomplice in the one just successfully carried into execution. Austria had been lured on by the expectation of sharing in the spoliation of Denmark, defrauded of her portion of the spoils, and stripped of a great part of her original possessions, to the advantage of Prussia. In like manner Louis Napoleon was disappointed of the acquisitions he hoped to receive as a reward for conniving at the spoliation of Austria; he and his dynasty were overthrown completely, and we trust finally; France was humiliated to the dust and compelled to ransom herself from captivity by the price of her treasure and her territory. The disruption of the European bond left France, as Austria had been left, at the mercy of her perfidious ally, converted into an open and relentless enemy.

During the preliminaries of peace at Nikolsburg, afterwards ratified by the treaty of Prague, by which the German hegemony of Prussia was established, Bismarck persuaded the French emperor through his envoy, the unfortunate M. Benedetti—the same one who knew his man and followed him up so skilfully—that “the reverses of Austria allowed France and Prussia to modify their territorial situation.” Hints were thrown out about the Rhine provinces and Belgium. After Prussia had completed her own modification of her territorial situation for the time being, Bismarck continued, while Prussia was taking a rest and making all her political and military arrangements perfect, what he called his “dilatory negotiations” with Louis Napoleon. The latter was asking for compensations, for which he had not stipulated when he placed his services at the disposal of his employer. Mephistopheles qualified this demand as a “policy of pour boire.” You engage a fiacre in Paris, you pay the stipulated price to the driver, and he presents his hand again, unless you anticipate him by a voluntary gratuity, with the familiar phrase: “Pour boire, monsieur, s’il vous plaît!” If you are a good-humored gentleman, you hand over a few sous and he departs contented. If you are gruff and parsimonious, and show unwillingness to comply with his polite request, he will reiterate it with less deference and civility. Whereupon, if you are violent and profane, and have sufficient command of the French language to speak after the manner of the gamins de Paris, you refer him to a person beyond the “Porte de l’Enfer.” The history of the secret treaty of offensive and defensive alliance between France and Prussia, giving the aid of France to carry out the further programme of Prussian ascendency in Germany, and the aid of Prussia to secure Luxembourg and Belgium to France, signed by France, though not signed, only laid up in her archives, by Prussia, is well known. A previous project of a treaty ceding the Rhine provinces to France was shown to the South German plenipotentiaries and drove them into a secret and strict alliance with Prussia. The work of Nikolsburg and Prague was completed, the whole military force of North and South Germany was at the disposal of King William, and nothing was wanting but a war with France to make him emperor of Germany, with Alsace and Lorraine as additional provinces of his kingdom, and all expenses paid by the French treasury. Bismarck could now drop the mask whenever he pleased, and bully the unfortunate emperor into the folly of trying to expiate his past misconduct by baptizing himself in the fire of Prussian artillery and mitraille. This dark and tragic act in the drama of the Downfall of Europe is summed up with consummate truth and terseness in that little masterpiece entitled The Fight in Dame Europa’s School: showing how the German boy thrashed the French boy, and how the English boy looked on:

“Only one boy—his favorite fag—did William take into his confidence in the matter. This was a sharp, shrewd lad named Mark, not over-scrupulous in what he did, full of deep tricks and dodges, and so cunning that the old dame herself, though she had the eyes of a hawk, could never catch him out in anything absolutely wrong. To this smart youth William one day whispered his desires [of annexing part of Louis’ garden] as they sat together in the summer house smoking and drinking beer. 'There is only one way to do it,’ said Mark. 'If you want the flower-beds, you must fight Louis for them, and I believe you will lick him all to smash. You see, old fellow, you have grown so much lately, and filled out so wonderfully, that you are really getting quite formidable. Why, I recollect the time when you were quite a little chap!’ 'Yes,’ said William, turning up his eyes devoutly, 'it has pleased Providence that I should be stout. Then, my dear Mark, what do you advise me to do?’ 'Ah! that is not so easy to say. Give me time to think, and when I have an idea I will let you know. Only, whatever you do, take care to put Master Louis in the wrong. Don’t pick a quarrel with him, but force him, by quietly provoking him, to pick a quarrel with you. Give out that you are still peaceably disposed, and carry your Testament about as usual. That will put old Dame Europa off her guard, and she will believe in you as much as ever. The rest you may leave to me.’ An opportunity of putting their little plot into execution soon occurred. A garden became vacant on the other side of Louis’ little territory [Spain], which none of the boys seemed much inclined to accept. It was a troublesome piece of ground, exposed to constant attacks from the town-cads, who used to overrun it in the night and pull up the newly-planted flowers. 'Don’t you think,’ said Mark one day to his friend and patron, 'that your little cousin, the new boy [Prince Hohenzollern], might as well have that garden?’ 'I don’t see why he should not, if he wants it,’ replied William, by no means deep enough to understand what his faithful fag was driving at. 'It will be so nice for Louis, don’t you see, to have William to keep him in check on one side, and William’s little cousin to watch him on the other side,’ observed Mark innocently. 'Ah! to be sure,’ exclaimed William, beginning to wake up, 'so it will; very nice indeed. Mark, you are a sly dog.’ 'I should say, if you paid Louis the compliment to propose it, that it is such a delicate little attention as he would never forget—even if you withdrew the proposal afterwards.’ 'Just so, my boy; and then we shall have to fight.’ 'But look here, won’t the other chaps say that I provoked the quarrel?’ 'Not if we manage properly,’ was the reply. 'They are sure to fix the cause of dispute on Louis rather than on you. You are such a peaceable boy, you know; and he has always been fond of a shindy.’ So Dame Europa was asked to assign the vacant garden to William’s little cousin. 'Well,’ said she, 'if Louis does not object, who will be his nearest neighbor, he may have it.’ 'But I do object, ma’am,’ cried Louis. 'I very particularly object. I don’t want to be hemmed in on all sides by William and his cousins. They will be walking through my garden to pay each other visits, and perhaps throwing balls to one another right across my lawn.’ 'Oh! but you might be sure that I should do nothing unfair,’ said William reproachfully. 'I have never attacked anybody.’ 'That’s all my eye,’ said Louis. 'I don’t believe in your piety. Come, take your dear little relation off, and give him one of the snug corners that you bagged the other day from poor Christian.’ 'Come, come,’ interposed the Dame, 'I can’t listen to such angry words. You five monitors must settle the matter quietly among yourselves; but no fighting, mind. The day for that sort of thing is quite gone by.’ And the old lady toddled off and left the boys alone. 'I wouldn’t press it, Bill, if I were you,’ said John, in his deep, gruff voice, looking out of his shop-window on the other side of the water. 'I think it’s rather hard lines for Louis—I do indeed.’ 'Always ready to oblige you, my dear John,’ said William; and so the new boy’s claim to the garden was withdrawn. 'What shall I do now, Mark?’ asked William, turning to his friend. 'It seems to me that there is an end of it all.’ 'Not a bit,’ was the reply. 'Louis is still as savage as a bear. He’ll break out directly; you see if he don’t.’ 'I have been grossly insulted,’ began Louis at last, in a towering passion, 'and I shall not be satisfied unless William promises me never to make any such underhand attempts to get the better of me again.’ 'Tell him to be hanged,’ whispered Mark. 'You be—no,’ said William, recollecting himself, 'I never use bad language. My friend,’ he continued, 'I cannot promise you anything of the kind.’ 'Then I shall lick you till you do, you psalm-singing humbug!’ shouted Louis. 'Come on!’ said William, lifting up his hand as if to commend his cause to Heaven, and looking sanctimoniously out of the whites of his eyes. 'Come on!’ shouted William, thirsting for more blood. 'Vive la guerre!’ cried poor Louis, rushing blindly at his foe. Well and nobly he fought, but he could not stand his ground. Foot by foot and yard by yard he gave way, till at last he was forced to take refuge in his arbor, from the window of which he threw stones at his enemy to keep him back from following. And when William, who talked so big about his peaceable disposition, and declared that he only wanted to defend his 'fatherland,’ chased him right across the garden, trampled over beds and borders on his way, and then swore that he would break down his beautiful summer-house and bring Louis on his knees, everybody felt that the other monitors ought to interfere. But not a foot would they stir. Aleck looked on from a safe distance, wondering which of the combatants would be tired first. Joseph stood shaking in his shoes, not daring to say a word for fear William should turn round upon him and punch his head again; and John sat in his shop, grinding away at a new rudder and a pair of oars. 'Come and help a fellow, John,’ cried Louis in despair from his arbor. 'I don’t ask you to remember the days we have spent in here together when you have been sick of your own shop. But you might do something for me, now that I am in such a desperate fix and don’t know which way to turn.’ 'I am very sorry, Louis,’ said John, 'but what can I do? It is no pleasure to me to see you thrashed. On the contrary, it would pay me much better to have a near neighbor well off and cheerful than crushed and miserable. Why don’t you give in, Louis? It is of no mortal use to go on. He will make friends directly, if you will give back the two little strips of garden; and if you don’t, he will only smash your arbor to pieces, or keep you shut up there all dinner-time and starve you out. Give in, old fellow; there’s no disgrace in it. Everybody says how pluckily you have fought.’”

The ingenious author has made a mistake about Aleck and Joseph. Aleck was in league with William, and his threats alarmed Joseph and kept him from interfering. Bismarck had succeeded in reconciling Gortchakoff to the sacrifice of all the old friends and family connections of Russia in Germany. Moreover, he had in some way convinced him so completely that it was for the interest and future advantage of Russia to ally itself closely with Prussia, that he turned a deaf ear to the advances of France and Austria in reference to the Oriental question, and gave a strong moral support, which in case of need he was ready to transform into active military co-operation, to his most iniquitous and oppressive measures against France. M. Thiers was convinced of this when Prince Bismarck handed to him his Russian portfolio and allowed him to read at leisure thirty letters which it contained, while he sat by quietly smoking a cigar and enjoying the chagrin and discomfiture of the aged statesman. Besides this, we must consider that England had a reason for coolness towards France in the unprincipled negotiations of the French government respecting England’s protegée, Belgium. And at last, when England did wish to interfere to obtain for France more favorable conditions of peace, and made propositions for concerted action to St. Petersburg, it was Russia which threw cold water upon the plan and kept all Europe back while William was finishing up his quarrel with Louis. It cannot be doubted that Bismarck had given Gortchakoff to understand that, when the proper time came, Prussia would secure for Russia a fair field and no interference for a decisive and final effort to destroy the European empire of the Turk. Fuad-Pasha, said to have been one of the greatest statesmen of Turkey, while lying on his death-bed at Nice dictated a political testament, which was sent, after his mortal career had closed, to his sovereign, the sultan. In this document he had said: “When this writing is placed before the eyes of your majesty, I will no longer be in this world. You can, therefore, listen to me without distrust, and you should imbue yourself with this great and grievous truth: that the empire of the Osmanlis is in danger. An intestine dissension in Europe, and a Bismarck in Russia, and the face of the world will be changed.” The date of this document is January 3, 1869.

The conflict between Prince Bismarck and the Catholic Church has been treated of repeatedly in former articles in this magazine. We will, therefore, abstain from going over that ground again. It has been surmised that the policy of the Prussian chancellor in respect to the church has been dictated to him by the necessity of satisfying the demands of the radical-liberal party. We cannot think that it is to be accounted for simply on this ground. The general idea and fundamental principle of Bismarck has been to destroy the community of nations which was the remnant of ancient Christendom, and raise up an independent, self-subsisting, absolute, and dominating German Empire. It is an essential part of this plan to destroy the principle of unity and community centred in the Holy See, and to make the emperor absolute head of all churches within the boundaries of his state. The idea is wholly pagan and despotic, and includes the subversion of all right except that which is a conceded privilege derived from the sovereign will of the state. Not only, therefore, is all international right ignored by it, but every right of municipalities, of orders, of legislative and judicial bodies, of subordinate members of the government, of associations and individuals, is suppressed and merged in one paramount right of force, of physical power—in a word, of tyranny, the worst, as Plato long ago taught, of all possible political organisms.

In perfect harmony with the oppressive, persecuting policy of Prince Bismarck toward the church has been his conduct toward the Prussian nobility, the legislative chambers, and all those who have in any way asserted their rights against his despotic might. This is illustrated in the case of the Count Harry von Arnim.

We had intended to go more deeply into the merits of this affair than we now find our remaining space will permit. Catholics have little reason for cherishing amicable sentiments toward this unfortunate victim of a relentless persecution under the forms of law. He has been one of the most artful and persistent enemies of the Holy See among the statesmen of Europe. The pamphlet Pro Nihilo, on account of which, in great part, he was condemned of treason by a Prussian court, is sufficient, by itself, to show that if he had been in power he would have been more dangerous than even Bismarck. His cold contempt is more offensive to Catholic feelings than the violence of his successful rival. Nevertheless, there is in him more of honor, probity, veracity, and the courtesy of a gentleman than is at this day very common among diplomatists of the “new era.” Besides, he has been tricked, insulted, ill-used, and all but crushed in pieces by a cruel enemy, and therefore we cannot help sympathizing with him. There is something deeply tragic in his story. The gist of it lies in this: that he would not be a blind, subservient tool in the hands of the chief of the administration, that he dared to think for himself, and that the old Prussian nobility had fixed their hopes on him as a desirable successor to the chancellorship, in case anything happened to Prince Bismarck. Hence the long, perfidious, and in the end brutal warfare waged against him by his unscrupulous and relentless enemy, who has for the time being triumphed, according to his own maxim, La force prime le droit. The Count von Arnim is still, however, a formidable antagonist. With the pen, on the field of legal argument, in the subtle tactics of diplomatic writing, he is superior to his persecutor, and master of a force dangerous even to the man who can command armies. He has a host of friends and sympathizers in Prussia, of allies throughout Europe. M. Benedetti was not mistaken when he applied the epithet “maniacal” to the man who was called “mad” by the friends and boon companions of his youth. His madness is not without method, and, like that of Charles XII. of Sweden, has given him a certain prestige of heroism and success. On the day of Solferino that prestige sat on the helmet of Napoleon III. Sedan, Wilhelmshöhe, and Chiselhurst were still invisible in the future. The career of Bismarck is not yet finished, nor can the destiny which awaits the empire he created be foretold. It is reported that he has recently replied to those who asked him whether there would be war in Europe over the Eastern question: “The devil only knows!” He appears to regard his Satanic Majesty as the god of modern Europe and the supreme controlling power in modern politics. Formerly the name of God was frequently on his lips, and his thoughts spontaneously referred all things to him. It was God who decided battles and controlled the destinies of nations. Men of great genius cannot escape from their clear and vivid intuitions of the supersensible. One who has had the insight and the sentiment of the meanness of the world, and the sole grandeur of eternal principles of truth and morality, belonging to a mind naturally great, cannot be a complete dupe of the illusions by which he deceives and subdues the multitude. We can see this deep melancholy of a mind which cannot be satisfied with the trivialities of life, and is restlessly yearning after something greater, in all the wild conviviality, restless scheming, audacious enterprise, ironical sporting in word and deed with all persons and things held in awe and regarded as sacred in the common sentiments of humanity, in the whole career of this Carlylean hero. Satan, we have no doubt, has had a great control over the rulers and the politics of modern Europe. Bismarck can see this, and has assuredly not forgotten his own prophecy of the results of the policy of adorning one’s self with the feathers of eagles which have been brought down by the devil’s bullets. When he says that “the devil only knows whether there will be war in Europe,” we hear Robin telling Max that he has concluded an infernal compact and must stand by it. We know, however, that although the devil knows his own plans, and tries to guess at those of God, he cannot fathom or thwart these plans of one who is infinitely stronger and wiser than he is, and has often before made him catch himself in his own mouse-trap. Bismarck is like the legendary giant Christopher, while he was in the service of the demon, thinking him to be the strongest master he could serve. He has acted as if he supposed that God had given up Europe to the devil’s dominion, yet he betrays his conviction in a hundred ways that there is a stronger power than the revolution or the anti-Christian despotism “spotted with red,” which is only biding its time. He despises and sneers at his own master, because he sees him wince at the crucifix on the cross-road. We think it quite probable that in his secret soul he venerates Pius IX., as did Mazzini, and is convinced that if anything on earth is great, true, and as enduring in the future as it has been in the past, it is the Catholic Church. His fear of it, and his war à l’outrance against it, show an estimate of its power which can have no rational foundation except in an unwilling, hostile apprehension of its divine origin. The shallow, clever Count von Arnim is a cool, quiet sceptic. So, we conjecture, is Prince Gortchakoff. Bismarck is too deep for that sort of smooth, placid incredulity. He fears an ultramontane as children are afraid of a bear under the bed. He is afraid of Jesuits, afraid of nuns, afraid of children singing hymns in honor of the Sacred Heart.

We think he has some reason to be afraid. The waters are rising around him, and it is likely that he will yet have to plunge into them “in his swimming-drawers.” “Sooner or later radicalism will stand upright before the king, will demand of him its recompense, and, pointing to the emblem of the eagle on that new imperial flag, it will say: Did you think, then, that this eagle was a free gift?”

“Without a religious basis a state is nothing but a fortuitous aggregation of interests, a sort of bastion in a war of all against all; without this religious basis all legislation, instead of regenerating itself at the living sources of eternal truth, is only tossed about by human ideas as vague as changeable.” This is the great case of Bismarck versus Bismarck. His renunciation of his own principles, and maniacal following of passion against reason, is but a type of the conduct of Europe. The modern Germany has renounced and made war upon the principles which were the foundation of its old imperial greatness. France has done the same; Italy has done the same, with a worse and more parricidal impiety. Europe has done it, and the natural consequence is “war of all against all.” “La force,” says Lacordaire, “tôt ou tard, rencontre la force.” “A house divided against itself cannot stand”; and such a house is the one which Bismarck has built. The Napoleonic fabric was overwhelmed by the volcanic fires of Sedan. We believe that there will be a Sedan for the similar fabrics of Cavour and Bismarck, for the whole structure of modern European politics. And where can be found these “living sources of eternal truth” at which “legislation can regenerate itself”? Let us remind our readers that the Encyclical and Syllabus of Pius IX. were proclaimed in 1864, between the epochs of Solferino and Sadowa. We think they will easily understand why the Holy See condemned the principles of “accomplished facts” and “non-intervention,” and perceive to what an abyss these principles have conducted Europe. They will remember that the date of the Council of the Vatican is 1870, between Sadowa and Sedan, and perceive the import and reason of our conclusion, that the source of regeneration for Europe is the same source from which European Christendom received its birth and the life of its youth and manhood. To quote again from Lacordaire: “On n’emprissonne pas la raison, on ne brûle pas les faits, on ne déshonore pas la vertu, on n’assassine pas la logique.” That policy of which Prince Bismarck is the great master is the policy of fraudulence, perfidy, violence, and tyranny. The whole European apostasy and conspiracy against the Holy See—the centre of religious unity and political equilibrium for Europe and the world—is a revolt against reason, history, morality, and the logic by which the sequences of principles and events are demonstrated and applied to the concrete matter of human destiny. These are indestructible powers, and no artillery can overthrow them or fraud pervert their decisions. “There is no kingdom of hell upon earth,” but only a continuous resistance of the infernal powers to the kingdom of Jesus Christ, which from time to time breaks out into a revolution. And the same calm, historic record, in which past Catholic historians have narrated the successive defeats of these revolutionary enterprises will, in each new chapter added by succeeding centuries, continue the chronicle of similar failures; placing the impartial mark of indelible dishonor against the names of all those who have sought for greatness by fraud and violence.

VERONICA
A LEGEND OF MÉDOC

In fines terræ

Verba corum.

Descending the river from Bordeaux amid verdant isles, and between shores that produce some of the choicest wines of France, we soon come, on the right, to Blaye, with its chivalric memories of Orlando and the fortress that makes it the Key of Aquitaine, as it was in the days of Ausonius, who says:

“Aut iteratarum qua glarea trita viarum

Fert militarem ad Blaviam.”

At the left we pass Pauillac, the ancient villa of St. Paulinus of Nola. The Gironde soon becomes a sea. The shore lowers and is on a level with the waves. The poor hills of Saintonge escape to the north, and the white houses of Royan become visible on the far-off shore. The sea-gull flies over our head, tireless as the ceaseless waves that feed him. We see the white tower of Cordouan at a distance framed in a dazzling sea of blue and gold, out of which it rises two hundred feet above low tide, full of grace and majesty, like an enchanted castle. It is said to stand on the remains of the ancient isle of Antros, which Pomponius Mela, in the first century, places at the mouth of the Gironde. We cannot resist the temptation to climb its three hundred steps for the sake of the wonderful view over fell and flood. The foundation of this tower is lost in obscurity. Even its very name is a mystery. Some think it of Moorish derivation, and that the first light-house here was built by the Saracens—a most ridiculous supposition; for the Moors, though they destroyed a great deal in Aquitaine, certainly had no time for building, whatever their taste for architecture. Others say it was due to Louis le Débonnaire, and that he appointed a keeper to light a beacon-fire and sound a cor, or horn, night and day, to warn the sailor of the perils of the coast; but any one who ever heard the noise of the tumultuous waves breaking high against the cliff of Cordouan can imagine the inefficiency of the most vigorous lungs in such violent storms as are proverbial on the Bay of Biscay. The poor keeper would have needed the Horn of Thunder of the Armorican legend, given St. Florentius by a Norman chief to summon aid when attacked by his piratical horde, or the magic oliphant of Orlando, then kept hard by at Blaye, wherewith its owner once blew so terrible a blast that all the birds dropped dead in the forests of Roncesvalles and it was heard for twenty miles around.

The earliest historical knowledge we have of a light-house here is from a charter of the fourteenth century, by which we learn that the Black Prince built a tower on the cliff of Cordouan, with a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, kept by a hermit. In 1409 the hermit’s name was Geoffroy de Lesparre, who subsisted by levying two grossos sterlingorum on every vessel from Bordeaux laden with wine—a toll that Henry IV. of England authorized him to double.

As for the modern tower of Cordouan, Louis de Foix was

“Le gentil ingénieur de ce superbe ouvrage.”

He was one of the architects employed by Philip II. of Spain in building the Escorial, and the inventor of the mechanism by which the waters of the Tagus were carried to the highest part of the city of Toledo. Some curious things are related of this ingenious architect while in Philip’s service. The ill-conditioned prince, Don Carlos, seems to have placed confidence in him; for he commissioned De Foix to furnish him with a book heavy enough to kill a man with a single blow. The architect made one of twelve tablets of stone, six inches long and four broad, bound in steel covers embossed with gold, which weighed over fourteen pounds, and might have had for its motto the excellent mot of Callimachus on the danger of weighty books. De Thou relates the account of this momentous tome, which is also referred to in the list of Don Carlos’ expenses, and says De Foix told him the idea was by no means an original one of the prince’s, but suggested by a similar volume improvised in his grandfather’s time by Don Antonio de Acuña, Bishop of Zamora, who, confined in the castle of Simancas for taking part in the rebellion of the Comuneros, covered a brick of the size of his breviary with leather, and with this volume of decisive theology killed his keeper and made his escape. Perhaps Don Carlos overlooked the fate of the bishop, who was overtaken by the keeper’s son and hanged on the battlements of the castle of Simancas. All who have visited the Armeria Real at Madrid will remember the armor of this belligerent prelate.

De Foix also invented several curious clocks for Don Carlos, who seems to have inherited Charles V.’s taste for chronometrical instruments. Every one knows the anecdote of the servant who, suddenly entering the emperor’s room one day, overthrew the table and broke to pieces the thirty watches on it. The emperor laughed and said: “You are more successful than I, for you have discovered the only means of making them all go alike.” Among these clocks of complicated mechanism made for the prince by De Foix was one in the shape of an antique temple adorned with columns, that indicated the hours, days, months, and other things.

Don Carlos, as if conscious of the insecurity of his life, also ordered De Foix to construct a machine with pulleys and weights by which he could himself open and shut his chamber door while in bed, and yet no one could enter the room against his will. De Foix seems to have been faithless to the prince; for on the 18th of January, 1568—by the king’s order, to be sure—he stopped the movement of the pulleys, unknown to Don Carlos, whose chamber was thus opened and he conveyed to prison. De Thou’s account of this is confirmed by the letter of an Italian at Madrid written eight days after, in which the door with its pulleys is mentioned.

Louis de Foix (or sans foi) is said to lie beneath the tower he erected; so we could not say: “Light be the turf above thee!” even had we been disposed.

Six or eight miles south of Cordouan we came to Soulac, amid the sand-dunes and salt marshes, with its antique church of Notre Dame de la Fin des Terres, held in great veneration by the sailors of the middle ages, and recently dug out of the sands in which it had been buried for one hundred and twenty years. In fact, it had been partly buried since the fourteenth century. Few churches have so strange a history as this. Tradition attributes its original foundation to the pious Veronica, on whose linen veil the weary Saviour, on his way to Calvary, left the impress of his sacred face. It was strange to come upon her traces on this distant shore, and we took great interest in hunting up all the local traditions respecting her. Lady Eastlake considers her de trop, both morally and pictorially, and regards her very existence as problematical; but we who have so often met her in the sorrowful Via Crucis, and pondered on the touching lesson she has left us, feel how utterly that somewhat stringent author is mistaken. Seraphia, Bernice, Beronica, or Veronica—no matter by what name she is called—is a being full of reality to us. As to her identity with the Syro-Phœnician woman of the Gospel, we are disposed to say with Padre Ventura: “It is not certain the hémorroïsse was the same as Veronica, but it is probable that she who had the wonderful favor of wiping the sweat and blood from the divine face of our Saviour was the same matron who touched the hem of his garment with so much courage and faith, and gave such a testimony to his divinity.” Even if the contrary were proved, this would not affect the ancient tradition respecting her apostolate in France, which modern research is far from shaking. Holy chroniclers of the middle ages assert that Veronica was not only an intimate friend of the Blessed Virgin, but one of the women whom Jesus healed of their infirmities and who consecrated themselves to his service, following him in his round of mercy, and aiding him with their substance. The learned Lucas of Bruges declares her positively the Syro-Phœnician woman healed by our Saviour, who, says Julian in his chronicles, lived part of the time at Jerusalem and part at Cæsarea of Philippi. Eusebius says he saw with his own eyes the monument she erected at Cæsarea in memory of her cure, on which she was represented at the feet of her divine Benefactor—a memorial destroyed by Julian the Apostate.

A Polish poet, Bohdan Zaleski, thus alludes to the traditional intimacy of Veronica with the Holy Family in lines full of graceful simplicity in the original:

“Joseph and Mary have lost the child Jesus at Jerusalem. Elizabeth comes to tell them he has been found. 'It must be either in the Temple, then, or at Veronica’s,’ replies Mary.

“The Holy Family go to visit Elizabeth. Jesus, afar off, joyfully hails the aged matron, as well as Veronica, Martha, and Salome.

“Joseph makes the accustomed prayer to thank God for his gifts. Jesus breaks the bread and blesses it. Veronica passes around the basket and distributes the bread among the guests.”

Pilgrims for centuries have mentioned Veronica’s house as at the corner of a street near the spot where Jesus fell for the second time under the weight of his cross. She is said to have been the wife of St. Amadour—the Zaccheus of the Scriptures, who in early life, says the legend, was in the service of the Blessed Virgin. He had watched over the childhood of Jesus, and this was why he was so joyful to receive him in his house. After the Crucifixion he and Veronica attached themselves anew to the service of Mary, with whom they remained till her glorious Assumption. According to a lesson in the breviary of Cahors—founded on an old MS. of the tenth century by Hugo, Bishop of Angoulême, which Père Odo de Gissey, who collected all the traditions respecting St. Amadour, declares he had seen—Saul, the persecutor of the church, wished to force Amadour and Veronica to return to the old law. They were condemned to die of hunger, but an angel of the Lord mercifully delivered them from the power of their persecutors and conducted them to a bark, ordering them to abandon themselves to the mercy of the waves and land wherever their boat should come to shore, there faithfully to serve Christ and his holy Mother.

One old chronicle says the demon invoked the winds, swelled the waves, and unchained the very furies against the frail bark. Death at every moment seemed at hand in its most frightful form. But the venerable matron, in the height of danger, seized the sacred relics she brought with her, and, raising them to heaven, invoked the assistance of God. Wonderful to relate, the storm at once ceased, a favorable breeze sprang up and brought the boat safely to the western coast of France to a place called Solac, in face of the setting sun. Here she built, as best she could, a church in honor of the blessed and glorious Virgin Mary, and deposited therein with due honor the holy relics of Our Lady she brought with her.

Bernard de la Guionie, a Dominican of the thirteenth century, says that, by a particular providence of God, they brought with them many precious relics of the Blessed Virgin, such as her hair and shoes, and even some of the Sanctum Lac that nourished the divine Word. It is generally believed this relic gave the name of Solac, or Soulac, to the place—Solum Lac, because the other relics of the Virgin were distributed among various churches. This relic was not once considered so extraordinary. It was not only venerated in many parts of Christendom as the symbol of the divine Motherhood, but it became a symbol of the supernatural eloquence and sweet doctrine of several doctors of the church. Every one who has visited the magnificent gallery at Madrid will remember Murillo’s beautiful painting representing St. Bernard deriving the food that lent to his lips such sweet, persuasive eloquence from the pure breast of the gentle Deipara. The dignity and grace of the Virgin in this painting are something marvellous, and take away everything that might seem human from the subject.

We have all heard of the Grotto of Milk at Bethlehem, with its rock of offence to so many scoffing tourists. It is only those who have a profound faith in the Incarnation that venerate everything associated with the divine Infancy. St. Louis of France built the beautiful Chapelle du Saint Lait in the Cathedral of Rheims to receive the relic that gave it its name. A like relic was venerated in the church of Mans in the time of Clovis. And a vial was borne before the army at the battle of Askalon, in 1224, which reminds one of Rubens’s painting at Brussels in which the Madonna bares her breast before the awful Judge, as if he could refuse nothing at the sight of the bosom on which he had so often been pillowed, and where he had been nourished. There is an old legend of a similar vial of this sacred laict being brought from the Holy Land by a pilgrim, who, weary, stopped one day to repose by a fountain near Evron, and hung the reliquary on the hawthorn bush that overshadowed him, and went to sleep. When he awoke, the bush had grown into a tree and the relic was far beyond his reach. He tried to cut the tree down with a hatchet, but could make no impression on the wood. Feeling an inward assurance this was the spot where Providence wished the relic to be honored, he gave it to the bishop, who built thereon a church, which became known as Notre Dame de l’Epine Sainte. The high altar enclosed the hawthorn tree. François de Châteaubriand, abbot of Evron in the sixteenth century, gave this church a beautiful reliquary of silver gilt, in the form of a church, beneath the dome of which was a tube for the relic. Devotion to this relic still exists at Evron.

But to return to Soulac. It is not surprising the Syro-Phœnician woman should come to this distant shore. We know by Strabo that the ancient Phœnicians and Carthaginians came to traffic on this coast, and even went to Great Britain. Soulac was probably the ancient Noviomagos spoken of by Ptolemy. The old legend of Cénebrun speaks of Veronica as la Dame Marie la Phénicienne, who came from the East under marvellous circumstances, learned the language of Médoc, and built a church beside which God caused a fountain of fresh, soft water to spring up out of the salt shore for the cure of tertian fevers so common in this region. Moreover, it appears she was in such constant relations with the governor of Bordeaux, appointed by Vespasian, that, to facilitate the intercourse between Soulac and the capital, a Roman road was constructed, “very level and as straight as a line—rectissimum sicut corda.” If Vespasian had anything to do with it, we may be sure it was straight; for we know how, to rectify a bend in the Flaminian Way, he bored a tunnel through a rock a thousand feet long.

It was at Bordeaux that Veronica converted Benedicta, a woman of distinguished birth, and the wife of Sigebert, a priest of the false gods, who, attacked by a cruel malady, and hearing of the marvels wrought by St. Martial, said to Benedicta: “Go and bring the man of God; perhaps he will take pity on me.” St. Martial gave her the miraculous staff of St. Peter, at the touch of which Sigebert recovered the use of his limbs. He at once proceeded to Mortagne, accompanied by a great number of soldiers and other followers, all of whom were baptized by St. Martial. At his return to Bordeaux he overthrew all the pagan altars, with the exception of one, which St. Martial purified as a memorial of the triumph of the true faith. The inscription graven thereon is still to be seen in the museum at Bordeaux: Jovi Augusto Arula donavit. SS. Martialis cum templo et ostio sacravit—Arula gave this altar to Jupiter Augustus. Martial consecrated it with the temple and vestibule.

Benedicta continued to work miracles with St. Peter’s staff, and greatly contributed to the propagation of the faith in the province. She died in the odor of sanctity, and was buried in the oratory of St. Seurin at Bordeaux, where her remains are still honored on the 8th of June.

Sigebert, whose name signifies the powerful or courageous, became the first bishop of Bordeaux, where he is honored as a martyr under the name of St. Fort. To his sanctum feretrum at St. Seurin’s people formerly went to take solemn oaths.

The foregoing reference of the old chronicler to Vespasian reminds us of the part Veronica is said to have had in the destruction of Jerusalem. A curious old play of the middle ages tells us Vespasian was afflicted with the extraordinary inconvenience of a wasp’s nest in his nose, and, after trying every known means of dislodging it, sent for the great Physician of the Jews. Finding he had been put to death by his own nation, he demanded some of his followers, whereupon Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Veronica are said to have gone to Rome. The emperor expressing a desire to see a portrait of Christ, Veronica held up the Volto Santo before him, at the sight of which he was instantaneously healed. In his gratitude he vowed to take vengeance on the murderers of Jesus, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem. The connection between this legend and the traditional respect in which Veronica was held by Vespasian’s representative at Bordeaux is curious.

Some say it was Tiberius who was cured of the leprosy by the holy veil, which accounts for his leniency to the Christians and his placing a statue of Christ among the gods. These legends, confused by time, may be regarded as traces left by Veronica at Rome, where a constant tradition asserts she herself brought the Volto Santo.

This precious relic must have been in great repute to have been placed at St. Peter’s in 707 by Pope John VII. When removed to the Santo Spirito, it was confided to six Roman noblemen, each of whom had one of the keys that gave access to it. For this service they annually received two cows at Whitsuntide, which were eaten with great festivities. In 1440 it was restored to St. Peter’s, where it is preserved in a chamber within one of the immense piers that sustain the wondrous dome. None but a canon of the church can enter this chamber, but the Vera Iconica is annually exposed from the balcony. It seems to have all the solemn gravity traditional in the Greek representations of our Saviour. Petrarch respectfully speaks of it as the verendam populis Salvatoris Imaginem.

Veronica’s statue is beneath—one of the guardians that stand around the tomb of the apostles. Perhaps she came to Rome with St. Martial; for there are traces of her wherever he announced the Gospel. Else remembers their visit, and says, when they left its walls, they directed their course towards Gaul. Mende and Cahors carefully treasure the shoes of the Virgin she brought, and Puy has some of her hair. St. Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, says that, according to the ancient traditions of the churches of Italy and France, Amadour and his wife Veronica accompanied St. Martial to Gaul. And St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscan, in the thirteenth century, in one of his homilies, represents St. Veronica in a humble cabin at Pas-de-Grave visited by St. Martial.

St. Amadour embraced the solitary life, and is believed to have been the first hermit of Aquitaine. His whole life is painted on the walls of the subterranean chapel at Roc Amadour, where he died. The inscriptions attached to these frescoes thus sum up the legend respecting him:

1. Zaccheus, because he is small and unable to see Jesus in the crowd, climbs up into a sycamore-tree. Jesus, perceiving him, says: Zaccheus, make haste and come down; for to-day I must abide at thy house.

2. Zaccheus is Jesus’ disciple. Veronica, his wife, becomes one of Mary’s attendants. They are persecuted for the faith, but an angel comes to deliver them from the prison in which they are confined.

3. An angel orders Zaccheus and Veronica to put to sea and land at whatever port the vessel shall enter, there to serve Christ, and Mary his holy Mother.

4. The vessel arrives on the coast of Médoc at a place called Soulac, where they live in fasting and prayer. St. Martial visits them and blesses an oratory they have erected in honor of St. Stephen.

5. Zaccheus, at the order of St. Martial, goes to Rome to see St. Peter. St. Veronica remains in the Bordelais country, where she dies. Zaccheus returns to Soulac, where he erects two monasteries and retires from the world.

6. St. Amadour, in the year of our Lord 70, chooses as his hermitage and place of retreat a cliff inhabited by wild beasts, since known as Roc Amadour.

7. The inhabitants of the country are almost savages. St. Amadour catechises them and makes known the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ.

8. St. Amadour erects an altar on the cliff in honor of Mary. This humble altar, now so glorious, is consecrated by the blessed apostle Martial, who visits our saint several times in his retreat.

9. St. Amadour, at the approach of death, is transported before the altar of Mary, where he expires.

Veronica herself is said to have carried in her apron the turf or clay which served to build the chapel of Soulac. It was a mere cabin, which, with the spring, was enclosed in the church built at a later period. This was probably destroyed by the Normans when they ravaged the coast of France to the terror of the people, who doubtless joined heartily in the verse then added to the liturgy, beginning:

Auferte gentem perfidam

Credentium de finibus, etc.

According to the traditions of Aquitaine, Veronica lived to a great age, and, if already in the Temple at the Presentation of the Virgin, she must have been about a century old at her death. She is believed to have died about the year 70. She was, at first buried with great honor at Soulac in the oratory she had so signally endowed. It was Sigebert, or St. Fort, who, says tradition, went to Soulac to pay her the last honors. It was long the custom of the bishops of the diocese, before taking possession of their see, to visit her tomb, and render homage to the venerable traditions of the place. Her remains were afterwards carried for safety to Bordeaux, where her tomb, of the Roman style, is still to be seen in the crypt of St. Seurin. She is said to have been of uncommon stature, and this has been confirmed by the recent examination of her remains, so wonderfully preserved amid the storms of so many ages. Placed under the seal of the archbishops of Bordeaux, and watched over with religious care, a source of miraculous grace, and the object of popular veneration, they have escaped the perils of wars and civil commotions. Cardinal de Sourdis, who opened her tomb in 1616, said her festival had been celebrated in his diocese from time immemorial on the 4th of February.

Her remains were carefully examined a few years since by a learned anatomist, who not only declared them of great antiquity, but said the articulation of certain bones showed the advanced age at which she died. Thus science comes to the aid of tradition. The popular belief as to her majestic stature was likewise confirmed by this examination.

Veronica’s oratory, probably destroyed by the Normans, as we have said, was afterwards rebuilt by the Benedictines, but at what precise time is doubtful. We only know there was a monastery at Soulac in 1022, which became dependent on that of Sainte Croix at Bordeaux. In 1043 Ama, Countess of Périgord, gave the lands of Médrin to the monastery of Sancta Maria de Finibus Terræ, ob remedium animæ suæ necnon parentum suorum, to relieve the poverty of the monks who there served God and worthily fulfilled their duty. An old Benedictine chronicle says the devotion of the faithful towards this holy spot increased to such a degree that the monks were soon enabled to build a larger church, which they enriched with much silver and many relics. This was in the twelfth century. This church, of the Roman style, to which the Benedictines were partial, enclosed the miraculous fountain of St. Veronica, which had always been in great repute, and had an altar to her memory where solemn oaths were administered as at the tomb of St. Fort. Her statue stood over the fountain, and, before leaving the church, the devout, after drinking of the water and bathing their eyes, used to cross themselves and make a reverence to “Madame Saincte Véronique.”

This church was no sooner completed than it began to be invaded by the sands, which every year grew higher and higher. The lateral doors had to be walled up, and the pavement raised three times to be on a level with the sands without. Veronica’s fountain was kept open, but soon became a well. The monastery and town finally disappeared under the dunes in the latter part of the thirteenth century. The monks returned when the sands were stayed. They found the church filled to the chancel arch and the capitals of the pillared nave. They removed part of the roof, raised the Avails, and so arranged the church that it continued to be used till devastated by the Calvinists of the sixteenth century. It was hardly repaired before the sands besieged it anew and soon buried it utterly, with the exception of the top of the belfry, which a boy could easily scale, presenting a curious and picturesque appearance on the lone shore. Under Louis XV. the open arches of this steeple became a kind of light-house, and the pines sown by Brémontier soon took root among the arches of the church totally hidden in the sands.

Tradition says Soulac was once important as a port, and alive with commercial activity. Henry III. of England embarked at old Soulac for Portsmouth about the middle of the thirteenth century, which shows how extensive have been the sand deposits since. Once the church was so near the water that in great storms the foundations were washed by the waves, though built on a slight acclivity. It appears by documents still preserved at Bordeaux that the sands in 1748 covered the greater part of Soulac, causing the loss of many salt marshes and other sources of revenue. Many other parishes on the shores of Médoc have wholly disappeared. The church of La Canau was rebuilt three times before the moving sands. Sainte Hélène has transported hers ten kilometres, leaving behind what is now an islet with a few trees to mark the spot where it once stood, still called by the people Senta Lénotte, or Ste. Hélenotte—that is, little St. Helen.

St. Pierre de Lignan, or, as called in old titles, Sanctus Petrus in Ligno—St. Peter on the Wood, or Cross—said to have been originally built by Zaccheus, or St. Amadour, in memory of the martyrdom of the apostle, which he had witnessed at Rome, has been abandoned two hundred years, and now lies under the waves of the ocean.

Pauillac, sung by Ausonius in his epistle to Théon:

“Pauliacus tanti non mihi villa foret,”

is likewise half-buried in the sands.

But to return to Soulac. The thirteenth century was the most glorious era in the history of Notre Dame de la Fin des Terres. Its popularity was at that time increased by a terrible pestilence that visited Médoc. The people had recourse to prayer, and went in crowds to the sanctuary of Soulac, vowing to renew their pilgrimage annually. The most noted of these pilgrimages was that of Lesparre, a small town which excited our interest by its reminiscences of the English occupation of the country. Its ruined fortifications; the square tower, sole remnant of the ancient castle, and the church with its Saxon arches and coarse sculpture—all bespeak great antiquity. In the twelfth century the castle and village around it were held by Baron Eyquem, a contentious lord, who liked nothing better than a brush with his neighbors. Perhaps it was this quarrelsome turn of mind that recommended the lords of Lesparre so strongly to the favor of the English sovereigns. Henry III. of England summoned Baron Eyquem to his aid at Paris. The baron’s son also served the same king with all the forces he could muster, and Henry so counted on his devotedness that, in 1244, after promising to reward his services, he commissioned him to aid by his sword and counsel in repelling the King of Navarre, who had invaded Guienne. During the entire contest between England and France the Sires of Lesparre remained faithful to the English; and when the last hour of English rule in the country sounded, the Baron de Lesparre took the lead in an effort to replace Guienne under its dominion. He went secretly to England with the lord of Candale and several notable citizens of Bordeaux to assure the king that the whole country would rise in his favor as soon as the banner of St. George should be once more seen on the Gironde. The English eagerly responded by sending the valiant Earl of Shrewsbury,

“The Frenchman’s only scourge,

Their kingdom’s terror, and black Nemesis,”

to Bordeaux, but their last chance was lost by the defeat at Castillon in 1453, in which the gallant old earl, immortalized by Shakspere—doubly immortalized—was slain. The Baron de Lesparre was banished, and the following year beheaded at Poitiers for breaking his bounds. Charles VII. of France then gave the Seigneurie de Lesparre to the Sire d’Albret, to whom in part he owed the triumph of his arms.

Lesparre having lost two-thirds of its inhabitants by a pestilence, the remainder, in their terror, went to prostrate themselves before the altar of Notre Dame de la Fin des Terres, and made a solemn vow to return every year, if spared. The account of this annual pilgrimage reminds one of the caravans of the desert. The pilgrims were divided into two bands. A part were mounted on horseback, preceded by the cross-bearer and the curé; the rest followed on foot with baskets and sacks of provisions. The four bells of Notre Dame de Lesparre pealed joyfully out over the marshes to announce their departure. They stopped at every chapel they came to, to salute its tutelar saint by some hymn in his honor, and then kept on their way, chanting the litanies. Most of these chapels were dedicated to saints specially invoked in time of pestilence; for every grief of the middle ages left its record in the churches. There was St. Catharine, always popular in this region. Then came St. Sebastian, now destroyed, but which gave the name of La Capère (the chapel) to a little village we passed, and St. Roch still standing at Escarpon. As soon as the caravan came in sight of the belfry of Soulac, on a height between St. Vivian and Talais, the pilgrims descended from their horses to salute the Virgin on their knees. Arrived at the holy sanctuary, each one offered his candle streaming with ribbons—a necessary adjunct in all religious offerings in Médoc. An enormous mass of these old ribbons have been preserved at new Soulac. After their devotions the pilgrims went out on the seashore to take their lunch. The next day they returned to Lesparre in the same order. This annual pilgrimage was continued for five centuries, which accounts for the vivid recollections of it among the people. Near the manor-house of the Baron d’Arès, now buried in an immense dune, flowed a fountain as late as 1830, but since filled up, where the pilgrims stopped to quench their thirst, with the pious belief that St. Veronica had brought here a vein of the sacred spring that flowed for the healing of the people in her sanctuary.

Lesparre, once the capital of Médoc, has now only about a thousand inhabitants. From the tower there is an extensive view over the broad moor with its patches of yellow sand, here and there an oasis with a few vegetables, and perhaps an acre or two of oats, barley, or maize, which grow as they can. In winter this vast heath becomes a marsh. The water stands in pools among the sand-hills. The peasant shuts himself up with his beasts, and warms himself by the peat-fire, while the pools freeze and the sands grow white under the icy breath of the sea-winds.

St. Veronica’s Church, so venerated in the middle ages, has within a few years been dug out of the sands and repaired. The miraculous statue of Notre Dame de la Fin des Terres has been restored to its place on her altar, and, after a silence of one hundred and twenty years, the bell once more awakens the echoes of the sand-hills, thanks to the interest taken by Cardinal Donnet in reviving a devotion to this ancient place of pilgrimage. Veronica is once more honored in the place where she died—a devotion that seems significant in these times. Perhaps she comes to hold up anew the bleeding face of Christ for the healing of the nations. The Volto Santo is said to have turned pale a few years since when exhibited at Rome. We may well believe it, in view of all the wounds since inflicted on Christ’s Bride—the church. “O Veronica!” cries Padre Verruchino, a Capuchin friar, “suffer us, we pray thee, to gaze awhile at thy holy veil for the healing of our sin-sick souls!”

An old MS. of the thirteenth or fourteenth century at Auch contains the following sequence: De Sancta Veronica Memoria, showing how well our fathers in the faith, even in those dark ages, knew how to rise above every type and shadow to the substance of things hoped for. It is good to echo the prayers of those earnest times.

Salve, sancta facies
Nostri Redemptoris
In qua nitet species
Divini splendoris,
Impressa panniculo
Nivei coloris,
Dataque Veronicæ
Signum ob amoris.

Salve, decus seculi,
Speculum sanctorum
Quod videre cupiunt
Spiritus cœlorum.
Nos ab omni macula
Purga vitiorum,
Inque nos consortium
Junge Beatorum.

Ave, nostra gloria,
In hac vita dura,
Labili et fragili,
Cito transitura.
Nos perduc ad patriam,
O felix figura,
Ad videndam faciem
Christi, mente pura.

Esto nobis, Domine,
Tutum adjuvamen,
Dulce refrigerium,
Atque consolamen,
Ut nobis non noceat
Hostile conamen,
Sed fruamur requie.
Nos dicamus: Amen.[27]

DANTE’S PURGATORIO.
CANTO FIFTEENTH.
TRANSLATED BY T. W. PARSONS.

Between the third hour’s close and dawn of day,

Much as appears of the celestial sphere
Ever in motion, like a child at play,
So much appeared now of the sun’s career
To be remaining towards his western way.
There it was evening; here the middle night;
And on our front, the rays directly beat,
For we had circled so the hill that right
On towards the sunset we inclined our feet;
When on my brows I felt a load of light,
Greater in splendor than before had been,

And o’er my sense, as ’twere from things unknown,

A stupor stole; and of my palms a screen

I made against the excess of light that shone.

As when from water or a mirror’s face
The ray leaps upward to the opponent side,
Mounting in like mode as through equal space
The ray descendeth, and with line as wide
From the direct line of a falling stone
(As science shows, and art hath verified),
So did I seem, by some reflected light
Before me there, to be so struck that fain
I would have suddenly withdrawn my sight.

“What is it, gentle Father, that in vain
I shield my visage from, and still towards us
Seems as in motion?” He made this reply:
“Marvel not if, as yet, the splendor thus

Of heaven’s bright household overpowers thine eye.

This one is sent to ask men up the height;
Soon it shall be that to behold these things
Will cause thee no dismay, but bring delight,
Even as thy soul due disposition brings.”
Soon as we reached the blessèd angel’s side
He said, with glad voice: “Here you enter in
By steps more easy than you yet have tried.”
We thence departed, and, ascending now,
Heard Beati Misericordes chanted
Below, behind us, and, “Be joyful thou
To whom to conquer in this pass is granted!”

My Master and myself in lonely mood
Still mounting, I considered as I went
How I might gather from his word some good,
And turned to him inquiringly: “What meant
That spirit of Romagna speaking so
Of partnership forbid?” He made reply:
“Of his own worst defect he now doth know
The torment; therefore, do not wonder why
Others he chides to make their penance less.
Because you point your wishes at a prize
Where part is lost if it permit largesse,
Envy’s bad bellows move your selfish sighs.
But if the love of the supernal sphere
Heavenward exalted every wish of yours,
Your bosom would not harbor that low fear;
For so much more as there they speak of Ours,
More love in that celestial cloister glows,
And so much more of good each soul secures.”

“Now to be satisfied my hunger grows,”
I answered, “and my mind is more in doubt
Than if no question I had asked of thee.
How comes it, that a blessing parcelled out
More rich its many owners makes to be
Than if a few possessed it?” He replied:

“Because thy mind its reasoning cannot stretch

Beyond those things of earth to which ’tis tied;

Thou from true light dost only darkness fetch.

That Good ineffable and infinite
Who dwells above there, runs to love as fleet
As to a lucid body a ray of light,
And so much giveth as it finds of heat.
Broad as the flame of charity may burn,
The eternal flame above it grows more great:

And more their number is who heavenward yearn.

More for his love there are, and they love more,

Like mirrors that each other’s light return.
Now, if thou hunger still, despite my lore,
Thou shalt see Beatris, and sure, she will
Give unto this and every wish repose;
Only may those five wounds remaining still,

That heal in aching, like the twain soon close.”

Whiles I was musing, and would fain have said,

“Thou hast contented me,” I looked, and, lo!

To the next cornice we had come; here fled

All power of speech, mine eyes were ravished so!

For, seized with ecstasy, I seemed to be
Rapt in a sudden vision of a crowd
Met in a temple. I could also see
That entering, 'mid those men, a woman stood
With sweet mien of a mother, saying: “Why
Hast thou so dealt with us, my darling son?
Behold, in every place thy sire and I

Have sought thee sorrowing.” Soon as she had done

This vision vanished, and I next beheld
Another lady, with such drops besprent
As down the cheeks flow from a bosom swelled
With scorn of some one and by anguish rent;
Saying: “If thou be ruler of the town,
About whose name the gods had such a strife

And whence all knowledge gleams to give renown,

Pisistratus! avenge thee on his life

Whose bold embrace hath brought our daughter down!”

And her lord seemed to me benign and mild,

Answering with aspect that her fury stemmed:

“What should we do to one that harmed our child,

If one caressing her be so condemned?”

Next I saw people raging hot in ire,

Slaying a youth with stones, and shouting loud:

“Martyr him! martyr him!” in tumult dire;
And I saw him drop down before the crowd
Dying, but lifting, ere he did expire,
Looks that might win compassion for his foes;

And with such eyes,—they seemed the doors of heaven!

Praying the most high Father that, for those

Who wrought such wrong, their sin might be forgiven.

Soon as my mind that from itself had swerved

Came back to true things that outside it lie,

I knew my dreams false, but their truth observed.

My leader then, who could perceive that I

Walked like a man by somnolence unnerved,

Said: “Come! what ails thee that thou canst not keep

Thy footing straight, but more than half a league

Hast moved, with faltering steps, as if by sleep

Or wine o’ercome, and eyes that show fatigue?”

I answered: “O sweet Father! I will tell,

If thou wilt hear me, all that I have seen,

While my limbs failed me and my strength so fell.”

And he replied: “Shouldst thou thy visage screen

Beneath an hundred masks, I still could spell

Each slightest thought of thine, and read thy dreams.

This vision came lest thou be self-excused

Thy heart from opening to the peace that streams

From love’s eternal fount o’er all diffused.
I did not ask 'what ails thee,’ as men speak,
Who look with mortal eye that cannot see
The soul without its body. Thou wast weak,
And I, to strengthen, reprehended thee.
So men are wont dull servants to reprove

That when their watch comes round are slow to stir.”

During these words we did not cease to move
On through the evening, and attentive were
To look beyond us, far as vision might,
Against the level sun’s o’erpowering rays;
And towards us, lo! a vapor, dun as night,
Little by little growing on our gaze,
Deprived us of pure air and dimmed our sight,
Nor was there shelter from the blinding haze.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER XII.
“TO BE, OR NOT TO BE.’

The Signora’s life in these days was disturbed by a doubt that was all the more troublesome because she was obliged to solve it unaided, and that without delay. What should she do with Mr. Vane?

Advice could be of no use, even if she had been willing to ask it. He satisfied perfectly all the conditions concerning which outward influence could have weight with a woman of character and refinement. It is always possible to tell a woman that she should not marry a man, the reasons given being good ones; but it is never possible to tell her that she should marry him, if she does not wish, however excellent he may be. The question with the Signora was, Should she marry at all? She certainly did not wish to marry. Was she willing? Here came up a host of arguments for and against, till she was as tormented and uncertain as Hamlet. If Mr. Vane would have consented to spend his life in Rome and remain her friend, without asking for more, she would have been satisfied, and have thought that her life had gained by him a sweetness she had never known, nor even thought of. For she had not been conscious of anything wanting, till his companionship had taught her that one niche in her house was vacant. She contemplated the possibility of marrying him only in order to keep him near her, not because she wished to change their relations. But the choice was forced upon her to lose him or to marry him.

It was a choice between two evils. Her life had been so exquisite, so nearer perfect than any one but herself could know, that to introduce new and important interests there was a dangerous experiment. How much more likely they would be to disturb than to complete the harmony! And yet, how pleasant was that masculine presence, like a shady tree in the midst of a sunny garden of flowers! How pleasant the sense of a superior physical strength and manly sympathy ever near! How pleasant the consciousness of constantly pleasing one worth pleasing by the thousand little feminine ways and words, and by the very being what she was, like a fragrant rose set in a chamber, silent and gracious. How many little pleasures he gave her which a man gives only to the woman he prefers to all others! It seemed to her she had never been well listened to before. Then to see her do a favor to any one, perform some graceful little act that might pass unregarded by others, even go about her ordinary duties, gave him a vivid pleasure. He appreciated the very rose in her hair, the ribbon at her throat, the bow on her slipper. Little things: but it is the little pleasures which make life sweet, as the little displeasures may do more than afflictions can to make it bitter.

She watched to see what danger there might be of certain small annoyances which she had seen fretting the course of many a married life, and he came out triumphantly from the ordeal. He did not hang for ever about the house till the women grew tired of him, any more than he went to the opposite extreme of staying away too much. He preserved a respectful ignorance of household affairs, in which he held that women should be autocrats, and at the same time listened with interest to any details that might be vouchsafed him, as to curious particulars of a country he had never visited, but which sent him important supplies. He was habitually polite to women, but never gallant, and he would have given a civil reply to a civil question proffered him even by an infamous person; and in the most private life, he dropped only ceremony, never respect. As far as personal habits went, he was a man who might have been a hero, even to his valet-de-chambre.

Point by point the Signora tried him, and still found no defect which could seem to indicate a disagreeable habit or an intolerable opinion. She could but laugh—a little nervously, indeed—at her own perplexity.

“You dear soul!” she thought, “why will you not do something hateful and set my mind at rest?”

He would not. He was not even guilty of the one fault that might naturally have been expected of him under the circumstances: he had no appearance of hanging upon her words and looks, as if for some indication of a change of intentions regarding him. She was free to act herself perfectly, without fear of misinterpretation. And yet, in spite of his forbearance, she felt that time was committing her, and that she must soon either decidedly prevent or decidedly receive a renewal of his offer.

The Signora might easily be accused by persons of little refinement of being one who did not know her own mind. On the contrary, she was rather exceptionally prompt and clear as to her requirements. But she was past the age when women usually marry in haste to repent afterward at leisure; and was, moreover, one of the comparatively few women who are fitted by their character to be friends to men without marrying them. The insidious sisterhood which ends in wifehood or in mischief she saw through and reprobated. “No man can have a sister,” she was wont to say, “other than the daughters of his mother. But he may have a friend. And no man has a right to expect sisterly service and familiarity from a woman not born his sister. It is a snare.” As a friend, she would never have charged herself with the care of Mr. Vane’s collars and cravats, advised him regarding the most becoming cut of his beard, nor performed the sentimental service of “bathing his fevered brow” when he had a headache, though she might have done all these things as a sister or a wife.

It was, altogether, a perplexing and even painful situation, and the Signora found all her pleasure disturbed by that ever-present fear of either throwing away a good which she might afterward regret, or committing herself to a state of life which she might regret still more. The weather added to her annoyance. Summer had reached its meridian heat rather prematurely, the sun poured his rays down in a torrent, and at noon the city was like a martyr at the stake. The nights began to lose their freshness and be scorched about the edges; the early stars, instead of shedding dews, were like the coals left in a half-swept oven; and the mornings languished on the horizon. It was a time for not only dolce far niente, but dolce pensar niente. Besides, people, being at this season so shut up together, need to be at ease with each other. There was very little to call them out, few friends left in town, and but few festas.

On one of these days came the festa of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the vigil of which is unique in Rome, being a real witch’s holiday, according to popular superstition. It is an ancient belief among the people that on this vigil the witches have liberty to go about where they will; and, since the world all goes to St. John Lateran, the witches go there too. In order to detect them it was the custom to procure a stick with a natural fork at the end. This fork was placed under the chin, the two prongs coming up over the jaws. Looking at a person over it in this wise, it could be known if he or she were a witch. Moreover, since it was believed that the witches would take advantage of the absence of the heads of the family to enter the houses and do harm to the children, the little ones being their favorite prey, a new broom was bought, and set, broom-end upward, outside the door. Before entering, the witch was obliged to count every spill of the broom. As a further precaution, some salt was sprinkled on the threshold, and, in case that should not prevent their entering, these words were repeated while sprinkling it: “Come tomorrow to borrow salt of me.” The witch who entered was constrained to come and knock at the door the next day, and ask the loan of a little salt. For the further safe-keeping of the children during the night, the mothers hang some object of devotion about their necks or bind it around their bodies, and, when they are about going to sleep, whisper the Credo in their ear, repeating every word twice, thus: “I believe, I believe, in God, in God,” etc.

“What do they think a witch would do to the children, if she should enter?” we asked our Roman informant.

“Take off the object of devotion and touch them, or do something to them so that they would die,” was the reply. “A child that has been touched by a witch pines away to a skeleton, and dies, without any one being able to find out what ails it. I believe, and I do not believe,” she said with a shrug. “Who knows? The Scriptures tell of evil spirits having power. Who knows how it may be? My sister, however, lived and died persuaded that her only child was touched by a witch, though it was not on St John’s eve. She had been getting her baby to sleep one day, when a neighbor came and called her to the door for some reason. She went out, leaving the door open and the baby in its cradle. When she returned, there was an old woman bending over the cradle and talking to the child—an ugly, dirty old creature, that she had never seen before. My sister took fright at once, and called out to her to go away. 'I saw the door open and heard the baby crying, and I came in to soothe it,’ the old woman said. My sister told her she had no right to come in, and chased her away. On the threshold the woman turned and shook her finger. 'You will repent this,’ she said. In fact, the babe, which had been healthy, and was just dropping peacefully asleep, began to moan and cry, and nothing could pacify it. My sister examined and found that the little devotion it wore had been taken away. From that day the child pined. She got nurses for it, she tried everything possible, but nothing helped it. Finally, she carried it to the church of St. Theodore, in the Roman Forum, where all the mothers carry their sick babies. The priest blessed it, but told her that it was too late: the child would die. And it did die. She tried then one proof more. She took all its clothes that it died in, and that it had on when the witch touched it, put them in a grate, and kindled a fire under them. They burned as if there had been gunpowder among them. That was a sure proof, they said. But for me,” continued the story-teller, with another shrug, “I believe, and I don’t believe. Chi lo sa?”

It is curious to find how this witch-idea is embodied in every nation, and always with very nearly the same features: old, ugly, child-hating, powerful for petty malice, but a slave to the most trivial spells, repelling, disgusting—a fair representation of the utter despicableness and feebleness of evil.

At the first soft fall of twilight the family of Casa Ottant’Otto stepped into a carriage and drove out to the Lateran by the roundabout way of the Roman Forum. From the Colosseum up to the church, all about the church and palace, in a part of the piazza, and the ends of the streets leading to it, every nook and door-way and every rod of ground had its table or booth, some lighted by a soft olive-oil lamp, others clear and bright with petroleum, others flaring with the red light of a torch. Piles of cakes of every shape and size, wine in bottles, flasks, and jars, cones of the delicious Roman lemons, that are so juicy and fragrant, trinkets, scarfs, knick-knacks of various sorts, covered the tables and counters. Here and there a more ambitious salesman, probably a Jew, had erected a little shop. Everywhere were pinks and lavender. Each table and counter held sprigs and bunches, and men, women, and children went about with their arms full of it. A little crowd of these noisy venders surrounded the carriage the moment it stopped, and the ladies supplied themselves with lavender for their drawers, and bought large bunches of red pinks, and each of them a St. John’s bouquet. This bouquet consists of a little white flower surrounded by pinks, and outside four sprigs of lavender. The lavender for drawers is ingeniously done up. A bunch is gathered with long stems to the sweet gray seeds and blue flowers, and a string is tied close under their little chins. The stems are then turned back to make a cage for the cluster, and tied again at the other end; and yet again turned back and tied a third time, so that only glimpses can be had of the caged bloom; and all is lavender.

“We should have come to first Vespers, if we wished to think of the austere St. John,” the Signora said. “The scene is simply picturesque and beautiful at this hour, and will be bacchanalian later. The world doesn’t begin to come till twelve o’clock, and at that time it will be almost impossible to move for the crowd, which does not disappear entirely till daylight.”

They drove off toward Santa Croce, and, turning there, stayed awhile under the soft dusk of the trees, looking back on the twinkling lights and crowding figures, and talking a little. The fiery half-ring of the three days’ moon touched the tip of a pine-tree in the west and kindled it; the stars overhead seemed to be melting out of their orbits in a glowing rain; the air was full of a sweet fragrance and delicately fresh. Sounds of laughter and mingled voices reached them now and then. But all—the wafts of air, the sounds, the radiating lights, the motions—were so soft that the whole might be a great picture which they half imagined to be alive.

The Signora leaned back in her seat and gave herself up to the scene, mingling with it the ever-present thought: What should she do with this man who sat opposite her? His face was turned to look back, so that she saw the profile, a fine one. She felt very feminine and weak just then—not at all like taking care of herself all her life long, being both mistress and master of her house, and her own adviser and support. The spirit of strength, of an enthusiastic liberty of effort and labor, faded and fainted within her. They could not live in such a scene. She wanted to be taken care of. All the insidious arguments of the sluggard began to whisper themselves to her. Of what use was this constant toil and strain, which was but a daily rolling up hill of a burden that every night rolled down again? Of what use the study, the thought, the self-denial? All had seemed pleasant; but, come to think of it, where had been the repose? Had she ever looked at a flower without, after the first glance, studying how she should present its beauties in words to other eyes? Had she ever drunk a sunset with all its color down into her own soul, and left its glory there, but speedily her pen must dip the light of it up to shine on a page for others to see? Whither had fled the long, tranquil sleep, the calm folding of the hands, the deep and steady thought for thought’s sake? There was no one in the world, it seemed to her, who thought so much of others as she did. She analyzed her pains, her religious emotions, her very temptations, for them, and studied her own breathing that she should be able to tell them how they breathed. And what was the return? Bread, and not too much of that. She had studied her art as the painter, the sculptor, and the musician study, making a science of it, and not one in a hundred looked on it as any more than an idle and facile play. She had felt her way, by a natural gift and an acquired power, into the depths of souls, and had led them out alive into the light; yet how many an ignorant critic and shallow moralist had set up his wooden or card-paper model for her to follow!

How odd she had not known before how tiresome it was! She had at times felt tired, but to know that all was tiresome, and vanity of vanities—that had but just broken on her. This soft and joyous scene, usurping the hours of sleep, making the work of the day to follow an impossible thing to be done, and finding its playground under the stars—this was what had opened her eyes. A careless laugh had done it. She looked at Mr. Vane and thought: “I hope he won’t ask me to-night, for if he should I shall certainly promise to marry him; and I do not like cutting Gordian knots with sudden resolutions. I would rather untie this a little more leisurely,” she considered, still looking at him. “If I want honors and favors, I could win more by giving good dinners than by writing good books. A dinner is more powerful than an epic; for anybody can take in a dinner, but everybody cannot take in an epic. If I want friends and the reputation of being amiable, the good-natured complacency of prosperous ease will go a great deal further than the somewhat over-earnestness of a serious life.”

She snatched her eyes and her thoughts quickly away from the subjects that occupied both, and began to talk; for Mr. Vane turned, as if aware of being observed, and looked at her.

“I must have a little longer to think,” she said to herself, with a fluttering heart. “It will never do to decide to-night.”

“If we are going to keep up our character of a sober and orderly household, we must soon be on our way home,” she said. “The witches are certainly abroad—I almost see them—and we have no spell to prevent their getting into our carriage.”

Mr. Vane had been holding his breath for the last few moments. He knew, without looking, what eyes were on him, and almost knew what thoughts were passing in the Signora’s mind. He felt that his fate was in the balance. The prize seemed to be within his grasp; for to hesitate, even, seemed to give consent. At the first word he felt that hope grow dim. Consent would have lingered in that enchanted scene, would have given itself up to some ideal dream, forgetting the flight of time. She was evidently resisting, if not refusing.

“Let us take one turn round by the wall and Santa Croce,” he said. “Then we will go. I don’t think I shall ever have another drive just like this, and I would like to prolong it a little.”

“Prolong it as much as you please!” the Signora exclaimed, with quick compunction. “I only made a suggestion, which came from habit. If you like to stay, I shall be pleased.”

His voice, a little quickened and a little deepened, had seemed to have a touch of reproach in it, as though he should say: “Think, at least, a little of me!” But his answer to her was quite friendly: “You were right. We had better not stay long. One turn will be enough.”

They went on, the Signora fighting now two forces instead of one—for pity for him was added to pity for herself. What a beautiful and noble patience his life had shown, and with what a sweet dignity he had covered that painful thought that he had never been first to anybody!

As they passed round near the wall, approaching Santa Croce, the trees hid all the lights from them. The two daughters, one at either hand of the father, leaned on his arm and sighed with delight; Marion, seated beside the Signora, leaned forward to touch Bianca’s hand, unable in that shadow to see her. The darkness touched their faces like a down, so thick and moist was it, and so full of fragrance.

They came out before Santa Croce, and, turning, went back as they had come. More than one of the company would have liked to propose walking back along the avenue, but did not venture to do so. A few minutes brought them to the piazza of St. John’s again, and into the midst of a crowd of eager buyers and sellers. Here and there out of some dim corner a face shone red in the flare of a half-shaded torch, small figures ran and danced across the lights, black as silhouettes; the whole coloring was Rembrandt.

Then home through the quiet streets, where occasionally they met a couple or a party, all going toward St. John’s.

“It seems to me a kind of Santa Claus time, except that it is hot weather,” Bianca said when they reached home. “I feel as though somebody ought to come down the chimney to-night.”

“By the way,” the Signora exclaimed, “I have never introduced you to my Santa Claus. How ungrateful I am! I am going to tell you my little story; for I am almost sure that you four good people are as ignorant of the genealogy of the Santa Claus of Christmas fame as I was when I came to Rome. If you are wiser, then you can at least hear how I was enlightened. When I had been in Rome but a little while, I made the acquaintance of an elderly prelate, who was so kind as to do for me many of those little services which a stranger needs, and was of the greatest use to me in many ways. I seldom, almost never, asked anything of him, but it was constantly happening that he offered some kindness at the very moment it was needed. I never went to visit a city new to me but he introduced me to some influential friend there, and I never heard of a new old sight to see but he could tell me how to gain the best view of it. His kindness was so pleasant and opportune that after a while, without the least intention of being disrespectful however, I came to call him in my own mind Santa Claus. His Christian name is Nicholas. One day, while talking with me, he asked if I had any of the manna of St. Nicholas of Bari. I replied that I did not even know what it was. He looked at me in astonishment, and explained that it was a limpid substance like water which had oozed from the bones of St. Nicholas the Great, without ceasing, for more than fifteen hundred years, the saint having been born somewhere late in the third century; that every morning the sacristan gathers it with a sponge and preserves it in bottles; and that the people of Bari and all that region have so great a faith in the saint and his miraculous 'manna’ that they use it for every malady. He ended by promising to send to his brother, an archbishop somewhere in the south of Italy, to procure a bottle of this precious liquor for me. In a few days he brought it. Here it is!” The Signora brought from a little shrine that closed with a door in the wall, and displayed, a bottle filled with what appeared to be the brightest and most limpid water. “Monsignor showed me a similar bottle that he has had forty years,” she continued, “and it was as pure and bright as this—perfectly unchanged. He had opened it, now and then, to take out a few drops. Some years ago he gave a bottle also to the Holy Father, who keeps it beside his bed on a little shelf. Here is the picture of my saint.”

It was a quaint old print, copied, doubtless, from a picture in the church of St. Nicholas, in Bari, and represented the sainted archbishop standing on the shore, with the sea and ships behind him. At his right knelt a youth on the sands; at his left three infants were rising out of a tub, commemorative of two of his miracles.

“After having given me this relic of his great patron, Monsignor, full of zeal for his honor and of pity for my ignorance, began to tell me something of his life, and how knowing of an impoverished noble family, driven to desperation by need, and almost deciding to sell the daughters to a life of vice, since they had no money to marry them, this young saint went slily by night, and dropped a bag of gold in at the window sufficient for a dot for the eldest; and, after a while, in the same manner, provided for the others, the family rejoicing over their escape and repenting of their evil resolution. When Monsignor had got so far with his story, I broke out, 'Why, it is Santa Claus!’ And, sure enough, it was. The great saint was no longer a stranger to me. I had known, without knowing, him all my life, from the time when I had first read the wonderful illustrated story-books of Christmas, and seen my mother hang my stocking in the chimney-corner before taking me off to bed on Christmas eve.”

The Signora was very glad to have this little story to tell by way of making an inclined plane to the saying of good-night. Undercover of it she escaped to her own room without being entrapped into a private interview, which she almost suspected Mr. Vane of plotting.

Then they had a little expedition for the morning to see the making of tapestry in the great hospice of St. Michael.

“If the weather and the time of day were not so hot,” the Signora said, “we would go a little further on, to the scene of a miracle of Santa Francesca Romana; but I don’t believe we shall be able to do so. A little way from the hospital is the Porta Portese, and outside that is the vineyard where that beloved saint and her companions worked one January day from dawn till noon, without having anything to eat or drink. They had forgotten to bring provisions; and Francesca, when she saw her companions suffering from thirst, accused herself of having neglected to provide for them. She was then, you know, a mother-superior, and these were her oblates. Well, the youngest of them, almost crying with thirst, begged to be allowed to go to a fountain out on the public road. The saint told her to be patient, and, withdrawing herself, began to pray: 'Lord Jesus, help us in our need; for I have been thoughtless in neglecting to provide food for my sisters.’ 'She’d much better take us home at once,' said the poor little nun to herself. And then Francesca, rising from her knees, pointed to a tree around which twined a vine loaded with large clusters of grapes—just as many clusters as there were poor nuns to eat them. They had passed this very tree again and again, and seen the vine dead and withered that very day. That same Santa Francesca is one of the dearest saints in the calender,” the Signora said. “Though, to be sure,” she added, “when we think over their lives, each one seems to be the dearest.”

“My idea of saintliness is always associated with asceticism,” said Isabel.

“If only the asceticism be not sour, as it never is with the saints,” responded the Signora with a sigh. “About the most uncomfortable company one can have is that of a person who, we cannot doubt, is virtuous in many ways, but who looks upon one with an expression full of suspicion and condemnation, without seeming aware that in so doing he has committed a sin against charity which, according to St. Paul, renders his other virtues nothing. To my mind, one of the first requisites of a Christian character is to mind one’s own business.”

“Oh! I don’t mean asceticism that goes only far enough to stir up the bile,” Isabel said, “but that which clears the heart, so that the light of charity shines quite through it and brightens every object it looks upon.”

They were already on their way to the asylum of St. Michael—that immense establishment, which contains a little world within itself, where beauty and charity dwell together; where the young find protection and instruction, and the old a refuge, under the same roof; where music, sculpture, painting, and kindred arts have made their home. Here the poor, instead of being swept away like dead leaves from a garden, to decay in obscure disgrace, slip, consoled and unashamed, into the grave, like fallen leaves that die in peace between the embracing roots of the green tree they once helped to adorn. The long, arched corridors were fresh and cool, the brilliant day entering only in a tender light, or, here and there, in some splash of gold that burned only the spot it fell upon. Fountains murmured in the courts, and all the business of the place moved with a subdued and leisurely action which made work seem a pleasure. It was not toil, but occupation—that wise and healthy degree of work which makes work possible for many years, instead of crowding the force of a whole life into a few feverish days. There was not a face which showed anxious and nervous hurry. All were calm and cheerful.

Our friends did not attempt to see anything more than the tapestry-making and mending, the first in the men’s department, the last done entirely by women and girls. The two immense halls devoted to these works, with the ante-chambers, were completely hung with old tapestries, making a softly and richly-colored picture-gallery of the whole place. In the manufacturing hall upright frames held the great squares of the warp, with the design drawn or stamped carefully on the closely-stretched threads. Behind these sat the weaver, working in the figures with long spools of colored wools, pressing down closely each stitch with a little instrument he held in the left hand. A score or more of these bobbins hung at the back of the tapestry, each to be caught up and woven in in its turn. Across the lower part of the carpet already a yard was splendidly woven of solid and brilliant color. In another part of the hall hung a large picture for a future weaving—a balcony with a vine and figures—and on a table under it were arranged the myriad selected shades and colors that composed it. Here all in the work was brightly colored; but when they went to the other part of the building, where the women were occupied in restoring, it was like passing from dazzling midsummer to a late October day. The very light and atmosphere of the place seemed different. Stretched on large frames laid out like country quilting-frames were dim old tapestries with figures of gods and goddesses, of mythical heroes and heroines, or of historical persons and events, the fabrics all more or less ragged, but inestimably precious. Girls were grouped around these, mending, directed by an artist. Hanging on the walls were other tapestries that had been repaired, and so perfectly that it was impossible to distinguish what part had been restored without looking at the wrong side of the work. Lying in bunches and snarls on the work, or hanging in long rows of varied hues on the wall, were skeins of wool, of every shade and color, dim, dark, soft, or pallid, like colors seen by night, by the stars, or by the moon, or colors guessed at by eyes half-blind or by eyes that are dying. There was a suggestion of tragedy in those old new colors, as in sad or blighted faces of children. And how much more of interest and tragedy in the old tapestries for which they had lost all their brightness! Nothing else is so interwoven with romantic possibilities as old tapestry. Luxury, which may have been regal, clings to it, but it is the luxury of olden times, when the beggar touched the prince. Mystery and terror are its companions; for who knows who or what may sometimes have been hidden behind that splendid curtain? Lifting its fold on some day of an age gone by, what white, cold face might have been found there between it and the wall, what sliding figure of a hiding spy, what twinkle of a dagger-point in the dusky corner! And then what pageants does it not suggest of the times when life was a picture!

“It really takes one out of the nineteenth century,” Mr. Vane said.

“The weaving of this tapestry,” the Signora told her friends, “was first taught here by a monk—I have forgotten in the time of what pope. This monk was a backslider and ran away from his convent; after being absent ten years he repented, and came back to throw himself at the feet of the Holy Father. 'Give me any penance, Holy Father,’ he said, 'and I will do it gladly.’ The pope, rejoiced to receive this prodigal, asked him where and how he had passed the ten years of his absence, and was told that they had been spent in the tapestry-works of Coblentz, where he had learned all the art of tapestry-making. 'Go, then, to St. Michael’s,’ said the pope, 'and teach them to make tapestry. That shall be your penance.’ And so it was done; and that is the origin of the work in Rome. The story was told me by a prelate who was formerly director of St. Michael’s.”

It was too near noon when the inspection was over for them to go to Santa Francesca’s vineyard. They could only hide themselves in the large covered carriage, and drive slowly home through the almost silent streets. They sighed with contentment when they reached the doorway, where, through the half-open valves, the floor showed freshly sprinkled and all the place cool and softly lighted.

Isabel glanced back into the street. A sick beggar, who was at his post on a doorstep of the opposite convent so constantly that one might well believe he had no other home, leaned back and seemed to sleep, his pallid face whiter than the white stone it lay against. A poor man slept in the shadow of the garden wall above, lying flat on his face on the pavement. Further up, a woman, with two little children clinging to her, sat on the ground in the shadow, and ate her dinner of a piece of bread.

“It seems to me,” the girl said thoughtfully, as she followed the others up-stairs, “that there should be a perpetual thanksgiving society which every one who has a home or a roof to cover them should join.”

The Signora touched Isabel’s arm affectionately and smiled in her pretty, sober face. She found this girl changing, or, rather, developing into something nobler and more serious than she had expected.

“There is a Perpetual Thanksgiving Society in Rome, my dear,” she said. “I am so glad you have had the thought without having heard of it. It is one of the most beautiful societies in the world. It has its meetings the third Thursday of every month, at the Caravita, a little church that used to belong to the Jesuits. There is an instruction, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and afterward the Magnificat is sung. The special objects of the association are to thank God constantly for the good we receive through the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, the Sacred Heart, and by the intercession of the Virgin Mary; and the special festas of the society are Epiphany, Pentecost, Corpus Domini, Sacred Heart, Annunciation, Visitation, Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin, St. John the Evangelist, St. Gertrude, St. Felix de Cantalice, and Our Lady of Grace. The loveliest thing of all is the practice enjoined on the members of making constantly the aspiration, 'Thanks be to God.’ I wish this society were in every town in the world. We beg, we are always begging, and the showers are always coming down. How beautiful is the idea of a society which asks nothing, but sends up a perpetual Deo gratias, as the earth sends up mists in return for the rain!”

“I shall join that society at once,” Isabel said with decision.

The Signora laughed. “You had better take off your bonnet and have some dinner now,” she said.

“Your society pleases me very much,” Mr. Vane remarked. “But the most perfect act of thanksgiving I know is that in the Gloria: 'We give thee thanks for thy great glory.’”

There was a little moonlight reception and tea-party that evening out on the loggia. Clive Bailey came to take leave before going away for a few weeks into the country. Mr. Coleman also had been unexpectedly called to England on business, and was so afflicted about going that the Signora was vexed.

“I cannot bear to have a man about who cannot get along without me,” she said privately to Isabel, “especially when I can get along perfectly well without him. When a man falls into that dependent and moony state, he loses all his character and becomes despicable. It disgusts me the more, besides, because it is usually the strong-willed, driving women who have such masculine appendages. I do hope I’m not getting into that way. For pity’s sake, tell me if I show signs of it. I have seen ladies—I recollect at this moment a lady, clever, pretty, prompt, and circumscribed in character, who makes all her familiar gentlemen acquaintances either hate her or serve her like dogs. I’ve seen her take a man whom I thought a very respectable sort of person, with a mind of his own, and, by dint of smiling and scolding, rewarding him promptly when he was good, and punishing him promptly when he didn’t obey, end by making a perfect ninny of him. He couldn’t brush his boots or tie his cravat except just as she directed him; if she was vexed with a person, he didn’t dare be civil to them; if she was reconciled to the same, he immediately beamed upon them with the most unconscious and imbecile servility. Yet the two were not lovers, and never dreamed of being so, I presume, and both of them would have been astonished, or would have pretended to be astonished and indignant, if one had hinted that his firmness had been nothing but starch, and she had washed that out of him. I wouldn’t be such a woman for the world. I wouldn’t be a driving, positive woman for anything. I wouldn’t be a woman persistent in small things for my eyes. Mr. Coleman makes me feel as if I were growing so.”

“Nonsense!” Isabel laughed. “It isn’t in you to be so. Mr. Coleman needs change of scene, that is all. He has been circling round you so long that he has got dizzy.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s going off at a tangent,” the Signora replied, only half-reassured. “He certainly would provoke me dreadfully, if he were to go on in this way under my eyes. Don’t let him come near me this evening, and don’t give him a chance to say good-by to me. Take him quite off my hands—that’s a dear girl.”

Isabel promised, and kept her promise so well as to make of the poor bewildered gentleman as nearly an enemy as he was capable of being to any one. He had another source of disquiet, too, and that was the exceeding politeness and cordiality with which the Signora treated the very cruel relative who had come to take him away, and whom he had brought up with him that evening in the vain hope that she would help him to escape. On the contrary, she merely sealed the compact.

“You are quite right, sir,” she said. “These affairs of property can so much better be attended to in person than by proxy.”

“Besides,” replied the cousin, “a man who has property in the country has really some duties there. He should spend a little of his money for the benefit of the state, his neighbors, and the church.”

He privately despised this city of Rome, which he now visited for the first time. Its dinginess, its dirt, and its religion disgusted him.

“Church!” echoed the Signora with calm inquiry. “I was not aware that Mr. Coleman belonged to any church.”

“He has certainly deteriorated very much since he left England,” was the rather sharp response, “but our family are all Catholic.”

“Indeed!” she exclaimed, in real surprise. “I have always understood from Mr. Coleman that his family belonged to the English Episcopal Church.”

“We claim that to be the Catholic Church, madam,” the gentleman responded proudly. “Or, rather, we claim the title for that older branch of it which now restores the ceremonies and beliefs it laid aside for a while.”

“Oh! the family are Ritualists,” said the Signora.

The gentleman drew himself up. “The term does not describe us,” he said. “We have a ritual, of course; but that is not all. I consider the title trivial and disrespectful.”

“I did not intend the least disrespect in the world,” the Signora made haste to say. “I merely repeat the name I have heard. I have always considered Ritualism very—refined—and”—she seemed to be laboriously seeking some words of suitable praise—“and—delicate. It has many beauties—and—in short, is, it seems to me, an—eminently—lady-like religion.”

Mr. Vane took pity on the Englishman, who looked confounded, as if not knowing whether to believe his ears, which had heard, or his eyes, which beheld, the perfectly simple and courteous expression of his entertainer. Mr. Vane, without seeming to have heard a word, introduced the subject of property, on which men can always talk unflaggingly for any length of time.

The Signora gave her attention to an enthusiastic Catholic lady, who was making a pilgrimage of her visit to Italy. This lady was one of those charming Christians who sometimes puzzle us a little. Her whole life was given up to what may be called religious pursuits. She attended functions unceasingly, and on every day was to be found in the church dedicated to the saint whose day it was. She visited relics, shrines, and scenes of religious events, and she did all with an enthusiasm which expressed itself in the most gushing manner. In short, she luxuriated in religion. She knew all about the lives of the saints, and spoke of them with the ease and familiarity of an intimate friend. One could perceive by her conversation that she believed them to be particularly watchful over her, and rather more ready to do her favors than to attend to the wishes of most others. She exhorted people a little now and then, gently, with the air of one who knows. The whole manner of the woman, in things religious, was that of a favorite daughter in her own father’s house, to which the world at large was welcomed with a smiling charity and hospitality. But that others were there also in their own father’s house, and equally beloved by him, did not seem to occur to her. The clergy and all religious she admitted and gave precedence to, seeking and admiring them almost as she did the saints. But, after them, she seemed to walk alone; or rather, she entered with them, and others waited a permission. People in the laity, like herself, were, in some mysterious manner, assumed to be unlike her. The silence of deep religious feeling in others she treated as indifference, and sometimes strove, with seeming good intention, to stir up the souls of those already more deeply moved than herself. She abounded in little devotions, little pictures, little lamps and candles, a multiplicity of pious knick-knacks, enough to bewilder a person of simpler tastes. She wore every scapular, and all the medals she could get, and her girdle was laden with rosaries. By most people she was called a very pious woman; by many she was believed to be a saintly woman. She certainly was a fairly good woman and a nice lady of religious tastes. But, looked at by clear eyes, she was a little puzzling, like some others of her kind. One missed there a central virtue, the sweet humility that makes little of its own goodness, and the charity which rejoices to see others beloved and preferred. With such assumption, one would have expected these virtues. Looking so, moreover, one suspected the existence of a deep and pernicious pride. How did she receive a word of exhortation from an equal? Not as she expected her own exhortations to be received, certainly, but with an expression of astonishment, mortification, and even displeasure. When did she sacrifice herself for others, and say nothing about it? when did she do an act of charity, and conceal that she had done it? when did she hesitate to obtain for herself an advantage because it was to be at the cost of another, unless that other were a person in orders or in religion?

The Signora looked at this lady, and liked her, and admired her in many ways, but she could not help wishing that there were a little less self-complacency in spiritual matters, and a little more willingness to sacrifice her own wishes and aims at times. The thought would intrude itself into her mind that it was less a real, working Christian that she beheld than a religious sybarite. She could not say of her, as a famous author has said of some characters rather similar, that “their celestial intimacies did not seem to have improved their earthly manners, and their high motives were not needed to account for their conduct”; but she was frequently pained to perceive a striking discrepancy between the profession and the practice.

“I have been to-day for the first time to see Santa Maria degli Angeli,” the lady said, in the gay and pleasant way habitual to her. “There seems to be no one left there but a few old, old men. They were in choir when I went to the church, but I should never have suspected it. I asked the sacristan if there would be a Mass soon. 'After coro,’ he said. I asked when coro would be, and he replied, looking at me with some surprise, that it was going on then. I had heard a sound like a little company of bumble-bees among the clover, but that it had anything in common with the great, ringing chorus of St. Peter’s or the other great churches I never dreamed. By and by choir and Mass were over, and they all came out. Such a group of dear old Rip Van Winkles! They were all tall, had long hair and long beards of white, or streaked black and white; they drooped in walking, and their black and white robes, not very fresh, gave me a strange impression of antiquity and decay. It must have been the color and oldness of their clothes that made me think of Rip Van Winkle. I was quite ashamed of the thought. More than one head among them would have answered for a St. Jerome. That dear St. Jerome!” she added, drooping into pensiveness, as if, in uttering the name, she had been rapt away.

She recovered herself after an instant, and came back smilingly to the present. “You have no idea what a devotion I have for St. Jerome,” she said.

“I can quite understand it,” the Signora replied. “His character is one to inspire a great admiration and reverence. Here in Rome one becomes more familiar, in a certain way, with the saints. One is so much nearer their earthly lives, their relics and their festas abound so, and one comes so constantly upon places which they have inhabited or visited, that one has a sense of shame and humiliation at coming no nearer their virtues.”

The lady smiled. “I had not thought of that,” she said. “I approach the saints with all confidence and simplicity.”

“That is a very pleasant feeling,” the Signora said calmly, “and, to an extent, may be a virtue. But do you not think that we should have also a feeling of awe in view of that splendid faith of theirs, and of that sublime constancy and ardent charity, which led them to face torments and death without flinching, while our lives seem but a series of compromises, and dispensations from everything that does not agree with our delicate and pampered natures? It seems to me that, if we remember the difference between our lives and theirs, we shall almost expect that when we approach their shrines they will perform one miracle more, and speak an audible reproof to us.”

The lady looked disconcerted and a little displeased. But, some one interrupting them, the subject was dropped.

After they were gone Mr. Vane displayed a letter he had received that day from the prior of Monte Cassino, inviting him and his family to visit their monastery. This clergyman had been on very friendly terms with Mr. Vane in America, where he had spent a good many years, and now, hearing of his conversion, was anxious to renew a friendship which would have a charm it had not before possessed, and to welcome to a brotherhood of faith one who had always been kin to him by a community of generous nature.

“He writes that we can stay a few days on the mountain and see everything there at our leisure,” Mr. Vane said. “There is a house outside the gate where you ladies can stop, and I can have a bed inside. What do you say to it?”

The invitation was accepted by acclamation. Monte Cassino was one of the places to see in Italy—a gem of nature, religion, and art. Before sleeping that night their plans were made. They would put off the visit a little, hoping for cooler days, as the journey was one of five or six hours. Meantime they had a little trip to Genzano in view, to see the festa of the Santissimo Salvatore. And close upon them was Santa Maria delle Neve.

To Be Continued.

“MAY-FLOWERS.”

Dear Mother, on our country’s breast—
Our country that is thine—
Our poets place as scutcheon flower
Small argent stars that shine
With pallid light when scarcely wake
The leaf-buds from their sleep,
When, nursing summer’s waiting bloom,
The storm-stained leaves lie deep.

Fair, little stars that faintly gleam
Like planets sunset-dimmed,
The dearer for their glory scant
On barren heavens limned.
Pale May-flowers, whose stainless cheek
Seems born of winter snow—
One rosy drop of living blood
Flushing the veins below.

Whose faint-breathed perfume seems to rise
Like prayer of anchorite,
The heart that pours its incense forth
Low hidden from our sight;
Whose sweetness seems like nimbus pale
Crowning some saintly head,
The light of self-forgotten life
In holy odor shed.

Kind Mother, see, these little flowers
Our land is given to wear,
When still the forest arches stand
Of leafy tracery bare;
When still the heavens’ softened blue
Grows dim with wind-swept snow,
And lonely-seeming Phœbe chants
Disconsolate and low.

This precious bloom bears thy dear name—
Though given unaware—
And in its gentle life we trace
The gleam of thine more fair.
In France’s thoughtful land they give
Bright flowers to be thine eyes,
Within their blue forget-me-nots
Thy glance’s calmness lies.

Upon our matin blossom rests
No depth of peaceful blue,
Yet breaks the rosy dawn of love
Its cheek’s pure whiteness through.
Amid the darkened leaves it lies
In blest humility,
A lowly handmaid of the Lord,
Unstained of earth, like thee—

A hidden life e’er pouring forth
An offering pure of prayer;
The sweet unconsciousness of grace
Soft’ning the rude, bleak air.

The blood-stained heart the sword hath pierced

The spotless breast within,
The quiet shining on a world
Bitter and drear with sin.

A crown of stars that perfects all
With heaven-won aureole—
Let France’s blossom claim thine eyes,
Claim ours thy spotless soul;
Whose gracious blessing ever rest
On this broad land of ours,
That not in vain her poets’ shield
Be quartered with May-flowers.

THE LEPERS OF TRACADIE.[28]

“Ah! little think the gay, licentious crowd,

Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround—

Ah! little think they, while they dance along,

How many pine! how many drink the cup
Of baleful grief! how many shake
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind!”

—Thomson’s Seasons.

“In a rage, I returned to my dwelling-place, crying aloud: 'Woe unto thee, leper! Woe unto thee!' And as if the whole world united against me, I heard the echo through the ruins of the Château de Bramafan repeat distinctly: 'Woe unto thee!' I stood motionless with horror on the threshold of the tower, listening to the faint tones again and again repeated from the overhanging mountains: 'Woe unto thee!'”

—Xavier de Maistre.

On the low and miry land forming the borders of the county of Gloucester in New Brunswick, fifty miles from Miramichi and twenty-five south of Caraquet, between a narrow river and the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, stands a little village. The situation it occupies is dreary and sad to a degree. On one side moans the gray sea, on whose dull and turbid waters rarely is seen a sail. On the other stretches a long, low line of coast, dotted at intervals by the huts of the fishermen. The whole landscape is painfully monotonous, desolate, and mournful. The cottages are mean in the extreme, while the simple church is without architectural merit. Afar off frowns forbiddingly a large building shut in by high walls. In this melancholy spot the passing traveller says to himself: “Is this place accursed alike by God and man?”

Accursed, alas! it has indeed been by despairing lips and hearts; for the building is the lazaretto of Tracadie. Before the year 1798 no register was kept of baptisms, marriages, or burials in the parish. Since that date, however, and up to 1842, Tracadie was under the care of the curés of Caraquet, a neighboring parish.

On the 24th of October, 1842, arrived the first resident priest, M. François Xavier Stanislas Lafrance, who remained there until January, 1852. M. Lafrance has since died. At Tracadie he was succeeded by the present curé, M. l’Abbé Ferdinand Gauvreau,[29] with whose name the history of these poor lepers must always be interwoven.

Probably the most terrible chastisement inflicted on a guilty people is that known as leprosy. In ancient times it was only too well known, for it was then more frequent than in our day. It made such fearful ravages in certain parts of the world that its very name was whispered in accents of horror and dread.

From time immemorial has this scourge been looked upon as utterly distinct from all other diseases; more virulent in its effects; more insidious in its approaches, and above all by reason of the frightful manner in which it distorts and disfigures its victims.

Leprosy has probably been known from the creation of the world. Nothing in history leads us to reject this idea, and, indeed, many interpreters who have exercised their talent on certain obscure passages of Holy Writ have found no better way of defining the terrible sign with which God marked the fratricide Cain than by supposing it to be leprosy. The alarm that has always been felt in regard to this most loathsome disease arises not alone from its hideous results, but also from the conviction that has always existed as to the absolute hopelessness of cure.

Before the time of Moses leprosy was well known. The first mention made of it in Holy Writ is in the fourth chapter of Exodus. God, having chosen Moses to deliver the Hebrews from the tyranny of the Egyptians, orders him to present himself before his afflicted people and to announce himself to them as their deliverer. Moses objected, saying: “They will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice; for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee!” Then the Lord, to convince Moses of his divine mission, said unto him, “Put now thine hand into thy bosom,” and he put his hand into his bosom; and when he took it out, behold his hand full of leprosy, white as snow—“instar nevis.”

Here, then, was leprosy easy to recognize, since it had the whiteness of snow. Let us not forget this peculiar feature, for we shall see it again later.

From this incident we see clearly that the disease was by no means unknown to Moses, because on seeing his hand he said: “Leprosam instar nevis.” Therefore we have a right to believe that the disease existed before Moses. To the support of this opinion Dom Calmet, in his Biblical Dictionary, cites Manetho the Egyptian, Lysimarchus, Appian, Tacitus, and Justin, who have advanced the idea that the Jews went out from Egypt on account of the leprosy. Each one of these historians narrates the events in his own fashion, but all agree that the Hebrews who left Egypt were attacked by leprosy.

Not only does leprosy fasten on mankind, but it clings to clothing and to the stone walls of houses. It is to be presumed, however, that the leprosy brought by the Israelites out of Egypt was not of this malignant type; for Moses, by the order of God, takes pains to mention another and more virulent kind known in the land of Chanaan, the promised land of the Israelites.

In Leviticus, chapter xiii., we find the following: “If there be a spot, greenish or reddish, in the garment, of wool or of skin, the garment must be shown to the priest; and the priest shall look on the plague, and shut it up for seven days; and if at the end of the time the spots have spread, the priest will burn the garment, for it is a fretting leprosy. If the priest find, however, that the spots have not spread, he shall order the garment to be washed; and, behold, if the plague have not changed his color, and be not spread, it is unclean: thou shalt burn it in the fire.”

As to the suspected taint of leprosy in their houses, let us see their method of proceeding: “When you be come into the land of Chanaan, if you think there be leprosy in the house, he that owneth the house shall go to the priest, who shall order the house to be emptied. If the priest finds in the walls hollow streaks, greenish or reddish, he shall shut the house for seven days. The priest shall come again the seventh day, and shall look; and if the plague be spread, the stones shall be taken away, and cast into an unclean place without the city. Then the rest of the house shall be scraped within and without, and they shall pour the dust without the city, and they shall take other stones and put them in the place of these, and other mortar to plaster the house.

“And if the plague come again, and break out in the house, it is a fretting leprosy, and the house is unclean and shall be destroyed.”

Thus it is seen that the leprosy known to the ancients—this lamentable scourge, “this eldest daughter of death”—attacked in its fury not man alone, but his clothing and the very walls of his house. The primary cause of an evil so malignant and so wide-spread must for ever remain a mystery. The learned Dom Calmet, as commentator of the Bible rather than as a physician, offers a theory in his notes on Leviticus. He maintains that the disease is caused by a multitude of minute worms. These parasites glide between skin and flesh, gnawing the epidermis and the cuticle, and then the nerves, producing, in short, all the symptoms that are remarked in the beginning, the progress, and the end of leprosy. Dom Calmet concludes by saying that “venereal diseases are but forms of leprosy which were only too well known to the ancients.” In this century leprosy still exists in some portions of Italy and in Norway to a very considerable extent, according to the reports of Drs. Danielson and Boëk. It is still to be met with in Turkey in the village of Looschori—the ancient Mytilene of the Ægean Sea—in the Indian Archipelago, on the coast of Africa, and in the West Indies. I myself have seen it in Jerusalem and at Naplouse, ancient Samaria; at Damascus also, where there is a lazaretto very poorly supported by public charity. To Mr. Charles A. Dana, one of the editors of the New American Cyclopædia, the maladie de Tracadie is not unknown; for he says that leprosy exists in Canada and in other portions of America.

But to return to the Scriptures: Moses is not the only one of the inspired writers who speaks of leprosy, and more than once our blessed Lord, on his journeys through Judea, exercised his charity and showed his goodness by curing lepers who threw themselves at his feet, entreating mercy. Job was struck by the hand of God with this scourge, and has described it with marvellous beauty and pathos. He was forsaken by his wife and his friends in his humiliation and suffering; they shrank from him, saying that he must have committed some fearful crime to have drawn upon himself so heavy a chastisement. A similar horror of this disease existed among all nations. In Pérsia no citizen infected by it could enter a village or have any intercourse with his fellow-creatures, while a stranger was driven pitilessly forth into the desert (Herod., Clio).

Æschines, giving an account of his sea voyage, states that, the ship putting into Delos, they found the inhabitants suffering from leprosy, and the travellers hurried away in fear and trembling, lest they themselves should fall victims.

In Egypt Pliny[30] says that when this evil attacked kings, it was most unfortunate for their people; for to cure them baths of warm human blood were believed to be efficacious.

In later days we find that lepers have been the victims of most unjust and cruel laws among almost all nations. Thus, among the Lombards, in 643, one law ordered not only that lepers should be confined to isolated localities, but declared them also civilly dead, deprived them of their property, and confided them to the charity of the public. Several provinces in France adopted this law with some qualifications. In certain localities even the posterity of lepers were excluded—as at Calais—from all rights of citizenship, and in 757 an ordinance of Pepin le Bref permitted divorce between a healthy wife and leprous husband, or a healthy husband and leprous wife. Charlemagne augmented the severity of laws already so hard. He ordered lepers to live apart, permitted them no social intercourse whatever, and finally, as their crowning misery, these unfortunates saw themselves thrust on one side by the church itself from communion with the faithful.

At the time of the separation of the lepers from family, home, and friends, the church pronounced over them the prayers for the dead. Masses were said for the repose of their souls, and, to complete the mournful illusion, a handful of earth was thrown upon their bodies. They were forbidden to enter any church or any place where food was prepared, nor could they dip their hands in a running stream, nor accept food or anything handed them, save with a fork or the end of a stick. They were compelled, moreover, to wear a particular costume that could be seen and recognized from afar off, and, under threats of severe penalties for disobedience, were ordered to ring a little bell to announce their coming. More recently, in France, lepers herded together, in secluded places, which were called léproseries. In the year 1244 there were throughout all Christendom 19,000 of these léproseries, and in France alone 2,000.

There these poor wretched creatures passed their desolate lives, separated from the outside world, without occupation or interest, save that of watching the slow but sure progress of their companions toward the inevitable and horrible death that was impending.

In the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, says Mgr. Gaume, leprosy extended its ravages over a large part of the world. The pestilence attacked suddenly all parts of the body at once, drying it up, as it were; and, like the plague, leprosy was unquestionably most contagious. To receive the infection it was but necessary to touch the clothes or the furniture, or even to breathe the tainted air; consequently, every one fled in dismay at the sight of a leper. They were driven from the vicinity of towns, and they were seen from afar wandering over the fields and hillsides like living corpses, while at a distance they were compelled to signal their approach by a rattle or bell. Abandoned by the whole world, and a prey to horrible sufferings, they called on death to deliver them.

The King of France, anxious to protect his subjects from exposure to this disease, formed a complete code of laws for lepers. “Every person,” said M. Deseimeris in his Medical Dictionary, “who is suspected of leprosy must submit to a thorough examination by a surgeon. The suspicion confirmed, a magistrate takes possession of the individual to dispose of him according to law. If he be a stranger, he must be sent at once to the place of his birth, bestowing first upon him, however, the poor gifts of a hat, a gray mantle, a beggar’s wallet, and a small keg. The poor creature, on arriving at his native village, must carefully avoid all contact with his fellow-creatures.” Even the church rejects him. Each town or village was compelled to build for his reception a small wooden house on four piles, and, after the death of its inmate, the house, with all that was in it, was consigned to the flames.

As the number of lepers was constantly increasing, the erection of so many of these small tenements became a source of great expense. It was therefore finally decided to unite them under one roof, and give them the name of a léproserie. In this way their support became less onerous, while their seclusion was far greater, and their diet and medical treatment was easier of regulation.

Louis VIII. published in 1226 a code of special laws for the government of léproseries. These laws were intolerably severe. A leper once incarcerated within the walls of a lazaretto incurred the penalty of death if he passed over the threshold again; scaffolds were erected where they could be seen from the hospital, thus keeping this fact ever in the remembrance and before the eyes of the miserable inmates.

I have recounted these details to demonstrate the utter horror with which leprosy was regarded. It must not be supposed that only the ignorant and superstitious were overwhelmed by foolish dread, or that it was an idle prejudice, a relic of barbarism; for in the nineteenth century we witness the same horror, and here on our own shores encounter the same rigorous legislation. We should also find the lepers as uncared for, as shunned and neglected, as they were of old, were it not for the Catholic Church, which, with its customary zeal in all labors of charity and mercy, aroused in the hearts of a humble priest and a few weak nuns the wish and determination to consecrate their lives to the service of this most miserable class of their fellow-creatures.

The first settlements on the Miramichi River were made after the treaty of Utrecht in 1718 by the subjects of France—Basques, Bretons, and Normans. Under the administration of Cardinal Fleury stringent measures were taken to encourage and protect these colonies. After a time, when their prosperity seemed secure, a certain Pierre Beauhair was sent from France as intendant to rule and arrange matters for the French government. He erected a small villa on a point of land that since his death bears his name, at the mouth of the northwestern branch of the Miramichi River. The island opposite l’Ile Beauhair was strongly defended, and tradition states that the intendant built within the walls of the fort a foundry for cannon, and other buildings for the manufacture of munitions of war.

During the summer of 1757 the colony on the Miramichi suffered much from the war between France and England, which sadly interrupted their traffic in fish and furs. Consequently, the following winter was one of great suffering, and many of the colonists died of hunger. Two transport ships, laden with provision and supplies of all kinds, were sent out by the French government in 1758, but both vessels were captured by the English fleet then assisting at the siege of Louisburg.

While these colonies were enduring suspense and starvation a French vessel, called the Indienne, from Morlaix, was wrecked at the mouth of the Miramichi near the “Baie des Vents”—a name now corrupted into “Baie du Vin.” Tradition states that this ship, before coming to America, had traded in the Levant, and that a large number of bales of old clothes had been taken on board at Smyrna. The clothes were strewn upon the beach after the vessel went to pieces, were seized by the inhabitants, dried, and afterwards worn. However this may be, it is certain that from that date arose a most terrible pestilence among the Canadians, who were already decimated by famine. The first victim of this malady was M. de Beauhair, and he, with eight hundred others, it is said, were buried at Point Beauhair. The survivors abandoned Miramichi and fled, some to l’Ile Saint-Jean—now Prince Edward’s Island—and the greater number settled along the western coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they formed scattered hamlets under the names of Niguaweck, Tracadie, and Pokemouche, combined in one parish—that of Caraquet.

For eighty years, although it was known that isolated instances of leprosy existed in the different colonies, they attracted little or no public attention up to 1817, when a woman named Ursule Laudry died of the disease.

An account written by one of the nuns of l’Hôtel Dieu attributes a somewhat different origin to this scourge. This good sister writes that the disease was carried to New Brunswick in 1758 by a ship from the Levant; the vessel having made the port late in the autumn, the crew were paid off and dispersed, many seeking a temporary home in Caraquet. Unfortunately, this crew was afflicted by a malady that was unsuspected by any one. The colonists were kind to the sailors; the women washed their clothes and in this way contracted the disease, which was transmitted from one to another and from father to son, and in time acquired its peculiar features. Hamilton Gordon, the Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick in 1862, has assigned a similar origin to the malady in an interesting pamphlet entitled Wilderness Journeys in New Brunswick in 1862-3.

“A vague and uncertain tradition exists,” he says, “that somewhere about a hundred years ago a French vessel was wrecked on the coast of Gloucester or Northumberland, and that among the crew were some sailors from Marseilles, who in the Levant had contracted the hideous leprosy of the East, the veritable elephantiasis Græcorum; however this may be, it is beyond all question that for many years a part of the French population of these two counties has been sorely afflicted by this mysterious disease, or by one that closely resembles it, and which may be, indeed, the form of leprosy so well known on the coast of Norway.”

“It is difficult,” says in his turn M. Gauvreau, curé of Tracadie and chaplain of the lazaretto, in a letter published in the Journal de Montreal, November 30, 1859—“it is difficult to persuade one’s self that this malady could be the spontaneous generation of the locality where it now exists. The geographical position of Tracadie is on the sea-coast, with the fresh currents of a river close at hand, the waters of which are salt for eight or nine miles above the mouth. The soil in some portions is sandy, in others clayey; in the vicinity are no marshes, no stagnant water, consequently no injurious malaria. These facts seem to justify the opinion which I have long held, and which as yet I see no reason to change, that the poisonous virus was not the growth of this spot, but was brought here by some traveller.”

These traditions are, in the main, probably correct as to the origin of the scourge in this Canadian village. The inhabitants of other villages than Tracadie subsist almost entirely on fish, are equally poor, equally ill-fed and insufficiently clothed, living in the same damp and foggy atmosphere; but it is only in Tracadie or its vicinity that a leper is to be seen. The inhabitants of Labrador and Newfoundland eat fish almost exclusively, and live amid similar climatic conditions, paying no more enlightened attention to hygienic laws, and yet the “maladie de Tracadie” does not attack or decimate them.

From the date of the introduction of this disease into the village it increased slowly but steadily until 1817, when certain precautions began to be taken; but not until 1844 did the authorities try any active precautions. In that year a medical board was organized, who made a report of their investigations to the government, and later in the same year an act of the Provincial Legislature was passed, renewed and amended in 1850. It authorized the lieutenant-governor to establish a health committee. This committee recommended the erection of a lazaretto on l’Ile de Sheldrake, an isolated spot in the middle of the Miramichi River eighteen miles above Chatham. “Whoever was found to be unquestionably tainted by the disease,” says the article, “must be torn from his family, using force if needful. The husband must be taken from his wife, the mother from her children, the child from its parents, whenever the first symptom of leprosy declares itself. An eternal farewell to all they hold most dear must be said, and the poor creature is sent to the lazaretto. It often happens that a leper refuses to go quietly; he is then dragged by ropes like a beast to the shambles—for none is willing to lay a finger upon him. Often the unhappy beings are driven with blows to the very door of the lazaretto.” Things, of course, could not long remain in this brutal condition. The lepers, driven to desperation by their physical and mental sufferings, by a wild longing for the liberty denied them, and for the sight of their loved ones, sometimes effected their escape.

An attempt was finally made to ameliorate their condition, and in 1847 the lazaretto was removed to the spot where it now stands, about half a mile from the parish church of Tracadie. A large tract of land was here purchased by the government, and the present building was erected, surrounded by a wooden wall twenty feet high, set thick with nails to hinder the escape of the lepers. The windows of the lazaretto were barred heavily with iron, and thus added to the melancholy aspect of the building. The lepers, weary of the revolting resemblance to a prison, themselves tore most of the bars away, and, when the nuns arrived there they at once ordered the remainder to be removed.

In 1868 the nuns from the Hôtel Dieu of Montreal took possession of the lazaretto of Tracadie. For some few years a strong necessity had been felt for the reorganization of this institution. A wish was expressed that it could be placed under the care of the Hospital Nuns. I have now before me a letter from the Rt. Rev. James Rogers, Bishop of Chatham, in which is given an account, for the Conseil Central de la Propagation de la Foi at Paris, of the steps that had been taken up to December, 1866:

“Since my first visit to the establishment,” says the bishop, “I have always thought that it would be most desirable to place it under the care of the Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu, who would watch over the souls and the bodies of these sufferers, whose number varies from twenty to thirty. But so many great and pressing needs claimed my attention—while my resources were insufficient even for the alleviation of physical suffering, and also, perhaps, for the spiritual wants of certain souls—I was compelled to postpone my plans in regard to the lazaretto, until my diocese could satisfy the religious needs of its inhabitants by an increase of the number of priests, and by the erection of chapels in places where they had long and earnestly been demanded, and also by the establishment of schools for the Christian education of youth. Another obstacle to the immediate execution of my intention was the lukewarm approbation and co-operation of the government. The total lack of suitable lodging for the nuns, as well as the uncertainty whether the Protestant element which pervades our government and our legislature would be willing to grant us funds or permit us to make needful preparations for the sisters to take charge of the lazaretto—all conspired as hindrances to my desires.

“Last spring I petitioned the government, but political changes interfered, and no steps were taken until now. This is the reason why the worthy curé of Tracadie continues to be the only priest who administers the consolations of religion to that portion of his flock so bitterly afflicted.”

The steps taken by Bishop Rogers seem to have been singularly felicitous. He obtained from Bishop Bourget the assistance of the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu of Montreal, and the government appears to have regarded with favorable eyes this regeneration of the lazaretto, which produced in a very brief period of time the best possible results upon the patients. Abbé Gauvreau draws a sad picture of the state in which these poor creatures lived before the nuns went to their assistance. In a letter dated April 28, 1869, addressed to the mother-superior of the Hôtel Dieu of Montreal, he says:

“I am absolutely incapable of describing the state of abject misery in which our poor lepers passed their lives before the coming of the sisters. I can only say that from the hour of their transfer from l’Ile aux Bec-scies (Sheldrake) at the entrance of the river Miramichi, discord, revolt, and insubordination toward the government, divisions and quarrels among themselves, made the history of their daily lives. The walls rang with horrible blasphemies, and the hospital seemed like a den of thieves.”

The Board of Health spared nothing to make the lepers comfortable. Good food, and abundance of it, appropriate clothing, and careful medical attendance were liberally provided; but, in spite of these efforts, the hearts of these poor creatures were as diseased as their bodies. Some of them revolted against the summons of death, notwithstanding the constant exhortations of the chaplain, and even after their last communion clung strongly to the futile hope of life. Of this number was one who had been warned by the physician that his hours were numbered and that a priest should be summoned. His friends, and those of his relatives who were within the walls of the lazaretto, implored him to prepare for death. “Let me be!” he cried. “I know what I am about!”

About nine o’clock in the evening he begged his companions in misery not to watch at his bedside, and, believing himself able to drive away Death, who was hurrying toward him with rapid strides, insisted on playing a game of cards. The game had hardly begun, however, when the cards dropped from his hands and he fell back on his bed. Before assistance could reach him all was over.

With the arrival of the nuns a new order of things began. Without entering into a detailed account of all the labors performed by the sisters since their arrival, it is enough to state that cleanliness and order prevail and true charity shows itself everywhere. The poor creatures, who formerly revelled in filth and disorder, now see about them decency and cleanliness. They are induced to be submissive and obedient by the hourly example of the sisters; their modesty and reserve, their virtue and careful speech, their watchful care and devotion, their tender attention to the sick, teach the inmates of the hospital the best of lessons. It is easy to imagine with what joy the poor lepers welcomed the nuns who came to consecrate their lives to this service, and also to understand with what affection and respect these holy women are regarded.

“The enclosed grounds of the lazaretto,” says Governor Gordon in his Wilderness Journeys, “consist of a green meadow three or four acres in extent. Within these limits the lepers are permitted to wander at their will. Until recently they were confined to the narrowest limits—a mere yard about the lazaretto. I entered these dreary walls, accompanied by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Chatham, by the secretary of the Board of Health, by the resident physician, and by the Catholic priest of the village, who is also the chaplain of the institution.

“Within the enclosure are several small wooden buildings, separated from each other, consisting of the kitchen, laundry, etc. A bath-house has recently been added to these, which will be a source of infinite comfort to the patients. The hospital contains two larger halls—one devoted to the men, the other to the women. Each room has a stove and a table with chairs about it, while the beds are ranged against the wall. These halls are both well lighted and ventilated, and at the time of my inspection were perfectly clean and fresh. At the end of these halls is a small chapel arranged in such a way that the patients of both sexes are able to hear Mass without meeting each other. Through certain openings they also confess to the priest and receive the holy communion.”

Many changes in the interior arrangements of the lazaretto followed the arrival of the sisters. The patients and the nuns now hear Mass at the same time. The male patients occupy two rooms twenty-five feet square, while similar apartments above are reserved for the females. The grounds of the lazaretto have also been enlarged.

“Before giving the characteristics of this appalling disease,” says Mr. Gordon, “I wish to reply to a question which you undoubtedly wish to ask: How is this malady propagated? No one knows. It seems not to be hereditary, since in one family the father or mother may be attacked, while the children entirely escape. In others the children are leprous and the parents healthy. In 1856 or '57 a woman named Domitile Brideau, wife of François Robichaud, was so covered with leprosy that her body was one mass of corruption. While in this state she gave birth to a daughter, whom she nursed—the mother shortly afterward dying in the hospital. Meanwhile, the child was absolutely healthy, and remained until she was three years of age in the hospital without any unfavorable symptoms being developed. The girl grew to womanhood and married, and to-day she and her children are perfectly healthy. Many similar examples might be cited.”

This malady, then, can hardly be contagious, since in one family husband or wife may be attacked, while the other goes unscathed. There is now at Tracadie a man, François Robichaud by name, who has had three wives; the two first perished of leprosy, the third is now under treatment at the lazaretto—the husband in the meanwhile enjoying perfect health. In one family two or more children are lepers, while the others are untainted. One servant-woman resided for eight years in the hospital, ate and drank with the patients, yet has never shown any symptoms of the disease. The laundress of the institution lives under its roof, and has done so for two years; she is a widow, her husband having died of the scourge, she being his sole nurse during his illness. She is in perfect health. It has also happened more than once that persons suspected of leprosy, and placed in the hospital, after remaining there several years and developing no further symptoms, are discharged as “whole.”

All the patients now in the hospital agree that the disease is communicated by touch, and each has his own theory as to where he was exposed to it—either by sleeping with some one who had it, or by eating and drinking with such.

I am strongly persuaded that this disease, whatever may be its origin, is greatly aggravated by the kind of life led by the natives of Tracadie, who are all fishermen or sailors. Their food is fish, generally herring, and their only vegetables turnips and potatoes. Such is their extreme poverty that there are not ten families in Tracadie who ever touch bread.

Let us follow Governor Gordon into the lazaretto.

“At the time of my visit,” he says, “there were twenty-three patients, thirteen men and ten women. They were all French and all Catholics, belonging to the lower class. They were of all ages, and had reached various stages of the disease. One old man, whose features were distorted out of all semblance to humanity, and who had apparently entered his second childhood, could hardly be sufficiently aroused from his apathy to receive the benediction of the bishop, before whom all the others sank on their knees.

“There were also young people who, to a casual observer, seemed vigorous and in health; while, saddest of all sights was that of the young children condemned to spend their lives in this terrible place. Above all was I touched by the sight of three small boys from eleven to fifteen years of age. To an inexperienced observer they had much the look of other children of their own age and class. Their eyes were bright and intelligent, but the fatal symptoms that had sufficed to separate them from home and kindred were written on their persons, and they were immured for life in the lazaretto.

“The greatest sympathy must naturally be felt for these younger victims when one thinks of the possible length of years that stretches before them, hopeless and cheerless; to grow to manhood with the capacities, passions, and desires of manhood, and condemned to live from youth to middle age, from middle age to decrepitude possibly, with no other society than that of their companions in misery. Utterly without occupations, amusements, or interests, shut off from all outside resources, their only excitement is found in the arrival of a new disease-stricken patient, their only occupation that of watching their companions dying before their eyes by inches!

“But few of the patients could read, and those who could were without books. There was evident need of some organization that might furnish the patients with employment. Both mind and body required occupation. Under these circumstances I was by no means surprised to learn that in the last stages of the disease the mind was generally much weakened.

“The suffering of the majority of the patients was by no means severe, and I was informed that one of the characteristic features of the malady was profound insensibility to pain. One individual was pointed out to me, who by mistake had laid his arm and open hand on a red-hot stove, and who knew nothing of it until the odor of burning flesh aroused his attention.”

After Governor Gordon’s visit the condition of the lepers was much improved. The sisters taught the young to read and employed them in making shoes and other articles.

The investigations of Governor Gordon, although made during a brief inspection of the lazaretto, are correct as far as they go, but are far from complete. The Abbé Gauvreau has been for eighteen years chaplain of the hospital. He has watched keenly the progress of the disease in over a hundred cases. He has noted every symptom of its slow and fatal march. He has been present at the deathbeds of many of the lepers, and he recounts with horror the terrible scenes he has witnessed.

“Without wishing to impose my opinions on you,” he says, “I cannot resist the conviction that, apart from divine will, this scourge of fallen man is a most subtle poison introduced into the human body by transmission or by direct contact, or even, perhaps, by prolonged cohabitation.

“But whichever of these suppositions is the more nearly correct, when once the poison is fairly within the system its action is so latent and insidious that for some years—two, four, or even more—the unfortunate Naaman or Giezi perceives in himself no change either in constitution or sensations. His sleep is as refreshing and his respiration as free as before. In a word, the vital organs perform all their functions and the various members are unshorn of their vigor and energy.

“At this period of the disease the skin loses its natural color, its healthy appearance, and is replaced by a deadly whiteness from head to foot. This whiteness looks as if the malady had taken possession of the mucous membrane and had displaced the fluids necessary to its functions. Without knowing if the leper of the Orient possesses other external indications, it is certain that in this stage the malady of Tracadie is precisely similar to the leprosy of the ancients—I mean in the whiteness of the skin. In the second stage the skin becomes yellow. In the third and last it turns to a deep red; it is often purple, and sometimes greenish, in hue. In fact, the people of Tracadie, like myself, are so familiar with the early symptoms of the disease that they rarely fall into a mistake.

“Only one death has ever occurred in the first stage—that of Cyrille Austin. All the other cases have passed on to the second or third stages before death; and, strangely enough, it has been remarked by the patients themselves that the treatment of Dr. La Bellois had always a much better chance of success during the third period than during the second.

“At first the victim feels devouring thirst, great feverish action, and a singular trembling in every limb; stiffness and a certain weakness in the joints; a great weight on the chest like that caused by sorrow; a rush of blood to the brain; fatigue and drowsiness, and other disagreeable symptoms which now escape my memory. The entire nervous system is then struck, as it were, with insensibility to such a degree that a sharp instrument or a needle, or even the blade of a knife, buried in the fleshy parts or thrust through the tendons and cartilage, causes the leper little or no pain. Some poor creature, with calm indifference, will place his arm or leg on a mass of burning wood and tar, and let it remain there until the entire limb, bones and all, is consumed; yet the leper feels no pain, and may sleep through it all as quietly as if in his bed.”

In another letter the abbé gives the following example of this astonishing insensibility:

“One of these afflicted beings who died at the lazaretto, and to whom I administered the last sacraments, lay down to sleep near a hot fire; in his slumbers he thrust one arm and hand into the flames, but continued to sleep. The overpowering smell of burning flesh awakened one of his companions, who succeeded in saving his life.”

One of the nuns says: “Since we reached Tracadie two of the patients have burned their hands severely, and were totally unconscious of having done so until I dressed the wounds myself.” In regard to this torpidity of the system, M. Gauvreau remarks that it is but temporary, but he knows not its duration; and the nun adds that the torpidity is not invariable with all the patients, and with some only in a portion of the body. In certain individuals it is only in the legs; in others, in the hands alone; but all complain of numbness like that of paralysis.

“By degrees,” says M. Gauvreau, “the unnatural whiteness of the skin disappears, and spots of a light yellow are to be seen. These spots in some cases are small and about the size of a dollar-piece. When of this character, they appear at first with a certain regularity of arrangement, and in places corresponding with each other, as on the two arms and shoulders—more generally, however, on the breast. They are distinct, but by degrees the poison makes its way throughout the vitals; the spots enlarge, approach each other, and, when at last united, the body of the sick man becomes a mass of corruption. Then the limbs swell, afterward portions of the body, the hands, and the feet; and when the skin can bear no further tension it breaks, and running sores cover the patient, who is repulsive and disgusting to the last degree.

“The entire skin of the body becomes extremely tender, and is covered with an oily substance that exudes from the pores and looks like varnish. The skin and flesh between the thumb and forefinger dry away, the ends of the fingers, the feet, and hands dwindle to nothingness, and sometimes the joints separate, and the members drop off without pain and often without the knowledge of the patient.

“The most noble part of the being created in the image of God—the face—is marred as much as the body by this fell disease. It is generally excessively swollen. The chin, cheeks, and ears are usually covered by tubercles the size of peas. The eyes seem to start from their sockets, and are glazed by a sort of cataract that often produces complete blindness. The skin of the forehead thickens and swells, acquiring a leaden hue, which sometimes extends over the entire countenance, while in other cases the whole face is suffused with scarlet. The explanation of these different symptoms may be found, of course, in the variety of temperaments—sanguine, bilious, or lymphatic. This face, once so smooth and fair, has become seamed and furrowed. The lips are two appalling ulcers—the upper lip much swollen and raised to the base of the nose, which has entirely disappeared; while the under lip hangs over the chin, which shines from the tension of the skin. Can a more frightful sight be imagined? In some cases the lips are parched and drawn up like a purse puckered on strings. This deformity is the more to be regretted is it precludes the afflicted from participation in the holy communion. Leprosy—that of Tracadie, at least—completes its ravages on the internal organs of its victims. It attacks now the larynx and all the bronchial ramifications; they become obstructed and filled with tubercles, so that the unhappy patient can find no relief in any position. His respiration becomes gradually more and more impeded, until he is threatened with suffocation. I have been present at the last struggles of most of these afflicted mortals. I hope that I may never be called upon to witness similar scenes. Excuse me from the details. If I undertook them my courage would give out; for I assure you that many of you would have fainted. Let me simply add that these lepers generally die in convulsions, panting for air; frequently rushing to the door to breathe; and, returning, they fling themselves on their pallets in despair. The thought of their sighs and sobs, the remembrance of their tears, almost breaks my heart, and their prayers for succor ring constantly in my ears: 'O my God! have mercy on me! have mercy on me!’

“At last comes the supreme moment of this lingering torture, and the patient dies of exhaustion and suffocation. All is over, and another Lazarus lies in Abraham’s bosom!”

After the above vivid picture of this loathsome disease we naturally ask if the evil be such that no medical skill can combat it with success. The Hospital Nun in the infirmary of the lazaretto tells us all that she has yet learned upon this point.

In 1849 and 1850 Dr. La Bellois, a celebrated French physician residing at Dalhousie, treated the lepers for six months and claimed to have cured ten of them: T. Goutheau, Charles Comeau, T. Brideau, A. Benoit, L. Sonier, Ed. Vienneau, Mme. A. Sonier, M. Sonier, Mme. Ferguson, Melina Lavoie. “All the above cases are now quite well, and the treatment I adopted was entirely for syphilitic disease, thus establishing without any doubt the nature of the disease” (extract from La Bellois’ report, Feb. 12, 1850).

Meanwhile, from the report of the secretary of the Board of Health—Mr. James Davidson—we gather that all the sick above mentioned returned after a time to the hospital; that they died there, with the exception of three, of whom two died in their own houses and the third still lives. Of this one Dr. Gordon, of Bathurst, says: “The disease is slow in its progress, but it is sure, and the fatal termination cannot be far off.”

Dr. Nicholson undertook the treatment at the lazaretto. By a certain course of medicine, the details of which he kept a profound secret, and with the aid of vapors, he wonderfully improved the physical condition of the lepers, who in many instances indulged sanguine hopes of recovery. Unfortunately, however, this physician suddenly abandoned his profession, and, to the sorrow of his former patients, died three years later. The lepers soon relapsed into their former hopeless state, and since then no change has taken place.

“On our arrival at Tracadie,” said the sister, “we found twenty inmates of the hospital, and since three more have been admitted. These poor creatures, being firmly persuaded that we could cure them, besieged us with entreaties for medicine, and were satisfied with whatever we gave. At first I selected three who had undergone no medical treatment; these three were also the only ones who suffered from contraction of the extremities. The first, twenty-two years of age, had been at the hospital four years, and as yet showed the disease only in the contraction above mentioned, and in a certain insensibility of the feet and hands. The second, fifteen years old, had been in the hospital for two years, his hands and feet were drawn up, and he suffered from a large swelling on the left foot. This young fellow is very delicate, and suffers intensely at times from spasms of the stomach. The third case is a lad of eleven, who for two years has suffered from the disease. His hands are twisted out of shape, and his body is covered with spots, red and white; these spots are totally without sensibility. I have administered to these patients the remedies as prescribed by Mr. Fowle—Fowle’s Humor Cure, an American patent medicine. The first and second patient experienced no other benefit from this remedy than a certain vigor previously unfelt. To the third the sensibility of the cuticle returned, but the spots remained the same. This in itself is very remarkable, because in no previous case have these benumbed or paralyzed parts regained their sensation. To another, a patient of twenty-two, I gave the same remedy. For eight years he had been a martyr to the virulence of the disease. When we arrived at the lazaretto, we found his case to be one of the worst there. His nose had fallen in; the lips were enormously puffed and swollen; his hands equally so, and looked more like the paws of a bear than like the hands of a human being. The saliva was profuse, but the effort of swallowing almost futile. Soon after taking this same medicine the saliva ceased to flow and he swallowed with comparative ease.

“On the 23d of January he was, by the mercy of God, able to partake of the holy communion, of which he had been deprived for four years. His lips are now of their natural size, and he is stronger than he has been for years. But the pains in his limbs are far worse than they have ever before been. I have also given Fowle’s cure to all the patients who had been under no previous medical treatment, and invariably with beneficial results. In some the tint of the skin is more natural; in others the swelling of the extremities is much abated; but the remedy seems always to occasion an increase of pains in the limbs, although it unquestionably acts as a tonic upon the poor creatures. In all of them the mouth and throat improve with the use of Fowle’s cure. And here let me say that this disease throughout bears a strong resemblance to syphilis. In both diseases the throat, the tongue, and the whole inside of the mouth are ulcerated. In both diseases the voice is affected to such a degree that it can hardly make itself heard. They cough frightfully, and some time after our coming a leper presented himself for admission at our hospital doors. The poor creature was covered with ulcers and every night was bathed in a cold perspiration. After he had rested for a few days, I gave him a powerful dose of la liqueur arsenicale, which has since been repeated. The night-sweats have disappeared, and the ulcers are healed, with the exception of one on the foot. His lips are still unhealthy, but he is much stronger, and the spots on his person are gradually disappearing.

“Two others, later arrivals have taken la liqueur arsenicale and have improved under its use. Suspecting that the origin of this malady may be traced to another source, and remembering the opinion of Dr. La Bellois, I gave the bichloride of mercury, in doses of the thirty-second part of a grain, to the worst case in the hospital. It is too soon, however, to judge of its effects. The improvement in no one of these cases is rapid, but we trust that it is certain. We look to God alone for the success for which we venture to hope. I can find no statistics which will enable me to give you the number of victims that have fallen under this dread malady of Tracadie. I find, however, a letter from M. Gauvreau, bearing the date of November 30, 1859, that sixty persons perished from its ravages in the previous fifteen years, and that twenty-five of both sexes, and of all ages, were then inmates of the lazaretto, awaiting there the end of their torments.”

In 1862 Mr. Gordon said that he saw twenty-three patients at the hospital, and the Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu found twenty there when they reached the lazaretto, and have since admitted three in addition; it does not seem, therefore, as if the “eldest sister of Death” had relaxed her hold on this unhappy village. Yet if the disease can but be confined to this locality, wonders will be achieved. Good care, regular medical attendance, incessant vigilance, with intelligent adherence to hygienic laws, may eventually cause its entire disappearance from our soil. Let us hope that the faithful sisters will succeed in their good work; for we ourselves, every one of us, have a personal interest in it. Unfortunately, this good result is far from certain, as the Abbé Gauvreau desires us to understand.

“One or more of these unfortunates,” he says, “feeling the insidious approaches of the disease, and shrinking from the idea of the lazaretto, have at times secretly escaped from Tracadie. They leave Miramichi on the steamer, intending to land at Rivière-du-Loup, at Kamouraska, perhaps at Quebec or at Montreal. As yet no ulcers are visible, nor, indeed, any external symptoms which could excite the smallest suspicion. On landing at some one of the places mentioned they procure situations in different houses, and remain in them for a month or two, perhaps, saying nothing all this time of their symptoms to any one, not even to a physician. They eat with their master’s family, and, even if they take the greatest precaution, they convey this poisonous virus to their masters. When they have reason to fear that suspicion is about being aroused, they depart, but it is too late, and they go to scatter the contagion still further.

“The following instance came under my own observation: A youth suffering from this disease, and dreading the lazaretto, went to Boston, where he secured a position on a fishing vessel, hoping that the sea air, with the medicines that he would take, would effect his cure. He soon found that these hopes were groundless, and was obliged to enter the hospital in Boston, where, in spite of the care and attention bestowed upon him by the physicians of the medical school at Cambridge, he died, far from friends and home.”

One naturally asks, with a thrill of horror, whether, before the admission of this poor creature to the hospital, he did not transmit to his shipmates the poisonous virus that filled his own blood.

The total disappearance of this disease—if such disappearance may be hoped for—will be due exclusively to the noble and untiring exertions of the sisters. Tracadie and its afflicted population would not alone owe a debt of eternal gratitude to these Hospital Nuns. America itself would share this feeling. With an example like this of charity and self-abnegation before us, we cannot cease to wonder at, and to deplore, the narrow minds of those persons who condemn the monastic institutions of the church. Let us compassionate all such; for to them light is lacking, and they have yet to learn the great truth that the duty most inculcated by the church, after the love of God, is the love of our neighbors.

TESTIMONY OF THE CATACOMBS TO SOME OF THE SACRAMENTS.

In a former article,[31] whilst following Mr. Withrow and other Protestant controversialists through their evasions and misinterpretations of the evidence to be found in the Catacombs on behalf of certain points of Catholic doctrine and practice, we pointed out that prayers either for the dead or to them were the only two articles on which it would be reasonable to look for information from the inscriptions on the gravestones. We said that these prayers were likely to find expression, if anywhere, by the side of the grave. As they took their last look on the loved remains of their deceased friend or relative, the affectionate devotion of the survivors would naturally give utterance either to a hearty prayer for the everlasting happiness of him they had lost, or to a piteous cry for help, an earnest petition that he would continue to exercise, in whatever way might be possible under the conditions of his new mode of existence, that same loving care and protection which had been their joy and support during his life; or sometimes both these prayers might be poured forth together, according as the strictness of God’s justice, or the Christian faith and virtues of the deceased, happened to occupy the foremost place in the petitioner’s thoughts.

When, therefore, we proceeded in a second paper to question the same subterranean sanctuaries on another subject of Christian doctrine—the supremacy of St. Peter—we called into court another set of witnesses altogether: to wit, the paintings of their tombs and chapels. Exception has been taken against the competency of these witnesses, on the plea that they are not old enough; they were not contemporary, it is said, with those first ages of the church whose faith is called in question. To this we answer that the objection is entirely out of date; it might have been raised twenty or thirty years ago, and it might have been difficult at that time satisfactorily to dispose of it. Those were days in which writers like M. Perrot in France could affect to pronounce dogmatically on the age of this or that painting, solely on the evidence of its style, without having first established any standard by which that style could be securely judged. There are still a few writers of the same school even at the present day, such as Mr. Parker in England, who assigns precise years as the dates of these subterranean monuments with as much confidence as if he had been personally present when they were executed, and (we may add) with as wide a departure from the truth as if he had never seen the pictures at all. Such writers, however, have but few disciples nowadays. Their foolish presumption is only laughed at; and it is not thought worth while seriously to refute their assertions. Men of intelligence and critical habits of thought are slow to accept the ipse dixit of a professor, however eminent, upon any subject; and all who have studied this particular subject—the paintings in the Catacombs—are well aware that the question of their antiquity has now been carried beyond the range of mere conjecture and assumption; it has been placed on a solid basis of fact through the indefatigable labors of De Rossi. Those labors have been directed in a very special way towards establishing the true chronology of the several parts of the Catacombs; and when this had been done, it was manifest to all that the most ancient areæ were also those which were most abundantly decorated with painting, whilst the areæ that had been used more recently—i.e., in the latter half of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century—were hardly decorated at all. This gradual decline of the use of pictorial decoration has been traced with the utmost exactness through the successive areæ of a single Catacomb; six or seven tombs being found thus decorated in the first area, two in the second, one in the third, none at all in the fourth; and the same thing has been seen, with more or less distinctness, throughout the whole range of subterranean Rome. Then, again, every casual visitor to them can see for himself that before the abandonment of burial here—i.e., before the year 410—many of the paintings were already considered old enough to be sacrificed without scruple to the wishes of those who would fain excavate new tombs in desirable sites. Men do not usually destroy to-day the paintings which they executed yesterday; certainly they do not allow the ornamentation which they have just lavished on the tombs of their fathers to be soon effaced with impunity. We may be sure, then, that those innumerable paintings which we see broken through in order to make more modern graves must have been of considerable antiquity at the time of their destruction. Then, again, it must not be forgotten that some of these paintings were actually appealed to as ancient testimony in the days of St. Jerome, on occasion of a dispute between that doctor and St. Augustine as to the correct rendering of a particular word in his Latin translation of the Scriptures. Finally, it is notorious that the fine arts had rapidly decayed and the number of their professors diminished before the days of Constantine—in fact, before the end of the third century.

We cannot, however, pretend to give in these pages even a brief summary of De Rossi’s arguments and observations whereby he establishes the primitive antiquity of Christian art in the Catacombs. We can only mention a few of the more popular and palpable proofs which can be appreciated by all without difficulty; and we will only add that it is now possible, under the sure chronological guidance of De Rossi, to distinguish three successive stages in the development of painting in the Christian cemeteries, the latest of which was complete when the Constantinian era began, and the first falls hardly, if at all, short of even apostolic times. This is no longer denied by the best instructed even among Protestant controversialists; they acknowledge that painting was used by the earliest Christians for the ornamenting of their places of burial; only they contend that it was done “not because it was congenial to the mind of Christianity so to illustrate the faith, but because it was the heathen custom so to honor the dead.” The author of this remark, however, has omitted to explain whence it comes to pass that the great majority of the paintings which survive in the cemeteries are more engaged in illustrating the mysteries of the faith than in doing honor to the dead.

But we must not pursue this subject any further. We have said enough, we think, to establish the competency of these paintings as witnesses to the ancient faith, and we will now proceed to question them concerning one or two principal mysteries of the faith—those that are called its mysteries par excellence: its sacraments. We do not doubt that, if duly interrogated, they will have some evidence to give. We say, if duly interrogated, because it is the characteristic of ancient Christian art to be eminently symbolical; it suggested rather than declared religious doctrines and ideas, and it suggested them by means of artistic symbols or historical types, which must be inquired into and meditated upon before they can be made fully to express their meaning. This is of the very essence of a symbol: that it should partly veil and partly manifest the truth. It does not manifest the truth with the fulness and accuracy of a written historical description, or it would cease to be a symbol; on the other hand, it must not be so obscure as to demand a sibyl for its interpretation; it must have a tendency to produce in the mind of the beholder some leading feature of the object it is intended to represent. And where should symbols of this kind be more abundantly found for the Christian preacher or artist than in the histories of the Old Testament? Ancient Christian art, says Lord Lindsay, “veiled the faith and hope of the church under the parallel and typical events of the patriarchal and the Jewish dispensations.”

We need not remind our readers that the principle of this method of interpreting Holy Scripture has express apostolic sanction; but few who have not studied the subject closely will have any adequate idea of the extent to which it was followed in the ancient church. We will give a single example, selected because it closely concerns the first mystery of which we propose to speak—the Sacrament of Baptism.

Tertullian, who lived at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, wrote a short treatise on this sacrament. This treatise he begins by bringing together all that Holy Scripture contains about water, with such minuteness of detail that he is presently obliged to check himself, saying that, if he were to pursue the subject through all Holy Scripture with the same fulness with which he had begun, men would say he was writing a treatise in praise of water rather than of baptism. From the first chapter of the Book of Genesis to the last of the Evangelists, and even of the Apocalypse, he finds continual testimony to the high dignity and sacramental life-giving power of this element. The Spirit of God, he says, moved over it at the first; whilst as yet the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the heaven was as yet unformed, water alone, already pure, simple, and perfect, supplied a worthy resting-place on which God could be borne. The division of the waters was the regulating power by which the world was constituted; and when at length the world was set in order, ready to receive inhabitants, the waters were the first to hear and obey the command and to bring forth creatures having life. Then, again, man was not made out of the dry earth, but out of slime, after a spring had risen out of the earth, watering all its surface. All this is out of the first two chapters of Genesis; and here he makes a pause, breaking into that apology which has been already mentioned. Then he resumes the thread of his discourse, but passing much more briefly over the remainder of the Old Testament. He notes how the wickedness of the old world was purged by the waters of the Deluge, which was the world’s baptism; how the waters of the Red Sea drowned the enemies of God’s people and delivered them from a cruel bondage; and how the children of Israel were refreshed during their wanderings through the wilderness by the water which flowed continuously from the rock which followed them, “which rock was Christ.” Then he comes to the New Testament, and briefly but eloquently exclaims: Nowhere is Christ found without water. He is himself baptized with it; he inaugurates in it the first manifestation of his divine power at the wedding-feast in Cana; when he preaches the Gospel, on the last and great day of the feast, he stands and cries, saying, “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink.” He sums up his whole gift to man under the image of a fountain of water, telling the Samaritan woman that he has living water to give, which shall become in him that receives it a fountain of water springing up unto life everlasting. When he gives instruction upon charity, he instances a cup of cold water given to a disciple; he sits down weary at a well and asks for water to refresh himself; he walks on the waves of the sea, and washes his disciples’ feet; finally (Tertullian concludes), “this testimony of Jesus to the Sacrament of Baptism continues even to the end, to his very Passion; for, when he is condemned to the cross, water is not absent—witness the hands of Pilate; nay, when wounded after death upon the cross, water bursts forth from his side—witness the soldier’s spear.”

There may be something in this symbolism that sounds strange to modern ears; but we are not here criticising it; we have nothing to do with its merits or demerits, but only with the fact of its general use—so general that it was the one principle of exegesis which every commentator on Holy Scripture in those days followed, and we have every right to suppose that Christian artists would have followed it also. When, therefore, we find in the Roman Catacombs (as, for example, the other day in the cemetery of San Callisto) a glass vessel, very artistically wrought, with fishes in alto rilievo swimming round it in such a way that, when full of water, it would have represented a miniature image, as it were, of the sea, is it a mere fanciful imagination which bids us recognize in such ornamentation a reference to holy baptism, and conjectures that the vessel was perhaps even made for the administration of that sacrament? It may be so; but we cannot ourselves think so; we cannot at once reject the explanation as fanciful; the work of the artist corresponds too exactly with the words of the theologian to allow us to treat the coincidence as altogether undesigned. “We little fish are born,” says Tertullian, “after the likeness of our great Fish in water, and we cannot otherwise be safe than by remaining in the water.” And we seem to ourselves to read these same words, written in another language, in the beautiful vessel before us. We read it also in another similar vessel, which looks as though it had come out of the same workshop, yet was found in an ancient cemetery at Cologne; and in another of bronze, dug up in the vineyard over the cemetery of Pretextatus, that used to be shown by Father Marchi in the Kircherian Museum at the Roman College. In all these instances we believe that this is the best account that can be given, both of the original design of the vessel and also of its preservation in Christian subterranean cemeteries. However, if any one thinks otherwise, we do not care to insist upon our explanation as infallibly certain. We will descend into the Catacombs themselves, and look about upon the paintings on their walls or the carving on their gravestones, and see whether baptism finds any place there also.

And, first, we come across the baptism of our Lord himself. We are not now thinking of the subterranean baptistery in the cemetery of Ponziano, with the highly-decorated cross standing up out of the middle of it, and Christ’s baptism painted at the side. For this is one of the latest artistic productions in the Catacombs—a work of the eighth or ninth century possibly. We are thinking, on the contrary, of one of the earliest paintings in a most ancient part of the excavations, in the crypt of Lucina, near the cemetery of Callixtus, with which, in fact, it is now united. We shall have occasion to return to this same chamber presently for the sake of other paintings on its walls having reference to the Holy Eucharist; just here we only call attention to the baptism of our Lord, which is represented in the space over the doorway. We do not know of any other instance of this subject having been painted in the Catacombs besides the two that we have mentioned, but it is quite possible that others may be hereafter discovered; but of baptism as a Christian rite, veiled, however, under its types and symbols, we have innumerable examples.

Few figures recur more frequently among the paintings in the Catacombs, and none are more ancient, than that of a man standing in an open box or chest, often with a dove, bearing an olive-branch in its mouth, flying towards him. When this was first seen after the rediscovery of the Catacombs in the sixteenth century, men set it down to be the picture of some ancient bishop preaching in a pulpit, and the Holy Ghost, under the form of a dove, inspiring him as to what he should say, according to the legend told of St. Gregory the Great and some others. Nobody now doubts that it was intended for Noe in the ark; not, however, the historical Noe and the historical ark—for nothing could be more ludicrously false to the original—but those whom that history foreshadowed: Christians saved by the waters of baptism and securely housed in the ark of the church. Some persons, who seem to take a perverse delight in assigning a pagan rather than a Christian origin to everything in the early church, account for the difference between the Biblical and the artistic representation of the ark by saying that the Christian artist did but copy a pagan coin or medal which he found ready to his hands. It is quite true that certain coins which were struck at Apamea in Phrygia during the reigns of Septimius Severus, Macrinus, and Philip the elder—i.e., at different periods in the first half of the third century—exhibit on one side of them a chest, with a man and a woman standing within it, and the letters ΝΩ, or ΝΩΕ, written on the outside; and that these figures were intended to be a souvenir of the Deluge, which held a prominent place in the legends of Phrygia. It is said that the town of Apamea claimed to derive its secondary name of κιβωτός, or ark, from the fact that it was here that the ark rested; and it is quite possible that the spread of Christian ideas, gradually penetrating the Roman world, and filtering into the spirit even of those who remained attached to paganism, may have suggested the making of the coins we have described; but it is certain, on the other hand, that we can claim priority in point of time for the work of the Christian artists in the Catacombs. The coins were struck, as we have said, in the beginning of the third century; the earliest Christian painting of the same subject is assigned to the beginning of the second.

But whatever may be the history of the forms under which Noe and the ark are represented, there can be no question as to their meaning. We have the authority of St. Peter himself (1 iii. 20, 21) to instruct us upon this point; and Tertullian does but unfold what is virtually contained in the apostle’s words when he says that the ark prefigures the church, and that the dove sent out of the ark and returning with an olive-branch was a figure of the dove of the Holy Spirit, sent forth from heaven to our flesh, as it emerges from the bath of regeneration. And if we quote Tertullian again as our authority, this is not because he differs in these matters from other Christian writers who preceded or followed him, but because he has written at greater length and specially on that particular subject with which we are now engaged. St. Augustine, writing two hundred years later, gives the same explanation, and says that “no Catholic doubts it; but that it might perhaps have seemed to be a merely human imagination, had not the Apostle Peter expressly declared it.” It is, then, from no private fancy of our own, but simply in conformity with the teaching of all the ancient doctors of the church, that we interpret this scene of a man standing in an ark, and receiving an olive-branch from the mouth of a dove, as expressing this Christian doctrine: that the faithful obtain remission of their sins through baptism, receive from the Holy Spirit the gift of divine peace—that peace which, being given by faith in this world, is the gage of everlasting peace and happiness in the next—and are saved in the mystical ark of the church from the destruction which awaits the world. And if the same scene be rudely scratched on a single tomb, as it often was, and sometimes with the name of the deceased inscribed upon the chest, we can only understand it as denoting a sure and certain hope on the part of the survivors that their departed friend, having been a faithful member of the church, had died in the peace of God and had now entered into his rest.

We pass on to another of the Biblical stories mentioned by several of the Fathers as typical of baptism; and we will select as our specimen of it a painting that was executed about the very time that Tertullian was writing his treatise on that sacrament. It is to be seen more than once on the walls of a series of chambers which open out of a gallery in the Catacomb of San Callisto, not far from the papal crypt. The first figure that greets us from the wall on the left-hand side as we enter these chambers is Moses striking the rock and the water gushing forth. Are we to look upon this as a mere historic souvenir of the Jewish legislator, or are we to see in it a reference to Christian baptism? The artist in the present instance does not allow us to doubt. Side by side with it he has painted a fisherman, and we need not be reminded who it was that compared the work of the Christian apostle to that of fishermen; and immediately he adds, with still greater plainness of speech, a youth standing in the water, whilst a man pours water over his head. Finally, he fills the very little space that remains on the wall with the picture of a paralytic carrying his bed, and it would be easy to show that the Fathers recognized in the pool of Bethsaida, to which place this history belongs, a type of the healing waters of baptism. Was it possible for the Christian artist to set forth the sacrament more unequivocally? There is no legend to interpret the painting, but surely this is not needed. The mystery is veiled, indeed, from all who were uninstructed; but it was perfectly intelligible to all the baptized; it was veiled under types and symbols taken partly from the Old Law and partly from common life.

We need hardly say that this same figure of Moses striking the rock occurs in scores of other places throughout the Catacombs; but we have selected this particular specimen, both because it appears with a more copious entourage of other symbols determining its sense beyond all dispute, and also because it is here brought, as we shall presently see, into immediate proximity with the other sacrament, to which it is a necessary gate of introduction—the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. But before we pass on to examine the symbols of the Holy Eucharist, let us first inquire whether there is anything further about baptism to be gleaned from the Catacombs—not now from their paintings, but from their inscriptions.

We must remember that the most ancient inscriptions were very brief—very often the mere name of the deceased and nothing more, or a short ejaculatory prayer was added for his everlasting happiness. It is clear that we should search here in vain for any mention of the sacraments. By and by, when it became usual to say something more about the deceased, to mention his age and the date of his death or burial, or other similar particulars, perhaps room might be found also for saying something about his baptism. Accordingly, there are not wanting monuments of the fourth or fifth centuries which tell us that the deceased was a neophyte, or newly illuminated—which means the same thing: viz., that he had been lately baptized—or that he had lived so many months or years after he had received the initiatory sacrament of the Christian covenant. Occasionally, also, a faint reference may be found to another sacrament—the Sacrament of Confirmation. This was often, or even generally, administered in olden times immediately after baptism, of which it was considered the complement and perfection. “From time immemorial,” says Tertullian (ab immemorabili), “as soon as we have emerged from the bath [of regeneration] we are anointed with the holy unction.” Hence it is sometimes doubtful which sacrament is intended, or rather it is probable that it was intended to include both under the words inscribed on the epitaphs—the verbs accepit, percepit, consecutus est (the same as we find in the fathers of the same or an earlier age), used for the most part absolutely, without any object whatever following them; but in one or two cases fidem or gratiam sanctum are used. An epitaph of a child three years old adds: Consecuta est D. vi. Deposita viii. Kal. Aug. Another says simply: Pascasius percepit xi. Kal. Maias; and a third: Crescentia q. v. a. xxxiii. Accepit iii. Kal. Jul. A fourth records of a lady that she died at the age of thirty-five: Ex die acceptionis suæ vixit dies lvii.; to which we append another: Consecutus est ii. Non. Decemb. ex die consecutionis in sæculo fuit ad usque vii. Idas Decemb. This last inscription is taken from a Christian cemetery in Africa, not in Rome; but it was worth quoting for its exact conformity with the one which precedes it. In both alike there is the same distinction between the natural and the spiritual age of the deceased—i.e., between his first and his second birth. After stating the number of years he had lived in the world, his age is computed afresh from the day of his regeneration, thus marking off the length of his spiritual from that of his merely animal life.

A Greek inscription was found a few years since on the Via Latina, recording of a lady who had belonged to one of the Gnostic sects in the third century, that she had been “anointed in the baths of Christ with his pure and incorruptible ointment”—an inscription which probably refers to two separate rites in use among the Gnostics, in imitation of the two Christian sacraments. Of a Christian lady buried in Spoleto, her epitaph records that she had been confirmed (consignata) by Pope Liberius; this, of course, belongs to the middle of the fourth century. And we read of a boy who died when he was a little more than five years old: Bimus trimus consecutus est—words which were a veritable enigma to all antiquarians, until the learned Marini compared with them the phrases of Roman law, bima trima die dos reddita, bima trima die legatum solutum, and pointed out that as these phrases undoubtedly signified that such a portion of the dowry or legacy was paid in the second year, and such another portion in the third, so the corresponding words in the Christian epitaph could only mean that the deceased had received something when he was two years old, and something else when he was three; and although the particular gifts received are not mentioned because of the disciplina arcani, we can have no difficulty in supplying baptism and confirmation. De Rossi adopts this interpretation; indeed, it does not seem possible to suggest any other.

It seems, then, that there is not much evidence to be derived from the Catacombs as to the Sacrament of Confirmation; that, on the contrary, which has reference to the Holy Eucharist is most precious and abundant, and it is generally to be found in juxtaposition with monuments which bear testimony to the Sacrament of Baptism. The chamber in the crypt of Lucina which gives us the oldest painting of the baptism of our Lord gives us also what are probably the oldest symbolical representations of the Holy Eucharist; and certainly the chambers in the cemetery of San Callisto, in which we have just seen so many and such clear manifestations of the Sacrament of Baptism, contain also the most numerous and the most perfect specimens of the symbolic representations of the Holy Eucharist carried to their highest degree of development, yet still combined with mysterious secrecy. Before enumerating these in detail it will be best to make two or three preliminary remarks helping to clear the way before us. First, then, we may assume as known to all our readers, both that the doctrine about the Blessed Sacrament belonged in a very special way to the discipline of the secret, and also that from the very earliest times one of the most common names under which our Blessed Lord was spoken of was the fish, because the letters which go to make up that word in Greek were also the initials of the words Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. And, secondly, we must say a few words about the different circumstances under which a fish appears in the artistic decorations of the Catacombs; at least, of the different kinds of feasts or entertainments in which it seems to be presented as an article of food. These feasts may be divided into three classes: First, the fish merely lies upon a table—a sacred table or tripod—with one or more loaves of bread by its side, and not unfrequently with several baskets full of bread on the ground around it; secondly, bread and fish are seen on a table, at which seven men are seated partaking of a meal; and, thirdly, they are seen, perhaps with other viands also, at a feast of which men and women are partaking indiscriminately, and perhaps attendants also are there, waiting on the guests, pouring out wine and water, hot or cold. Paintings of this latter class have not uncommonly been taken as representing the agapæ, or love-feasts, of the early church. But this seems to be too literal an interpretation, too much out of harmony with the symbolical character of early Christian art. More probably it was meant as a representation of that wedding-feast under which image the joys of heaven are so often set forth in Holy Scripture; and in this case it is not necessary to suppose that there was any special meaning in the choice of fish as part of the food provided, unless, indeed (which is not at all improbable), it was desired to direct attention to that mystical food a participation in which was the surest pledge of admission to that heavenly banquet, according to our Lord’s own words: “He that eateth this bread shall live for ever.” However, it is not necessary, as we have said, to suppose this; it is quite possible that in these instances the fish may have been used accidentally, as it were, and indifferently, or for the same reason as it sometimes appears on pagan monuments—viz., to denote the abundance and excellence of the entertainment.

Paintings of the first class, however, are much too peculiar to be thus explained, neither is there anything resembling them in the works of pagan artists which could have suggested them; and those of the second class, we hope presently to show, can only have been intended to represent a particular scene in the Gospel history. It is only with paintings belonging to one or other of these two classes that we need concern ourselves to-day. And, first, of the bread and fish when placed alone, without any guests at all. In the crypt of Lucina it appears twice on the wall opposite our Lord’s baptism, and in a very remarkable form indeed. The fish is alive and apparently swimming, and he carries on his back a basket full of loaves, in the middle of which is a vessel of glass containing some red liquid. What can this mean? Nobody ever saw anything like it in nature. We know of nothing in pagan art or mythology which could have suggested it. Yet here it finds a place in the chamber of a Christian cemetery, and as part of a system of decoration, other parts of which were undoubtedly of a sacred character. Is this alone profane or meaningless, or does not rather its hidden sense shine forth distinctly as soon as we call to mind the use of the fish as a Christian symbol on the one hand, and the Christian doctrine about the Holy Eucharist on the other? The fish was Christ. And he once took bread and broke it, and said, This is my body; and he took wine and blessed it, saying, This is my blood; and he appointed this to be an everlasting ordinance in his church, and promised that whosoever should eat of that bread and drink of that chalice should inherit everlasting life. Here are the bread and the wine and the mystical fish. And was it possible for Christian eyes to attach any other meaning to the combination than that it was intended to bring before them the remembrance of the Christian mysteries, whereby death and the grave were robbed of all their gloom, being only the appointed means of entrance to a never-ending life? If anybody is tempted to object that the vessels here represented as containing the bread and wine are too mean ever to have been used for such a purpose, we must remind him that it had already been put on record by archæologists, before the discovery of this monument, that the early Christians in the days of poverty and persecution continued to use vessels of the same humble materials as had been used in the sacrificial rites of Jews and Gentiles before them, and that these were precisely such as are here represented. Nay, further still, that even when vessels of gold and silver had come into use in the church, still there were exceptional times and circumstances when it was lawful, and even praiseworthy, to return to the more simple and ancient practice. St. Jerome praises St. Exuperius, Bishop of Toulouse in his day, because, having sold the church-plate to relieve the pressing necessities of the poor, he was content to carry the body of Christ in a basket made of wicker-work, and the blood of Christ in a chalice of glass. Most assuredly St. Jerome would have been at no loss to interpret the painting before us.

But let us now pass on into the cemetery of San Callisto, and enter again the chamber in which we saw Moses, and the fishermen, and the ministration of baptism, and the paralytic. Let us pursue our walk round the chamber, and immediately after the paralytic, on the wall facing the doorway, we come to the painting of a three-legged table with bread and fish upon it, a woman standing on one side in the ancient attitude of Christian prayer, and a man on the other stretching out his hands over the fish and the bread, as though he were blessing them. Can it be that we have here the act of consecration of the Holy Eucharist, as in the adjacent wall we had the act of baptizing, only in a somewhat more hidden manner, as became the surpassing dignity of the greater mystery? Nobody, we think, would ever have disputed it, had the dress of the consecrator been somewhat more suited to such an action. But his breast and arm and one side of his body are considerably exposed, as he stretches out his arm from underneath his cloak; and modern taste takes exception to the exposure as unseemly in such a time and place. We have no wish to put a weapon into the hands of the anti-ritualistic party. Nevertheless, we believe that it is pretty well ascertained that at first no vestment was exclusively appropriated to the celebration of Mass. We are not sure that Dean Stanley was in error when he wrote the other day that St. Martin, the Apostle of Gaul and first Bishop of Tours, wore a sheepskin when he officiated, and that “he consecrated the Eucharistic elements with his bare arms coming through the sheepskin.” And at any rate it is certain that in the days of Tertullian, to which the picture before us belongs, many ministers of Christ’s word and sacraments used the pallium as the dress most suitable to their own profession. The writer we have named published a short treatise on the subject, in which, with his usual wit and subtlety, he commends its use, and he concludes with these words: “Rejoice, O Pallium! and exult; a better philosophy claims thee now, since thou hast become the vestment of a Christian.” Forty years later a fellow-countryman of this writer, St. Cyprian, expressed a strong objection to the dress, both as immodest in itself and vainglorious in its signification. Thus everything conspires to support the interpretation which the picture itself suggests and the age to which it has been assigned; and we conclude with confidence that those who first saw it never doubted that it was meant to set before them the most solemn mystery of their religion.

They would have recognized the same mystery again without hesitation, under another form, in the painting which follows immediately afterwards, in which seven men are seen seated at a table, partaking of bread and fish. Our own thoughts, as we look at it, fly naturally to the last chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, where such an incident as this is minutely described after the miraculous draught of fishes which was the occasion of it. But unless we are very familiar with the writings of the Fathers, our thoughts would probably go no further; they would rest in the mere letter of the narrative; we should not penetrate beneath the surface, and see (as all the Fathers saw), in every circumstance related, a prophetic figure of the whole history of the church: first, the immense number of souls caught in her net, then the union of those souls with Christ, “the fish that was already laid on the hot coals” (Piscis assus, Christus passus), their incorporation with him through partaking of that living Bread which came down from heaven, and consequently their sure hope of abiding with him for ever in the world to come. This is no private or modern interpretation; it is drawn out at greatest length by St. Augustine; but it is to be found also in all other patristic commentaries on Holy Scripture; and the marvellous unity, not only in dogmatic teaching, but even in the use of allegories and artistic symbols, which reached from east to west in the ancient church, warrants us in assuming that it was not unknown to him who selected this scene as the central piece of decoration for the principal wall of this chamber.

Next after it he painted Abraham with his son Isaac, the ram, and the faggot for the sacrifice—a type both of the sacrifice on Mount Calvary and (in a yet more lively manner) of the unbloody sacrifice still perpetually renewed on Christian altars.

Thus there is the most exact similitude between the illustrations used to set forth the Holy Eucharist on the one wall and those of holy baptism on the other. Both sacraments are at the same time veiled from unbelievers, yet indicated to the faithful, by types taken from the history of the Old Law, by incidents belonging to the life of Christ, and by representations, sufficiently simple yet obscure, of the actual manner of their administration. And then the last wall was reserved for the setting forth of our resurrection, in the example of Lazarus, which was, in truth, the natural end and completion of all that the sacraments led to.

We have not left ourselves space to speak at length of the miracles of changing water into wine, or the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, as other figures of the Holy Eucharist often to be seen in the Catacombs. That they were painted there in this sense we cannot doubt, when we consider how they were connected with that sacrament in the sermons and catechetical instructions of the early church. In the first miracle the substance of water was changed into the substance of wine; in the second a limited substance was, by Christ’s power, so multiplied as to be made present in a thousand places at once, capable of feeding a thousand persons, whereas a minute before it had been only present in one place and was sufficient only to satisfy the appetite of one. The analogy is obvious; but these miracles do not seem to have entered so early into the system of decoration of the Catacombs (except in a very fragmentary and indirect manner), neither do they anywhere enter into so long and beautiful a series of mystical figures, as those others which we have been just now examining. Those form a series of rare and very special interest. They are repeated, as we have already said, in several successive chambers, whose date can be determined, by a number of concurrent indications, as not later than the first quarter of the third century. In these chambers the same histories and the same symbols are repeated in the same style, freely changed in their arrangement and in some accessories of the composition, yet constant in their hidden meaning and theological sense; and that sense is briefly this: the idea of a new life imparted to the Christian soul by baptism, fed by the Holy Eucharist, and continued uninterruptedly throughout eternity.

TWO MAY CAROLS.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

DARKNESS.

The authentic Thought of God at last

Wanes, dimly seen, through Error’s mist:

Upon that mist, man’s image cast

Becomes the new God-Mechanist.

The vast Idea shrivels up:

Truth narrows with the narrowing soul:

Men sip it from the acorn’s cup:

Their fathers drained the golden bowl.

Shrink, spelled and dwarfed, their earth, their skies;

Shrinks in their hand their measuring-rod;
With dim, yet microscopic eyes
They chase a daily-dwindling God.

His temple thus to crypt reduced,
For ancient faith is space no more,
Or her, its Queen.[32] To hearts abused
By sense, prime truths are true no more.

LIGHT.

The spirit intricately wise
That bends above his ciphered scroll
Only to probe, and analyze,
The self-involved and sunless soul,

Has not the truth he holds—though plain;

For truth divine is gift, not debt:—

Her living waters wouldst thou drain?

Let down the pitcher, not the net!

But they, the spirits frank and meek,
Nor housed in self, nor science-blind,
Who welcome truths they did not seek;—
Truth comes to them in every wind.

Beside his tent’s still open door,
With open heart, and open eye,
The patriarch sat, when they who wore
That triad type of God drew nigh.

The world of faith around us lies

Like nature’s world of life and growth:

Seeing, to see it needeth eyes

And heart, profound and simple both.

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.
FROM THE FRENCH.

November 16, 1869.

Thérèse has followed her sister.... At the last moment reason returned; she looked at her mother and said: “Here is Mad; give me your blessing!” O my God! it is, then, true—the nest is empty.

Kate, how are Berthe and Raoul to be consoled?

November 22, 1869.

Margaret is here again—a ray of sunshine after the storm, in this dwelling, twice visited by death. Oh! how we wept in embracing her. And with what affection she hastened to Berthe, this devastated, disinherited, wounded, and bleeding heart! “How shall we leave this cemetery now?” said my mother to Gertrude. Oh! I would wish to remain here with her. To return to Orleans, to find their traces everywhere, would be too much grief. What a crushing blow! What incredible, unforeseen suddenness! It is enough to take away one’s reason. Raoul speaks no more, hears no more, sees no more; Berthe is in tears: we have to console and support them. Help us with your prayers, happy Kate, who witness no death! In the middle of the park are two trees which Raoul planted on the day his daughters were born. They are to be transplanted to their tombs. Dear children, so united, so beautiful, and inseparable, even in death! O the mother! what sorrow is hers. Ought children to die before their mother?

Mme. de T—— is heroic in self-denial, and yet these deaths revive all her troubles. Ah! who could have foretold that my happiness would so soon have declined, and that God would so quickly have claimed his portion of our treasure! See, here are Gertrude and Berthe—two mothers without children: Ellen and Edith in eternity; Marcella at Naples. I now experience an indescribable apprehension, and count the beloved heads by which I am still surrounded.... I remember the L—— family, carried off in one year.

A radiant letter from Marcella, who does not yet know of our mourning. Beati qui lugent! Let us love God, let us love God!

It is in him that I cherish you, my Kate.

November 28, 1869.

All our Ireland in letters of fraternal condolence. The saintly Isa speaks to me sweetly of the happiness of the souls thus called away, and exhorts me to perfect love. Lizzy invites me to cross the Channel to receive the consolations of those whom I consoled formerly. Sarah and the others comfort me in our beloved tongue. O Kate! it was so beautiful, our peaceful home, with its assembly of children and grandchildren, forming, as it were, a glorious crown around my venerated mother; and now a void has been made, the birds have spread their wings, and, like the dove from the ark, return no more.

O charming towers, silent witnesses of our happiness! O vast sea, coming to murmur at our feet! O flowers they loved! O thickets where their voices, fresh and pure, resounded! O lawn whereon they tried their earliest steps; dear abode which witnessed their growth! O forests through which they sped along, lively and swift of foot, in chase of butterflies or of their favorite dog! O solitary paths which they so often traversed to go and lavish on the poor their gold and their love!—speak to us of them, and of them always.

Dear Kate, pray for the desolate parents. “All my future has vanished,” says Berthe. May God be with her! Everything else is very small in trials so great as these. My mother begs you to ask for fifty Masses at Fourvières; we have not the strength to write.

Life, the sunshine, and blue sky—all have disappeared. Adieu, dear sister.

December 5, 1869.

Adrien is reading to us Herminie de la Bassemoûturie, a true narrative of a life of suffering and humiliation, borne with a courage so heroic and supernatural that one’s heart kindles at it. Margaret is going away, perhaps to-morrow. On the 30th Heaven sent Lucy a dear little daughter, who was baptized yesterday without any pomp. Gertrude was godmother, and the godfather is a brother of my pretty sister’s. They have called this little daughter of Brittany Anne—a good name.

Dec. 6.—I have just returned from accompanying our friends as far as to D——. Emmanuel continued to send me kisses while the carriage went slowly away.... Dear Margaret! how much I regret her. Everybody loves her, wherever she goes. Now we are alone.... Johanna, Paul, and their children leave us this evening to spend some months at Paris. I never tell you about Arthur and Edward, whose vacation is over, and who are very good friends together. The abbé remains with us, that we may not be deprived of daily Mass. From henceforth follow me in thought into the great drawing-room, once so bright with the dear young creatures whom I so loved, and there you will see, in her large easy-chair, my mother, whom grief has aged, with your Georgina on a low chair at her feet. Gertrude, with needlework in her hands, occupies the other side of the fire-place, Berthe is near her, then Adrien, René, Raoul, Edouard, and the abbé round the table, near which is seated also the charming Lucy.

But a ray from on high pierces the sombre veils: our dear ones see God; they contemplate him in eternal ecstasy. I had bought at Orleans a poetic little picture—a lily broken on earth, which flowered again in heaven—and underneath it a verse of the beautiful lines by Mlle. Fleuriot on the death of Alix. How this lily recalls Picciola to my mind! René is working at a miniature which he intends to give to Berthe: in the foreground the twins are embracing a poor old man; in the distance are two lilies on a tomb and two doves taking flight. I am continuing the History of the Popes; it will be for Marguerite and Alix.

How I wish you were here! My heart aches for Berthe, formerly so happy, and so lonely now. Ah! what burning tears are those that spring from the hearts of mothers when God takes back from them the precious ones lent them for a day. O remediless grief, deep void, unfathomable abyss!

Yes, we shall remain in Brittany. The noise of the festivities of this world would be to us a martyrdom; but I am athirst for my Kate, and it seems as if I shall be stronger when her gentle hand has laid balm upon my wounds. René and I will be in Paris on the 23d for a few days.

Mistress Annah shed many tears at the moment of leave-taking. Margaret was pale and greatly moved; why should there be any separations, sister? Ah! doubtless because earth would be too delightful. May God be always with you!

December 12, 1869.

Do you know that Overbeck is dead? Edith MacMoor sends me long and interesting details from Rome. Edith has taken up her abode in the city which is the fatherland of Catholics, and her old sympathy with me, she says, has reawakened before the Sibyls. Dear, ardent soul, always so amiable! O our artist, so beloved, so admired! The world is no more anything to me but a Campo Santo.

Have you heard of the Pearl of Antioch? I am reading this Christian romance with René.

On the 8th we observed as a special festival the opening of the great sittings of this Council which will crown with a new glory the reign of Pius IX. Our life is quite monastic: no more joyous laughter rings along the corridors; silence—the “first power in the world,” as the Père Lacordaire called it—dwells with us. We are in mourning for our beloved children, and these dark dresses are of a solemn sadness which strikes our visitors. Every day, no matter what the weather may be, René accompanies me to the cemetery. In spite of the cold, there are flowers, and this marble is almost joyous. The Revue gives an interesting story—“Laurence,” an account of a young girl who wished to die because her sister, on whom she lavished all her love, had departed to heaven. I do not think that Thérèse wished for death, but think rather that Picciola asked of God that she might share her felicity.

Lucy is well, and thanks you for your sisterly prayers. We are expecting news from Margaret and Marcella. Mary and Ellen write regularly to Berthe and to me. Good and kind hearts, full of gentleness and affection!

Kate dearest, what do you say to my idea?—the adoption of these children would console my sister. Would it be well to propose it to her?

I find René changed. Pray for us.

December 15, 1869.

Margaret sends me her Journal since the departure, every line of which is redolent of poetry and affection. Emmanuel is hourly asking for us. Marcella sends me pages bathed with tears: “Why did you allow me to go away, dear and generous friend? I feel that your soul would have taken refuge with mine in these sad days.”

Kate, what, then, is happiness, since it lasts so short a time?

Marcella is going to spend the winter at Rome; Anna continues to grow both taller and stronger, “but the departure of her friends makes her wish for heaven, and everything gives me the presentiment that in a few years my beloved one will enter a convent. You will scold me for thinking this so long beforehand, but you will agree with me that her piety is beyond what is ordinary. I have so unlearnt happiness that I live always in uncertainty.” A friend of Adrien’s tells him of the reception given at Naples to the happy family party: Mme. de V—— is allied to the Princess of X——. How fair a future has opened before my friend! “To return to Rome, where so many of my memories linger, was my earnest desire; blessed be God, who permits it to be realized!”

René is writing to you. Good-by for to-day, dearest sister!

December 18, 1869.

Read an admirable pastoral letter by Mgr. Berthaud. “It is a fountain of living water, a springing fountain,” writes Louis Veuillot, who has the happiness to be in Rome.

Berthe yields to the entreaties of her mother, who begs her to go to her in her old castle on the banks of the Rhine. Lucy is going away at the same time to show her sisters the beautiful little Anna, her rosebud. I look forward with fear to the feeling of solitude which will seize upon us after they are gone. O my God! these will all return, but thou keepest thine angels.

The happy Karl sends the most fraternal letters that he has ever yet addressed to me. He is now in retreat, almost ready to mount the steps of the altar and accomplish Ellen’s last desire. “I am never lonely,” he writes. What ardor consumes him! How he burns to shed his blood for Christ! “My whole soul springs forth towards those disinherited souls who know not God! If you still take an interest in your unworthy brother, wish for him crosses, trials, sorrows, and persecutions. But I am not worthy to participate in the Passion of my Redeemer, and it may be that my cross may be the burden of a useless life.” Saintly friend! noble heart! His director, who is a relative of our good abbé, never wearies in his praises of Karl. According to all probability, he will set out for Marseilles the day after his ordination, where the first ship that sails will take him on board. What am I, my God, by the side of this brother left me by Ellen?

I am coming to see you, dear Kate, to refresh myself with you—a too rapid apparition, too fleeting a happiness, and one in which I scarcely can believe.

December 22, 1869.

Dear Kate, this sacrifice must also be made. Yesterday a frightful accident threw us all into the greatest agitation. My mother’s horses ran away. The footman, losing all presence of mind with terror, leaped down and was killed by the fall. He was taken up quite mutilated.... Horrible! horrible! My mother has fever; we remain. The unfortunate Antoine will be buried to-morrow morning. He leaves three children. He was an excellent Christian, and was preparing to make his Christmas communion.... I am writing to Karl, and at the same time to the venerable superior to obtain permission for our friend to give us one or two days previous to quitting France and Europe.

My mother was coming back from the town, whither we had all gone to take those of our party who were leaving. René and I were to have taken our departure this evening. All in this world is nothingness, except the pure and holy love of God. I had so set my mind on this journey that I can only give it up by doing violence to my heart. But if the shock my mother has undergone should bring on an illness, I should never forgive myself for having gone away.

Pray, dear Kate!

December 25, 1869.

My mother is better, dear sister, although the doctor condemns her still to repose. The good curé is very unwell, and, since my mother would not have been able to attend the midnight Mass, the abbé offered to say it at the parish church. Ah! if the twins had been here. We left the house at ten. What a night! What impressions! In a clear and calm night, with the sky spangled with thousands of stars, to go through hedge-bordered paths to this old Breton church, so vast and so full; the singing, the sounds of the organ played by René, the Gloria in Excelsis, so sweet and grand, the numerous communions, the dimly-lighted sanctuary—all these things had about them an indescribable old-world poetry, a certain interior and heavenly charm, which made me ask if we were not at Bethlehem, and if we were not suddenly about to behold with our bodily eyes, like the shepherds, the adorable new-born Saviour in the manger. “The Cedar of Lebanon is gone forth from the hyssop in our valley.” Lord Jesus, grant thy blessing upon France!

It is two years to-day since Ellen entered into glory. With what ecstasy she must behold Karl at the altar! Dear Kate, I know not what atmosphere is surrounding me, but it seems to me that every sorrow brings me nearer to God.

My mother was visibly affected on reading your kind lines; how she loves us! Gertrude is more saintly than ever; her self-denial is increasing. She has owned to me that she never loses the presence of God. We five form a severe group, in which the highest questions are discussed. Gertrude is on fire when she speaks of charity. There is no sort of mortification in which she does not take delight; how I startled her yesterday by coming suddenly upon her as she was exchanging her shoes for those of a beggar! She fasted on bread and water the three last days of Advent, and has asked me if I would go with her barefoot to the crucifix on the mountain, the path to which is covered with brambles. You see she is a worthy imitator of the Acta Sanctorum.

A Dieu, best beloved!

December 28, 1869.

Karl arrives on the 31st. Dear Kate, his letter showed me heaven. Good news of everybody, and my mother is in the drawing-room. So the year is about to end—this year, so eventful, and so plentiful in tears! O my God! how many loving looks follow me no more. In my meditation this morning I asked myself whether I am yet submissive and resigned. Alas! I truly wish whatever God wills, but I am weak.

Just now two little birds came and perched on my window, fluttering as if wanting to come in. I opened it gently and crumbled a cake for them, and the pretty little hungry creatures pecked up the crumbs gladly. Then they flew away, and I began to think of the two sweet birds which, almost before we were aware, have flown away also. I was so proud of this beautiful family, so happy to belong to it! Oh! you know well, Kate, that it is above all for the sake of the poor father, the sorrowing mother, that I regret these two attractive creatures! Raoul writes that Berthe is more calm, and he thinks she will remain some time where she is. What an image of death is this silence and the solitude that now surrounds us! I work hard, take long walks, teach two little boys their catechism, and yet, in spite of everything, as soon as René is no longer there, as soon as I recall the past, my heart is ready to break.

“Take care, my dear daughter,” my mother says to me. “Strengthen your soul; throw yourself upon God.” And Gertrude: “The thought of God softens everything. He has permitted it—let us submit; let us live in heaven.”

Would that we could go thither together, dear sister!

Accept all my best wishes for the New Year—wishes for every day and every hour, for your earthly and eternal happiness.

January 5, 1870.

Dear Kate, how good God is! This is the cry of my heart, crushed beneath the weight of its gratitude. Karl has been our Good Samaritan. If Berthe and Raoul could only hear him! What unction in his words!

He made his appearance like the angel of Providence amongst us. It was in the evening. René had gone to wait for him; we had heard no noise, when the door opened.... It was he! There was a moment of emotion and tears, and when he consented to bless us, and I saw him in the light, I understood the words of Gertrude: “He has found true happiness.” Then his Mass the next day, the Communion, and Thanksgiving said aloud, the chanting of the Magnificat and of the Lætatus—it was heaven. This impression still remains; thanks to a concurrence of circumstances in which I perceive the intervention of our good angels, the newly elect of the priesthood remains with us until the 20th—an unhoped-for and most precious favor. Alas! shall we see him again?

He has given me a little book which he had kept by permission of his superior; you are aware that this generous Karl despoiled himself of everything before giving himself also to God. This Basket of Eucharistic Flowers is full of sweetness to my heart. I find in it some verses on Picciola—not mine, but the flower—and the heavenly utterances of the pious Marie Jenna, my favorite poetess. Listen to this:

“Oui, cette vie en larmes est féconde;
J’ai peu vécu, j’ai déjà bien souffert.
Mon Dieu, j’ai soif, et les routes du monde
Ne me sont rien qu’une aride désert.
Mais à tes pieds mon âme se repose.
O tendre Ami, Divin Consolateur,
Qu’importe à moi de perdre toute chose,
Si je te garde, amour de mon Sauveur!”[33]

And this cry of the soul:

“Jesus, pour seul bonheur, ah! donnez-moi des larmes

Que vous consolerez.”[34]

January 10, 1870.

Karl has spoken to me much of you, dear sister. He wishes that his last sculpture in Europe should be for our chapel: René and his brothers have for some time past been working at a pulpit; the principal figure will be our missionary’s work. He has consented to let me prepare his baggage. Kate, I was complaining of our solitude, and now it has become sweet to me, because I love God more. Oh! what a blessing to the soul it is to love.

I am slipping these few words in with René’s, and send you a thousand loving messages.

January 14, 1870.

Impossible not to give you the history of our day, although it is very late. I wished to go to Auray with Karl, and my mother felt strong enough to go with us. On the way we met with a German, poor as Job, a true disciple of Luther, his Bible in his hand. His gentle and melancholy air interested us. We entered into conversation with him, Karl preached to him, he came with us to Auray, and when we came out of the church he told us that his mother was a Catholic, that the sight of our fervor had touched him, etc., etc. In short, we brought him back with us to the château, and Karl is going to catechise him and finish his conversion. You see the good Saint Anne has indeed had a hand in this. Is it not a charming episode?

15th.—Letters: 1st, Margaret, who sends you her heartful of good wishes; 2d, Marcella, with the chronicle of the Council and the account of an audience with the Holy Father; 3d, Lizzy, who wants to make me admire her Daniel; 4th, Lucy, who is impatient to come back, because her pretty Anne cannot be happy without us, says our amiable sister; 5th, my Kate. I mention all in chronological order; you know very well that you are first in order of affection. But how short it is, dearest! Tell me soon the reason of this brevity; you must have so much to say!

A Dieu, my dearest Kate. All and each of the happy inhabitants of my Brittany offer you their homage and respect.

January 19, 1870.

Well, dearest, he leaves us to-morrow—this friend, this good brother and generous priest. Our German is converted, but for reasons of prudence the baptism is deferred. The worthy man does not wish to quit us, and does his utmost to render himself useful. He is passionately fond of music, and teaches it to our pastors, who in return strengthen him (as he says) in the catechism. How sadly we shall miss Karl! But then, souls, souls! Ah! I would not keep him back, even if I could.

I have had a strange dream. I was with you in your cell. You seemed to be asleep; I spoke to you, but you did not answer me. I went to kiss you, and in this kiss I felt so strange a thrill, as if your beautiful face had been of marble, that I woke, crying out in a manner which alarmed René. It is in vain that I say to myself again and again that it is but a dream; the impression remains—a profound terror, and an anguish which oppresses my heart. Write to me; reassure me, dear Kate. I have lost faith in happiness. What am I saying? So long as I belong to God, and nothing can separate me from him, shall I not have the only happiness worthy of the name?

Karl promises to write to us. He is going to China, that literary country, where barbarism and civilization are so strangely mingled. My mother, the Adriens, and we are putting together our savings to give them to the dear missionary, that with them he may have more facilities in his work of gaining souls. How I bless fortune on these occasions!

A thousand lovingnesses, dear sister—the dearest of sisters.

January 26, 1870.

We accompanied Karl to his ship, which I visited, and which we saw start on her voyage. Thus he is now between sea and sky, exposed to tempests. Oh! “how beautiful are the feet of those” who have left all—family, friends, country, repose, comforts, enjoyments—to go in search of the lost sheep. It seems to me that the angels of faith and love must spread their wings over the vessel and keep far away all contrary winds.... We seem as if impregnated with sanctity. Grief is a powerful lever to raise one to God and to transform souls!

You do not write. René is uneasy and tries in vain to conceal his anxiety from me. Did you receive his letter of the 24th? Dear Kate, if you are ill, send one word and we will hasten to you. O my God! Ill! You! Could it be possible? That terrible dream is always before my eyes. You will scold me, dearest.... Remember that for some months past I have suffered so much that even the thought of a misfortune overwhelms me.

Oh! may God guard you, darling Kate, my sister, my soul. Take care of yourself for the love of me.

My mother entreats you to write; she suffers on account of my anxiety. My God! grant that that may have been only a dream.

January 29, 1870.

Still nothing; perhaps your letter is lost.... May God protect you! The Univers pleases me. Mgr. Berthaud has had a triumph at Sant’ Andrea della Valle—the dear church where we have prayed. “His imagery is rich and abundant,” writes Louis Veuillot, “because his faith keeps alive in him a perpetual enthusiasm for the works, the mercies, and the love of God. His thoughts are an endless song. What he says he sees; what he sees he admires and adores. External things, enveloped and, as it were, transpierced by the rays of the divine Sun, appear to him as magnificent as he describes them to be. Things are the works of God; men are the children of God, divinities in flower, called by their adoption to the ineffable glory of the divine union. As soon as they are in their way, their vocation, their order, their accidental defects are effaced; there is no more ugliness, there are no more rags, no more miseries—all is already transfigured, already at the attainment of its end, and the lyre, vibrating to the touch of a sacred enthusiasm, gives forth sounds at once vehement and sublime.”

What eulogy! What style!

Mgr. Mermillod made a magnificent discourse at Saint Louis des Français, on the perpetuation in the church of the Gospel scene of the Magi. “The action of God in the world, the redemption of souls, the perpetuity and definition of the truth, all repose upon these three great weaknesses: a Child at Bethlehem, a Host in the tabernacle, an aged man at the Vatican.”

Kate dearest, I admire, but nothing dispels my preoccupation, the dominant note of my thoughts—you! yourself! Why this silence? I must know it! Write to me; I am suffering....

January 31, 1870.

It is here, on my writing-table, this white page on which you have traced but one word.... “It was not a dream!” We start at once; this note will precede us by a few hours. Oh! live for me, my beloved sister; ask God to cure you.

My God, I have so often prayed thee to preserve her to me—to let her live as long as I!

JOURNAL OF GEORGINA AFTER HER SISTER’S DEATH.

February 15, 1870.

O amare! O perire tibi!

O advenire ad Deum!

Still would I write to you, beloved sister who have left me! Oh! can this be possible? You, my Guardian Angel! It is in heaven that I now look for you, that I now behold you—in heaven, your true home—in heaven, where you have found again our mother. O my God! my God! Always shall I remember this last journey, of which you were the object; the anguish on the way, the haste to arrive, the chill that fell on my heart at the gate of the convent. Oh! you knew that I could not bear to see you suffer; and then, perhaps, you might think you would recover, for I cannot believe that you desired to die.... Ah! to see you dying; to embrace you, watch by you, hear the last effusions of that tenderness to which my mother had bequeathed me; to see this flame, which was my life, die out, and yet not die myself—Kate, Kate, I can think only, speak only, of you!

I have been very ill. I feel weak, very weak—almost discouraged to live. Tell me that you are not gone away; soul of my sister, speak to my soul! Oh! how it seems to me as if I had lost everything. You it was who gave so great an interest to my life, animating everything with your affection. And now....

February 28.

Dear Kate, obtain strength for me. I desire to live for René. Why did you not stay with us, my beloved? I have bitter regrets.... I should have wished to nurse you, to keep you here. O foolishness of love! what right have I to wish to keep you from your own country? Dear sister, the correspondence which was my daily delight must not end: I will write my journal for you. God, who is so good, even when he separates two hearts which were one, could not refuse anything to his elect. Ask him, then, my sister, that you may every day come to me, if even only for an instant. Oh! would that I could see you. It seems to me that with you all died; that nothing more will ever in this world smile on me, that the eternal mourning of my soul can never more be comforted. Our friends write to me. Margaret and Marcella weep with me. My mother, Adrien, Gertrude, and René are full of unspeakable tenderness and solicitude towards me; and yet I have scarcely any response to make them but my tears. All is night around me: the Sun has set.

Oh! speak to me, Kate—only one word, one vibration of your dear voice, one of your smiles. Is it true, my God, that for twenty-five days past this face so dearly loved has been covered with a shroud?

Is it true? Has death indeed come between us? Had we not enough of absence and of separation, that other mourning of the soul? I still hear her last word.... Oh! who will give me back my past joys, fled away, and the affection which enfolded all?

Adrien is reading me the Beatitudes, by Mgr. Landriot. There are some admirable conferences on the divine words, Beati qui lugent. “There are,” says the Père Lacordaire, “tears in all the universe; and they are so natural to us that even if they had no cause, they would flow without cause, solely from the charm of that ineffable sadness of which our soul is the deep and mysterious well.” Again: “Melancholy is the great queen of highly sensitive souls; she touches them without their knowing how or why, in a secret and unexpected moment. The ray of light which gladdens others brings veils to them; the festive rejoicing which moves and delights others pierces them with an arrow. It is with much difficulty that God and our Lord can scatter from the heart which loves them these vain and chilling clouds; the suffering is so much the more difficult to vanquish from having a less real cause.”

Oh! the cause of my sorrow, can I forget it? Kate, obtain strength for me. How truly I feel you present!

March 5.

We are come back to Brittany. They say that I have become a mere shadow. Kate dearest, I wish to be courageous, but my poor human nature gives way on this Calvary. O my memories! They are a golden book in which I read every hour, in which every leaflet recalls my other self, her devotedness and love. Your papers have been given to me—the private pages which God alone has read with me. How you have loved me! Dearest, I weep no more, except over myself. You were hungering for heaven, as were Mad and Thérèse, Ellen and Edith. Oh! gone—you also, you my guardian angel!

I wanted to write, to relieve myself a little; my heart swelled, and I could do nothing but sob. I have fearful moments. Oh! speak to me, Kate. Last night I seemed to witness your death again. Oh! those eyes, those eyes which I almost worshipped—I had to close them. Kate, what is happiness? Mine has fled away like a cloud, and I seek after it in vain.

I know that you are happy, and yet my selfishness grieves. Pray for your Georgina!

March 8.

Strange blindness of heart! You were to me so sweet, so infinitely precious, that the thought of an adieu without ever meeting here again had never occurred to me.

You were six years old when you imprinted your first kiss on the brow of your Georgina. Our most distant memories show me your beloved image. You never left me; the sight of you was a talisman that stopped my tears; your voice taught me my first baby-words. Oh! this union of ours from the very cradle was my mother’s pride—this mother, so beloved and so beautiful, who saw herself over again in you. You did not know that you were fair; you early disdained earthly frivolities; and how much it must have cost you, later, to remain in the world for me!

Everywhere you were surrounded by sympathy and respect; your sisterly devotion made you an aureole. Kate, who was like you?

Tell me that you hear me, that you see me every day. How shall I live without you? A great void has been made in me; my heart is like a desert. Ah! I loved you too well, and our God is a jealous God.

I adore his will, and, in spite of my inexpressible desolation, I kiss his divine hand beneath the blow which overwhelms me. I desire to become truly your sister by sacrifice and love.

Help me! I know not how to climb up Calvary!

March 10.

No, I cannot believe that it is at an end; that I have no more a sister. At times I believe myself to be under the influence of a nightmare. My black dress—this sombre vestment which made me afraid—is become dear to me since I wear it for you; but ... what faintings of heart! In what an ocean of grief my soul is plunged!

To-day I wished to go out and visit my poor; my strength failed. Kate, sorrow is killing me.

March 12.

An unexpected consolation—a visit from the Père de G—-. His touching, penetrating words roused me. Pardon me, Kate! I was cowardly. God forbids not tears, but he forbids despair. Alas! formerly I comforted others, and now I am unwilling to accept any solace in my trouble; I wish for no truce to my regret. Oh! be happy, soul of my sister. Obtain for me grace to love much, more than ever, all who suffer, all the elect of misfortune. The gentle Abbé Perreyve used to say: “The greater part of souls would remain closed to other souls, if they had not suffered; trial bruises them, and compels them to shed around them floods of love.”

I loved them already—these dear poor of the good God! But I feel that my time belongs to them, that I owe myself also to those who love me, and that it remains to me to pray and suffer while I love.

Help me, dear Kate, help me!

March 15.

How kind René is, dear Kate, and how fraternal! He understands my wish to write to you still, to continue my life so violently cut in twain, and unceasingly to speak to you. I am stronger, but not yet resigned. Can one be resigned to such a loss?

I saw yesterday a young girl whom Gertrude knows, and who has opened her heart to me as to a friend. With what ardor of desire she dreams of the religious life! God permits her to be cruelly tried: her mother is utterly opposed to her departure. There are several other sisters, one of whom shares the aspirations of my new acquaintance. How they both suffer! Would that a heavenly light might illuminate the heart of their mother, who little comprehends the martyrdom of her children! How everything is at cross-purposes in this poor world! People are saddened by things at which they ought to rejoice, and vice versâ. Mothers, who have had experience of the cares and pains of marriage and the world—mothers, who know too well the sum of happiness that may be expected from even the best-assorted unions—make themselves miserable at the mere thought of their daughters’ union with God, as if he were not the Supreme Good, the Spouse par excellence, the faithful Friend, the plenitude of every virtue and of love! Ah! it is because everything in this world has its shades and its defects, and because few souls know truly how to love.

Thus is it that there is a mixture and alloy in my affection for you when I weep for you so bitterly, dear sister of my life!

Nothing can separate our souls. I am yours in life and death!

March 18.

Berthe’s brother has just sunk under a malignant fever. The poor widow is ill of grief. Three such beautiful children, whom he loved so much—so many powerful bonds which bound him to this world so suddenly broken—all this makes the grief immense. Gertrude said to me: “Why, then, are those mourned for who enter the port—those who go hence to rest in God? They only who remain behind are really to be pitied.” Ah! what deadly affliction must not our friend feel, widowed of her happiness, which nothing can restore to her—nothing, until that hour when, delivered in her turn from this life sown with crosses, she too shall see God, and, with God, him whom she weeps!

Kate, would that I could see you and embrace you again as in that last hour! Everywhere death, everywhere mourning!

March 21.

Count de Montalembert died on the 13th of March. It is a great funereal date. May God receive him into his glory! I was just now hearing some beautiful pages by Alfred Nettement, dead also the 14th of November—dead in the breach, in those combats of pen and thought so worthy of admiration and of enthusiasm when their object is the defence of the church. Our dear M. de Riancey is also dead, faithful, to his last moment, to this proscribed monarchy, which sees its best defenders falling one by one. O my God! what losses. Kate, if I could forget you for a single instant, would not these deaths lead me back to the thought of you?

Adrien has given me The Book of All who Suffer, by M. Gautier. How well this good brother was inspired!

Marcella, Margaret, Lizzy, Isa, and so many other kind hearts write to me frequently, but nothing can replace my Kate!

April 1.

Dear sister, I have suffered fearful pains for ten days past. My good René has been to me like a Sister of Charity. I am like Thérèse, I cannot live without my other self. Oh! to see you, to hear you, to kneel by you, and kiss your beloved hands.

Until now I did not know what separation meant. I remember with a sort of remorse how joyous my first letters were after that first farewell which was to be so soon followed by a farewell that seems eternal. I saw you as having attained the object of your dreams. I entered with glad heart into this new life where all was golden. Kate, I am ungrateful! God has permitted me to know no other troubles than those which should not be such to the Christian—death, the beginning of true life for those who love God. Help me, that I may be strong; my sadness clouds so many brows!

April 8.

Nelly, who flattered herself that she would recover, has bid adieu to this poor world, in which she suffered so terribly, although possessing numerous certainties of happiness, if it be true that anything can be certain here below, even when one is only twenty years old.

My new young friend visits me often; her fervent piety and the ardor of her desires find an echo in my heart. You were thus, O sister of my soul! at her age, in that spring-time of life thrice happy and thrice blessed when one belongs to God.

April 15.

The Duchess de Berry died on the 10th, at her castle in Upper Styria, far from Naples, far from France, far from her son. Yet another grand figure disappeared! Kate, do you remember our presentation to this heroine? But she is now with you, in the true fatherland of souls, far from agitations and sufferings. Call us, call us, all together—all our corner of Brittany; I, too, am athirst for heaven.

What a day was this Good Friday! Made four times the Way of the Cross for the souls in purgatory. Is there any possibility that you are in that place of expiation, dear Kate? Oh! tell me, or rather assure me, that you are in heaven. Gaston yesterday asked his mother to show him Mme. Kate up in the sky; he believes that you have become a star. Charming belief!

April 16.

A year ago, and I was full of joy and hope. O my happy days with my sister! you have for ever fled away.

April 17.

God be praised! I saw you this morning.... Oh! do not let me be told that it is a dream. I saw you, dear Kate; your beautiful hair falling over your shoulders, and you were smiling. Happiness enough for one whole day!

Christ is risen! The weather is splendid; we are in the full bloom of spring; bright sunshine, songs of birds, verdure everywhere; joy in our souls. Kate, I weep no more; you are in heaven!

April 19.

Walk with Amélie, the future religieuse of whom I spoke to you. She relieves herself a little to me of some of the desolation that fills her heart. She is not allowed to depart, and yet the delay requested is expired. Her grief makes my heart ache, and I would that it were given me to smooth for her the way to the cloister. For that I should be obliged to go out, to visit the mother; and as soon as I see any one I burst into tears. Do you blame me for the fidelity of my regrets? In listening to Amélie I understand what you must have undergone when once the Lord’s choice was clearly manifested. Pardon me for having wished still to hold you back!

Gertrude, our saint par excellence, speaks admirably of heaven. Lucy weeps with me, and makes her pretty Anne wipe away my tears. Kate, will you read this?

April 26.

Minds are much occupied respecting the plébiscite. My politics are not of this world; I hear what others say, and that is all. Sister, what is earth? I fear and pity it.

Berthe is at Paris, somewhat preoccupied by present agitations. My poor soul passes through the most varying states: nameless anguish, indescribable discouragement, sweet and pure joys; one thing comes as a repose to the other, and life slips away.... Amélie came to me yesterday; she talked long of her crosses, glad to be understood, compassionated, and loved; she would willingly have remained with us for the night. Her home, where she was formerly so happy, appears to her now an insupportable place of abode, and her life, with all its struggles and contradictions, is a real martyrdom.

I read her, from the Pilgrimages of Switzerland, a beautiful page on Christian resignation. Oh! how I would wish to console others—I, who cannot be consoled, alas!

April 30.

Kate, I have been dreaming of you. Why did you go away so soon, sweet sister, so beloved?

A cousin of Amélie’s died the day before yesterday, after two years of marriage. See how short a time human felicity lasts! Every terrestrial happiness reunited on this charming head for so short a time! Her poor mother had buried all her other treasures one by one, and concentrated her affections and her hopes on this idolized daughter, the only one spared to her, and who was to be stricken down after two years of so happy a union! Were these two souls truly religious? I know not. Ah! who will comfort the mother, if God is not her comforter? Alas! these rapid destinies, these human fragilities, these futures broken, these deaths, this mourning—will they not open the eyes of those who persist in not seeing? Amélie is always breathlessly eager to attain her object, and distressed at the hindrances which hold her back. How pitiful that difficulties so contemptible and vulgar should be raised in order to turn aside the flight of this poor soul from the heavenly Bridegroom! I can only conceive a mother with an absolute devotion, a complete self-forgetfulness, a perpetual sursum corda. But these miserable obstacles, these calculated delays, to enchain this dear Amélie in spite of her tears and ardent longings—how they make me suffer! It appears that for three years she has been soliciting her mother’s consent. My God, where are the hearts which see but thee in all things? Mme. de Vals[35] is overwhelmed by this catastrophe. All the family is in a state that breaks one’s heart. Oh! if these distressing scenes had only shown Mme. de Vals the vanity of earthly illusions; if she had only understood that we must cling to God above all!

Kate, my sister in heaven, pray for this friend of your Georgina, and pray also for me, who cannot live without my sister!

May 5.

The month of flowers, the month of songs, the month of the ever-blessed Virgin, comes to me with bright memories. My own Ireland, mother, sister, where are you? What cowardice is mine!

Brittany is smiling, rosy under a beautiful sun; the sea is calm and magnificent. I have just been leaning over my balcony and looking long at this grand spectacle: the blue sky, the green sea, in the grand and majestic silence of immensity. Was there not a Christian meaning in the words of the philosopher of antiquity who said: “God does all in silence”? How fine is this expression!

Dear Kate, bless me! I go out, move about, wish to be useful; I work with Gertrude, with my mother, with René. But I drag heavily the cross of your absence. I complain to God without ceasing. Love makes everything sweet and light: I have, then, no love?

From this month of May will date for your Georgina the adoption of a prayer, sweet among all others—the Office of the Blessed Virgin. Oh! these psalms, these hymns, these harmonious supplications—how sweet they are to my poor soul! I love especially the Lætatus. Lucy and René sing it with an expression which charms me. You, dearest Kate, have entered there, into the house of the Lord!

May 12.

I am reading the Interior of Jesus and Mary, by the Père Grou, the Conferences of Père de Ravignan, and our dear Review. The letters on the Council interest me particularly. I try to imagine that I am reading them with you; that your dear head is resting on my shoulder.... Oh! the fair and happy times which return to my memory. We so loved the Chansons de Gestes, those pretty French ballads which my mother translated with so peculiar a charm! M. Léon Gautier has published a thoughtful and exquisite study on France under Philip Augustus; he brings on the scene the fair Aude, the fiancée of Roland, who died on hearing of the death of her Paladin—I can understand love like this!—and the charming little Aelis, and Sibylle de Lusignan, and the Duchess Parise, and Aye d’Avignon, and the courageous Ameline, and Berthe, the wife of Duke Girart, and Guiboure, that magnificent type of the Christian woman! Do you remember, sister, Count Robert of Flanders refusing a crown because he was in haste to see his son again? the little Garnier nursing his father, stricken with leprosy? the mother of the sons of Aimon—Belissende and Heustace? How we had learnt to love those middle ages!

Pray for Amélie, dear Kate; she is so unhappy! O inestimable favor, priceless benefit, incomparable fidelity of the religious vocation! how little are you understood in this world.

It seems as if I heard you saying to me: Speranza! Pazienza! Coraggio!

May 16.

My soul is fallen again into an abyss of desolation. It is strange, and at the same time painful, these struggles between myself and myself; between nature which revolts and grace which submits. On this day four years ago where were we? Kate, help me!

May 28.

I have been travelling a little, and my moments have all been employed. René wants to give me change and distraction; but I cannot drag my thoughts away from these images of death. Hélène has written me a letter, saintly and sweet. Alas! who does not suffer here below?

June 5.

I have just quitted Amélie, who is keeping her room from indisposition. Her mother is kind, I believe, but how severe in aspect! Berthe and Raoul arrived yesterday. Kate, I dreaded this meeting again, our hearts were all so sad! Berthe is more tranquil than I had expected; she has seen Mary and Ellen, the dear exiles! who showed her that they greatly desire to see us. Inspire me, dear Kate. Lucy is going away again; the house without children is like a heaven without angels. Johanna will not return for two months.

June 12.

René would like to bring the two orphans himself. My mother approves. They will occupy the apartments of the twins. Kate, who will replace you?

More funereal letters: two friends of our dear ones who have flown away have also been summoned to their Father’s house. Happy souls! if they were prepared; but poor mothers whose joy they were!

June 17.

Dear Kate, I thought I saw you yesterday evening.... A young and amiable religious, collecting for her poor, caused me a thrill. I calmed myself and conversed with her. Her life is admirable. But what emotion afterwards, and poignant grief!

Sister dearest, let me hope that you read these lines; that there exists a means of communication between heaven and earth; that you have not wholly quitted me! It was so sweet to write to you, to confide everything to you. I should like to write your life; to relate to myself the story of our childhood—that golden morn when so many smiles and joys surrounded us; but these souvenirs are so distressing!

June 24.

Mary and Ellen are sleeping beneath those curtains of gauze which I have so often parted.

They are grown, and prettier than ever. With what grace they presented themselves yesterday! And already I am anxious; have they not been taken sufficient care of? I know not, but their almost constant cough oppresses me like a remorse; and to replace their mother....

June 29.

Berthe loves our orphans, who rarely quit her. Gertrude draws me with her in her walks, in her life of devotedness and labor, and I let it be so. I am no more myself; my better part is wanting. Oh! you were my strength, my counsel, my happiness.

Feast of SS. Peter and Paul—a glad festival for the Christian. Louis Veuillot, who has the happiness of being at Rome, writes there charming, sublime incomparable pages; he counted on the desired dogma being proclaimed to-day, but all is not so easy, even in the things of God. Anniversary of the death of Albert.

July 1.

Mary and Ellen are very attractive. Decidedly we shall keep them with us. Berthe sees in them a resemblance to her doves; my mother likes their smiles for the poor, for flowers, for every living thing, their precocious reason, and their already remarkable piety. Lucy is gone. What voids! and how different to '67, the happy year, at least during its first months! Trial, you used to tell me, is a grace; that those favored with the good things of this world ought to expiate their enjoyments. Kate, I submit!

July 4.

The letters of Marcella and Margaret are frequent. My friend beyond seas speaks of returning soon; she knows what a balm the sight, the beloved sight, of her brings. Marcella quits Naples and its blue sky no more; Anna writes to me of her joys, without suspecting what a price the health of which she is so proud cost us.

The abbé takes in the Univers, rendered so attractive by the truly magic pen of the author of the Parfum de Rome. Finished La Marquise de Montagu, an interesting book, the style of a great lady of the seventeenth century. Reading is worth less than prayer, but both ameliorate exile.

René is carving an altar for the parish church. He and Adrien are making curious studies in the precious MSS. of the Saint of the Sea-shore. What splendid gifts God has bestowed upon this friend of my soul!

July 8.

The pious and learned editor of Eugénie de Guérin, who also revealed to the world the treasures of Cayla—M. Trebutien—is just dead. René assures us that Eugénie must have opened to him the gate of Eden. Oh! I love to believe this. Amélie is at the height of her wishes: her mother has suffered herself to be vanquished by our united entreaties, and her entry into Carmel is fixed for the 6th of August. Another separation. God wills it thus.

July 14.

Marie Jenna, the sweet poetess, has written some noble pages on the regretted M. Trebutien. “It is the hand of a friend still trembling with emotion that has written this”; it is the first cry of affection and of grief, but of pure and holy affection, and of grief resigned and Christian in the highest acceptation of the word. “If this were a learned man, an antiquary, an artist, above all he was a soul—a soul, that masterpiece of God, that thing so fair that he himself delights in it, that he has profoundly loved, even when, having lost the attraction of innocence, she had no other attraction than misfortune. He was an ardent Catholic, he prayed, he loved God. He, who so hungered after justice, love, and beauty, could not but love God! The gifts of the understanding exercised over him an irresistible magic; but if he lived by intelligence, he lived still more by the heart. His friendship was full of strength and tenderness; he gave himself without measure.”

Ah! dearest Kate, I forget that you are no longer here. Ellen is extremely sympathetic towards me; she listens to me, speaking of you, for hours together. This morning, after a long account, in which her mother’s name and yours recurred a hundred times, she said to me with feeling: “I am going to pray God to put me soon where they are.”

O Blessed Virgin! may she stay with us.

July 18.

Arthur is ill. Johanna writes agitated and sorrowful pages. My saintly Kate, pray for us!

The rumors of war which have for some days been circulating are taking consistency. What is about to become of this poor country? Will the hour of vengeance strike, or will mercy again carry the day? Epidemic maladies and drought have already spread desolation everywhere.

Kate, I would fain penetrate into the future. O folly! What would it be, when I cannot even support my present grief?

René has had three attacks of fever. O this dear invalid, this son of liberty and space, restless as a lion! in repose. Dear, good friend! Come, then, and see him, dear Kate, when three times a day he attends to an unfortunate child whose wounds horrify everybody. “The hand of M. René passes over my sores like the wing of an angel!” What charming praise, and especially in Breton, in the mouth of this frightful little lad, who is distressed at his own ugliness! Gertrude is teaching him the catechism; Mary and Ellen prepare his meals with their little white hands. Ellen has lovely eyes of sea-blue, very dark.

July 24.

The Univers of Wednesday, the 20th, is splendid: “The Infallibility is proclaimed! Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia! The times are hard; war, pestilence, famine; but the year 1870 will be none the less immortal. This will be called the Century of Pius IX., the Pope of the Immaculate Conception and of the Infallibility.” Great joy in the Catholic world.

Here is war with Prussia—that power which, whatever may be said, is truly redoubtable. Happy the people whose history is wearisome! Misfortune to those who depart from the path traced for them by Providence! What a magnificent page might France have added to her history had she so willed! “Archimedes asked but a lever and a fulcrum to move the world,” said the Père Lacordaire at Notre Dame; “but in his time this lever and this fulcrum were unknown. They are known now: faith is the lever; and the point of support, the Breast of the Lord Jesus.”

Who, then, will lift this lever? My God! may they who seek thee find gladness and joy in thee. Tristis es, anima mea!

Arthur is better; our dear Parisians are returning to us; the horizon is so dark to those who see things rightly! Berthe is gone to the town for the funeral of a friend of her childhood who passed through the greatest trials in the world. She made a most edifying death, preserving the fulness of her faculties to the last, blessing her children, and putting all her soul into her last directions. And when she had said all, and was asked if she desired nothing, she answered with her failing voice: “I desire nothing but God!” The long agony of her heart, the suffering which has killed her, this painful martyrdom—all is over, and the Blessed Virgin, whom she so loved, must have welcomed her into glory. Amen! The two little children, alarmingly pale, followed the coffin. How one would pity them, if God were not the Father of orphans!

Spain in a state of revolution. Queen Isabella has abdicated in favor of Prince Alphonso. Poor Spain! Where is Isabella the Great, the Catholic?

Adrien is reading to us the tenth volume of the Histoire du Monde, by De Riancey. The illustrious and lamented author wrote from Rome, after receiving from the Pope and the Comte de Chambord precious tokens of affection: “Now I am almost ready to sing my Nunc Dimittis, and there remain only the joys of heaven to be added.“ Dearest Kate, I said something like this when I still possessed you....

[TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.]

UP THE NILE.
CONCLUSION.

The dignity of some of these half-clad Nubians is almost beyond conception. As we walked through the town of Korosko we saw numbers of elephants’ tusks, ostrich feathers and eggs, and great piles of gum-arabic. We told Ali to pick up a handful of the gum, and then demanded the price. With a shrug of the shoulders, the owner answered in the most indifferent manner: “Whatever you please.” Ali offered him one piastre. The merchant took out his purse and coolly handed a piece of the same value, saying: “If you cannot pay more than that for the gum, you must be very poor; take this for backsheesh.” “Well,” broke in Mr. S——, unable to restrain his indignation, “would you like us to give you two pounds for that handful of gum?” “Oh! no,” he replied quietly; “whatever you please.” He was finally satisfied with the amount first offered.

This Korosko is an important town; for from here the direct road lies across the desert to Aboo-Hamed, Shendy, Sennaar, and Khartoom. The bend in the river between this place and Derr is so great that the river flows south-southeast. Going up, we were detained some time. The north wind, which carried us up thus far, was now almost dead ahead, and we were obliged to wait till it died out. The temple at Wady Sabooah a few miles below is of the time of Rameses II. His favorite amusement, to judge from the figures on the temple walls, was to catch hold of a few score of his enemies by the hair of the head, all at once, and in one hand too, while with the other he knocked them about with a club. The old temple was afterwards used as a Christian church. In the time of the great temple-builder a figure of some god stood in the adytum; the Christians covered it with plaster (it was a bas-relief), and then painted on it a picture of St. Peter. The other figures are not altered, and the result is that the great Rameses is now making offerings to a Christian saint.

I was anxious to obtain a dress—a full dress—of a Nubian young lady. I did not propose to introduce this style at home—it would scarcely be suited to our winters, although it might answer in summer—but it would be a pleasant thing to show it, and, when some fair one should ask what it was, to reply: “Oh! that is a dress that belonged to a lady friend of mine in Nubia; she gave it to me to remember her by.” Just think how jealous all the men would be! Frank carefully treasures up a ribbon, and Charley considers priceless a lock of hair which his fair one has worn—small trinkets compared with mine, even if I cannot put mine in a locket. So I am bound to have one by fair means or foul.

The reader will probably be anxious to know what this dress is. Well, he must not be shocked; he must remember the climate is warm, and the immediate descendants of Eve set the fashion here. The full costume consists of a leather girdle, from which hangs fringe of the same material, about six inches long, ornamented with shells. I have one. It belonged to a very pretty, dark-eyed young lady of thirteen, from whom I purchased it as a curiosity. The girl’s wardrobe being unusually well stocked, she sold me her best for the small sum of six piastres.

The people are very much afraid of the evil eye, more dangerous on this account: that no one can tell who possesses it. Even some of the innocent howadjii may have it; if they look at any one who is near, he or she is instantly possessed by some spirit and becomes sick. But they have medicine; for they immediately send to some priest and inform him in what way the sufferer is afflicted. For a small fee he writes out a portion of the Koran which will cure the disease. This is enclosed in a leather bag and worn on the arm or around the neck. The disease is not only cured, if the extract be the right one, but all future danger from the evil eye is averted.

We have been visiting temples and tombs almost every day for the past week, and have been very much annoyed by the crowds that followed us and in many cases prevented us from properly inspecting. On Feb. 6 we visited the little temple of Baybel Welly. I put into operation a plan I had thought out last night. I wanted to try the effect of sarcasm on these half-civilized Nubians. The temple was very small and the crowd pushed in after us. We withdrew, and I then spoke in a quiet, dignified manner to the one who appeared to be the leader. “This temple is not large enough for both of us to visit at the same time. We will wait outside until you and your friends finish your examination, and then we will look at it. If you find anything particularly interesting, you will be kind enough to inform us.” At first he did not take the point; after a time a light broke upon him, and he replied: “You go in; I will keep these walluds out.” And he did so.

I have told of the presents we gave the crew. They made a common pool, a sort of joint-stock company on the mutual-benefit plan. Reis Mohammed was treasurer. They held a meeting and resolved to declare a dividend, after the manner of many modern railway dividends—for it was paid out of the capital. A very noisy confab prevailed for an hour or more; then votes were cast, and it was resolved “that the treasurer be instructed and empowered to purchase a calf at a price not exceeding seven dollars, said calf to be served up immediately for the use of the stockholders.” This should furnish a hint to antiquarians; perhaps they may be able to trace back the origin of our modern corporations to the old Egyptians. The similarity of management should afford some clue.

On the 10th of February we reached Philæ. On the mainland opposite is the small town of Belal. Here is an old mosque; from its minaret the first Moslem call to prayer in Nubia was made. It is February 12, and we are still lying at Mahatta, waiting for the Shellallee, to take us down the cataract. They will not come to-day, so we go to visit the quarries of syenite granite from which the obelisks were taken. Two of the party mount the diminutive donkeys; I want to oversee them, so I climb on a camel. He kneels for me to mount, and then rises at command. The camel rises with three distinct motions. I have said that he kneels for one to mount; this will hardly convey the proper idea. His legs are doubled underneath and his belly touches the ground. With the first motion he raises himself on his fore-knees, then straightens up his hind-legs, and then his fore-legs. The effect of this motion upon the rider is very curious. He is first pitched violently backwards, but before he has time to fall off is thrown forwards again; and just as he feels certain that he is about to dive into the sand, he regains his equilibrium, and off goes the camel. When he walks, the rider sways back and forth; his run is not unlike the trot of a horse.

An unfinished obelisk—one that has never been entirely detached from the rock—shows us the means employed by the Pharaos for cutting out these immense masses. Holes were cut along the whole line of the block a few feet apart. Into these wooden wedges, saturated with water, were firmly driven. The swelling of the wood, causing an equal pressure, split the rock in a straight line. Just above where we are moored is the body of a man lying in the water. His hands are tied behind his back—probably a slave from away up country, beaten to insensibility and then thrown into the river. Perhaps he stole a few piastres, or was not sufficiently quick in obeying his master’s commands. It is a sickening sight, this putrid, bloated corpse, so we ask Ahmud to have it taken out and buried. It was carried by the current into this little cove some four days ago; hundreds of people pass it daily, yet no one will remove it. Ahmud says it is the duty of the governor to bury it, and, unless he does so, the natives will let it remain until the fish and vultures eat it up. “If I see the governor,” continues Ahmud in the most unconcerned way, “I will speak to him about it.”

Early next morning the Shellallee assembled and preparations were begun. To make the descent it is requisite that the water should be smooth and not a breath of wind stir the air. The day was all that could be desired; so at six A.M. began the charge of the black brigade. On they come from every quarter; every rock sends forth two or three. We have sixty or seventy on board. Ali says that most of them come to get a place to sit down and smoke their chibouks. There is the usual amount of talking, and at a quarter to seven we cast loose from our moorings and stood out into the stream. God’s flag was tied to a post on the port side of the quarter-deck—a red flag with two yellow stars and a diamond, the latter representing the sword of Mohammed, and over all the sacred name “Allah.” This was placing the dahabeeáh under the divine protection to ensure a prosperous descent. Our old friend Nogood was with us, seated by the flag, smoking a long pipe and reading the Koran. Another sheik was seated on the opposite side telling his beads. Four men stood at the helm, and two at each oar. To judge from the noise and excitement, you would be led to think that no boat had ever descended the cataracts before. Ahmud was so nervous that tears came into his eyes. The balance of the Shellallee squatted on the deck, lit their chibouks, and never moved until we hustled them off at Assouan. The current carried us swiftly on to the west bank, and we neared the great gate. A piece of wood was thrown overboard; it was a guide to the steersmen. Now all was quiet; not a word was uttered on board. The rowers stopped, the howadjii held their breath; a moment more we rounded the corner almost at a right angle, and shot into the great rapid. The boat grazed the rocks on the port side. The waves dashed over the bow. Directly ahead the rocks rise perpendicularly to the height of twenty feet. The howadjii shudder; surely we will be dashed to pieces. Before we have scarce time to think, before we are at the bottom of the rapid, the rudder is jammed hard to starboard, the boat swings round at a right angle; we are in smooth water—we have descended the cataract in safety. This rapid is two hundred feet long between the rocks, about seventy feet broad, and falls from six to seven feet. Old Nogood springs up now with astonishing activity, and snatches the turban from Reis Mohammed’s head. This is his perquisite. It is the custom for the head sheik to take both tarbosh and turban from the captain’s head when the descent is safely accomplished. This was all very well when these descents were first made, there being then some doubt as to their safe accomplishment. Now numbers of boats are taken down every year and an accident rarely happens. This custom should be done away with—at least, so thought Reis Mohammed; for he put on the oldest tarbosh he had, and it was so bad that Nogood would not take it. Every one shook hands all around. One of the Shellallee cut his foot very badly; I put court-plaster upon it, and then bound it up with my own handkerchief. He smiled and asked for backsheesh.

About nine we reached Assouan. Every one wanted backsheesh, even those I told about who sat on the decks smoking chibouks, and had never raised a finger to help us. Finally we got rid of them all. What a relief it was to be alone again with our little family!—for we are coming to love our sailors; they have been with us so long, and, in spite of their few faults, they are a good set and we have had no serious trouble with them. There is a modern temple at Kom Ombos, about thirty miles below Assouan, built by one of the Ptolemies about one hundred and fifty years before Christ. It is interesting, and, notwithstanding its recent construction, we examined it with care. There is another of these Ptolemaic temples at Edfoo, one of the most interesting temples on the Nile. True, it is far younger than Karnak, but then it is the best-preserved temple in Egypt. As a perfect specimen of an Egyptian temple, complete in all its parts, it stands unrivalled. Let me go into details here and describe this temple. It will give an idea of all the others; for the temples of ancient Egypt were all constructed on the same plan, except rock-hewn Ipsamboul, which has been described before. The Egyptian temple was not a place of public worship, like a Greek or Roman temple, or a Christian church. It was an edifice erected by a king in honor of some triad of divinities to whom he wished to pay special homage in return for benefits conferred or in hope of future favors. A rude brick wall surrounded the whole enclosure and shut out from the vulgar gaze all that took place inside. This wall is almost entire at Edfoo, but a small portion of it having been destroyed. A gateway admits us into the enclosure, and we pass through an avenue of sphinxes to a second gateway with its propyla, or immense pyramidal tower, on either side. Over the gateway is a winged scarabæus in high relief. The pyramidal towers are covered with intaglio sculptures representing the king holding a brace of his enemies by the hair, and about to knock off their heads with a club. Flag-staffs were attached to the outside of these towers, rising many feet above their summit. Entering a large hypæthral hall through this second gateway, we see before us the portico of the temple itself. We enter this between two columns; from these to the side walls are screens reaching about half-way to the roof. A little further on we reach the sanctum sanctorum—a magnificent monolithic chamber of polished gray granite, in which was kept the hawk, the emblem of the god Horhat, who was the principal divinity of this temple. The rest of the naos, or portion of the temple behind the portico, and in which this sanctuary was placed, was cut up into a number of small chambers used for religious purposes. Within the enclosure was the temenos, or grove, thickly planted with trees, and near at hand was a lake. The whole length of this temple, including the gateway and wall of circuit, is four hundred and fifty feet. The breadth of the propylon—the inner gateway with its pyramidal towers—is two hundred and fifty feet and its height one hundred and fifteen feet. The sculptures all over the walls are extremely interesting. Some give the names of the several chambers of the temple, and their dimensions in cubits and parts of cubits, so that the modern measurements can be compared with the ancient ones. Others give valuable information respecting the ancient geography of Egypt.

During the reign of Psammenitus, son of Amasis, a most remarkable prodigy befell the Egyptians, says Herodotus; for rain fell at Egyptian Thebes, which had never happened before nor since, to my time, as the Thebans themselves affirm. For no rain ever falls in the upper regions of Egypt, but at that time rain fell in drops at Thebes. In the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and seventy-four the same remarkable prodigy befell the Egyptians, say I; for rain fell at Egyptian Thebes. If we did not know the dignity and sober character of that ancient traveller, we might suppose a sarcastic witticism lay hid in the closing part of the above story. See how cautious he is: the rain fell in drops. Well, that is precisely the way it fell when we were there. And the drops could be counted. There was no shower. The dust was not even laid. But it rained. I saw it—perhaps the first time in three thousand years. It is no small affair for a man to be able to say to his grandchildren in years to come: “It rained when I was at Egyptian Thebes—in drops, you know.”

Ten days tied up at Luxor, measuring the columns of Karnak, looking at the endless procession of gods and warriors, and going far into the mountain-side to search for the sarcophagi of Egypt’s long-departed rulers. The ruins of Thebes are familiar—at least to every one who has read any of the numerous works on Egypt; so I will not describe them. There is one place, however, not mentioned in the guide-books about which I will say something. Behind the temple of Dayr el Medeeneh, on the western shore, there are several mummy-pits. Mr. S—— and I determined to visit them. We descended a well about ten feet deep, at the bottom of which we found a narrow passage, so low that we were obliged to crawl. This led into a large chamber filled with bodies. Ali begged to accompany us, but, when he caught sight of the first body, he beat a hasty retreat to the upper air. Truly, it was a solemn, ghastly sight. The mummies were piled up to what depth no one knows; as they then were they had filled up the room to a level with the narrow passage, forming a floor over which we walked. The Arabs had been there hunting for scarabæi and other antiques to sell to travellers, and in so doing had handled the corpses without care or ceremony. Here was a man standing on his head with his feet resting against the wall; there a woman broken in two, the legs placed astride the neck; corpses all around in every conceivable position—grinning, staring corpses, enough to give one the nightmare for weeks to come. Beneath this top row they were placed in layers. I found the body of a young woman well preserved, and with hair banged across the forehead, like the French style of a few years ago. I carried the body out to show it to the rest of the party, thinking somewhat of bringing it home. “Desecrating graves,” “robbing sepulchres,” and words of like import met my ears, and, feeling somewhat abashed, I took the body back, but detached the hair and brought it with me. In this pit we found numbers of the small clay figures of Osiris. They were rudely made—for these were the fellaheen, or lower class, who were thrown into a common pit. They were embalmed in the cheapest way, which was done, according to Herodotus, by thoroughly rinsing the abdomen in syrmæa, and then steeping it with natron for seventy days.

The boy who owned my donkey was sick, so Fatma, his little black-eyed sister, attended for him. She was a pretty, bewitching little creature, yet of a marriageable age—thirteen, I think. Day after day she ran behind my donkey, urging it on, and occasionally coming up alongside to make some pleasant remark and disclose teeth like Oriental pearls. When we were parting I gave her a small present and asked her if she would go with me to America. “Certainly.” And the little one jumped and clapped her hands with joy. “Do you know where America is situated?” I asked. “Not exactly, but down the river, somewhere near Alexandria, is it not?”

Here we are at Keneh, and when we see a fine large house, in appearance not unlike a provincial theatre, we naturally ask who inhabits it. The consuls of France and Prussia—the lion and the lamb lying down together. Here they live together in the same house on the best of terms, just as if King William had never marched into Paris or Napoleon III. had not surrendered at Sedan. We did not meet them, but very probably they were like Ali Murad—natives, with a faint idea that there had been some misunderstanding between France and Prussia; but then they were not concerned with that, so they smoke their pipes together and let the outside world take care of itself. Passing Sheik Selim’s place on March 9, we stopped and sent some of the sailors with presents. We arrived at Bellianeh, whence we proposed to visit the interesting temple of Abydos. We rode for six miles through rich fields of grain, principally wheat, and reached the modern village of Arabat, called by the Arabs Madfuné (the buried), from the ancient buildings that until recently lay all around covered with desert sand. On entering the town we saw a gang of men working at excavations under the charge of an overseer, who quickened their movements with a bamboo. We saw pictures of this on the tombs four thousand years old. A fine-looking man, with an immense red turban on his head, broke from the gang, rushed up to us, threw himself on the ground, embraced our feet, and piteously implored us to take him away. He was a sheik of a neighboring village, he said, and had been torn from his family and pressed into service. In proof of this he produced a long document, about as intelligible to us as the hieroglyphics on the temple wall. It was done by order of the viceroy, so we could not interfere, and he went reluctantly back to his work. His appeal to us angered the overseer, who struck him a fearful blow with the bamboo that felled him to the ground. Said—good-hearted Said—took the man’s part, and for a time it looked as though we were going to have a lively row. But it all evaporated in talk; the overseer promised not to beat him any more, and then he and Said became the best of friends.

These workmen are not paid very much—five cents a day; but their work is not very heavy—at least, as they do it. One man fills a small basket with earth, then sits down and smokes a cigarette. The basket is dragged about twenty feet, emptied out, then he has a little talk with some of his friends. We were looking for the celebrated tablet of Abydos, but the passage-way was so filled up with sand that we could not approach it. This tablet is called the new one, although M. Mariette supposes it to be the original of the fragmentary one found in the temple of Rameses II. at this place and now in the British Museum. It contains figures of Sethi and Rameses offering homage to seventy-six kings, their predecessors, beginning with Menes and ending with Sethi I., and has been of incalculable benefit to the historian. But we are going farther back than Menes, for there is the Kóm es Sultan, the Holy Sepulchre of the ancient Egyptians—the tomb of Osiris. It is not a natural tumulus, but is formed by the heaping up of tombs during many ages one upon another. Are they not the tombs of those rich Egyptians that Plutarch tells of who came from all parts of the country to Abydos to be buried near Osiris?

A few days after we were strolling along the east bank when we came upon a Coptic church. Entering, we saw a novel rendering of the legend of St. George and the dragon. I have said before that St. George is the patron saint of the Copts, and here they turn the dragon into a Turk, substituting a real enemy for a mythical one. St. George, on a spirited steed, is frantically endeavoring to pin a Turk to the earth. He has his lance run through the neck, but the Turk is a tough fellow and is fighting so hard, while the horse is balancing himself in the most incredible manner on one leg, that it is a question which will get the upper hand.

As we run close to the bank scores of urchins salute us with that now familiar cry, “Backsheesh, howadji”—“Alms, O shopkeeper”—not that they took us for shopkeepers, but then these were the first to travel for purposes of trade; and when others, travelling for pleasure alone, came after them, no distinction was made by the natives, but all were classed in the same category. Everywhere in the East, from the poorest beggar to the sultan himself, is heard the same demand, “Backsheesh, howadji”—from the great ones couched in hidden terms and well-set phrases, but as well understood as the outspoken clamor of the rabble. After careful study and deliberation I have classified the different uses of this phrase. I have divided them into eleven different demands, expressing the following ideas: First, the distant or dubious demand. This is made by small urchins from the bank as we sail by. The tone of voice indicates that they doubt very much whether they will receive anything, but deem it worth while to make the attempt, although sometimes a quarter of a mile of water separates us from them. Second, the salutative demand from older ones. As we ride or walk through the country we meet an Arab. “Naharak Saiid” (May the day be good to you), say we. “Backsheesh, howadji,” he replies in the same salutative tone, and moves on. Surely he cannot expect anything; he does not even stop. Third, the imperative demand, growled out in a fierce tone by half-grown boys—your-money-or-your-life demand of highwaymen. This is always unsuccessful. Fourth, the curtailed demand from over-lazy ones, as this: “Backshee, howadj”—a very indifferent one. Fifth, the plaintive demand—the fourteen-children and seven-year-widow story listened to by tender-hearted people. Sixth, the non-expective demand, a mere matter of form, and surprise exhibited if complied with. Seventh, the interrogative demand—to wit: “Did it ever occur to you, O howadji! that a small present would be acceptable to your petitioner?” An idea similar to this frequently crossed the howadji’s mind. Eighth, the confidential demand from the donkey-boy when near the end of a trip. In a low whisper, and with a knowing look: “Howadji and I understand one another; it is all right; about two piastres will do.” Ninth, the future demand: the praises of the donkey are sounded when starting out; professions of fidelity and attachment on the part of the attendant are loud and constant; he will show you everything, and—“Backsheesh kabeér dahabeeáh” (Much backsheesh on the return to boat), in a matter-of-course tone. Tenth, the infantile demand, from imps scarce able to talk: “Backtheeth, howath”—most successful of any. Eleventh, the fraudulent demand, practised principally in Nubia. A mother holding an infant in her arms: “Backsheesh for the baby, O howadji!” and when the kind-hearted traveller places a coin in the little dimpled hand held out to receive it, the mother takes possession of it for her own use. When the traveller approaches a town, every child is snatched up into some one’s arms—it is immaterial whether the mother gets her own child or some one belonging to another—and presented to him.

Little Saida, our gazelle, broke her leg at Thebes; we sent for the barber, who is doctor also, to bind it up. He performed the operation in a bungling way, and mortification set in a few days after. She had become a great pet, and was beginning to know us and eat from our hands. So we concluded it was best to kill her, as she was suffering very much. Wishing to preserve the skin, she was hit on the head with an axe, so as not to injure it. After the skin had been removed we offered the body to the crew for a meal. Reis Mohammed threw it overboard, saying that it was not killed in the proper way for them to eat: it should have been shot, or else the throat cut, after repeating certain passages from the Koran. It is strange to see how obedient these Arabs are to the sacred writ. They are fond of meat, but do not have it very often. On one occasion we were lunching in a temple. When we had finished, some fine slices of ham were left. I gave them to Ali for himself and the two sailors who were with us, and whose lunch had consisted of dry bread. Without a moment’s hesitation he threw them to a dog who was near us, saying that it was good food for dogs and Christians, but not for Arabs.

On the summit of the rocks of Gebel Aboofayda, near their southern end, are the caverns of Moabdeh, commonly called the crocodile mummy pits. We stopped and procured some fine specimens—small crocodiles which had been treated as gods five thousand years ago. Every one in this country seems to know every one else. It seemed to me that, when our crew wanted to see any one, they simply called out the name—Ali, Mohammed, or whatever it was—and he soon appeared. When purchasing goods it makes no difference whom you pay, whether owner or not, provided you pay some one. Many people marvel how the old Egyptians transported their obelisks and colossi from the quarries at Syene to their destination several hundred miles down the river. Back of the Christian village called Ed Dayr en Nakhl, on the east bank nearly opposite Rhoda, are a number of grottoes cut into the mountain-side. In one of them is one of the most interesting paintings found in any of the Egyptian tombs, which will enable us to understand how these immense masses of stone were conveyed from one place to another. We had great difficulty in finding this grotto; for, although it is mentioned in the guide-book, the natives seemed unaware of its existence. At last we found it, away up on the mountain-top, the entrance so filled up with débris that we were obliged to crawl in. But we were well paid; for we saw the famous painting of “A Colossus on a Sledge,” which, as far as I am informed, is the only one of the kind in Egypt. The person represented by the colossus was called Thoth-ôtp, and was of high distinction in the military caste. He is styled the king’s friend, and one of his children was named Ositarsens, after the king. This grotto was his tomb. The figure is seated and placed upon a sledge, being firmly secured to it by ropes. One hundred and seventy-two men, in four rows of forty-three each, pull the ropes, attached to a ring in front of the sledge, and a liquid—most probably oil—is poured from a vase by a person standing on the pedestal of the statue, in order to facilitate its progress as it slides on the ground—or more probably on a tramway made for the occasion, though that is not indicated in the picture. Some of the persons engaged in this laborious duty appear to be Egyptians; others are foreign slaves who are clad in the costume of their country. Behind the statue are four rows of men, three in a row, representing either the architects and masons or those who had employment about the place where the statue was to be conveyed. Below are others carrying vases filled with water, and some rude machinery connected with the transportation of the colossi, followed by taskmasters with their wands of office. On the knee of the figure stands a man, who claps his hands to the measured cadence of a song to mark the time, and to ensure a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together. Before the statue a priest is presenting incense in honor of the person it represents. At the top are seven companies of men—a guard of honor, or perhaps reliefs for dragging the sledge. Beyond are men slaying an ox and bringing the joints of meat to the door of the building to which the statue was to be transported. From this we may judge with tolerable certainty how the great obelisks were conveyed to the temples before which they were set up, and how the great stones of the Pyramids were transported from their mountain-beds.

We are now rapidly sailing down stream and nearing civilization. In a few days we reached the lofty cliffs of Gebel et Tayr, which rise abruptly from the river to a height of several hundred feet. On its summit stands the Coptic convent of Sitta Mariam el Adra (Our Lady Mary the Virgin). As we approached several of the monks jumped into the stream—not from the top of the cliff, however—and swam out towards us. They seized hold, jumped aboard, entirely naked, and saluted us with “Ana Christian, ya howadjii” (I am a Christian, O howadjii!) Of course we could not resist this appeal, but a few paras satisfied them, and, putting the coins in their mouths, they swam back to shore, to sit like birds of prey waiting for their next victims—for they never miss a dahabeeáh that passes. This Gebel et Tayr—“The Mountain of the Bird”—has a strange legend attached to it. It is said that all the birds of the country assemble annually on this mountain, and, having selected one of their number to remain there till the following year, they fly away into Africa, and only return the next year to release their comrade and substitute another in his place.

A funny accident happened to Reis Ahmud. We had grounded on a sand-bank, where we remained sixteen hours, and the usual means were being employed to pull the boat off. An anchor was thrown out some seventy feet ahead in the direction of the channel. A rope was attached to this, and the other end carried through a pulley on the deck. The entire crew pulled upon this rope, when it became entangled in a block on the starboard side. Reis Ahmud went forward to release it, and, without slackening the rope, he began to pry it with a long pole. The strain on the rope was of course very severe. He succeeded in raising it over the block, but it acted like the string of a bow, and Ahmud, being in the place where the arrow usually is, was struck by it. He was shot directly over the top of the kitchen, and plunged headlong into the water on the other side of the boat as though he had been shot out of a catapult. The expression of fear, terror, and uncertainty as to what struck him, shown plainly in his face as he went flying over the boat, pole in hand, was most ludicrous. Fortunately, he was not hurt. A bad fright and thorough ducking will teach him to avoid strained ropes in future. Some statues, a few fragments of granite, and some substructions are all that can be seen of the ruins of a city which, if there is any truth in the descriptions given of it, must have exceeded any modern city as much as the Pyramids exceed any mausoleum which has been erected since those days (Curzon). So one day was enough at Memphis, and still on to the south we sailed. Now the great Pyramids loom up in the distance, and at ten of the morning of March 30 we reach the iron bridge at Cairo, our long Nile journey over. That night we left our dahabeeáh, and bade farewell to our crew. I have travelled far and wide throughout this world of ours, but I know of no trip that has afforded me more real satisfaction and pleasure than these four months on the Nile. The expense is not very great; a party of four can contract with a good dragoman to supply boat, crew, provisions, and everything necessary for the voyage for from five to six pounds sterling a day. The winter of 1873-'74 was cold for Egypt. The superintendent of the viceroy’s sugar-works at Rhoda informed us that it was the coldest winter known in Egypt for seventeen years. See what a cold winter is in the Orient—for these observations I took myself: Average thermometer from December 20, 1873, to March 28, 1874, sixty-nine degrees. Highest thermometer during same period, eighty-two degrees on February 21, 1874; lowest, February 8, 1874, sixty degrees. The observations were taken in the cabin—in the shade, of course—at noon of each day.

MAY.

The month of Maia—Cybele’s Roman name[36]—

Ere Rome was Christ’s. And ’twas for Vulcan’s priest

To kindle at her shrine the rosy flame

On sweet May-day. Womb’d in the fruitful East,

Not vainly Westward, as the myths increased,

This purer rite, nor unprophetic, came:

A flower that should be gather’d for the feast

Of Truth—with more that erst deck’d Pagan shame.

Not now the mother of vain gods[37] we pray,
But Her, the God-Man’s Mother, ever a maid:
And still to her this fairest month of May
Assign—our hearts upon her altar laid,

That her chaste love, descending with its fire,

May purge them from the dross of base desire

B. D. H.

THE FRENCH CLERGY DURING THE LATE WAR IN FRANCE.

The war of 1870 between France and Germany has taken the place, in the minds of the French, of those other, not more glorious, but more successful, wars with which the very word “war” was formerly associated. They were used to think of nothing but triumphs; individual losses were swallowed up in national exultation; and they connected with the memories of the two Napoleons the peculiarly French axiom that there existed no such word in their language as “impossible.” That is still true to-day, notwithstanding the reverses through which they have passed; for moral heroism stands upright on a lost battle-field as well as on a triumphant one, and the nation can say with its chivalrous monarch of old: “All is lost, save honor.” If the discipline was faulty, if the management was indiscreet, if the government was weak, if circumstances were contrary, there was still individual courage, and not only among the soldiers, but among all classes. The very misfortunes of the country roused the spirit of women, priests, students, exiles, of the weak and the poor, the secluded and the helpless; never was there such spontaneous truce to all differences, such generous sacrifice of personal comforts and, what is more, of personal antipathies; all good men and true shook hands across the barriers of politics, religion, and caste, and, with one mind and heart, did each his best in his own way for his suffering country. Of course there were cowards, time-servers, and place-seekers, making profit out of their fatherland’s necessities, getting into safe, so-called official, berths, and generally skulking; but they were not the majority, and it is superfluous to ask here if every nation has not its scum.

The part which the French clergy took in the war of 1870 exceeds that taken by them in any previous war, when some few members of their body acted as salaried chaplains to the troops. Even during the “wars of religion” under Henry IV. of France few priests accompanied the troops; the abbés of Turenne and Condé’s times were officers and gentlemen rather than pastors and nurses; during the wars of the great Napoleon public opinion would have frowned down their services; and the successful wars of the Crimea and of Italy under the late emperor, though they stirred the clergy more, were yet too successful to vie as a field of action with the ever-present needs of city and country parishes. But the last disastrous conflict was emphatically a home war; each family in the quiet hamlet where his cure of souls lay came to the parish priest, asking blessings for its departing members and prayers for its dead ones; each wife and mother claimed his comforting words and poured her sorrows and fears into his ears; soldiers on the march made his presbytery their natural home, slept and ate there, asked him for common little necessaries, and made sure of getting no denial had they asked for anything he possessed; boys whom he had christened came home to die, and it was he who gave them the last sacraments and read the burial service over their graves; in a word, he lived on the battle-field even while still cooped up in his village. It was not strange, then, that he should easily take one step further, and go himself to share abroad the same danger whose face was so familiar to him at home. A German historian, writing of the late war, says that there was more patriotism found among the French clergy as a class than in any other class in the whole nation. General Ambert, a soldier and a civil servant, has gathered together[38] many interesting episodes of the war relating to the heroic behavior of the priests, who from the beginning came eagerly to ask leave to act as chaplains for the love of God and their neighbor only; for when war was declared there were but forty-six accredited chaplains in the whole army. Not only parish priests presented themselves, but also hundreds of monks, brothers, and confraternity-men; every order was represented—Jesuits, Capuchins, Dominicans, Benedictines, Carmelites (the most distinguished of whom was Père Hermann, who died at Spandau), Trappists (of whom one convent alone furnished thirty-five), Cistercians, Oratorians, Lazarists, Redemptorists, Christian Brothers (of whom nineteen died during the war, besides those who were the victims of the Commune), and other brotherhoods, old orders and new, their members drawn from all classes, from the Legitimist nobleman to the peasant and the artisan, from the doctor of laws or of theology to the brother-scullerer or porter. One day in mid-winter, during the armistice, the Christian Brothers had been for more than twelve hours unceasingly at work digging in the snow for the bodies of the French dead of Petit-Bry, Champigny, and Croisy. Two Prussian officers, at the head of a detachment of their men, were doing the same for the bodies of the Germans. It was a bitterly cold night, the wind blew the flames of the torches about, and nothing was heard but short, business-like sentences, the sound of pickaxes breaking the ice, and that of the carriers’ feet as they bore the dead away on rough litters. The Prussian officers looked admiringly at the silent brothers, and one said to the other: “We have seen nothing so fine as this in France.” “Except the Sisters of Charity,” answered the other.

One day Brother Nethelmus, of St. Nicholas’ School, Paris, was wounded by a ball, which proved his death-blow two days later, and hardly was he buried before a young man asked to see the superior, and said to him very simply: “I am the younger brother of Nethelmus, and have come to take his place.” “Have you your parents’ consent?” asked the superior. “My father and mother blessed me before I left, and bade me come,” said the youth, as if nothing was more commonplace.

The service of the wounded was the priests’ favorite field of work, and it was in this that they most frequently met death themselves. The Abbé Géraud, after the defeat of Mans, being chaplain of the Vendean francs-tireurs, was seeking out the most dangerously placed among the wounded. The latter had in many cases been abandoned by the drivers of their ambulances, who, in the general rout and panic, had unharnessed the horses and run away. On one of these carts were two soldiers and two officers of “Mobiles”—one of whom tells the story—all badly wounded and trembling with cold and ague. Many a man ran past them, intent on his own safety and heedless of their piteous appeals, and the men despaired of help, when they saw a priest running quickly towards them with cheery looks and words, telling them he was looking for them. The first thing he did was to take off all his available clothing to cover the men and warm them a little; then, stopping some of the runaways, he begged, promised, and reproached so effectually as to induce several to help him. “Push the wheels, my fine fellows,” he cried, as he harnessed himself to the shafts, and from the battle-field he drew the cart to a village, where he never rested till he had begged for his charges food, coverings, and straw, and at last a horse, with which he drove them to the nearest hospital. He continued his labors throughout the war. The Abbé de Beuvron, who has lived with the soldiers for fifteen years in various times and climates, tells us of the priests at Fröschwiller, who, after confessing and anointing the dying placed in the village church, saved the wounded while the building was in flames, and persuaded the Prussians who guarded the wells to let them have a few drops of water for the sick; this blockade lasted for four days, after which fifteen Alsatian peasants were condemned to be shot for having mutilated the bodies of some Prussian soldiers. This system of shooting the first-comer for a crime committed by an unknown person was one of the most cruel features of the late war. These poor wretches, taken at random—some mere boys, some old, infirm men—were tied with their hands behind their backs to one thick rope which kept them all on a level. The Protestant clergyman, who had himself gone to the general and asked the lives of these men, came to beg M. de Beuvron to intercede for them; he was equally unsuccessful, and, when he begged as a Catholic priest to be allowed to see the condemned, the general smiled and said: “You are welcome; I will give you an escort.” But on addressing the poor men the priest found that they understood no French, and he could not speak German. He pointed to heaven, and spread his hands while he gave them absolution, and they, with one accord, fell on their knees, sobbed and prayed, and bowed their heads. This solemn, silent service seems to us as noble as the most magnificent of triumphant processions, with chants and rejoicings, and imperial cortége following—this, the last moment between time and eternity, between faith and vision.

It is M. de Beuvron who has said with truth: “It is the country parish priest who makes Catholic France.” And Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia echoed this sentiment when he said at an official dinner in 1872, at the table of the Bavarian ambassador: “There is in France but one class that is noble and patriotic, earnest, courageous, worthy of respect, and really influential, and that is the clergy. Impossible not to admire it as it appeared on the recent battle-fields.” Some of these heroic men preserved their incognito; one is mentioned by the London Times’ correspondent who followed the Saxon regiments. “There is a man,” he writes, “whom I have noticed, since Sedan until the struggles before the walls of Paris, constantly following the wounded. He has neither horse nor conveyance, but, stick in hand, he follows the track of the army, and, with the consummate finish of the man of the world and the tenderness of a woman, he attends and comforts the dying. He is a French priest, a Benedictine.... The other day I met him suddenly on a field of battle, and he asked me to direct him to where the wounded were. He had walked twenty miles that day. No government pays him; he is a volunteer in the best sense of the word.... He is in the prime of manhood, of handsome build, distinguished-looking, and with no less than courtly manners.” Another unknown volunteer, but a layman, was found dead at Forbach. No one had seen him till the day of the battle, and he wore a dark dress and cap and a fancy rifle. At the moment when the battle began he suddenly joined a brigade and fought like a hero. His purse held a large sum of money in gold, and his linen, unmarked, was remarkably fine, while round his neck was a medal hanging by a silken ribbon. There was nothing to identify him.

But to return to our parish priests, of whom many refused rich rewards and promotion after the war, as M. du Marhallach, who, though he accepted the Legion of Honor, declined the bishopric of Quimper, and, when his townsmen forced him to represent them in the National Assembly, managed to resign before long and return to humbler scenes of usefulness in his country parish. If a book were to be filled with incidents of the devotedness of the country priests, there would yet be ten times as many unknown and unrecorded. As the Prussians entered the village of Verrey, slaying all in their way—men, women, and children—the curé, M. Frérot, was almost ubiquitous among the dying. He was wounded twice with bayonets, and, as he retreated into his garden, the soldiers fired and wounded him twice more. He dragged himself to the doctor’s, where some wounded were being attended to, and got his wounds dressed, when the doctor, taking the flag of the Geneva Association with him, undertook to get him safe into his own (the doctor’s) house, where some of the wounded had been carried for safety. The enemy, heedless of the flag, fell upon him again with ball, bayonet, and gun-stocks till he fell down insensible. He died a few days after, glad, as he said, if his death could be in any way useful to his country. Useful! Yes, as an example; but how many precious lives are lost thus, while vile, worthless ones preserve themselves! One can only compare the pouring out of such blood to the “waste” of the precious ointment which our Lord so highly commended.

The Abbé Miroy, of Cuchery, near Rheims, died another kind of death: he was judicially murdered for having allowed arms to be hidden in the barn of his house. When asked for this permission, he was in the first agony of grief at the news of the death of his parents at a hamlet burnt by the Prussians. However, whether responsible or not—and probably as a Frenchman he saw no harm in passively helping in the defence of his country—he was shot at Rheims, at daybreak, on a bleak February morning and a Sunday. It was during the armistice. His people put this inscription on his tomb-cross: “Here lies the Abbé Charles Miroy, who died a victim to his love of country.”

M. Muller, parish priest of Sarreguemines, when asked for the keys of his church, flatly refused to give them up, and, on being threatened, answered:

“How many shots do you fire on a condemned man?”

“Eight and the 'coup-de-grâce.’”

“Very well, then, before you cross the threshold of my church to desecrate it fire these eight shots and the coup-de-grâce at me; for you shall only step in over my dead body.” There were many like instances; for the priests knew well that the enemy delighted in wantonly outraging the most sacred feelings of the people by profaning and robbing their churches. A barbarous story is told (General Ambert vouches for it) of the treatment undergone by the aged Abbé Cor, of Neuville in the Ardennes, who had considerably delayed the march of the Prussians by certain information given to the French, and who, notwithstanding his age (he was more than eighty), was tied to a horse’s tail and dragged along for a good distance, with another rope tied to his leg, with which a soldier pulled him up whenever he fell. At last the soldiers got tired, and threw him into a ditch, and, marvellous to relate, he recovered. One of his parishioners cried out in pity: “O father! what a state you are in.”

“Oh!” he answered cheerfully, with a twinkle in his eye, “it is only my old cassock!”

The parish priest of Gunstatt was brought before an improvised council of war just after the battle of Forbach; what was requested of him the book does not say, but his answer just before he was shot points to something evidently against his country’s interests: “I prefer death to the crime of betraying France.”

If these facts, which speak for themselves, allow us to make any commentary, we can think of none so appropriate as this: how does this France contrast with the feverish, theatrical, rationalistic, immoral France presented to us by a certain wide-spread form of French literature? No country is so libelled by its own writers as France. Granted that many novels represent “life as it is,” yet it is not the undercurrent of life, not the life of the majority. It is the artificial, sensational, exceptional life of large cities and of reckless cliques; and, besides this, novels have a trick of magnifying this diseased life into illusive dimensions. It fills the eye of the foreigner, it shapes his judgment, it draws his curiosity, till the sober, prosaic, quiet, respectable, and vital life of the country fades out of his memory. He forgets the vie de province, the impoverished gentlemen living in dignified retirement, like Lamartine and his mother at Milly, like the family in one part of a Sister’s Story, like Eugénie de Guérin with her homely, housekeeping cares; the cosey homes of the middle classes, their precise, thrifty, cheerful ways; the family bond that enables different families to live patriarchally in a fellowship which few Anglo-Saxons would or could imitate; the peasant-proprietors with their gardens and little farms; the healthy rural, natural life that is everywhere, and even in cities; the kindliness, the simplicity, and the innate refinement which ought to make many a traveller of the Anglo-Saxon race blush for his surliness and brutal, superficial, haughty way of setting down every foreigner as a monkey or a barbarian.

Among the country priests there were not only heroes, but strategists. Towards the beginning of the war a French column was on its way to join the main body, and had to retreat through a hilly, wooded, and unknown tract to avoid being surprised by the enemy. No one knew just what to do or advise, and the little maps were very unsatisfactory. The general stopped at a Lorraine village and sent for the authorities. The mayor and most of the inhabitants had fled in anticipation of danger; only the curé was left, with a few sick and old people. He was over seventy himself, tall and large, his hands and face swollen and his feet protected by huge wooden shoes. The general did not hope for much advice from him, but the old man sat down and explained that he was gouty and unable to get about, but knew the country. When the general had joked about this impromptu council of war, and the priest in return had reminded him how often the church had had occasion to help the army before, they examined the map together, and the curé took a pencil and quickly drew certain lines in a most business-like manner, calculating how long such a road would take to traverse, how much headway would be gained over the enemy, what points would be a safe resting-place for a few hours for the tired troops, the route which, believing the bridge to be destroyed, the Prussians would probably follow, the houses where the general would find willing and able contributors to the necessities of his men—in a word, every chance and every detail that an accomplished commander would have thought of. Then he asked for four soldiers, two to be placed in the steeple to look out for the Prussians and toll the bell the moment they came in sight, and thus give the understood signal to the column at its masked resting-place; and two to watch with him at the entrance of the village.

“Monsieur le curé,” cried the general, “you are a hero!”

The old man sneezed violently—he took snuff—and laughed as well, as he said: “Mon général, the seminaries are full of such heroes as I am. It is no heroism to love one’s country. Now, when you have given your orders, I shall carry you off to the presbytery and give you a roast chicken and some good omelet; and I think Turenne would have been glad sometimes to barter a few of his laurel branches for an omelet.”

The priest and the two soldiers had a long and cold watch through the night. At three o’clock in the morning the latter were getting tired, but the old man said: “Hist! do you see something over there?” The men peered through the dark and saw nothing; there was a wide circle of old trees and a road across—a well-known spot, the Fontaine wood. But the priest both saw and heard, or else he guessed by instinct. “See, they are creeping nearly on all fours behind the trees; now they stop to listen, they are gathering together. There is an officer speaking to them in whispers. It is time to ring the bell. Go now, children.”

“But how can we leave you alone?” said the soldiers.

“Never mind me; God will take care of me. Your general’s orders were to leave the moment the bell rang.” And as his companions withdrew he rang his little bell and the church tocsin immediately answered. Its sound was nearly drowned by the discharge of the Prussian rifles. The old man knelt down and began the Lord’s Prayer; he had not said the second line before a ball hit him and he fell. The French column escaped without the loss of one man; and when the general reported to his superior in command, the latter, lighting a cigar, said: “That priest was a brave fellow.” But the general was to meet him once more. The curé was not killed, but was afterwards condemned to be shot, which sentence was commuted to exile on account of his great age; and when he met his old friend, who believed him dead, he greeted him with the cheerful question: “Well, how did you like my omelet?” The other caught him in his arms and repeated with as much tenderness as admiration: “You are a hero!”

The next story we choose from the many related by Ambert is one of pure Christian self-sacrifice, and one that has its daily counterpart in hospitals and plague-stricken cities, even in peaceful times. Small-pox in an aggravated form had broken out among the French troops, and, on the approach of an infected battalion of Mobiles to a village not far from Beaune, a gendarme was sent on to bid the inhabitants lock their doors and keep out of the way, while the sick were taken through to an isolated camp-hospital at some distance. There were hardly any able-bodied men left in the village, as they were off harassing the Prussians and watching their movements, and the women, in their loneliness, felt a double fear. The patients came. A death-like silence prevailed; no face was seen at door or window. The sick men dragged themselves slowly and painfully along, asking for nothing, touchingly resigned to their lot of lepers and outcasts, though many of them were raw recruits of a few weeks only, whose homes were in just such villages as the familiar-looking one they were crossing now. They had passed the last houses, but at the door of one a little apart from the rest one soldier fell, and, seeing how hopeless it was to urge him further, a sergeant placed him on the doorstep and knocked at the door for help. No answer; and the battalion resumed its march, while the sergeant went back to tell the mayor. When he was out of sight a man and two women came hastily and furtively out of the house, carried the unconscious soldier some distance to the foot of a tree, and there left him. The sergeant had found the parish priest on his way back from a sick-call, and asked him to tell the mayor, as he was in a hurry to join his regiment. They came to the house, and, not finding the sick man, asked the owner where he was; the man half opened the shutter and pointed in silence to the tree. Without even seeking help, the priest, finding the soldier still alive, carried him home in his arms and laid him on his own bed. The hubbub was great in the parish; the old housekeeper indignantly remonstrated, but the priest gave her a few clear and severe orders as to her own liberty of staying away, and the substitute whom he had the means of sending for to replace him in church, also the manner of bringing him his food once a day, and then went out to speak to his excited parishioners. “There,” he said, pointing to a placard on the wall of the mayoralty, “you read 'Liberty, fraternity, equality.’ Am I to be deprived of the liberty of helping my neighbor? Is he not our equal, and does not fraternity require that we should give him every chance for his life? I cannot forget that the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.”

“But he does not even belong to the parish!” murmured the crowd.

“In such times as these,” said M. Cloti with enthusiasm, “all France is my parish, and every brave fellow who dies for you is my parishioner.”

And for sixty-five days and nights he watched the stranger, Jean Dauphin, made his bed every night, cooked his food, mixed his medicines, swept the rooms, and scarcely slept or ate himself. The doctor had insisted on the utmost cleanliness, but said that, with all precautions possible, only a miracle could save the soldier’s life. Charity wrought the miracle, and by the fortieth day the patient was sitting up listening to the priest reading to him. Only one person in the village caught the disease—the daughter of the man who had spurned the soldier from his door; and, though she did not die of it, she lost her beauty for ever. Some months after the doctor asked the priest if he knew at the time that he was risking his life, and that there was but the barest chance of escape for him. “Yes,” said M. Cloti simply, “I knew it.”

A terrible barbarity was the occasional punishment of the bastonnade—a kind of “running the gauntlet.” This occurred once at the village of Saint-Calais, where the enemy found some guns hidden in the belfry, and one hundred and forty-five male inhabitants, including the mayor, Baron Jaubert, and the priest, were seized. They were compelled to walk slowly between a double row of Prussian soldiers armed with clubs and sticks, and received merciless blows on their bare heads, their shoulders, back, arms, and legs. The number being odd, the priest was placed last and alone, so that both rows were able to reach and torture him. He fainted, and was given a glass of water, after which the torture began again; and when he fell the second time, his head was found to be split in five places, and his body was thrown aside for dead. He recovered, however, after a long and severe illness, but the baron died of his wounds. One priest, at Ardenay, was maltreated and imprisoned and finally carried away to Germany for having kept on his steeple a tricolor flag which had been there since 1830. Some priests whom one can forgive for their patriotism, but who were perhaps too forward, as ministers of peace, to foment war, used to go on the battle-fields and search the bodies of the dead for cartridges for the living; but these instances of enthusiasm were exceptional, and it should be remembered that some among the clergy were old soldiers.

Among the prisoners of war the priests found ample room for their ministry. Some of the clergy were themselves prisoners, while some left their country and volunteered for this special service. There was much to do. Besides saying Mass and administering the sacraments, there were the ignorant to instruct, the scoffers to convert, the young to protect, and the intemperate to reclaim. In that forced idleness many gave themselves up to drunkenness and grew reckless and desperate. This sin, which in our time seems to have sprung into new life and strength, showed itself lamentably strong among the captives, and the priests, to counteract it, had to attend not only to the spiritual needs of their charges, but to invent amusements and occupations to wean the soldiers from gross self-indulgence. Father Joseph, a missionary and military chaplain, published an interesting work on the prisoners, their behavior, pastimes, etc., the statistics of their captivity, their treatment, and such little things. During the war, more than 400,000 were taken prisoners. Letters with contributions came constantly through and from the country curés. Father Joseph, who was stationed at Ulm, quotes many of these letters, of which the following is a specimen: “I venture to recommend to your care one of my parishioners, made prisoner at Strasbourg. I recommend his soul to you—for it is his most precious possession—but also his bodily wants; I am afraid he is in need of clothes. If your circumstances allow it, be kind enough to give him what is needful; if not, set the whole to my account, and I will reimburse you. Our country will bless you for your charity.... May our soldiers, whom so many have labored to demoralize, be led to understand these truths; for then only will they be worthy of victory.” This dignified attitude of resignation to the hard lesson God allowed the unsuccessful war to teach France specially characterized the clergy of all ranks, but it did not take one jot from their eager and hot patriotism. Another country priest, over eighty years of age and nearly blind, begins by excusing himself on that score for his bad handwriting, and, mentioning one of his flock among the prisoners, says: “The poor boy must suffer terribly. Help him and comfort him; I shall look upon all that you do to him as done to me. It is long ago since it has been dinned into the people’s ears that we are their foes, while in truth they have no better friends; we are accused of not loving our country, while, on the contrary, we are her most devoted sons.... I fear that my age will prevent me seeing the end of her troubles, but it will be a comfort to me in death that to my latest breath I shall have labored in her service.” Charitable committees abroad and at home, mostly under church superintendence, sent food, money, and clothing, books, papers, games, etc., to the prisoners. Mgr. Mermillod’s committee at Geneva, and those of Lausanne and Bordeaux, chiefly distinguished themselves; but in this work religious fellowship overcame national prejudice, and the clergy and sisters of the Catholic Rhineland cordially helped their so-called enemies. They vied with the French in ministering to the prisoners in the several cities where the latter were confined; but not only they, for there were numberless Germans, both civil and military, who behaved generously, kindly, and delicately towards the prisoners.

We have already mentioned the terrible custom of choosing at random hostages or victims in reprisal for the acts of some unknown men. This took place once at Les Horties, a village where, despite the Prussian sentries, two hot-headed youths succeeded in picking off three German soldiers. The shots were returned, but the agile youths got away unscathed. A detachment was sent forthwith into the village, with orders to seize the first six men they happened to meet. This was done, the hostages guarded by the Prussians, and the mayor given till eleven o’clock the next morning to give up the real offenders, under penalty, if it proved impossible, of seeing the six men shot. Those who had fired on the Prussians were strangers, who hovered constantly on the outskirts of the enemy, accomplishing, most likely, some vow of vengeance for a wrong done by soldiers to some near and dear to them. There were many such. Heaven forgive them! for they brought untold sorrow on the heads of families like their own, whose death they were so blindly trying to revenge. It was out of the mayor’s power to give up the culprits, and no prayers or tears made any impression on the Prussian officer in command. The women’s lamentations were terrible; the men’s despair appalling. One of them, a widower of forty with five children, was all but out of his mind, blaspheming horribly and crying out: “Yes, yes, it was my three-year-old Bernard who fired on the wretches. Let them take me and my five boys, and let the rest go!” The priest, M. Gerd, was unable to comfort him, and slowly left the school-room where the poor victims waited their fate. Going to the headquarters of the German captain, he said: “I believe you only wish to shoot these men as an example; therefore the more prominent the victim, the greater the lesson. It cannot matter to you individually who is shot; therefore I have come to beg of you as a favor to be allowed to take the place of one of these men, whose death will leave five young children fatherless and homeless. Both he and I are innocent, but my death will be more profitable to you than even his.” “Very well,” said the officer, and the curé was bound with the rest of the men, and the man he had saved left him in tears. The night passed, and, like the martyrs of Sébaste, whose fortitude was strengthened by the young heathen who joined them in the stead of one of themselves who had faltered, these unhappy men were transformed by the priest’s words and examples into unflinching heroes. The hour came, and he walked at their head, saying aloud the Office of the Dead, the people kneeling and sobbing as he passed, when the condemned met a Prussian major who was passing by chance with some orders from the general. He was struck by the sight of the priest—an unusual one, even during this “feast of horrors”—and inquired into the matter, which seemed less a thing of course to him than it had to the captain. He countermanded the order and referred the whole thing to the general, who called the curé before him. It ended in the former saying that he was unable to make an exception in any one’s favor, but that for his sake he would pardon every one of the hostages, and, when the priest had left, he turned to his officers and said energetically: “If all Frenchmen were like that plain parish priest, we should not have long to stay on this side of the Rhine.”

But here is another story, very like this one and more tragic, which has not come within Ambert’s knowledge, and to which we are indebted to an English novelist, who, vouching for its truth, has worked it into a recent tale. Neither name nor place is given, but it runs thus: The same thing happened as at Les Horties, and a certain number—I forget how many—male inhabitants were condemned, all fathers of families. After vain appeals for mercy from the priest, the mayor, the old men, and the women, the former called all his people into the church, which had been pillaged and half burnt some time before. He went into the pulpit and held up a common black cross; it was the only ornament or symbol left of the simple village church treasury.

“My children,” he said in a voice trembling with sobs, “you know what has happened, and how many hearths are going to be left desolate. Here, in God, in Christ, is our only comfort and our only strength. I have no ties but such as bind me to each one of you equally. I have but one life to give, but I will gladly take the place of one of these fathers of families, and trust to God to protect you when I am gone. Now, if any of you feel that God will give you grace to die in the stead of any other of your brethren, say so, and God bless you!” He knelt and bent his head on his clasped hands in prayer; silence, only broken by suppressed sobbing, filled the church. The women were in agonies of weeping; the men’s faces worked as if in some mighty struggle. Presently one young man rose up and said: “Father, I will follow you; I have neither wife nor children. I will take such a one’s place.” And then rose another youth, giving up all his hopes of the future for the sake of another of the victims; and the women crowded round them, blessing them, crying over them, pressing their hands, and calling them heroes and deliverers. Those for whom no substitutes had appeared caught the high spirit of the occasion, and bore their fate like Christians and men. No Providence interposed in this case, and the priest was allowed to consummate his sacrifice. Such courage was more than human.

The part taken by the sisters of various orders in the scenes of the war and the Commune was one which neither France nor Germany will ever forget. They shared every danger to which the soldiers themselves were liable, even that of being shot in cold blood, which was the fate of four sisters at Soultz, near Colmar, on the Rhine. They were found nursing the wounded, and the Prussians accused them of advising and encouraging the inhabitants to resist. There was no inquiry, no form, but a few of the scum of the invading army dragged the women away at once, set them against a wall, and shot them. During the retreat after the battle of Reischoffen a Sister of Charity made her way among the disorganized troops, seeking some one to help. Balls and shells were whizzing past, and frightened horses wildly galloping by. A cry was heard as a man fell mortally wounded, and the sister stopped, knelt down, and began her work; but hardly a minute after a ball struck her and carried off both her legs. She fell in a swoon by the soldier’s side. M. Blandeau, who tells the story, did not know her name; he only says pointedly: “She was a Sister of Charity.” An officer of the French Army of the Rhine gives an account of a Trinitarian nun, Sister Clara, who the night of the 16th of August, 1870, after a bloody battle, was tending the wounded in a barn; they were in such pain as not to be able to bear being carried to a safer place, and all they cried for was “Water, water!” Every five minutes the nun went quietly in and out, under the fire of the enemy, to fetch as much water as her scanty number of vessels would hold; you would have thought she was armor-plated, to judge by her calm and smiling demeanor. The next day began the dreary retreat towards Metz; the wounded were heaped on carts and wagons, and there again was Sister Clara, comforting, helping, encouraging the men, giving water to one, changing the position of another. She left on the last cart, holding against her breast the head of the nearest wounded man; but not half a mile further the column was made prisoner by a detachment of Uhlans, the ambulances cut off, and in the mêlée a shot struck and killed the sister, who was probably buried by and among strangers. At Forbach the superior of the Sisters of Providence, whose house was a hospital and asylum at all times, was killed by a shell, and at Metz no less than twenty-two Sisters of Charity died either from wounds, disease, or exhaustion in the service of the soldiers. At Bicêtre, during the siege of Paris, eleven died of small-pox in one day, and a request having been made for the same number to supply their place, thirty-two presented themselves at once. At Pau, at Orleans, at Mans, at Nevers, and in numberless other cities, as well as in impromptu hospitals, canvas towns, villages, and battle-fields, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Sisters of Charity, the Visitation Nuns, and other orders too many to mention distinguished themselves. Many sisters were forced later on to accept the Legion of Honor, but a far greater number of those who deserved it did not live to have it offered. At the siege of Paris their courage seemed absolutely superhuman. An officer once met near Châlons, on the road to Paris, a blind and wounded soldier led by a Sister of Charity. He was an old veteran from Africa, without relations, of a terrible temper, and with not much religion. The Prussians had left him on the road, finding him an encumbrance among the prisoners. The sister found him and undertook to lead him to the Invalides, where, she said, he had every right to claim a home. In all weathers this strange couple plodded along. She begged food and shelter for him, and always gave him the best; but he was fractious and not very grateful. One day the weather was a little finer, and he heard a lark sing; he seemed quite touched and happy. The sister asked him to kneel down and repeat the “Our Father” after her, and he did not refuse. This was the beginning of his conversion. But the Sister now grew ambitious, and wanted to restore his physical sight to him as well as his spiritual; so she said: “We will not go to the Invalides after all, but I will take you to the best surgeons and the most famous oculists in Paris, and beg them, for the love of God and their country, to do their utmost to cure you; and if God sees fit to let them succeed, you will promise me to be a good Christian as long as you live, will you not?” Three months later the soldier was as hearty as ever and had recovered his sight, while the sister had long been at work in a country school; but at Notre Dame des Victoires may be often seen a veteran praying on his knees before the grated door of the shrine—praying for his deliverer.

The Pontifical Zouaves formed a volunteer regiment of their own during the war, and fought like lions; most of their members were the descendants of old French families whose sympathies are with the last of the exiled Bourbons, and who, while they reject the empire and the republic equally, and keep out of the way of office or active employment of any kind, even to the prejudice of their career and to the point that many of their young men are forced to make a life for themselves in foreign service or by emigration, yet are full of real love of their country. The virtues of such enthusiasts always come out in adversity, while in prosperity their attitude of aloofness may seem rather childish. In the last war they fought nobly. Plenty of Breton peasants joined them; they have nearly the same traditions and fully the same faith; in fact, they have long been natural allies.

The incidents of the Commune—a period so much more terrible and shameful than that of the war—have been so often and fully described that we will not add much to this sketch by going over the fearfully familiar subject. Every one knows the phase of rabid feeling which came uppermost among the Communists: the hatred of God, religion, and priests—even a more rabid feeling than that entertained towards owners of property. The clergy were thus forced to be prominent in that national delirium: the chief victims were ecclesiastics. In Paris and other places it has been noticed that a certain class of lazy, good-for-nothing men live from hand to mouth around the barracks and the churches, living on the alms of soldiers and priests, inventing excuses to account for their indolence, cheating and lying and taking ravenously all they can get. When a revolution comes, these men become denunciators, assassins, and leaders. It is they who cry the loudest against the army and the priesthood—the “butchers” of Versailles and the “hypocrites” in cassocks. Raoul Rigault spoke their sentiments when he said to the porter of M. Duguerry’s house (the famous parish priest of La Madeleine, shot with Archbishop Darboy at La Roquette): “God! you fool!” (the man had exclaimed, as is the custom, innocently meant, in France, 'O mon Dieu!') “Hold your tongue; how dare you speak of God! Our revolution is against your God, your religion, and your priests. We will sweep all that rubbish away!” And, by way of contrast to this plain confession of faith, here are the words of M. Duguerry in prison to his biographer, the Baron de Saint-Amand: “My dear friend, if I knew that my death would be of any use to the cause of religion, I should kneel down and beg them to shoot me.” But it is not necessary to multiply quotations to show the intense hatred of the Commune towards religion and its ministers. Holy Week in 1871 was indeed the Passion Week of many of the latter. The devilish conduct of many women recalled the worst excesses of the Reign of Terror. A woman with a military cap on rode at the head of the escort of the hostages, three of them Jesuit Fathers, who were taken from La Roquette to Belleville to be shot. She swore and yelled and gave orders, insulting the priests especially. On the Boulevards, as the condemned passed, riots took place, and disorderly crowds nearly killed the prisoners in their impatience. Women again were prominent, brandishing guns, knives, and pistols, throwing bloody mud on the priests, and blaspheming as badly as any man; it would have been safer to run the gauntlet of a crowd of maniacs let loose from the asylum. Mgr. Surat was killed in the streets on another occasion by a young girl of sixteen, who deliberately put a pistol to his forehead. “Mercy, mademoiselle!” cried the priest quickly; but with an untranslatable slang play on his words[39]—equivalent, say, to “You shall have it hot and peppery,” or some such phrase—she drew the trigger and stretched him dead at her feet. The Abbé Perny, in his evidence before the council of war, says: “I have lived among the savages for twenty-five years, but I never saw among them anything to equal the hatred on those faces of men and women as we passed them on our way from Mazas to La Roquette.”[40] Father Anatole de Bengy, a Jesuit, was a remarkable man who had been military chaplain in the Crimea, and was volunteer chaplain of the troops during the last war till the siege, when he attached himself to the Eighth Ambulance. He had a singular power of commanding the love, obedience, and confidence of others; he was brave and good-tempered, and such a thorough soldier that Marshal Bosquet said of him: “Upon my word, if there are many Jesuits of that kind, I say hurrah for the Jesuits!” His letters are full of pleasantry and life. He tells his friends how he helps “our poor soldiers,” and jokes about his tramps with “his bundle on his back,” which phrase, he says, “always rouses a certain pity in the listener; but indeed, my dear Aymard, the bundle (le sac) does not deserve its bad name: it urges the body forward, and its inconveniences are fully made up for by the advantages it gives rise to. Some thinker should undertake the Praise of the Bundle, and rehabilitate it in the eyes of pilgrims.” The words of this manly and brave priest at the funeral of Commander de Dampierre would serve as his own eulogy: “The fountain-head of duty is in the three world-famous words, God wills it.” When his name was called at La Roquette, on the list of condemned, the Communist official stumbled over it, and Père de Bengy stepped briskly forward, saying: “I know my name is on the list—Bengy; here I am.” M. Crépin, a shoe-maker, who was condemned, but saved by the entrance of the troops, saw the butchery of Belleville, and in his evidence said: “Let no one speak ill of the clergy before me again! I have seen them at home now; I know them by experience; I have witnessed their courage and been comforted by their words.”

The Dominicans of Arcueil transformed their school into an ambulance during the siege, and Père Bengy happened to be chosen chaplain. But the Commune was to elicit greater sacrifices. The monks might have left, but did not, and reopened their hospital for the wounded wild beasts, whose curses sounded upon their watchers even from their sick-beds. The Geneva flag was hoisted, and the Sisters of St. Martha acted as domestic servants, besides many other women and girls. There were twenty wounded in the hospital on the 19th of May, 1871, when the Commune arrested the inmates of the house, thirty-eight persons—priests, lay brothers, tradesmen and servants in their employment, some of them foreigners, nuns, married women and widows, two young girls, and a child of eight years old, daughter of the tailor, who was afterwards shot with the priests. The latter were, with a devilish show of mercy, offered their liberty if they would take arms against the Versailles troops, and, when they refused, they were condemned. Their death took place a few days later, and the shooting was not done with military precision, but bunglingly, so that the victims were rather butchered than shot. After the bodies had ceased to breathe they were savagely mutilated, the heads and larger bones hacked with axes, and the flesh pierced with bayonets. Some of the priests managed to escape in the crowd and smoke, all of them wounded, however; and one was saved by a woman who hurriedly threw her husband’s clothes to him. According to the saying of a National Guard who escorted the Belleville victims to their death, and who, on being asked by a passer-by, “Where are they taking those men to?” answered gravely, “To heaven,” the road these priests walked was truly the “narrow road that leadeth to salvation.”

Surely, if any class of French citizens did their duty in troublous times and deserve well of their country, it is the clergy.

DE VERE’S “MARY TUDOR.”
PART II.

We said, in our last article,[41] that the Catholic reader would find this second play much more painful than the first. We are sure, too, that the non-Catholic reader will deem it inferior in point of interest. Yet we do not agree with the London Spectator that there is an “artistic chasm” between the two plays. At any rate, whatever constructive defects are to be found in the present performance, there is no falling off in dramatic power.

The play is preluded by an “Introductory Scene,” in which Mary is discovered prostrate on the tomb of Jane Grey. This does not at all surprise us after the remorse we have witnessed in the last scene of the preceding play. Holding herself criminally responsible for the execution of her cousin, it was natural for her to perform “penances severer than the Church prescribes.” The gentle Fakenham—now Abbot of Westminster—may well express anxiety for his penitent.

“Pray God
Her mind give way not: sorely is it shaken.
These tearful macerations of the spirit,
These fasts that chain all natural appetites,
Nor mortify the sinful flesh alone,

Must be restrained: or death will close the scene.”

While he is soliloquizing Gardiner enters with Elizabeth. Fakenham has requested the latter’s presence.

“Whate’er hath passed,
Be sure her Grace hath ever truly loved you.
Therefore we trust your coming may dispel
The baleful visions that enthrall her spirit;
Dispersed, as fiends before rebuking Saints.”

Elizabeth answers:

“You hope too much. Awakened jealousy

Preys on her, like the Egyptian’s asp.”

But she is mistaken; for presently the queen, on recognizing the “veiled mourner,” says tenderly:

“I part
The tresses on thy brow; and gaze upon thee
With the strong yearning of a blighted love.
I know thee, sister! Take me to thine arms—
And let me weep.”

The weeping revives Mary’s energy, but that energy takes a shape in which we see the old despair combined with a new fanaticism.

“Elizabeth. These mingling tears wash out

All venom from past sorrow—”

Queen. “Not from mine!
Immedicable evil hath infected
The fount of life within me. I shall die
In premature decay; and fall aside

As withered fruit falls from a blasted branch.

I, like a mother by her dying babe,

Have closed the eyes of hope; and o’er my heart

Torpid despair fans with his vampire wings.”

Then, suddenly apostrophizing the “Eternal Majesty,” she appeals, as one “hemmed in by dark conspiracies” and “baited by schismatics,” for “prescience to detect” and “strength to control them”; deeming herself, once more, “the Lord’s Vicegerent,” to execute his judgments.

“Fly, brood of darkness! for my prayer hath risen:

And God will hear, and smite, as once he smote

The sin of Korah: and the earth shall ope
And swallow blasphemy; and plagues leap forth
Consuming impious men: even till the Church,
Swinging her holy censer in the midst,

Shall stay the pestilence, God’s wrath appeased!”

This is a fine allusion to the destruction of the three schismatical upstarts in the wilderness; and it is surprising to see a Protestant author attribute to Catholics so much knowledge of the Bible. Nevertheless, poor sinful mortals never make a greater mistake than when they fancy themselves ministers of what they call the “justice” of Him “whose thoughts are not as our thoughts.”

Perhaps Fakenham was about to make some such reply; for this poet-created Mary Tudor—after pausing, we suppose, to take breath—continues:

“Answer me not. I rise from this cold grave,
My penitential couch, with heart as frozen
As the dead limbs beneath, and will unbending

As this hard stone that shuts her from the world.”

Thus we are fully prepared for anything she may do; yet, in fact, she proves singularly innocuous.

The play opens with a discussion between Gardiner and Fakenham on the subject of the queen’s marriage. Both are agreed that she ought to marry, for the good of State and Church; but either has his eye on a very different candidate for her hand. The abbot’s candidate is Reginald Cardinal Pole—a character to whom our author does full justice as among the loftiest of his time. Fakenham thus describes him as a “student at Padua”:

“A nobler presence

Never embodied a more gracious soul:

Ardent, yet thoughtful; in the search of knowledge

Unwearied, yet most temperate in its use.

Whate’er he learned he wore with such an ease,

It seemed incorporated with his substance;

And beamed forth, like the light that emanates

From a saint’s brow.”

And again:

“Oft have I watched him sitting

For hours, on some rude promontory’s edge,

Wrapt in his mantle, his broad brow, sustained

With outspread palm, o’ershadowing his eyes.
And there, as one of Titan birth, he lingered
In strange community with nature; mingling
With all around—the boundless sky, the ocean,
The rock, the forest—looking back defiance
Unto the elements: as some lone column
Beneath the shadow of a thunder-cloud.”

For the thought in these last six lines Sir Aubrey seems indebted to Lord Byron, that poet “of Titan birth”—who, indeed, would have sat for the picture far better, we imagine, than Pole; except that, instead of “looking defiance at the elements” (an attitude for which we see no reason in Pole’s case either), his face would have shown ecstatic joy at “mingling with all around.”

“Ye elements, in whose ennobling stir

I feel myself exalted!”

(Childe Harold, canto iv.)

The way Gardiner sneers at Fakenham’s candidate, and then introduces his own, affords us an opportunity of correcting the author’s misconceptions of this prelate. First, then, there is no proof whatever that Gardiner was blood-thirsty, or even severe. Had he been the relentless persecutor he is popularly represented, his own diocese of Winchester would have become the scene of numerous executions for heresy; whereas, in fact, not one such execution can be shown to have taken place there. Neither, again, is there any more evidence that he egged on Mary to acts of cruelty. If he did make the attempt, he failed signally; for the real Mary Tudor was personally guiltless of a single act of intolerance even. The only authentic instance in which Gardiner played the part of evil genius to the queen was when he urged her to retain the Royal Supremacy established by her father—her title and authority as head of the English Church—a counsel which elicited the witty reply: “Women, I have read in Scripture, are forbidden to speak in the church. Is it, then, fitting that your church should have a dumb head?” At the time of giving this bad advice Gardiner belonged to the anti-papal party—which, of course, was therefore schismatical, though nominally Catholic. And this time-serving adhesion was the one great sin of his life. He repented of it some time before his death, and publicly lamented it in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross, preached on occasion of the reconciliation of the kingdom with the Holy See; nevertheless, the memory of it so weighed upon his conscience when he lay on his death-bed that he asked to have the Passion of Our Saviour read to him, and, when the reader came to the denial of Peter, said: “Stop! I, too, have denied my Lord with Peter; but I have not learned to weep bitterly with Peter.”

We may here remark that, had our author been acquainted with the above facts of Gardiner’s history, he would not have sacrificed truth to poetic effect by making him die suddenly after the burning of Cranmer; nor, again, have put into his mouth such an un-English argument as this against Pole’s fitness to share the throne with Mary:

“He is but an Englishman:

And ’tis an adage older than the hills

That prophets are not honored in their land.”

One so anxious, as Gardiner must have been at that time, to keep foreign domination out of England could never have advocated the marriage of his sovereign with “Spanish Philip,” nor, indeed, have been likely to call the latter’s father

“That wisest monarch, most devout of Christians,

Potent of captains, fortunate of men.”

But, of course, the poet stands to his colors. Having selected Gardiner for the villain par excellence, he makes him welcome even foreign domination in the person of a bigoted prince, who, he knows, will imbrue his hands in the blood of heretics.

Philip does not come upon the scene till the third Act; but the intervening scenes form a prelude to his advent.

First we have the queen in council on the question of her marriage, and particularly of the Spanish prince’s suit. While asking Gardiner’s advice she betrays her love for Reginald, and is quickly crushed into abandoning that hope by the chancellor’s daring assurance that her cousin is certainly Pope. Accordingly, she yields reluctant assent to the prayer of Philip’s ambassador. Then, in the same scene, follows a “patient hearing” of Ridley and Latimer, whose contumacious spirit is well shown by the dramatist. Mary treats them with great forbearance, and leaves them to ponder what she has said. The closing passage of this scene is noteworthy. Latimer boasts:

“O queen! that day is past

When spiritual knowledge was confined to priests.

Our very babes drink knowledge as they suck.

Each stripling, as he runs, plucks from each bough

The fruit of knowledge.”

Mary’s reply is of surprising force and beauty:

“Ah, sirs, have a care!

The tree of knowledge was an evil thing,

With root in hell, and fruitage unto death.

But in the self-same garden likewise grew

Another mystery, the tree of life.

This too bore fruit, unseen till after-time:

And this was Christ. Children of Adam, we,

Condemned to cultivate what first we stole,

Must tend the second tree with watchful love,

Or perish by the poison of the first.”

The remaining scene of this Act and the opening scene of the next are taken up chiefly with the disturbance occasioned by the approaching nuptials. Underhill, the “Hot-Gospeller,” is introduced, together with riotous citizens and the antagonists Sandys and Weston. Underhill is an honest fellow, and loyal to his queen, whose panegyrist he becomes at the play’s close. Though the rioters are in the minority, the rebellion becomes strong enough to attack Whitehall Palace, where Mary is seen at the opening of the second Act. Her masculine valor is here displayed. First she leans from the window to encourage her soldiers, then actually sallies forth to head them in person, and wins the day by thus risking her life. In the second scene Underhill excites the indignation of Sandys by his chivalrous defence of the queen not only as the one

“Whom the Lord gives to rule o’er Israel,”

but for her clemency.

“Underhill. The queen is not well served.
You heard yourself
How, leaning from the Holbein gallery,

Where she so long stood target to your shafts,

She bade her furious knights to spare, and spake

Peace to the suppliant throng.”

“Sandys. Yet your fierce captains

Do ramp along the streets with bloody staves,
Hunting the white-faced citizens like rats;
Or at their own doors summarily hang them.”

“Underhill. Not fifty thus have died: a sorrowful sum

If measured by domestic pangs, yet small
If balanced by the evil of their plots:
Small if contrasted with the precedents
Of former feuds. In Henry’s time, they say,
Full seventy thousand their viaticum
Had from the hangman.”

But our author does more than make Underhill her apologist. He seems anxious, every now and then, to remind us that he privately thinks much better of his heroine than the history he has read allows him to represent. He sets off the gentler side of her nature in strong contrast to the vindictive, and, indeed, attributes the latter to inherited qualities for which she is not responsible. Accordingly, in the third and fourth scenes of the second Act Mary’s generous forgivingness, and especially to Elizabeth, shines out gloriously.

Count Egmont, Philip’s envoy, has placed upon her finger his master’s betrothal ring, when Renaud, the Spanish ambassador, strikes in with:

“Permit me

To be so bold as to suggest ’twere prudent

His Grace delayed till treason be put down.

Too many prisoners your Grace releases.

Queen. It was the custom of my forefathers

To pardon criminals upon Good Friday.

Renaud. Pardon me: there may be

Some guiltier. Our prince must be kept back

Should your Grace yield to mistimed clemency.

Forgive my plainness. Can King Philip come

While criminals remain unjustified?

Your sister waits her trial.

Gardiner. Let me speak.

While she, the princess, lives, there is no safety

For England, for the Church.”

Here Bridges, Lieutenant of the Tower, enters with a sealed warrant.

“Bridges. Your Grace will pardon, if, in a case like this,

Your servant feels misgiving. This sealed warrant

Commands me yield the princess—to be dealt with

As sentence shall direct.

Queen. O thou good servant!

Thy queen, on her heart’s knees, thanks and rewards thee.

Whose is this deed? By God’s death, answer me!

Ay, Gardiner, thou shalt answer for this thing,

If thou hast done it.

Gardiner. Let me see the paper.

A sorry trick to fright the princess! Trust me,

I had no hand in it. [He tears the warrant.

Queen. Inhuman hounds!

That worry your poor victim ere you slay it.

But I shall balk your malice. Silence, Gardiner!

Too much already hath been said: your tongues

Are deadlier than poison. Bridges, through you,

Who pitied poor Jane Grey, I shall henceforth

Secure my sister. You have known and loved her.

You are my servant now. Receive your knighthood.”

Thus foiled in their design, Renaud and Gardiner pretend, of course, that they did not for a moment mean the death of the princess, but only her removal; and the Spaniard goes on to explain that this “removal” was to be effected “by a bridegroom’s sweet compulsion”—mentioning Philibert of Savoy as a suitor—and then, finding that offer contemptuously rejected, suggests “the kind keeping of the Hungarian queen.”

“Queen. Be content, sir.

My sister hath but one friend in this council—

Myself, companion of her youth. It may be

She hath compassed ill against me: yet will not I,

Who fostered her lone childhood, now destroy her

By death or exile. You are malcontent.

Conform ye to my will: I shall not swerve.”

In the following scene, where Mary and Elizabeth have it all to themselves, the generosity of the former is the more touching by reason of her reproaches, which Elizabeth can only answer by acting a part which such a dissembler could very easily feign. Mary shows strong grounds for suspecting her loyalty, but nobly acquits her and replaces on her finger the ring which was the pledge of love between them, saying:

“Or innocent or guilty, I forgive you.”

We regret that space does not allow us to transcribe this scene in full.

We pass to the third Act, which introduces the two best-drawn characters of the play—Philip and Reginald Pole.

In these two men the author has illustrated—perhaps unconsciously—the antipodal extremes of the moral results of the Catholic religion. In Pole we see a character perfectly Christlike in its mixture of majesty with gentleness; in Philip one who has degraded faith into superstition, and made doctrines and means of grace the instruments of selfishness and passion. The greater the good in a system, the greater the evil into which it may be perverted. The amiable Fakenham tells Gardiner, in the previous scene, his mind about the Spaniard’s portrait:

“A moody man,

Whose countenance is ghastly, bearing dismal:

For ever wrangling, rude. His glance is sinister,

Stealthy: his laughter a sardonic sneer.

I would rather face a vulture o’er a corpse,

Than such a man, whose hell is in himself.

He is a tree of death.”

Gardiner may well wince as he replies:

“You have a caustic brush:

The canvas burns beneath it.”

Yet poor Queen Mary fondly looks forward to the coming of her affianced as (to borrow Byron’s exquisite metaphor)

“the rainbow of her future years—

Before whose heavenly hues all sorrow disappears.”

Neither does she betray any foreboding in consequence of the storm that ushers in her wedding-day. The bridegroom, on the contrary, peevishly exclaims:

“A sorry day for our solemnities!

I kiss this crucifix. Avert the omen,

Most holy James of Compostella!”

He does not see in this conjugal union

“The cloud-compelling harbinger of love.”

The “omen” is not unfelt, though, by some of the spectators, particularly when Doctor Sandys gives tongue about it. The wedding-scene is simple enough. The queen says, very prettily, when Philip offers a diamond ring:

“Nay, my lord:

I would be wed, like any other maiden,

With the plain hoop of gold.”

It is the remaining half of the play which makes the whole so inferior to the first play. Not that, as we have said, there is any deficiency of dramatic power. Philip and the cardinal are masterfully handled. Full justice, too, is done—from the author’s stand-point—to the characters of Gardiner, Cranmer, and the rest. But a thick gloom overhangs the entire picture; and the glaring historical untruth of much of it is no relief to Catholic eyes.

Philip and Pole clash instantly. The Spaniard has a presentiment of this at the moment when Sir John Gage announces

“The cardinal legate’s boat hath touched the beach.

Queen. The cardinal arrived! My dear, dear cousin!

Go, my lord chamberlain—go, Sir John Gage,
And bear our greetings to his Eminence.
Let his legantine cross be borne before him;
And all appliances of holy state
Attend his blessed footsteps. This our king,

And we, shall welcome him on Whitehall stairs.

Philip. You are right gracious to the cardinal.

In Spain we condescend less.

Queen. Ah! you’ll love him,

As I do, when familiarly you know him.

Philip. I somewhat doubt it.”

In the next scene, when the cardinal has congratulated the queen on the return of England to the faith—telling the nation:

“Be sure

The light devolving from great Gregory

Still shines from Peter’s chair. Who turns from it

Renounces hope. Peace ripens in its beams”—

and Mary has joyfully responded:

“Here stand we without question, king and queen;

And, with our Parliament, implore the pope

For reconciliation. Take this missive:

It is sincere. Kneeling we crave your blessing!”—

Philip interjects:

“Your Eminence shall pardon my stiff knees—

Stiff, Spanish manners. Ha! I cannot kneel.”

No wonder the queen faints as the cardinal blesses her.

Philip, having thus early begun with insolence, loses no time in showing the mixture of brute and devil that he is. He threatens to leave England because his sanguinary counsels are not taken; whereupon we are rejoiced to see the author make Mary as well as Pole defend the policy of “free discussion.” Of course Gardiner supports Philip eagerly. Presently—so outrageous is Philip’s conduct to his wife—the cardinal’s indignation can contain itself no longer, and his dignified remonstrance stings the king into exclaiming:

“Were I a basilisk, I’d look thee dead!”

Gardiner urges Pole to retire; but the hero answers:

“Not so. My heart is strong:

And like some stalwart wrestler, who hath need

Of exercise, and doubts nor heart nor limb,
I shrink not from the combat. He who carries
His cross, a daily burden, well may stand
In front of any giant of the ring
Who boasts he can move spheres.”

And again he warns the monster:

“Ay: you are great

Above us by your station, as the vulture

Upon his mountain pinnacle. What then?

The arrow makes a pathway in the air:

The peasant’s hands can reach the feathered tyrant,

And from the vale quench his despotic eye.”

—“Vulture,” mark: not eagle.

We find a profound study in Mary’s love for Philip, and particularly in its persistence. How she could feel toward such a man anything beyond wife-like duty—she, too, who had loved Reginald Pole from her childhood—is mysterious indeed. It will doubtless be said that the poet intends this new love for a part of her madness—like her passion for the worthless Courtenaye: her craving for love being such as to invest any spouse with “Cytherea’s zone.” Then, again, the treatment Pole receives at Philip’s hands, and his sublime bearing under it, ought to have the result of alienating her affections from the Spaniard even more than the latter’s behavior to herself. Hear her cry, one moment:

“Poor heart!

Thou wilt not break! Insult unmitigated!

Witnessed—by him!—by Pole! O Reginald!

Avenged!”

And the next, see her so overjoyed by an usher announcing “the king” that she springs up from the suppliant posture in which she has just been praying

“that even as the thief

On the third cross I may have peace in heaven”—

springs up, and exclaims wildly:

“The king! King Philip!

O speed him hither! Stay: here’s for thy news—

A jewel from my finger. Haste thee, friend.”

And again, though his Majesty enters “moodily,” she can actually greet him thus:

“O Philip. Philip! art thou come to me?

And shall there not now be an end of weeping?

I was thinking of thee—whom else think I of?

I talked of thee—of whom is all my talking?

But thou art here again: and my poor heart,

Like a caged bird, is beating at its bars,

To fly forth to the comfort of thy bosom.

Speak—speak—my soul! and give me peace.”

Verily, this is madness! Who has ever seen so extraordinary a picture of woman before? Has not the poet drawn something impossible? Not at all. He simply displays, we think, an unusual knowledge of the feminine heart. A much less acquaintance with that organ should prevent surprise at any phenomena it may exhibit—particularly in the shape of undeserved love or unreasoning constancy.

Of course the poor woman’s fondness only irritates her lord, instead of appeasing him; so he tells her bluntly what he has come for—to deliver his ultimatum; which is, first, the removal of the legate; and, secondly, the death of the heretical prelates. Of his feeling towards the cardinal he says:

“Call it not hatred, but antipathy:
Such as the callow chicken feels for hawks,
Or wild horse for the wolf. Aversion call it:
That wraps me in a cold and clammy horror
When we approach. I know he cannot harm me;

And have small doubt he would not if he could.

But still, my flesh creeps if I do but touch him,

As when one strokes a cat’s hair ’gainst the grain.

Odious is his garb

Of ostentatious purple; jewelled hands;

That beard down-streaming like the chisel’d locks

Of Moses from the hand of Angelo.”

Like a gleam of sunshine, for a moment, comes a happy description of a visit from Elizabeth to the queen. Underhill is the narrator. It is in the ninth scene of this too long third Act.

“Her royal barge
Was garlanded with flowers, festooned around
An awning of green satin, richly broidered

With eglantine and buds of gold. The bright one

Beneath this canopy reclined in state,
Fairer than Cleopatra with her Roman.
Her royal sister on the bowery shore

Of Richmond met her, kissing her 'tween whiles;

Her wan cheek flushing to a healthier glow.
With hospitable care, and love, she led
Elizabeth to where, shrined in green leaves

And flowers, a tent, curtained with cloth of gold

And purple samite, stood; whose folds were wrought

With silver fleur-de-lys and gold pomegranates.

The music they so love breathed in their ears
Like amorous blandishment: and when the morn
Rippled along the wave with soberer ray,
The princess stept once more into her barge,
And floated down the current like a swan.”

Yet one more quotation from this Act; for we shall have but little to cite from Acts fourth and fifth. The cardinal, after arguing with Gardiner against the severe measures that are being taken under his and Bonner’s supervision, and defending the queen from the charge of approval—her consent having been forced, and things of which she was ignorant done in her name—finds relief in conversing with Fakenham, whose virtues he thoroughly appreciates. The latter speaks of his friend’s failing strength; and Pole, at a loss to account for it, says he has “heard of vampire poisons,” but instantly suppresses the suspicion. They have been up all night, apparently.

“Cardinal. A sudden sunburst!—Lo!
God’s Image in our heart is as yon orb
Unto the universe; the eye of nature,
Dispersing rays more eloquent than tongues;

Beams that give life as well as light; whose absence

Wraps in cold shadow all that moves and breathes.

At times that Image walks through spheres remote;

Unobvious to the largely wandering eye:

Then nightmare darkness sits upon the soul:

Then, by its own shade mantled, waits the soul,

Like some dark mourner, lonely in his house.
But the harmonious hours fulfil themselves;
And sunrise comes unlooked for, peak to peak

Answering in spiritual radiance. This is indeed

So palpably to meet Divinity,

That hence the Pagan erred, not knowing God.”

In the fourth Act we have, first, the recall of Pole to Rome, contrived by Philip and Gardiner. The queen refuses to let him go; but while, in obedience to her, he remains in England, he resigns his legateship in submission to the interdict. Then comes the picture-scene, which is admirably contrived. The poor queen stops before Philip’s picture and talks to it as if it were a shrine. The original enters and brutally disenchants his worshipper. After a bitter interview, in which Mary accuses him of conjugal infidelity, the Spaniard takes his departure, answering her “Begone!” with a sudden “For ever!”

“Queen (alone). I submit to God’s decree.

Was it for this my maiden liberty

Was yielded?—to be spurned, despised, and still

Bear on without redress? O grief! O shame!

[She approaches the picture of Philip.

Back, silken folds, that hide what was my joy,

And is my torture! Back!—See, I have rent you,

False, senseless idol, from thy tinselled frame!

I wrench thee forth—I look on thee no more!

And thus—and thus— [she tears up the picture]

I scatter thee from out

The desecrated temple of my heart! [A pause.

My brain is hot—this swoln heart chokes my throat

Yet I am better thus than self-deceived.

Die, wretched queen! O die, dishonored wife!

I pant for the cold blessing of the grave!”

Next follows the trial of Ridley and Latimer. Cranmer, too, is present, and disputes, but is not on trial. The contrast between Gardiner and Pole is admirable. Mary, too, is represented as sedulously just. Ridley and Latimer speak, of course, as if perfectly conscientious and worthy of martyrdom, but make no attempt to disprove the principle of submission to authority, insisting solely on their own infallibility. The cardinal is at last compelled to say of them:

“This is very grievous!

Madam, so please you, these be heated men,

Who may not be convinced, and will not bend.”

He has better hopes of Cranmer; but his gentle earnestness is lost upon him no less.

Here be it remembered that it was the secular, and not the ecclesiastical, arm which inflicted the death-penalty for obdurate heresy. This penalty was the law in those days—days when every kind of felony was more severely punished than now. Whatever we moderns may think of this law, we must not forget that heresy is the greatest and most pernicious of crimes; and, again, that it was only formal and aggressive heresy that got itself arraigned and condemned. Moreover, what made the civil power so severe upon it was the fact that it was always coupled with sedition and treason.

But before we close our remarks upon the executions in Mary’s reign, let us look for a moment on the beautiful scene which intervenes between the one we have been examining and the prison-scene at Oxford—the last of the fourth Act.

Mary and Reginald are closeted together. The holy priest seeks to comfort his cousin.

“Poor soul!

Be to yourself more charitable. Think

That One there is who answers for your faults

And multiplies your merits.

Queen. Hope rests there:

Or I were mad.

Cardinal. All men are born to suffer.
What are the consolations of the Scripture,
The fruit of exhortation and of prayer,

If now you quail? No, you shall quail no more.

Queen. My web of life was woven with the nettle.

My very triumphs were bedewed with tears.

What now is left?

Cardinal. Religion. As the sunbow

Shines in the showery gloom and makes the cloud

A shape of glory, in thy path she stands

A herald of high promise. Blessed emblem!

Religion bids thee hope. This gloomy life

Must be amended. We must draw thee hence.

Queen. Thanks be to God! time works while
we grieve on.
Deprive not sorrow of the shade she needs,
The sad quiescence of desponding thought.
Job also raised his voice, and wailed aloud,
And so was comforted. Remember, also,
In weeping I can pray. Should I not?

Cardinal. Yea.

Pray with thanksgiving: ’tis the sum of duty.”

The sublimity of this passage needs no comment. The rest of the scene is equally touching. Mary speaks for an instant of Philip. She is still obliged to say:

“Whene’er I turn my thoughts to God, one image

Stands between me and heaven. Instead of prayer

A sigh for Philip trembles on my lips.

Cardinal. To pine thus for the absent, as men mourn

The dead, is sinful.

Queen. Speak no more of him.

Thoughts holier be my guide.”

Then Reginald teaches her what it is

“To stablish thrones on bounty; reign through love.”

The chief of greatness is surpassing goodness:

And that outsoars the ken of mortal eyes—

Hidden with God.”

She offers him the archbishopric of Canterbury. He answers musingly:

“He who hath stood
Upon the first step of the papal throne,
And vacant left the Vatican, may look
With eye undazzled on the chair of Lambeth.”

Then he accepts, and presently the queen observes:

“I have long thought it strange that you refused

The greater honor though the heavier burden:

The proffered crown of Rome.

Cardinal [after much agitation]. Look not alarmed. [A pause.

You touch the mind’s immedicable wound.

O God! that I had died before I knew thee!

Pardon me—pardon me!

Queen. We both need pardon.

Let us forget the past. God strengthen us!

Cardinal. Fear not. Henceforth we gaze upon each other,

As the two Cherubim upon the Ark—

The living God between.

Queen. Then take my hand.

It will be colder soon. May God be with you!”

This “immedicable wound” is the poet’s Protestant fancy, yet the pathos of the scene is exquisite.

The prison-scene at Oxford gives us, first, Masters Ridley and Latimer taking leave of Cranmer; then Cranmer watching their execution from the window, and Gardiner, unobserved, watching him. The famous recantation number one takes place; and the subsequent despair of the wretch closes the fourth Act.

The fifth Act we do not care to analyze minutely, so much of it is sickeningly untrue. Mary has become fanatical again. Pole tells her that “the poor, by thousands, perish in the flames.” This is utterly false. All the executions under Mary’s government did not amount to more than two hundred and seventy-seven, and “from this list of 'martyrs for the Gospel’ must be excluded,” says a learned writer, “the names of those who suffered for political offences or other crimes.” Dr. Maitland, the celebrated librarian of Lambeth, in his Essays on Subjects connected with the Reformation in England, speaks of “the bitter and provoking spirit of some of those who were very active and forward in promoting the progress of the Reformation; the political opinions which they held, and the language in which they disseminated them; the fierce personal attacks which they made on those whom they considered as enemies; and, to say the least, the little care which was taken by those who were really actuated by religious motives, and seeking a true reformation of the Church, to shake off a lewd, ungodly, profane rabble, who joined in the cause of Protestantism, thinking it, in their depraved imaginations, or hoping to make it by their wicked devices, the cause of liberty against law, of the poor against the rich, of the laity against the clergy, of the people against their rulers.” From this rabble, then, came the “poor” who “perished in the flames.”

As to Oxford’s pretended “martyrs,” Ridley and Latimer were inciters of sedition and brought upon themselves the vengeance of the law; while Thomas Cranmer was, without exception, the most unmitigated miscreant in the whole disgraceful business of what is called the Reformation. Who will question that he richly deserved the stake after bringing to it so many victims, in Henry’s reign, for denying doctrines which he himself was secretly denying at the time? There are living Anglican writers who rejoice in calling all these boasted reformers a set of “unredeemed villains.”

Of course, as we said in our review of the first play, we acquit the author of all conscious prejudice. The last words he puts into his heroine’s mouth—“Time unveils Truth”—are an appeal to “the avenger,” who will not fail to do her justice yet. It was a noble thought to make Underhill, the Hot-Gospeller, her panegyrist. Oxford vaticinates:

“Awful queen!

Hardly of thee Posterity shall judge:

For they shall measure thee—

Underhill. Let me speak, sir:

For I have known, and been protected by her,

When fierce men thirsted for my blood. I say not

That she was innocent of grave offence;
Nor aught done in her name extenuate.
But I insist upon her maiden mercies,
In proof that cruelty was not her nature.
She abrogated the tyrannic laws
Made by her father. She restored her subjects
To personal liberty; to judge and jury;
Inculcating impartiality.

Good laws, made or revived, attest her fitness

Like Deborah to judge. She loved the poor:

And fed the destitute: and they loved her.

A worthy queen she had been if as little

Of cruelty had been done under her

As by her. To equivocate she hated:

And was just what she seemed. In fine, she was

In all things excellent while she pursued

Her own free inclination without fear.”

NANETTE.
A LEGEND OF THE DAYS OF LOUIS XV.

I.

A police report is scarcely the place where one would look to find an idyl—least of all a French police report. But just as one comes at times upon a shy violet nestling in the dusty city ways, even in such an unpromising quarter, and in the records of a still more unpromising time, did the present writer stumble upon a veritable romance—

“Silly sooth
That dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age.”

Let the reader judge if it be not a genuine violet.

Of the many strange functions of the Parisian police in the days of the well-beloved Louis XV.—and altogether most worthless of his name—one of the strangest appears to have been that of furnishing for the amusement of the royal circle regular reports, or rather novelettes, of all episodes, striking or romantic, that came under their notice. The French have always had a taste for the dramatic aspect of the law, and to this day a procès-verbal reads often like a feuilleton of Ponson du Terrail. It may be supposed that, in the narratives which thus tickled the languid leisure of Louis, a rigid adherence to truth was not deemed essential where a slight embellishment enhanced the interest. But all had probably a basis in fact, which one is fain to hope was more than usually broad in so innocent and touching a history as that of Nanette Lollier, the Flower-Girl of the Palais Royal.

In the year 1740 there dwelt in the parish of St. Leu, at Paris, an honest, hard-working couple named André Lollier and Marie Jeanne Ladure, his wife; the former of whom held a subordinate position in the Bureau of Markets, while the latter attended to their fish-stand. Between them they earned ample to keep the pot boiling comfortably, had it not been for the prodigious number of small mouths that daily watered around that savory and capacious vessel; and when there came a sixteenth, it is to be feared that honest André received it rather ruefully and altogether as a discord in the harmony of existence—a blessing very much in disguise. So despite the new-comer’s beauty and precocity and countless pretty baby ways, her aggrieved parents were only too glad to accept her godmother’s offer to take her off their hands and to bring her up. By that good lady—who seems to have been really a most kind-hearted person, although she was a beadle’s widow—the little Nanette (so the child had been named) was carefully instructed in such branches of learning as a young person of her station was at that time expected to know, and which, in truth, were not very many. There is little doubt that one young lady of Vassar would have put the entire faculty of St. Cyr to rout.

But Nanette was soon found to possess a fine voice, and pains were taken to cultivate it—so successfully that when, at the mature age of twelve, the youthful chorister made her début in a Christmas anthem at the parish church, everybody was delighted. And when during the following Holy Week she sang a Stabat better than many persons four times her age, everybody said at once she was a prodigy.

Now, we all know what comes to prodigies. The praises, pettings, and presents this prodigy received turned her small and not very wise head. Good Mère Lollier wished to make a fish-mongress of her; mademoiselle spurned the proposal. What! she, a genius, a beauty, a divine voice, waste her life on horrid, ill-smelling fish? (She made no objection, you will observe, to dining on them when her mother cooked them for her, but that was quite a different matter.) She soil her pretty fingers with scales, haggle over herrings, or dicker about dace? Perish the thought! Her mother did it, to be sure, but then—her mother was not a genius. (Do young ladies nowadays ever reason thus?) No; she would be a flower-girl and sing her nosegays into every buttonhole—or wherever else they then wore their nosegays—in Paris. The manners of the fish-market even then lacked something of the repose of Vere de Vere, and Mère Lollier’s only answer to this astounding proposal was a slap and—we regret to say—a kick. She was not aware that genius is not to be kicked with impunity. She soon discovered it to her sorrow; for in her way she loved Nanette, and kicked her, we may be sure, only in kindness.

Shortly after this affront Nanette disappeared, and from that moment all trace of her was lost. Word came to her parents from time to time that she was well, but of her whereabouts their most persistent efforts could gain no tidings. Her absence lasted three years; how or where passed no one—we sniff the touch of the embellisher here—could ever discover, nor would she herself divulge. At last one fine morning comes a message to Mère Lollier that her daughter is at the convent of the Carmelites, and will be handed over to them in person, or to any priest who comes with an order from them.

Beside herself with joy, Mère Lollier, with just a hasty touch to her cap—even a Dame de la Halle is, outside of business, a woman—rushes off to M. le Curé with the great news. In those days M. le Curé was the first applied to in every emergency of joy or grief: perhaps it would have been better for Paris if the custom had not been survived by others less wholesome. The good priest lent a sympathetic ear; for the piety and industry of the Lolliers had made them prime favorites with him, and he had, besides, taken a lively interest in the fate of his little chorister. A fiacre is called at once, and the curé and Mère Lollier, with her eldest son, a strapping sergeant in the French guards—not then such pigmies as absinthe has left them now—fly to the convent at such a pace as only the promise of a fabulous pourboire can extract from a Parisian cab-horse. The lady-superior greets them in the convent parlor and presently ushers in a lovely young girl—what! a girl?—a princess, to whom Mère Lollier with difficulty represses an inclination to courtesy, while M. le Curé wipes his spectacles and the gaping sergeant at once comes to a salute. But the princess speedily puts an end to their doubts by embracing them all in turn with the liveliest emotion. It is indeed Nanette, but Nanette developed into such beauty and grace and sprightliness as many a princess might envy. Nor is her moral nature less improved. She is now as modest and docile as before she was vain and headstrong; only—she will still be a flower-girl. And yet women are sometimes called weak!

Before the young lady’s appearance in the parlor the superior had explained to her wondering auditors how a strange lady the evening before had brought Nanette to the convent—“Hum!” says M. le Curé dubiously, taking snuff—and on leaving her had left at the same time 20,000 francs for her dowry, if she wished to become a religious—“Ha!” says M. le Curé thoughtfully, brushing away the snuff that has fallen on his band. Then he beams upon Nanette, rubbing his hands encouragingly, while Mère Lollier nods acquiescence and the sergeant shifts to the other leg and gapes. But Nanette, in spite of these diverse blandishments, respectfully but firmly declined to be a religious. Her vocation was to be a flower-girl, and a flower-girl she would be.

“’Tis the devil’s trade,” cries the curé, quite out of patience.

“All roads lead to heaven, my father,” answers Nanette mildly.

So a flower-girl she becomes; and it must be confessed that, in spite of Undine, beauty seems more at home with the flowers than with the fishes.

II.

One bright morning in the summer of 1756 the loungers under the chestnuts which then adorned the garden of the Palais Royal—that forehanded and long-headed (though, long as his head was, he could not keep it long) personage, Philippe Égalité, thought shops would be more ornamental as well as more useful, so he put the chestnuts in his pocket and built that splendid colonnade which is the wonder and delight of the wandering American—the loungers in the shade of the Palais Royal chestnuts were conscious of a new sensation. Not that sensations were just then going begging. By no means. One or two royal gentlemen, by laying their crowned heads together, had already contrived that famous misunderstanding which was to turn a large part of three continents into a shambles for the next seven years; to cost the “well-beloved,” in Canada and India, the brightest jewels of his crown, and to make of Montcalm, for losing one and his life with it, a hero, and of Lally-Tollendal, for having the bad taste to survive the loss of the other, a traitor or a martyr as you were for him or against him. So often is it that for precisely the same services a grateful and discriminating country decrees to one of her sons a monument, to another a halter. Perhaps there is not so much difference between the two—to the dead men, at least—as some folks imagine.

But the heroes we are to deal with are by no means of the stuff of martyrs, and fighting, beyond an ornamental pass or two in the Bois de Boulogne, they vote vulgar and bourgeois. Here under the chestnut blossoms is a sensation much more to their taste. It is a new flower-girl. But what a flower-girl! Figure to yourself, then, Mme. la Duchesse, a flower-girl arrayed in silks and laces and jewels a marchioness would give her head for (marchionesses’ heads were rated higher then than they came to be before the century was over), with a golden shell for her flower-basket, lined with blue satin and suspended by an embroidered scarf from the daintiest waist in the world—a flower-girl with the face of a seraph and the figure of a sylph, with eyes of liquid light and hair of woven sunshine, with the foot of Cinderella and a hand—a hand only less perfect than that of Madame, which your humble servant most respectfully salutes.

News so important must be sent post-haste to Versailles. A score of noblemen sprang to the saddle and rushed to lay their hearts and their diamonds at the feet of this strange paragon. But Nanette, young as she was, could tell base metal from good. The jewels she took from her adorers with smiling impartiality; the other sort of trinkets—sadly battered by use, it must be confessed, and not worth much at any time—she rejected with equally smiling disdain. Always gracious, gay, and self-possessed, sparkling with raillery and wit, she yet maintained a maidenly reserve that abashed the boldest license, and her reputation grew even faster than her fortune.

And the latter grew apace. She became the rage. Her appearance on the Palais Royal, followed at a little distance by footmen in livery and her maid, gathered about her straightway all the gallants and wits in Paris. Her basket was emptied in a trice, and emptied again as often as refilled by her servants. It was deemed an honor to receive a nosegay from her pretty fingers, and more louis than half-franc pieces repaid them.

Great ladies came to her levées—for such they really were—and even deigned to accept from the beautiful flower-girl the gift of a rose or a violet—gifts always sure to be recompensed in noble fashion with jewels or costly laces, rich silks or pieces of plate. Within two years Nanette had thus accumulated in houses, lands, and rents an annual income of forty thousand francs, besides loading her kindred with presents.

Naturally, this circumstance did not cool the ardor of the followers whom her beauty had attracted. One of these was particularly noticeable for his assiduity. He was a young man about twenty-two years old, of distinguished air and handsome features, tinged with that shadow of melancholy thought to be so irresistible to the feminine imagination. His clothes, too, were in his favor; for though irreproachably neat and faultlessly cut, they had plainly seen their best days. We all know what a sly rogue Pity is, and how untiringly he panders for a certain nameless kinsman. Every afternoon found the melancholy young man at the garden awaiting the flower-girl’s coming. On her arrival he would advance, select a flower, pay a dozen sous, exchange a word, perhaps, and disappear till the following day. Once he was absent, and the fair florist’s brow was clouded. In other words, Nanette was extremely cross, and many an unlucky petit-maître was that day unmercifully snubbed for presuming on previous condescension. The garden trembled and was immersed in gloom. But presently the laggard made his appearance, Nanette’s lovely face was again wreathed in smiles, the garden breathed freely once more, and the petit-maîtres were astonished to find their vapid pleasantries received more graciously than ever. From this remarkable circumstance the sagacious reader will doubtless form his own conclusion; and we do not say that the sagacious reader will be wrong.

In point of fact, we may as well admit at once that Nanette, without knowing it, was already in love with this handsome, melancholy stranger, of whom she knew nothing, except that he was noble, since he wore a sword. She would have given half she was worth to know even his name, but she dared not ask it. As often as the question trembled on her tongue she felt herself blushing violently and unable, for the life of her, to open her lips. Her modesty had not been educated away by a season in the civilizing atmosphere of the court.

Chance at last befriended her. One evening the brilliant Marquis de Louvois, after talking awhile with the unknown, came up to the Count de la Châtre, who was seated beside her, and said to him:

“This ass of a De Courtenaye puts me out of all patience. The king has asked why he does not come to Versailles. I repeat to him his majesty’s flattering question. Well! it goes in one ear and out the other. Can one so bury one’s self in Paris?”

Think of that, good Americans, before you die! In the year of grace 1756 Paris was only a burying place for Versailles! So that 1870 had a precedent.

“What else is he to do?” asks the count. “It takes money to live as we do, and his father, poor fellow, left him nothing but a name, which, although one of the first in France, is rather a drawback than otherwise, since it won’t permit him even to marry for money anything less than a princess; and rich princesses like to get as well as to give.”

“True, true,” murmurs the compassionate marquis. “I had forgotten. More’s the pity; such a good-looking fellow as he is—”

“And a connection of the royal family.”

“Faith, the king is not over and above kind to his cousins.” And the gentlemen dismiss the royal poor relation from their noble minds as they would brush a grain of snuff from their ruffles, and stroll off, humming an aria from the latest opera of the famous Favart, the little Offenbach of his little day. Forgotten art thou now, O famous Favart! and thy immortal airs are as dead as Julius Cæsar.

But not so easily did M. de Courtenaye’s tribulations pass from the mind of Nanette, who had lost not a word of this conversation. She thought of him all through a wakeful night; she was still thinking of him the next morning—having arisen for that fond purpose long before the household was stirring—when she was startled by feeling a kiss upon her arm. She sprang up with a little cry of anger and alarm; but her frown changed to a smile when she recognized the offender. It was Marcel, the handsome Marcel, her favorite brother, a year her senior, but so like her they were often mistaken for twins.

“O Marcel!” she cried, “how you frightened me. How was one to look for such gallantry from one’s brother?”

“But if one is the brother of Nanette?” says Marcel still more gallantly.

Marcel has been in good company and flatters himself he has quite the bel air. As an apprentice to M. Panckoucke to learn the bookseller’s trade, wherein his sister, when he got old enough, was to set him up for himself, he had many opportunities of seeing and hearing the wits of the capital, not without profit to mind and manners. Indeed, he fairly considered himself one of them already.

“Yes, my dear little sister,” he added with a patronizing air, “you are positively the talk of the town. Go where I will—and you know I go into the best circles,” he says pompously, adjusting his ruffles as he has seen the dandies do—“I hear of nothing but the beautiful, the witty Nanette. Why, it was only the other day I was at M. de Marmontel’s”—the ingenuous youth did not deem it essential to state that he had been sent in the honorable though humble capacity of “printer’s devil” with a bundle of proofs for correction (the proofs, indeed, of the Contes Moraux: the dullest, surely—always excepting the delightful, interminable romances of the incomparable Mlle. de Scudéry—ever penned in the tongue of Montaigne and Molière,) but his sister understood his harmless vanity and did not so much as smile—“at M. de Marmontel’s with the Duke de Nivernais, the Count de Lauraguais, M. de Voltaire, and the Prince de Courtenaye.”

Nanette started slightly, but her brother did not perceive it. It is the way of brothers, and this brother, besides, was for the moment rapt in contemplation of the greatness reflected upon him by association with these great names. He fairly grew an inch in stature as he rolled them out, dwelling fondly on the titles. It is something to have a king speak to you, if only to ask you to get out of the way. Marcel continued:

“The talk was all of you. M. de Lauraguais, not knowing me to be your near relation, presumed to deny your wit and to question your virtue.”

Nanette’s beautiful eyes flashed in a way that would have made the slanderer uncomfortable had he seen it.

“Insolent!” she murmured, clenching her little fists.

“You may imagine how my blood boiled,” went on Marcel. “I was on the point of doing something rash when M. de Courtenaye took up the cudgels in your behalf. 'M. de Lauraguais,’ he said with grave severity, 'is it possible that you, a gentleman, can give currency to the lies set afloat by baffled libertines or malicious fools against the reputation of a defenceless girl? My life upon it, Nanette is as pure as she is lovely; and were proof of her innocence needed, I should ask none better than these stories of lovers whom no one has seen, or can even name. Why, had Nanette a lover, all Paris would ring with it in an hour.’ The impassioned earnestness of the prince made the company smile; but M. Diderot, siding with him, said he was sure you were better than the best that was said of you.”

Nanette’s eyes filled with tears. Had the youthful pedant been less intent on showing his familiarity with fashionable life, he must have had his suspicions aroused by her agitation. As it was, he was not even enlightened when Nanette, suddenly flinging her arms about his neck in a tender fury, kissed him twice or thrice passionately. He took the kisses complacently as a guerdon for his story. Fraternal obtuseness in such cases is simply limitless. “By the way, Nanette,” he added, “why wouldn’t it be a good idea to thank the prince by sending him some of your prettiest flowers? I can take them to-morrow with some books I am to convey to him.”

“Nonsense!” says Nanette incredulously. “I don’t believe you even know where he lives.”

“Don’t know where he lives?” cries Marcel indignantly. “Perhaps you will tell me next I don’t know where the Hôtel Carnavalet is, or how to find the Rue Culture Ste. Catherine? Don’t know where he lives, indeed!” And Marcel flings out of the room in a state of high dudgeon that his acquaintance with a great man should be doubted, and, worst of all, by Nanette. We are sorry to say he slammed the door after him. The best of brothers will do such things under strong provocation. But Nanette only smiled—the wily Nanette!

III.

The next morning, at his frugal breakfast in a rather lofty apartment of the Hôtel Carnavalet, the Prince de Courtenaye read with much amazement the following letter:

“My Dear Cousin: I am an old woman and your near relation. I have long observed with pain the poverty which keeps you from assuming your proper station. I have wealth, and not many years to keep it. What is a burden to me will be a help to you. Suffer me, then, from my superfluity to relieve your necessity—I claim it as the twofold privilege of age and love—and accept as frankly as I tender it the 25,000 francs which I enclose to procure you an establishment suited to your rank. On the first of every month 4,000 francs will be forwarded to you in addition.”

Some commonplaces of civility ended this remarkable but not unpleasant epistle—would that such a one some celestial postman might leave at the door of the present writer, to whom documents of a far different nature—but this is a painful and unnecessary digression. Let us continue. The prince read the queer communication with conflicting emotions, in which wonder predominated. He was not aware of any wealthy aunt or female relative particularly prone to this sort of furtive benevolence; but his connections were legion, and women were odd fish. Still, his honor seemed to him to forbid his accepting a fortune so acquired. But older and wiser heads stifled, or at least silenced, his scruples; and secretly resolving to leave no stone unturned to discover his mysterious benefactress, and to return to her or to her heirs every sou of the money, which in his heart he accepted only as a loan, he resigned himself to his good-luck with tolerable cheerfulness. Henceforth no more elegant equipage was to be seen than the Prince de Courtenaye’s. He became the fashion; he was the life and talk of every salon—as we should say, the success of the season. Nevertheless, he failed not to go every afternoon to the garden of the Palais Royal for his nosegay, with this difference only: that he now paid francs instead of sous.

A year sped away, spent by the prince in buying nosegays and in sharing the gayeties, though not the dissipations, of the court; by Nanette in continuing to perfect herself secretly in all the feminine accomplishments of her time, so that now, at the age of nineteen, she was not only peerless in beauty, but as cultivated as Mme. de Sévigné and as learned as Mme. Dacier—no, not as Mme. Dacier—no mere mortal was ever so learned as Mme. Dacier; but let us say as Mme. de La Fayette, who could set Father Rapin right in his Latin and silence Ménage. Was it for herself she underwent these prodigious labors? It is not known that she ever mentioned. But she still sold nosegays and still reaped a golden harvest.

One evening the Count de la Châtre was again sitting beside her when the Marquis de Louvois once more accosted him.

“My dear fellow,” said he, “what the mischief ails Pierre?” (he spoke of De Courtenaye). “He must be going mad. Have you heard his latest freak? Mlle. de Craon, one of our wealthiest heiresses, with a royal dowry and a princely income, is proposed to him, and what do you think? He refuses her—positively refuses. What bee is in his bonnet?”

“Love.”

“Love! Is it one of the Royal Princesses, then?”

“I imagine not.”

“Who then? Some divinity of the coulisses, I’ll wager.”

“Louvois,” said the count gravely, “you wrong our friend. De Courtenaye, as you know, abhors vice, and I am much mistaken if she whom he loves is not a virtuous woman.”

Louvois shrugged his shoulders as only a certain kind of Frenchman can. Virtue was a word not in his dictionary.

The next day the prince received this note, the second from his unknown relative:

“My Nephew: Why do you decline to marry Mlle. de Craon, who unites all that is illustrious in birth and splendid in fortune? I will provide you with the capital of the income I now allow you. Accept also as a wedding-gift for your intended the jewels I send herewith.

“If you consent, wear for eight days in your buttonhole a carnation; if you refuse, a rose.”

With the letter came a handsome jewel-case containing a million of francs in bills—it is well for the romancer to be liberal in these matters—and a magnificent parure of diamonds of the purest water, valued by the Tiffany of the time at 100,000 more.

That afternoon it was noticed in the garden that Nanette was unusually pale and silent. The Prince de Courtenaye entered at his usual hour; the nosegay in his buttonhole bore neither pink nor rose. He drew near the flower-girl, who offered him a posy with a hand she vainly tried to make steady. Like his own, it had neither pink nor rose.

The prince examined Nanette’s offering attentively, smiled sadly, stood for an instant in a musing attitude twirling the bouquet in his fingers, and then suddenly, as one whose mind is made up:

“My child,” he said, “will you make me the present of a rose?”

Nanette fainted.

IV.

When the flower-girl recovered she found herself in her own room, her family around her. But her eyes sought in vain the one face she most wished to see. Her mother and sisters told her with prodigious clamor and excitement, all talking at once at the tops of their voices, how she had fainted—“from the heat,” the gentleman said. “Yes, from the heat,” murmured Nanette softly, closing her eyes—how a great nobleman, the Prince de Courtenaye, had raised her, and how, without waiting for a carriage, and rejecting all aid, he had borne her in his arms to her house near by.

Nanette listened with closed eyes and a happy smile. All this was balm to her poor, sorely-tried heart. She even ventured to ask what had become of the kind gentleman. He had waited, they told her, to hear the doctor’s report giving assurance of her safety, and had then gone away, invoking for her their most zealous care. Presently the prince’s valet came to inquire after her health; but he himself did not come. Nanette was wounded, but she said nothing. Even pain in such a cause was too sacred a thing to be shared with another. Woman-like, she hugged her grief as though it were a treasure, and smiled, without knowing why, at the empty compliments of a crowd of petits-maîtres, who, after the fashion of the time, had rushed to pay her their condolences, and who ransacked Dorat for their vapid homage. Each took the smile to himself and redoubled his insipid gallantries. But Nanette was too much in love, if she had not been too clever, to heed them. So she contented herself and them by smiling.

At heart she was happy, in spite of the prince’s neglect. At least he would not marry; so much was secure. But the future: might he not have surprised her secret—she blushed as she thought it—and would he seek to abuse his power? No, she felt he was too noble for that, and, come what might, she would enjoy the present hour, the happiest she had known. So in vague, delicious hopes, and doubts not less delicious; in fluttering fears and half-formed, undefined resolves; in pain that seemed to be pleasure and pleasure whose sweetest element was pain—all the exquisite mélange of confused and dreamy emotions which take possession of a young and innocent heart so soon as it has fairly admitted to itself it loves—Nanette awaited her prince. She knew he would come; her heart told her so. And she was not deceived.

Early the next day he was announced. She essayed to rise as he entered, but sank back into her chair, half from weakness, half from agitation, murmuring incoherent excuses for her awkwardness. In an instant the prince was at her feet.

“Ah!” he cried, “I have found you out at last, my good cousin. But I am not come to return you your benefactions; only to beseech you to make it possible for me to keep them by adding to them a still more precious boon.”

“And that is—?”

“This fair, kind hand. Ah darling! you cannot refuse it me when you have already given me your heart.”

In sacrificing his name to this obscure young girl the prince was no doubt conscious of doing a noble and magnanimous act. And so it was—how noble, can only be realized by those who know the measureless distance which, in the days of Louis XV., divided the nobility from the people, or the insolent disdain with which the former looked down on the latter—a disdain commemorated to this day in the use of the word peuple to indicate a vulgar fellow. But if he thought to conquer Nanette in generosity, he was mistaken. The flower-girl, after a moment’s reflection, begged her lover to give her till to-morrow to answer. He consented reluctantly, but not doubting the result. Who could have looked in the eighteenth century to see a fish-monger's daughter refuse the hand of a French prince?

De Courtenaye arose the next morning satisfied with himself and with the world, and more in love than ever. He longed impatiently for the message which should summon him to the feet of his adored mistress to receive the seal of his happiness. At last, after, it seemed to his eagerness, an age of waiting, his servant brought him a letter. He glanced at the superscription; it was in the well-known hand. He pressed the dear characters to his lips and tore the missive open with trembling fingers. This is what he read:

“Love blinds you. A marriage with me would dishonor you. You love me too well for me to refuse you the most convincing proof of my love. I give you up, and I give up life for you. When you read this the flower-girl Nanette will have quitted the world for ever. Do not scruple to keep the money you have received, in your aunt’s name; it is yours by right. A kinsman, who accomplished your father’s ruin, simply made me the instrument of his tardy atonement. I leave to my family a fortune ample for their wants. Adieu! Think of me sometimes in the cloister, wherein I take refuge from my heart, and where I shall never cease to pray for you.”

So ends the history of Nanette Lollier. The Archbishop of Paris in person, it is said, conducted her to the convent of her choice, and the Palais Royal went into mourning. The prince was almost wild with grief; but his prayers, his supplications, his almost frenzied entreaties, could not shake Nanette’s resolve. He never married. The allusion in the flower-girl’s letter recalled to him certain rumors current at the time of his father’s death; but, as our chronicler shrewdly surmises, the story of the kinsman was simply a device of Nanette’s affection to disarm her lover’s pride.

This is the romance of Nanette, the flower-girl of the Palais Royal, as it is recorded in a chronicle of the time. In the foul and fetid annals of that most polluted reign, barren alike of manly honor and womanly virtue, it comes to us like a jewel we lift from the mire, or a fresh-blown rose we rescue from the kennel. Let us not ask if it be true. Stories of disinterested love, of magnanimity and devotion, let us rather accept as always true, saving our incredulity for narratives of another sort. For our own part we had rather believe Tiberius to be a myth than that Cordelia is a fiction; that Nero never fiddled in his life than that Henry Esmond never put his birthright in the fire to spare his benefactress pain.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Classic Literature, principally Sanskrit, Greek, and Roman. With some account of the Persian, Chinese, and Japanese in the Form of Sketches of the Authors and Specimens from Translations of their Works. By C. A. White, author of The Student’s Mythology. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1877.

We find on p. 12 of this new Hand-book of Classic Literature, as it is entitled on the back, among the “most commendable maxims” of the Pancha-Trantra—a work on morals composed by Hindoo sages—the following: “As long as a person remains silent he is honored; but as soon as he opens his mouth men sit in judgment upon his capacity.” The young people who will make use of this book, which is principally intended for their benefit and pleasure, must be the final judges of the capacity of its author to make classic literature intelligible and interesting to their minds. The author appears to understand them, and to have acquired that experience and skill in adapting instruction to the juvenile mind, by practical familiarity with young students in the class-room, which is almost necessary to ensure success in preparing a good text-book. The Hand-book of Classic Literature is not intended as a manual for lessons and recitations. It is not exclusively intended for those who study Latin or Greek; and we are not aware of any considerable number of young people who are studying Sanskrit, Persian, or Chinese, so that evidently no such class of pupils could have been in the eye of the author. In fact, the aim of the author is to give some general notion of the ancient authors and their principal works, and some fine specimens of the best translations which have been made into English, to those who do not study the ancient languages at all, or at most learn only the rudiments of one or two of them. Three-fourths of the volume are devoted to the Greek and Latin classics. The remaining eighty pages are divided between the Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese, with a brief notice of the Japanese. The most elaborate and valuable portion of the work is that devoted to Greek literature. The author has made use of the best critical works and selected a large number of the most excellent translations. So much learning, pains, skill in faithful and idiomatic rendering, and even poetic genius, have been expended by English scholars in translating the Greek classics that any reader of intelligence and taste may understand and enjoy to a very great extent these ancient masterpieces without learning a word of Greek. We notice as particularly discriminating and just the criticisms of the author on the three great tragedians. Specimens of several different authors who have translated Homer are presented, and a number of extracts from Aristophanes and others of the generally less known poets. There must be many whose curiosity will be excited by these choice morsels to read the entire translated works themselves. Next in interest to the sketches and translations from the Greek are those from the Sanskrit and Persian, on account both of the novelty of the subject-matter to the generality of readers, and also the intrinsic beauty of the selected passages. The author writes enthusiastically about Zoroaster, and we think with great justice. The song of the tea-pickers, from the Chinese, pleases us extremely, and is one of the prettiest and most touching of the minor pieces in the volume. The author has shown remarkable judgment and good taste in making this compilation, and writes in all that part of it which is of original composition in a style of peculiar accuracy and felicity of diction. The strict and conscientious regard in which the old saying Maxima reverentia debetur pueris has been kept throughout is an example for all those who write for the young. There is nothing which can endanger the faith or damage the moral delicacy of the young Christian pupil in all this volume filled up with the literature of heathen nations. On the contrary, its effect is salutary, and shows beautifully not only the great obscurity in which those gifted pagans lay from the want of a clear revelation of truth, but also that the human mind everywhere, in all times, naturally Christian, longs for the light.

The mechanical execution of the Classical Hand-book is remarkable for beauty and accuracy. We have noticed only two or three typographical faults in the whole volume. It is a most attractive book to take up and read. We have said that it is not properly a class-book. It is a reading-book for higher pupils, and a companion for lectures, suitable for reference or use in class-readings. We recommend it most cordially to all higher schools, especially academies for young ladies, and others where classical studies are not made one of the chief branches of instruction. The great number of choice and elegant extracts from the best writers, many of which are unfamiliar, as well as the historical notices and criticisms, make this book equally suitable for use in families and literary circles, especially for reading aloud, as for schools. We wish for the author the best reward which can be bestowed on one who is devoted to the culture of young pupils—the love and gratitude of their generous, affectionate hearts.

The Cradle of the Christ: a Study in Primitive Christianity. By Octavius Brooks Frothingham. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The author of this volume is one of the representative men of the left section of Unitarianism in this country. He is distinguished by a clear style, a finely-cultivated imagination, and his writings are characterized by a pervading placidity which is only occasionally ruffled by a mocking scepticism that suggests the too close proximity of Dr. Faust’s intimate friend.

The volume abounds in sweeping assertions, slovenly-expressed ideas, and lacks throughout the cement of a sound logic. It fosters on Cardinal Wiseman and Dr. Newman opinions which can only be accounted for on the supposition of the author’s inaccurate scholarship or his contempt for the intelligence of his readers. (See preface, page 5.) Among other things, he informs his readers that “it has been customary with Christians to widen as much as possible the gulf between the Old and the New Testaments, in order that Christianity might appear in the light of a fresh and transcendent revelation, supplementing the ancient, but supplanting it” (page 10). The custom of St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Catholic theologians generally is precisely the contrary. There is a remarkable book by a Catholic on this very point, published in our own day, entitled De l’Harmonie entre l’Eglise et la Synagogue, par Le Chevalier P. L. B. Drach, a converted rabbi. The rabbi, in his two volumes, aims at showing that a Jew, in becoming a Catholic, does not deny or change his religion, but follows out, completes, and perfects it. The Jewish Church and the Catholic Church are identically one, and the former is to the latter as the bud to the full-blown flower.

With a criticism that kills beforehand the life it would dissect, Mr. O. B. Frothingham ends by coolly telling his readers that Christianity is extinct. And with a self-satisfied air he naïvely exhorts them, by the efforts of their imagination, to build up a new and superior religion to Christianity. His readers will, we opine, politely decline this task, and leave to him who had the genius to conceive the idea its accomplishment. What a pity he did not tell them what he means by the imaginative faculty! For if in this, as in other things, he follows his foreign masters, we have no reason to expect as the result of its exercise in this direction, other than an additional illusion to the long list of religious vagaries given to the world, from Simon Magus down to Joe Smith and the Fox girls.

A scholar who has read the volume describes its contents as “theological, philosophical, and speculative old shreds picked up in German and French tailor-shops and cunningly sewed together in the shape of a cloak by a 'cute’ Yankee apprentice, in order to cover the nudity of the latest form of the unbelief of New England.”

The book before us shows no mean literary skill, but contains nothing original in the way of thought or erudition, not even an original error, though its errors are many more than the number of its pages.

The Problem of Problems, and its Various Solutions; or, Atheism, Darwinism, and Theism. By Clark Braden, President of Abingdon College, Ill. 8vo. pp. 480. Cincinnati: Chase & Hall. 1877.

Recent scientific research has at last put the orthodox world on its mettle and elicited expressions of opinion from all shades of believers. Coquetting with dangerous premises, even in the guise of science, toleration of views implicitly or indirectly infidel, and a general disposition to compromise, are not indicative of a healthy tone in any organization avowedly Christian. Yet such tendencies have for a long time characterized the relation of the various Protestant sects towards scientism, and one of the greatest outcries raised against the Syllabus proceeded from its alleged intolerance of, and general hostility to, unhampered scientific inquiry. But coaxing and cajoling, and a concurrent cry against the stupidity of Catholics, had no weight with Messrs. Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, and Draper, who went on just as ever dealing their blows against revelation and all positive forms of belief, as though his Lordship of Canterbury were a myth and his faith a sham.

At length consistency compelled the representative men of the various denominations to resist the further encroachments of an irreligious philosophy, and they are beginning to do so with the bitter consciousness that they were the very ones who most ridiculed the sagacity of the Holy Father when he censured the tone and tendency of modern scientism. But it is better late than never; and if the gentlemen who, from Princeton to Abingdon, feel themselves called upon to do the work will only graciously allow that they are eleventh-hour workers, we will find no fault with their intention, but confine ourselves to a criticism of its execution.

The Problem of Problems is the latest addition to the religio-scientific controversy, and it is entitled to serious consideration because of the earnestness of the author and the elaborate character of the work. This elaborateness is, however, more apparent than real, and consists in a measure of diluted thought and diffuse expression. Whether it is unfortunately a peculiarity of Western authors to strip a thought entirely bare and leave nothing to suggestion, as the charge is made, we are not prepared to say, but certain it is that Mr. Clark Braden has gone far towards justifying such a suspicion. He is not satisfied with a placid presentment of his own views, nor with a brief arraignment of what he deems to be the errors of others, but he must reiterate, emphasize, and in general lash himself into a state of incandescence not at all needful for his purpose. Dignified opposition, even if a little tame, is somewhat more congenial to the frigid tastes of persons living east of the Alleghenies than those fervid utterances which mistake sound for sense. This, however, is an error of form which does not necessarily militate against the intrinsic value of the work, nor do we think that an allusion to it is likely to discompose the learned author; for in a little prologue, addressed to “Reviewers and Critics,” he courts and solicits dispassionate and impartial criticism. In addition he requests that all publishers send him a copy of what their imprimatur has allowed critics to say concerning his book. We presume this is right; but when the request comes coupled with the condition that every one undertaking to comment on his work must not do so before having read it from cover to cover, we fear that it will not always be faithfully complied with, or that he will have to read some pages in which gall and wormwood abound more than the milk of human kindness. The reason of this we have hinted at. The book is prolix and repeats to a fault. Many excellent thoughts are covered up in a mass of verbiage which emasculates and obscures them. We wish the author had the academic fitness to cope with his antagonists—whose culture has made their productions marvels of composition and terribly enhanced their influence for evil. We are sorry that this charge should be the main one to prefer against a book which was prompted by the best of motives and which really exhibits rare evidences of argumentative power. Take even the opening sentence, and we find ourselves face to face with a flagrant grammatical inaccuracy: “One of the wise utterances of one whom his contemporaries declared spoke as never man spoke was, that no wise man, etc.” Here, apart from the slovenly repetition of “one” we find no subject for the first “spoke,” unless it be “whom,” and that is in the objective case. Similar mistakes occur throughout, and give painful evidence that Mr. Braden began his scientific investigations before he had made himself familiar with Blair or Lord Kames. We would, in connection with this same matter of style, suggest that the too frequent use of interrogation not only mars the beauty of a page, but has an inevitable tendency to wearisome diffuseness. Lest, however, we may be suspected of harshness towards the author, we select a passage at random, that the reader may judge for himself how little Mr. Braden is acquainted with the quality of a good style. On page 171 he says: “We have no horses on the pampas of the New World, although they existed as the most adapted to horses of any portion of the globe for ages, and there were equine types in the New World for several geologic epochs. Multitudes of cases might be given where man has carried animals into places where they did not exist and they flourished, and even improved, thus showing that the conditions were especially fitted for them, yet had not produced them, although they had existed for vast ages. Hence conditions have failed to evolve what was especially fitted to them, and just what they would produce, did they produce anything.” We submit that these sentences are not only clumsy in construction, but are positively ungrammatical, and no one who undertakes the guidance of others along the thorny paths of scientific research has a right to tax the general patience with slipshod composition of this kind. Such examples as those given are not isolated, but disfigure nearly every page. On page 87 we find the following; “There was at first use of bodily organs in appropriating food and slaying for food animals, and the use of spontaneous productions of the earth, like animals.”

So much for the form of the book. The matter is indeed better, though necessarily much impaired by the many faults of style. In consideration of fair play towards the author we will not accept his own standard of judgment while passing an opinion on his book; for we would then have either to mistrust our own intelligence entirely or to utter unqualified censure of all that he has written. In his appeal to “Reviewers and Critics” he says: “If there is censure or condemnation of what is written, let it be only after the critic understands what he condemns, and because he understands it.” Now, we do not propose to condemn any portion of the book because we understand it; for we freely confess that there is much valuable thought to be found in its pages, and the author gives proof of having a good logical mind, not hampered, indeed, by the subtleties of Port Royal or the Grammar of Assent, but sturdy and vigorous, with a Western breadth and freedom. We have not space to give even an outline of the plan Mr. Braden has mapped out for himself. Method is an important feature of a scientific and argumentative work, and, when judiciously adopted, goes far to promote the purpose of the author.

Clearness, natural development, logical sequence of thought, and ready conviction are the results of a suitable method, while confusion, weariness, and dissatisfaction follow from a neglect thereof. Mr. Braden’s lack of method will do much in the way of injuriously interfering with the effect of his book. Divisions and subdivisions without number, irrespective of reason, may swell the dimensions of a work, but do not certainly contribute to the satisfaction of the reader.

If all Mr. Braden has written in the present volume were presented in a more orderly and attractive manner his book would be a valuable contribution to polemics, but the faults we have indicated will constantly militate against its usefulness.

In the Appendix both Draper and Huxley come in for a share of censure, but while the author utterly fails to make a point against Draper, he so overloads with irrelevant matter his review of Huxley’s three lectures, delivered in this city, that the reader rises from the perusal of it with a tired memory and a dissatisfied mind.

The Childhood of the English Nation; or, The Beginnings of English History. By Ella S. Armitage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1877.

The authoress of this “little” book tells us, in her preface, that when she began to write it “no short and simple history of England had appeared which made any attempt to give unlearned people an insight below the surface of bare facts,” but that “since then numerous works of the kind have appeared.” Yes, indeed, too numerous; yet, as far as we know, not one of them so pretentious as this. With a very readable style and a great show of erudition (an appalling “list of authorities” is appended to her volume) she sets up for “an interpreter to those who have no knowledge of history,” taking for her theme what she is pleased to call the “childhood of the English nation”—by which she means the history of England “till the end of the twelfth century.” Of course, therefore, she has to deal largely with the work and influence of the Catholic Church. Now, when those who are not Catholic undertake to expound a philosophy to which they have not the key—to wit, the philosophy of any part of history with which Catholic faith has been concerned—we can pardon their mistakes, provided they evince that humility which is the mark of fair-mindedness. But, if this condition be wanting, we can only regard their attempt as a piece of insufferable impertinence; their very concessions to our cause—a trick quite fashionable of late—but making them the less excusable.

Here, then, lies our quarrel with the writer of this book. She goes out of her way to theorize on matters she does not understand, instead of confining herself to “bare facts.” For example, after acknowledging (p. 19) that “there is no saying how long the English might not have remained heathen if Pope Gregory I., in the year 597, had not sent missionaries to bring them to the faith of Christ,” she must needs endeavor to account for the Papacy as follows:

“Gregory was Pope or Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604. In his time the popes of Rome had not yet risen to the position of universal bishops and supreme heads of the church, though they were tending towards it. All men were agreed that there must be one, and only one, visible, united church, but all had not yet made up their minds that the Bishop of Rome was to be the head of that church. The church of the Welsh, for example, and that of Ireland (!), owed no obedience to Rome. The pope himself did not dare to call himself universal bishop: 'Whosoever calls himself so is Antichrist,’ said Gregory I. Still, it was natural that Rome, which had been the ruling city of the one universal empire, the queen of the West, should be the chief centre of the one universal church, and that the Bishop of Rome should become the head of the church, and all other bishops should bow to his authority. This was what did come to pass in time, but at the time of which I am now speaking it seemed very uncertain; for things had sadly changed with Rome. She had no emperor now; the emperor was at Constantinople; Italy was invaded by barbarians, Rome herself was scourged by plague and famine. The Bishop of Constantinople tried to set himself up as Universal Bishop and Head of the Church; and that the popes afterwards won the day in this struggle was largely due to the great influence which Pope Gregory I. gained by his wisdom and his powerful character.”

The cluster of absurdities contained in this passage would be “matter for a flying smile,” were it not that the ignorance displayed looks too much like perverted knowledge. Can the lady have really failed to perceive the transparent nonsense of supposing that such a power as the Papacy originated in people making up their minds that the church ought to have a visible head, and that the Bishop of Rome was the right man because, forsooth, Rome had been the seat of empire? If, again, she knows what St. Gregory said to the ambitious John of Constantinople, why does she not quote a few more of his remarks? “The care of the whole church,” said he, “was committed to Peter; yet he is not called 'Universal Apostle.’” “Who does not know that his see (of Constantinople) is subject to the Apostolic See (of Rome)?” St. Gregory, like his predecessor St. Pelagius, refused the title of Œcumenical Patriarch, or Universal Bishop, for himself out of humility; how, then, could he tolerate the assumption of it by a bishop who did not sit in Peter’s chair?

But we need not cite this book further to show that it is valueless in Catholic eyes.

Dr. Joseph Salzmann’s Leben und Wirken Dargestellt von Joseph Rainer, Priester der Erzdiöcese Milwaukee, Professor am Priesterseminar Salesianum. St. Louis: Herder.

The Salesianum is an ecclesiastical seminary near Milwaukee which enjoys a very high reputation for the learning of its professors, the solidity of its course of studies, and the strictness of its discipline. Near it there is a Normal College for the training of school-teachers, and another college for the intermediate education of boys. The man who was the principal founder of these excellent institutions was the Very Rev. Joseph Salzmann, D.D., an Austrian priest, who came to Wisconsin as a missionary thirty years ago and finished his earthly course in January, 1874, honored and regretted throughout the United States. The venerable Archbishop of Milwaukee first conceived the idea of founding a seminary to educate priests for the Northwest more than thirty years ago, while praying at the tomb of St. Francis de Sales, and this is the reason of the name Salesianum by which the seminary was christened. The first rector was the present learned Bishop of La Crosse, Dr. Heiss. Dr. Salzmann succeeded him in office in 1868. The Rev. Professor Rainer, in the little volume before us, gives an interesting account of the whole life of Dr. Salzmann, but especially of his great and arduous work of founding and establishing the Salesianum, which we may truly call a heroic achievement. He was a thoroughly learned and accomplished scholar, a man of sacerdotal dignity and personal attractiveness, an eloquent preacher, with fair and seductive prospects before him in his own beautiful Catholic land. He was well fitted to adorn those positions in the church which are surrounded with the most outward éclat, and give the opportunity of enjoying all the ease, comfort, and pleasure in literary pursuits and quiet seclusion which are lawful and honorable in the priesthood. Nevertheless, he chose the life of a Western missionary, and devoted the greater part of his time and energies, not to the intellectual and attractive employments of preaching and instruction in the sciences, but to that most repugnant and arduous work of collecting money and looking after the drudgery of building, providing, caring for the material wants of new, poor, struggling institutions. It is not possible for any who have not been brought up in some one of the old Catholic countries of Europe to estimate the sacrifice made by young men of refined character and education, and strong love of home and country, when they devote themselves to missionary labor in a new country, and to its hardest, most repulsive departments. There are special difficulties and hardships to be encountered by those who work among our German population. When they are bad or indifferent Catholics, they are the most obstinate and unmanageable people with whom a priest can have to deal, and very difficult to reclaim. Apostate and infidel Germans have a brutality in their hatred to the Catholic Church and all religion which is extremely odious and cannot be fully appreciated by one who has not come into personal contact with that class, whose only god is beer and whose church is the lager-beer saloon. Zur Hölle is the appropriate motto we have seen over one of these dens in New York. When thoroughly imbued with the Catholic spirit, the German people are admirable. The wonderful work of Christian civilization wrought out among them in past ages is known to all readers of true history. Dr. Salzmann, and others like him, are worthy successors of the apostolic men whose names are recorded in the history of the church. They are the men who carry on the true Cultur-Kampf in the vast realms of our Western territory. Their acts are worthy to be classed with those so charmingly related in The Monks of the West and Christian Schools and Scholars. A keen Western speculator said that “a bishop was worth as much as a railroad to a Western town.” All that is wanted to repeat in the immense regions of our new States and Territories the creation and development of great civilized and Christian communities is the virile force, the manhood, of those early times. Land and material resources exist in prodigal abundance. It is men that are wanted—masses of people with strength and spirit to abandon our crowded cities and old States and colonize new domains, and men with the ability and virtue of leaders, guides, founders, instructors, legislators, rulers, and benefactors. We trust that the modest recital of the life of one generous young priest who left his charming Austrian home to engage in this work may find its way among the educated young men and young ecclesiastics of Germany. There is work here for some among the hundreds of such young men, full of vigorous health, full of intellectual vigor, full of sound learning, who are at a loss to find a sufficient sphere for their activity in their own country.

The greatest and noblest project of Dr. Salzmann was one which he could not even begin to carry into execution—that of founding a university, a new Fulda, for the Germans of America. We do not think that such an institution could or should remain permanently an exclusively German university. We desire, nevertheless, to see this grand idea carried out, as a special work of our Catholics of German origin and language, under the direction of a corps of learned German professors, and with special reference to the education of youth who are of the same descent or who wish to study the language and literature of Germany. Time and the course of nature will eventually blend all our heterogeneous elements together, but we do not believe in violent efforts to hurry on the process. All that we can borrow from any European language or literature, all the recruits we can gain from the nurseries of scholars or population in the Old World, is so much added to our intellectual, social, and political strength and breadth. Of course the English language and literature, American history and institutions, ought to be assiduously studied by the learned foreigners who are domesticated among us, and taught to their pupils of a different mother-tongue. This may be done without abdicating the advantage which they possess, and which others must acquire at the cost of great labor, by being born heirs to the inheritance of their own immediate ancestors.

The great practical question of the moment is that of Catholic education. The advocates of compulsory secular education are the enemies of religion, of their country, and of true culture. The seminaries, colleges, and schools where Catholic priests, youths, and children are trained in sound religious knowledge, morality, and science are the fortresses and the centres of real civilization. Whoever does a great work in the cause of Catholic education is a benefactor to the church and the country. Such a noble and meritorious man was Dr. Salzmann, a priest powerful in word and work, a model for the young ecclesiastics of the Salesianum to imitate, an encouraging example for all who are laboring to found and perfect similar institutions. The diocese of Milwaukee was a poor and feeble little bishopric when the venerable Dr. Henni was consecrated in 1844. Now it is a metropolitan see, with above 190,000 Catholics in its diocesan limits, above 180 priests, several flourishing institutions for the higher education of both sexes, and schools in almost every parish. The Salesianum, where the first rector, Dr. Heiss, was professor of Greek, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and moral theology, numbers thirteen professors and two hundred and fifty students. Surely, the prayers and labors of a good bishop, seconded by those of able and zealous priests, can work wonders now as well as in the best ages of the past. Indeed, works which a St. Francis of Sales was unable to accomplish are now successfully performed within a short time and with comparatively little difficulty. Assuredly, we cannot fail to recognize a special benediction of God upon the church of the United States.

The Consolation of the Devout Soul. By the Very Rev. Joseph Frassinetti, Prior of Santa Sabina, in Genoa. Translated by Georgiana Lady Chatterton. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The worth of a book ought to be estimated chiefly from its intrinsic merits, yet, even without being acquainted with these, we may often obtain a fair idea of its character by knowing something about the author.

Father Frassinetti was an extraordinary man. He was born in the city of Genoa on Dec. 15, 1803, and died there on the 3d of January, 1868. Thirty-nine years of his life were spent in the priesthood, with an unsullied reputation for piety and zeal, and a wide-spread fame as a preacher, director of consciences, and writer on spiritual matters. A uniform edition of his works, which are all in Italian, was published shortly before his death in ten volumes, and dedicated to the late Cardinal Patrizi, Vicar of Rome.

The first volume of his collected works contains Il conforto dell’ Anima Divota, of which we have the excellent translation before us. Its author was not only a remarkably learned man, but also a singularly pious man—one whom our Holy Father Pope Pius IX. called, in a certain brief, a priest spectatæ doctrinæ et virtutis—and distinguished by the rare faculty of being able to communicate his knowledge to others, and of knowing how to lead others on to personal holiness. Nearly forty years of his life were passed in leaching his fellow-men by word and example how to love, serve, and honor God and save their souls. That such a one should have written this little book on The Consolation of the Devout Soul is a sufficient guarantee of its usefulness and doctrine. The work is divided into five chapters and an appendix, in which the author successively defines what is meant by Christian perfection, shows that it is not a thing too difficult to be acquired, solves certain objections against facility of sanctification, explains the beauty and utility of Christian perfection, points out the means of arriving at this much-desired end, and concludes with a short treatise on the holy fear of God. Several notes are added.

This translation bears the imprimatur of the devout and learned Bishop of Birmingham. We earnestly recommend it to the members of religious orders, and to people who serve God in the world.

The Code Poetical Reader, for school and home use. With marginal notes, and biographical notices of authors. By a Teacher. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This Reader is made up of eighty short poems from British and American authors. Each selection is accompanied by marginal notes and is headed by a short biographical notice. The plan is excellent, the publishers’ work is well done, but the biographical notices are so brief as to be of little value, and the marginal notes are nothing more than commonplace definitions of difficult words. Perhaps it is hardly just to call the words referred to difficult, since the majority of the poems are as simple in diction as Lord Ullin’s Daughter. The fault may be attributed partly to the marginal-note plan, since an absence of notes would leave an unsightly page. Still, this is no excuse for careless definitions: unfriended is a poor substitute for forlorn; California is not a mountainous country of North America on the Pacific coast; Indian is a name given to the aboriginal inhabitants of America, not to the ancient inhabitants; pollution does not mean to corrupt; concealing can hardly mean at once hiding and to keep secret. In the lines from The Village Blacksmith,

“Each morning sees some task begun,

Each evening sees its close,”

the word close is defined finished. These are a few inaccuracies out of many. The selections comprise some of the most exquisite short poems in the language, there being few extracts and but one translation. Were it not for the absence of selections from Catholic sources, this would be a desirable class-book. Why Adelaide Procter, Aubrey de Vere, Gerald Griffin, Davis, McGee, are excluded, and Bret Harte honored in two places, is a mystery. Nor do other poets fare better. Caswall is not mentioned; in truth, there is not one poem from a Catholic author. Catholics are not the only persons who suffer from the editor’s discrimination. Tennyson is excluded, while Rev. Charles Kingsley contributes two pieces. Six selections come from Longfellow. These facts show that it was not for want of space that Catholic poems find no room in a text-book published by a Catholic firm. Nor was it merit alone that prompted the editor in his selection. The book seems to have been prepared for schools in which neither the name nor the sentiment of a Catholic writer might enter. The system that excludes the grace and purity of Adelaide Procter, the sweetness and vigor of De Vere, and the perfect rhythm of Tennyson will bring forth bitter fruit, and those who assist the projectors in their plans may expect to reap the usual harvest of ingratitude, together with the unpleasant memory of having closed their eyes to the merits of Catholic poets because of the hostility of some so-called non sectarian school-board.

Summa Summæ. Pars Prima—De Deo. Confecit ac edidit T. J. O’Mahony, S.T.D., Philos. in Collegio OO.SS., Dublinii, Professor. Dublinii: apud M. H. Gill et Fil.; Lond.: Burns et Oates; Paris: J. Lecoffre et Soc. 1877.

This summary of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas is chiefly intended as an aid to ecclesiastical students in the study of the great work of the Angelic Doctor. The first part only is yet published. Dr. O’Mahony, of All-Hallow’s College, its author, with great skill and painstaking, has endeavored to make the order and arrangement of topics and divisions in the Summa more intelligible by means of a convenient type-arrangement and distinctive headings, and to facilitate the understanding of the text by an analytical abstract which contains many literal quotations, followed by a synthetic synopsis of subjects. The work seems to have been done intelligently and well, and its utility is obvious to every student who has attempted to read even one page of the Summa. It is neatly printed, and we trust may soon be completed.

Why are we Roman Catholics? Because we are Reasonable Men. By Hermann Joseph Graf Fugger Glött, Priest of the Society of Jesus. From the German. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A clear, solid, and short exposition of the Catholic faith, in view of actual objections against its reasonableness. It would be well if there were more works of this kind. The rational side of revealed truth needs a various development to meet the many intellectual demands of our age. Besides, there are many sincere persons in Protestant communities who are disposed to be Christians, but are in suspense because of the inconsistency of Protestantism with reason. These need only the obstacles to faith to be removed for them to become Catholics. For such this short treatise will be of special service. It should be also read by Catholics, as they ought to be prepared when asked to know how “to give a reason for the hope that is in them.” The author shows a familiar knowledge of the anti-Christian writers of our day, is free from all bitterness, and we hope to hear from his pen in this field again. The translation reads as if written in English.

Carte Ecclesiastique des Etats-Unis de l’Amerique. Lyons. 1877.

A few copies of this chart have been sent to this country, and we have received one through the courtesy of Father Perron, of Woodstock College. It is a handsome, well-executed, and, so far as we have discovered, correct map of the provinces and bishoprics of the United States. Such a map is convenient and valuable. We think it would be improved by making each of the provinces of one distinct color, and marking the dioceses by broad colored lines, and the States by similar black lines. The titles of the provinces and dioceses might also be printed in large letters, and the sees receive more conspicuous signs. The chart is published by the Society of Catholic Missions, 6 Rue d’Auvergne, à Lyon. Directeur, M. l’Abbé Stanislas Laverrière. All the profits are given to the missions. We suggest to our Catholic publishers to send for copies and keep them on hand for sale.

Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church. By the Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, D.D. With art illustrations. New York: J. B. Ford & Co. 1877.

We can do no more now than call the attention of our readers to this most beautiful work—beautiful in every sense—of which we have received advance sheets. The author’s name needs no introduction to Catholic readers. We reserve for a future date a fuller notice of a well-conceived and admirably executed work, one too of great practical utility. Father O’Reilly’s statement in the preface, that “the publishers have spared neither labor nor expense to make this book most beautiful in form,” is obviously true at the first glance.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 147.—JUNE, 1877.

THE PAPAL JUBILEE.
SONNETS BY AUBREY DE VERE.

I.
THE GREAT PILGRIMAGE.

What beam is that, guiding once more from far
Earth’s Elders Rome-ward over sea and land?
What Sanctity, serene as Bethlehem’s star,

From East and West leads on each pilgrim band?

God’s light it is—on an unsceptred Hand!

God’s promise, shining without let or bar,

O’er sleeping realms that yet may wake in war,

Forth from that Brow Discrowned whose high command

Freshens in splendor with the advancing night

Missioned to blot all godless crowns with gloom:—

Like fruits untimely from a tree in blight

Such crowns shall fall. Even now they know their doom!

Advance, pure hearts! Your instinct guides you right

The Bethlehem Crib, this day, is by Saint Peter’s tomb.

II.
THE JERUSALEM OF THE NEW LAW.

“The Tribes ascend.” Ten centuries and nine

Have well-nigh passed since first the earth’s green breast

Confessed, deep-graved, those feet that Christ confessed,—

Those feet which, then when earth was Palestine,

Circled her Salem new. Mankind was thine,

O Rome, that time. All nations sent their best

To waft thee offerings, and their faith attest:—

They love thee most who love thee in decline.

The noble seek thy courts. What gibbering crew

Snarls at their heels? The brood that fears and hates;—

Prescient Defeat in bonds, that jeers the brave:

Ascend, true hearts! Such tribute is your due!

In Rome’s old triumphs thus the car-bound slave

Scoffed, as he passed, of Fortune’s spite, and Fate’s.[42]

III.
THE CONFESSOR PONTIFF.

Full fifty years are past since first that weight

Descended on his head which made more strong

His heart, his hands more swift to war with wrong—

His martyred Master’s dread Episcopate:

Full thirty years beside the Apostles’ Gate

He reigned, and reigns: he roamed, an exile, long:

Restored, he faced once more the apostate throng,

Unbowed in woes, in greatness unelate.

New Hierarchies he sped to realms remote:

Central, by Peter’s Tomb he raised his hands

Blessing his thousand bishops from all lands;

Confirmed their great decree. False kings he smote:—

How long, just God, shall Treason’s banner float

O’er faith’s chief shrine profaned by rebel bands?

POPE PIUS THE NINTH.[43]

The whole Catholic world prepares to celebrate on the 3d of June of this year the fiftieth anniversary of an episcopate which has no parallel in the history of the church. Our Holy Father Pius IX. has surpassed most of his predecessors in the importance of his labors, and has far exceeded them all in the length of his pontificate. He was young when he reached the dignity of bishop, but Leo XII., to whom he owed his promotion, had already discerned the beauty of his character. Sinigaglia, where he was born, on the 13th of May, 1792; Volterra, where he passed six years at college; Rome, where he studied theology, abound with stories of the sweet and sunny disposition, the fervent piety, and the burning zeal which illustrated even his tenderest years. He was six years of age when the venerable Pius VI. was dragged away into captivity, and the biographers of Pius IX. speak of the excitement which stirred his boyish heart, and the prayers which he poured out night and morning at his mother’s knee for the outraged church. His earliest recollections of the Papacy were a fit preparation for what he was to undergo in after-life. The Holy Father appeared to his young eyes, not as the crowned pontiff, but as the suffering and heroic confessor. He saw Pius VII. following Pius VI. into banishment. He saw the last inch of territory taken from the Holy See. One of his uncles, a canon of St. Peter’s, was driven from Rome on account of his fidelity to the pope; and another uncle, who was Bishop of Pesaro, was thrown into prison for the same cause. He had finished his course at college and was living at home when Pius VII. returned from exile, and he was presented to the pontiff as he passed through Sinigaglia on the road to Rome. The Mastai family were distantly related to Pius VII., and the pope took an interest in his kinsman. But there was an obstacle which seemed likely to defeat the young Mastai’s desire to enter holy orders. He was subject to fits of epilepsy. The physicians gave him no hope of a cure. About the time of the pope’s return, however, the violence of the disorder began to abate, and his health was soon so far restored that he was encouraged to continue his studies for the church. He always ascribed his relief to the protection of the Blessed Virgin. In 1819 he was ordained priest by special dispensation, and appointed to the humble duty of serving the asylum for poor children established in the Via Giulia in Rome by a pious mason named Giovanni Borgi. It was called the Asylum Tata Giovanni, because “Tata Giovanni”—or Papa John—was the name which the lads used to give their protector. The Abbate Mastai had been a good friend and helper of Papa John, and was glad of the privilege of continuing his work now that the benevolent old man had gone to his reward. He occupied a little chamber in the asylum. He ate at the table with the boys. He spent all his income in their service. He kept his regard for them long after they had grown up, and even as Pope he remembered the names of his pupils and followed their fortunes with a tender interest. It has often been said that Pius IX. never forgot anybody.

The first employment which brought him into public notice was a mission to the New World. Some of the clergy of the South American states had petitioned the Holy See to fill their long-vacant bishoprics. Many years had passed since the close of their war of independence with Spain, but the mother-country still asserted the authority which she no longer attempted to enforce, and claimed the right of presentation to sees long withdrawn from her jurisdiction. The church in South America remained, consequently, in lamentable confusion until the Sovereign Pontiff resolved to re-establish order by the exercise of his prerogative, without government interference from either side; and the embassy of which we speak was despatched in consequence. Monsignore Muzi, with the title of vicar-apostolic, was at the head of it, and the Abbate Mastai was appointed adjunct.[44] Before the expedition sailed Pope Pius VII. died, but Leo XII. confirmed the selections made by his predecessor; and, indeed, the choice of the Abbate Mastai had been made originally by his advice. On the voyage the ship was driven by stress of weather into the Spanish port of Palma, in the island of Majorca. The governor threw the embassy into prison and kept them for some days in seclusion, on the ground that the country to which they were bound was in rebellion against the Spanish crown. “Then,” said the Pope, in telling this adventure nearly half a century afterward, “I realized the necessity of the papal independence. They sent me a ration of food every day from the ship, but I was allowed neither letters nor papers. I was initiated on this occasion, however, into the little stratagems of solitary prisoners; for we hid our correspondence in loaves of bread.” The embassy got away at last and spent two years of fatigue and danger in South America, visiting the missions of Chili, Peru, and Colombia, traversing the awful passes of the Cordilleras, and crossing the continent in bullock-carts—a journey which took them nearly two months. Once, in going by sea from Valparaiso to Callao, their vessel, caught near the coast in a gale, was driving upon the rocks when a fisherman put off in his boat, boarded them in the midst of the storm, and brought them through intricate passages into the harbor of Arica. The next day the Abbate Mastai visited the hut of this daring pilot, and left with him a purse containing about four hundred dollars. After becoming Pope he sent the man a second purse of equal value and his picture. The fisherman was overwhelmed with gratitude. The first four hundred dollars had proved the making of his fortune. He gave the second to the poor, and placed the picture of the Pope in a little chapel which he had built on a spot overlooking the sea.

The embassy returned to Rome in 1825, and the Abbate Mastai was appointed canon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, a little church on the Corso, with an oratory in which pious tradition relates that St. Paul and St. Luke used to teach the faith to the first Christians of Rome. He was also promoted to the prelacy and placed at the head of the great Hospital of St. Michael. “The Hospital of St. Michael,” says one of the latest of the biographers of Pius IX., “is a city in itself, and its administration is a real government.” Founded two centuries ago by Innocent X., it grew, by the additions of later pontiffs, to be one of the greatest and grandest asylums in existence—a house of refuge for the young, a retreat for the aged and infirm, a hospital for the sick, a reformatory for Magdalens, a home for virtuous girls, and, besides all that, a school of arts and industries. When Monsignore Mastai assumed the presidency of this vast and complicated institution, every department of it was in a deplorable state of disorganization. Nearly all the earnings of the boys and girls in the industrial schools went towards the support of the establishment, and yet there was an enormous deficit in the revenues. Bankruptcy seemed at hand. The new president took up his task with magnificent ardor and equally magnificent discretion, with the enthusiasm of a reformer and the practical sagacity of a man of business. In two years the disorder was at an end. The expenses of the institution were brought within its income, yet its charity was enlarged rather than restricted, and a large share of the earnings of the boys was paid into a savings’ fund, to be returned to them when they went out into the world. Monsignore Mastai had obtained this remarkable result in part by his talent for business; but not wholly by that, for when the work was done his own patrimony had disappeared. “Of what use is money to a priest,” said he, “except to be spent in the cause of charity?” So it happened that when Leo XII. called him to the archbishopric of Spoleto in 1827 he had not money enough to pay for his bulls. The last acre of his estate was sold for the customary fees, and he entered Spoleto as penniless as the apostle whom our Lord commanded to take the tax-money from the mouth of a fish.

The first years of his episcopate were passed as any one who had watched the labors of his priesthood might have predicted that they would be. He was rarely seen by the courtiers of the papal palace, but his people knew him as the friend and father of the poor, and loved him for a tenderness and generosity almost without bounds. He filled his diocese with good works, founding seminaries and asylums, introducing charitable orders, always setting a practical example of beneficence by attending personally to the wants of the unfortunate. He spent in alms the last copper in his purse, and sold the ornaments from his parlor for the poor when his purse was empty. It was the golden time of his life—a time of peace and consolation. The church in Italy just then was at rest. A long period of political disturbance had been followed by comparative quiet. Convents and pious schools were multiplied, and the saintly Archbishop of Spoleto found himself in the midst of a devout clergy and a grateful people. There was a short outbreak in the Romagna in 1831, premature and easily suppressed, and it was then that the archbishop was brought for the first time into contact with the spirit of revolution destined to make such a bitter and memorable war upon him in later years. Among the adventurers implicated in the movement were two scions of the Bonaparte family. The elder brother died during the enterprise; the younger lived to become emperor. There is a story that when Louis Napoleon fled from the ruin of the revolt in the Romagna, he knocked one night at the door of the Archbishop of Spoleto, and owed his safety to the charity of that most charitable of men. It is a story which rests upon no very firm authority, and yet, though often published, it stands uncontradicted. It is certain, however, that in the last days of the insurrection the archbishop did show his tenderness for the unfortunate in a signal manner. Four thousand revolutionists, pursued by Austrian troops, presented themselves before Spoleto. The archbishop went out to meet them. He persuaded them, since their cause was lost, to lay down their arms. He gave them several thousand crowns for their immediate needs. He pledged his word that they should not be molested. Then he performed the still more difficult task of inducing the Austrian commander to ratify the promise. The pursuit was abandoned; the insurgents retired quietly to their homes. Pope Gregory XVI., however, was not pleased with this transaction, and the archbishop was called to Rome to defend himself. We must presume that his explanation was satisfactory; for the next year he was advanced to the see of Imola. This is only a suffragan see, but it is more important in itself than the archbishopric of Spoleto, and is, moreover, what is called a cardinalitial post—under ordinary circumstances a step towards the higher dignity of the scarlet hat. It was held by Pius VII. when he was Cardinal Chiaramonti. The promotion of Bishop Mastai came in due course. His creation as cardinal was announced in December, 1840, having been reserved in petto since the previous year, and he took his title from the church of SS. Peter and Marcellinus. With his new dignity he adopted no new mode of life. Works of charity and devotion still filled his days. The love and respect of all classes of men still encompassed him. It is the best proof of the tranquil and happy course of his episcopate that of the nineteen years which he passed at Spoleto and Imola there is hardly an incident to be related.

His whole life thus far seems to have been a providential preparation for the two great works for which he was destined by Almighty God. On the spiritual side of the church he was to bring about the consolidation of Catholic dogma and the complete definition and development of the authority of the church over the minds and hearts of her children. On the secular side, after showing the perfect compatibility of the temporal power with the needs of modern society, he was to guide the church with fortitude and prudence, and give the Christian world a shining example of constancy during the trying days that were to see that power destroyed. What better training could he have had for this double destiny than so many years of charitable labor and close intercourse with God? He issued at last from his pious retirement with a character enriched by the daily practice of virtue, a disposition sweetened by the habit of self-sacrifice, a resolution strengthened by reliance upon God, and a heavenly courage that was proof against the threats and buffets of the world.

I.

We have spoken of the brief season of repose in Italian politics about the time of our Holy Father’s elevation to the episcopate. It was, indeed, only a transient gleam of sunlight in the midst of a tempestuous era. We come now to a period of universal disturbance. This is not the place to discuss the causes of the great revulsions of 1848. Probably they were more complex and reached further back than the world generally supposes. But whatever may have been the local provocations for revolt in particular states, it is clear that, for more than a quarter of a century before the date with which we are now occupied, the revolutionary tendencies of all Europe had shown a unity of direction which implied a single guiding impulse. It is not credible that a few clubs of political enthusiasts, visionary young students, hare-brained apothecaries, and metaphysical breeches-makers should be able by the fire of their own genius to set a continent in flames. The revolutionary propaganda of 1830-1848 found in every country of Europe a combustible population only waiting for the spark. Some states were rotten with social and moral disorders of long standing; some, like Poland, were writhing under an oppression which moved the sympathies of the whole world; some fretted under the restrictions of antiquated forms of government, unsuited to the wants of an expanding society. Thus the generous and patriotic were easily hurried into enterprises whose true purpose they were far from suspecting. The central influence which vitalized and directed all the scattered tendencies towards revolt was the conspiracy of the secret societies. “In the attempt to conduct the government of the world,” said the British prime minister last autumn, in his address at Aylesbury, “there are new elements to be considered which our predecessors had not to deal with. We have not only to deal with emperors, princes, and ministers, but there are the secret societies—an element which we must take into consideration, which at the last moment may baffle all our arrangements, which have their agents everywhere, which countenance assassination, and which, if necessary, could produce a massacre.” Lord Beaconsfield’s statement was a very mild one. The secret societies had become, at the time of which we write, the most formidable force in European politics. There was not a corner of the Continent in which their power was not felt. Intimately allied with Freemasonry, their origin dates back to a remote, unknown time. They were already strong in the eighteenth century, and their share in the great French Revolution is well understood. They became formidable in the Illuminism of Weishaupt in Germany a hundred years ago. They appeared in the Tugendbund, which had so large a share in the overthrow of the governments imposed upon the German states by Napoleon I. They were busy in Russia, in Greece, in Ireland, in Spain, and even in the Swiss Republic; in Italy they have never been idle since the first appearance of the Carbonari at the beginning of the century; in France they are the only power which seems to be permanent. As early as 1821 the Italian revolutionist, Pepe, gave Carbonarism an international character by establishing in Spain a secret association of the “advanced political reformers of all the European states”; and in 1834 Mazzini made a much more effective union of the revolutionary elements when, with the aid of Italian, Polish, and German refugees, he founded at Berne the society of Young Europe. The organization of Young Germany, Young Poland, and Young Switzerland dates from the same time and place, and Switzerland became the centre of all the agitations of the Continent. Young Italy had been grafted upon Carbonarism by Mazzini as early as 1831.

Many of these associations, as we have already intimated, professed an excellent object. They would have been comparatively harmless, if they had not attracted and deceived the good. The Tugendbund, for instance, originally aimed at the deliverance of Germany from a foreign yoke; Young Poland captivated the noble and the ardent; even the Carbonari had an alluring watchword in the Unity and Independence of Italy. But there was always an ulterior purpose, revealed only to the initiated. That purpose was one and unchanging, and it was the bond which united all the leaders of the vast conspiracy from the Irish Sea to the Grecian Archipelago, from Gibraltar to Nova Zembla. It was the establishment everywhere of an atheistic democracy; or rather the destruction simultaneously of all religion, all government, and all social bonds. Kings and priests were equally hateful to the “Illuminated.” There was to be no recognition of God in their republic. It was hostile not only to the Catholic Church as an organization, but to Christianity as a moral influence. The Illuminati were founded in the midst of the Masonic lodges of Bavaria; they passed thence into Austria, Saxony, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland; they were carried to Paris by Mirabeau, who was initiated in Germany; they were united with the Freemasons all over France. Recognized as the parents of the later societies, they sounded as early as 1777 the key-note of the whole complex movement. Findel, the Masonic historian of Freemasonry, declares that “the most decisive agent” in giving the order a political and anti-religious character was “that intellectual movement known under the name of English deism, which boldly rejected all revelation and all religious dogmas, and under the victorious banner of reason and criticism broke down all barriers in its path.” But Weishaupt found still too much “political and religious prejudice” remaining in the Freemasons, and consequently devised a system which, as he expressed it, would “attract Christians of every communion and gradually free them from all religious prejudices.” The “illumination” of the brethren was to be accomplished by a course of gradual education in which Christianity was carefully ignored. It was only in the higher degrees that the initiated were taught that the fall of man meant nothing but the subjection of the individual to civil society; that “illumination” consisted in getting rid of all governments; and that “the secret associations were gradually and silently to possess themselves of the government of the states, making use for this purpose of the means which the wicked use for attaining their base ends.” We quote this from the discourse read at initiation into one of the higher degrees, and discovered when the papers of the fraternity were seized by the Elector of Bavaria in 1785. The same document continues: “Princes and priests are in particular the wicked whose hands we must tie up by means of these associations, if we cannot wipe them out altogether.” Patriotism was defined as a narrow-minded prejudice; and, finally, the illuminated man was taught that everything is material, that religion has no foundation, that all nations must be brought back, either by peaceable means or by force, to their pristine condition of unrestricted liberty, for “all subordination must vanish from the face of the earth.” The ceremonies of initiation into the lodges of the Carbonari remind us so strongly of this explanation of the principles of Illuminism that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the two associations are closely connected. The neophyte was taught the same doctrine in both: that man had everywhere fallen into the hands of oppressors, whose authority it was the mission of the enlightened to cast off. Here, however, as in the earlier society, the pagan character of the proposed new life was only revealed by degrees to those who were prepared for it. The conspirators seem to have accommodated their system of education to the peculiarities of national training and disposition. For example, they humored the religious tendencies of the Italians by retaining the name of God and the image of the crucifix in the ceremonial of the lower degrees, and even published a forged bull, in the name of Pope Pius VII., approving the Carbonari; while in the training of Young Germany just a contrary course was adopted. “We are obliged to treat new-comers very cautiously,” says a report from a propagandist committee established among the Germans in Switzerland, “to bring them step by step into the right road, and the principal thing in this respect is to show them that religion is nothing but a pile of rubbish.” Indeed, the rampant atheism of the secret societies of Germany, and also of France, has always been notorious. Of the still more horrible manifestations of impiety to which they were carried in Italy we hesitate to speak, lest we be suspected of sensational exaggerations. All that we have said thus far of the principles and practices of the Masons, Illuminati, and Carbonari is quoted from their own books and papers, and may be found in the work of their admirer and apologist, Thomas Frost, the title of which we have placed at the head of this article. For a more startling picture of their inner mysteries we refer the reader to Father Bresciani,[45] who lived in Rome in 1848 and had direct testimony of horrors which almost defy belief. Mr. Frost, however, gives a glimpse of the worse than pagan spirit of Carbonarism when he describes the initiation into the second degree—a ceremony wherein the candidate, crowned with thorns and bearing a cross, personated our divine Lord, and knelt to ask pardon of Pilate, Caiphas, and Herod, represented by the grand master and two assistants, the pardon being granted at the intercession of the assembled Carbonari! In all the societies an abstract morality was taught which was not the morality of Jesus Christ, and laws were laid down at variance with the laws of the state. Assassination was one of the chief duties which the fraternity enjoined upon its votaries. The initiated fancied that they emancipated themselves from all subordination; but they bound themselves by the most awful penalties to murder any one, even friend or brother, who might be pointed out for death by some unseen, unknown, and shadowy authority.

When Pope Gregory XVI. came to the throne the conspiracies of ten years were just ripening. He was assailed in the very first month of his pontificate by the rising in the Romagna, and he spent the fifteen years of his reign in a struggle to keep down the evil spirit whose apparition then alarmed him. All Europe during these fifteen years was a volcano sending forth the deep mutterings and sulphurous vapors which presage an eruption. France was never at peace from the overthrow of Charles X. in 1830 till after the re-establishment of the empire—if even she is at peace yet. Every capital in Germany was in nightly danger of the dagger, the torch, and the barricade. Switzerland, though a free republic, was no less severely tormented by conspiracies than the monarchical countries, and after several years of contention her secret societies took arms in 1844 to compel the Catholic cantons, against the constitution of the confederation, to expel the Jesuits. In Poland, at the very moment when the nobles were preparing a revolt against the Austrian yoke, a socialistic and agrarian rising of the peasants against the nobles filled Galicia with massacres of incredible barbarity. In Italy the Carbonari negotiated for a while with the Duke of Modena, by whose aid they proposed to expel the Austrians from Lombardy and Venice, and unite the states of the north and centre under one sovereign—of course with the further object, held in reserve, of getting rid of the Duke of Modena as soon as they had no further use for him: a scheme almost exactly like that which Young Italy tried a few years later with Charles Albert of Sardinia. Defeated in this project and crushed in attempts at insurrection, they worked for some time in secret, but they worked with furious energy. The doctrines of Illumination were carried into every corner of the peninsula. A score of local secret associations came into existence, adding to the wickedness of the parent society some peculiar brutality of their own. Ancona had its “Society of Death,” Sinigaglia its “Infernal Association,” Leghorn its “Society of Slayers,” Faenza its “Band of Stabbers.”

Between 1831 and 1840, however, the policy of the Italian revolutionists was greatly modified. Mazzini established Young Italy under the conviction that the old methods of conspiracy must fail. Instead of wasting their strength in vain efforts to overturn the Italian princes singly, he urged the brethren to concentrate their energies upon a movement for the expulsion of the Austrians and a consolidation of all the Italian states. The fate of pope, and kings, and princes could be settled afterwards. “All questions as to forms of internal policy,” he wrote, “can be put off till the close of the war of independence.” Italy and independence! This was a programme, not for the secret societies alone, but for the whole peninsula. It captivated the generous, the impulsive, the ardent, the ambitious. It brought to the same work poetry, patriotism, and religion, the pistol, the dagger, and the poisoned cup. What was to be done with Italy, when it was united and rid of the Austrians, was one of the secrets of the initiated never explained to the common people; but remarkable illustrations of the inner character of this movement were found in 1844 among certain papers seized by the police in Rome. “Our watchword,” wrote one of the leaders, “must be Religion, Union, Independence. As for the King of Sardinia, we should seek some favorable opportunity to poignard him. I recommend the same course to be pursued in regard to the King of Naples. The Lombards may second our efforts by poison, or by insurrection, under the form of little 'Sicilian Vespers’ against the Germans. Functionaries or private citizens who show a hostile spirit must be put to death. Let them be arrested quietly during the night, and the report be circulated that they have been exiled or sent to prison, or have absconded.” Mazzini himself a little later, in an address to Young Italy, gave a significant explanation of his idea. “In your country,” said he, “regeneration must come through the princes. Get them on your side. Attack their vanity. Let them march at the head, if they will, so long as they march your way. Few will go to the end. If they make concessions, praise them and insist upon something further. The essential thing is not to let them know what the goal of the revolution is. They must never see more than one step at a time.” And he urged also the importance of “managing” the clergy. “Its habits and hierarchy make it the imp of authority—that is to say, of despotism”; but the people believe in it, and we must make its influence of use. With the Jesuits, however, he proclaimed war to the knife. None of the socialists and infidels were willing to make any terms with the sons of St. Ignatius.

In the prosecution of this new scheme of revolution the conspirators obtained invaluable help from a most unexpected ally. The erring genius of the unfortunate Abbate Gioberti did more for them than the machinations of the lodges. Carried away by visions of a new Italy and a new Catholicism, he forgot the divine mission of the church in speculations as to what she might accomplish in purely secular enterprises. His great error was in thinking of religion as an agent of civilization rather than an instrumentality for saving souls, and thus he was led into the blunder of attempting to unite God and the world in an equal partnership. He conceived the idea of an Italian federation with the King of Sardinia as military head and the Pope as spiritual president—a sort of dual empire like that of Japan, with a tycoon at Turin, a mikado at the Vatican. But the clergy were to abdicate their dominion over the minds of men, and bend their energies to effecting an alliance of religion with a material progress that in his theory had outstripped the church and become for ever incompatible with ecclesiastical tutelage. He wished the priests to put themselves at the head of the new social movements, and, hand in hand with the political agitators, to lead Italy to a material glory such as no nation on earth had ever seen. His book, Del Primato, was welcomed with unparalleled enthusiasm. The charm of a brilliant style, the force of an original, cultivated, and poetic mind, the glamour of a philosophy which seemed to meet all the wants of an exciting and uneasy time, turned the heads of the whole nation. Gioberti, Cesare Balbo, Massimo d’Azeglio, were the creators of a new literature, and all Italy read them with flashing eyes and quickening pulse. Theirs was a reform which seized upon the fancy of good and bad alike, and hurried into a common delusion the heedless Christian and the veteran Carbonaro, the young, the imaginative, the adventurous, and the artful. Mazzini, who afterwards became one of Gioberti’s bitterest enemies, was too shrewd to undervalue this influence. He sought an interview with Gioberti in Paris; he offered terms of co-operation; he even went through the form of renouncing what he styled his own “more narrow views,” and proposed a National Association which, adjourning all questions of forms and spirit of government, faith or scepticism, God or the devil, should unite Italy in the single purpose of creating an Italian nation. Different as the aims of the two men were—for Gioberti included even the Austrian government of Lombardy and Venice in his union—they embraced each other for the moment. Together they swept the peninsula. Every city from Palermo to Milan was aflame with the new ideas. The soberest patriots lost their composure, and many of the clergy began to dream wild dreams of political change, and to see visions of reformed conspirators kneeling at the feet of a democratic pope. We look back upon those days from the vantage-ground of experience, and we wonder that men should have been so deceived. But 1848 had not then given the lie to the professions of 1846. Devout Italians at that time did not see, as we do, that the secret societies which assailed the church on one side of the Alps with fire and sword could not be sincere in offering to place it in a new position of power and glory on the other, nor did they realize the extent of the conspiracy to overwhelm religion, government, and social order throughout Europe in one general ruin.

That conspiracy was more formidable in Italy than anywhere else, and it was more formidable not only because it was better organized, but because it involved so many men of blameless character and offered to satisfy a lofty national aspiration. During the last years of Pope Gregory XVI. an explosion seemed inevitable. Probably nothing kept it back except the age and infirmities of the venerable pontiff; the leaders preferred to wait for his death. He died on the 1st of June, 1846. The whole peninsula was instantly in commotion, and the symptoms of violence in Rome were so alarming that people doubted the possibility of an election. Austria, as the power most directly interested in the secular politics of the Holy See, was understood to demand a continuance of the restrictive policy of Gregory; France, on the contrary, was said to desire a moderately liberal pope. To avoid pressure upon the conclave, as well as to forestall an outbreak, the Italian cardinals resolved to begin their deliberations at once and finish them quickly. Without waiting for their distant colleagues, they entered the Quirinal on the 14th, the doors were closed, the guards were set, and the balloting began. Two ballots are taken in the conclave every day. The persons whom public opinion selected as most likely to command the necessary thirty-four votes were Cardinals Gizzi and Lambruschini. The modest and retiring Cardinal Mastai seems to have been little known by the outside world, though his merit was no secret to the Sacred College. He was appointed scrutator, to open and read the ballots. At the first session of the conclave his name was proposed by Cardinal Altieri, Prince-Bishop of Albano, and the first scrutiny showed that he united a large party of the cardinals. On the second ballot he gained a little. On the third his vote was twenty-seven—only seven less than a majority. He retired to his cell and spent the whole time in prayer till the evening meeting. He came to the performance of his functions pale and agitated. When the ballots were taken from the chalice in which they had been collected, he read his own name on the first, on the second, on the third, on every paper up to the eighteenth. He could not go on; he begged the conclave to commit the rest of the task to another. But to change the scrutator in the midst of the vote would invalidate the election. The cardinals gathered around him; for some time he sat terrified and almost insensible, while streams of tears flowed down his cheeks. On the completion of the count it was found that he had the suffrages of thirty-six out of the fifty-four cardinals present. As the whole assembly rose to confirm the choice by unanimous acclamation, the Pope-elect fell upon his knees, and profound silence reigned in the Pauline Chapel while he communed with Almighty God.

It was on the following day, June 18, that, according to custom, the bricked-up window in the front of the Quirinal Palace was broken open, and the cardinals came out upon the balcony to announce to the waiting multitude the choice of a new pope. It is said that men turned to one another in surprise when they heard the name, and asked who this Cardinal Mastai could be. But when his beautiful and benignant face appeared among the throng, and his hand was raised in that gesture of benediction which all who have seen him will for ever associate with his memory, he won the love and admiration of the Roman people; and the true Romans have loved him ever since.

The story of his first days in the pontificate reads like a charming romance. He called the steward of the palace and said to him: “When I was bishop I spent for my personal expenses a crown a day; when I was cardinal I spent a crown and a half; and now that I am Pope you must not go beyond two crowns.” He went about the city alone to search out abuses and to look into the condition of the poor. He presented himself without warning at public institutions. He knocked at the doors of religious houses at night. He startled the congregation at St. Andrea del Valle by appearing unannounced in the pulpit to preach against blasphemy. He delighted children by visiting the schools. He talked freely with the humble whom he met in the streets and on the country roads. He gave lavishly to the needy. A poor market-gardener lost his horse and walked boldly into the palace to ask the Pope if he could not spare an old one from the Quirinal stables. A secretary found the man on the stairs and took his message to the Holy Father. “Yes,” was the Pope’s reply; “and give him this money, too. He must be very poor, or he never would come to the Quirinal to get a horse.”

But Pius IX. was not ignorant of the dangers which surrounded his throne. He chose his course promptly. It may be doubted whether stern measures of repression could have accomplished any good in the excitement of that time, but at any rate he had no taste for them. He favored the idea of a national confederation under the presidency of the Pope, wishing to accomplish it by a friendly alliance of the existing governments, not by war and revolution. For the rest, he looked forward to a reform in the administration of his states, and the introduction of liberal and popular institutions as fast as the old forms could be safely changed, and he purposed to rule by kindness, generosity, and confidence. Yet, as we shall see, he did not lack firmness when firmness was needed. One of his first acts was to declare an amnesty for political offences, and a characteristic anecdote is told of him in connection with it. He called a council of his principal advisers and asked their votes upon the proposed measure of mercy. To his chagrin, a majority of the balls voted were black. He took off his white cap and placed it over them; “Now,” said he, “they are all white.” The prisons were opened. The exiles returned. One thousand six hundred persons were restored to freedom and friends. Rome was in a tumult of joy. The populace thronged about the pontiff whenever he went abroad, and waited long hours before the palace windows to get his blessing. On the feast of St. Peter’s Chains a great number of the pardoned received communion from the Holy Father's hands, and the occasion was celebrated with lively demonstrations. Nor was the Pope satisfied with an easy act of clemency. He made a close personal study of the administration. A multitude of petty abuses were swept away. The taxes were reduced. The liberty of the press was enlarged. Industries were fostered; railways were planned. The Jews were relieved of burdensome and humiliating restrictions. Then the old municipal privileges of Rome were restored, and a long stride ahead was made by the formation of a lay consulta of state and the popular representation of the provinces in the central government.

Nothing could surpass the enthusiasm of the people at this dawn of a new political era. It was almost a continuous holiday in Rome, with gay processions by day and torch-light parades by night, public banquets in the vineyards and gardens, triumphal arches spanning the streets, the papal colors fluttering from every window and decorating every breast. Because those colors were white and yellow, it became a point of honor with delighted Romans to breakfast every morning on boiled eggs. Nor was it only Italy which raised the chorus of applause. All over the world the Papacy shone with a glory which it had hardly displayed since Leo XII. The Protestants of New York held a monster meeting of felicitation at the Broadway Tabernacle, where cordial letters were read from ex-President Van Buren and Vice-President Dallas, and an enthusiastic address to the Pope, prepared by Horace Greeley, was adopted by acclamation. The British government offered its congratulations. The French ministry, led by M. Guizot, rivalled the French opposition, led by M. Thiers, in resolutions and speeches of encouragement. Mazzini, true to the policy already explained, addressed to the Holy Father a letter of ostensible sympathy and praise. Such halcyon days might well have filled the most wary with a dangerous confidence.

The Pope was not deceived. He knew that under this outward show of peace the conspiracy was active. The first attempt of the revolutionary party was to separate him from the cardinals. Three weeks after the amnesty, as he drove under one of the arches erected in his honor, the mob stopped some of the prelates of his suite and refused to let them pass. Certain demonstrations at the popular out-of-door repasts became so significant that the gatherings had to be forbidden. Before the end of the year the cry of “Viva Pio Nono!” changed to “Viva Pio Nono Solo!” and mingled with shouts of “Down with the Jesuits!” and “Death to the retrograders!” The next summer Rome was thrown into a fever of rage by an invention so outrageous and yet so ridiculous that one reads of it with amazement. It was alleged that Cardinal Lambruschini, the Austrian government, and the General of the Jesuits had organized a plot to fall upon the populace on the anniversary of the amnesty, and in the midst of the massacre to get possession of the Pope and put a stop to his liberalism. The fête appointed for the anniversary was given up, and the excitement enabled the revolutionists to depose the old police and throw the city into the arms of the civic guard, of which they were really the directing force. On New Year’s day, 1848, the Pope was molested in the street by a disorderly mob, shouting menaces against “reactionists” and “Jesuits.” The violence of the radical faction increased; their demeanor became more and more insulting; the danger of riot grew imminent; the civil guard showed plain symptoms of disloyalty. Yet all this while the Holy Father persevered in his reforms. He took no step backward. He withdrew no concession. The measure of popular liberty was constantly enlarging, the administration becoming more thoroughly representative. If it was “progress” that the agitators wanted, what was this?

We cannot understand the history of this strange time without bearing in mind that the danger arose, not from anything the Pope had done or failed to do, but from the steady and stealthy advance of the pagan conspiracy. Rome, under the mild rule of Pius IX., became the resort of all the chief revolutionists of the Continent, and it is hardly too much to say that the particular house in Rome where they met and plotted with the most comfort was the British embassy. Palmerston’s policy was always to encourage radical movements on the Continent. When he sent Lord Minto, therefore, as a special envoy to Italy, the parlors of that nobleman were instantly thronged by the Carbonari. In this diplomatic sanctuary gathered a strange company of princes and demagogues—Ciceruacchio, the orator of the rabble; Prince Charles Bonaparte, the radical in purple; Sterbini, the poet, physician, and journalist; Tofanelli, the tavern-keeper; Materazzi, patriot and joiner; Galetti, the grocer, who became Minister of Police in one of the later democratic cabinets.

A letter of Mazzini’s, written in 1847, taught Young Italy that the time for action was close at hand; it was useless to count upon the Pope; their best policy was to inflame the popular hatred of Austria; then provoke Austria to attack them; and in the heat of war to accomplish the rest. But at this critical time Austria herself committed an act which hastened the explosion. Alarmed at the aspect of affairs in Central Italy, she marched a body of troops into the papal territory. The treaty of 1815 gave her the right to place a garrison in the citadel of Ferrara; she went further and occupied the town; and although the spirited protest of the Pope caused her to withdraw after some delay, the occasion which the secret societies desired had been given, and a cry for war and independence resounded from the Gulf of Genoa to the Bay of Naples. We know but imperfectly the hidden springs of action of that year of revolutions; but, as if by concert, the insurrection flashed up almost simultaneously all over the Continent. The Milanese flew to arms. The revolt broke out in Vienna. Barricades arose at Berlin. The Republic was proclaimed in Paris. Naples and Tuscany were menaced. The municipality of Rome waited upon the Pope and demanded a constitution. He consented to give it. “I would have preferred,” said he, “to watch for a while the result of the reforms already instituted; but other Italian princes have granted constitutions, and I will not show less confidence in my subjects than they have had in theirs.” At the same time the ministry was changed. Cardinal Antonelli, whose management of the finances had made him very popular, became Secretary of State, and three of the most moderate of the liberals—Minghetti, Galetti, and Sturbinetti—entered the cabinet. It is characteristic of the spirit of the revolution that the first effect of these concessions was to stimulate a fresh attack upon the church, disorders in Rome, and an assault upon the Gesù. The Jesuits were forced to close their establishment, some taking flight, others finding shelter in private houses. The constitution was proclaimed in March. It provided for a Senate and a House of Deputies—the senators to be appointed for life, the deputies to be elected by the taxpayers of Rome and the provinces. This parliament was not to meddle with ecclesiastical affairs, but in other matters it had the usual powers of legislation.

Meantime, the war of independence in the north of Italy was in the full tide of success. Young Italy believed it had found a leader in Charles Albert of Sardinia. The Austrians were driven from Milan. The republic lived again in Venice. The Pope sent 17,000 men to protect his frontiers, with strict orders not to cross them. At once the conspirators spread the report that he had declared war against Austria. They called the people together in the Colosseum to ratify the new crusade, and there the Barnabite monk, Gavazzi, masquerading in the character of a new Peter the Hermit and brandishing a tricolored cross, made his first bid for notoriety. There were only 7,000 regular troops in the papal expedition; the rest were motley volunteers—the flower of the nobility and the dregs of the wine-shop, the most gallant lads of Rome and the scum of all the political clubs of the Continent. They hurried through the Romagna, gutting taverns and hunting Jesuits by the way, and when they reached Bologna their general (the Piedmontese, Durando) announced that the Austrians were making war upon our Lord, and that the soldiers of the Pope would give them battle with the cry, “God wills it!” It was afterwards discovered that this direct defiance of the Pope’s commands, this open act of hostility against a power with which the states of the church were at peace, was in accordance with secret instructions from the Pope’s radical Minister of War. While the sovereign ordered his troops to remain strictly on the defensive within their own boundaries, the ministers told Durando to cross over into Lombardy and place himself at the disposal of Charles Albert; and Durando prepared to obey them. It was impossible for the Holy Father to remain silent under such an outrage. He repudiated Durando’s order of the day in the official press, and he spoke more fully in an allocution: “We shall not make war upon Austria; we embrace all countries, all nations, with an equal paternal love.” And he took occasion at the same time to denounce the project of destroying all the governments of the peninsula in order to build out of their ruins one Italian republic with the Pope at the head of it. He was no doubt prepared for the explosion of wrath which followed. But the revolution was not to be ignored any longer. For some time ministers had been in the habit of counterfeiting his assent to measures of which he disapproved; if the army was to make war without his consent, his reign was at an end. Rome was in a tempest. The cry of “Treason!” rang through the streets. Ciceruacchio proposed to kill all the priests. The civic guards flew to arms, posted soldiers at the doors of the cardinals, and refused to recognize the Pope’s orders. A new and more radical ministry, led by Count Mamiani, came into office on the 3d of May, and on the same day the Holy Father wrote a touching letter to the Emperor of Austria—a plea for peace and Italian independence: “We exhort your majesty with the most paternal affection to withdraw from a contest which cannot reconquer for the empire the hearts of the Lombards and Venetians. There is no grandeur in a domination which rests only on the sword.”

The new ministry insisted at once upon war, but here it found the determination of the Pope unalterable. There seems to have been an attempt, of which the ministers themselves were possibly innocent, to precipitate hostilities by rousing an uncontrollable popular impulse. One day a courier, breathless and dusty, rode through the Corso announcing a great victory of Charles Albert over the Austrians. The city was illuminated; there was talk of forcing the clergy to chant Te Deum in the churches. But the next day it was discovered that the messenger, who entered Rome as if from Lombardy by the Porta del Popolo, had left the city only an hour before by the Porta Angelica, gathering all the stains of travel in an easy ride along the walls, and had been paid three dollars for the performance. Charles Albert had been signally defeated.

Whatever fitness for self-government might be latent in the Roman people, it was certain that, in the existing condition of the Pontifical States, a government by the people was out of the question. Every attempt to satisfy the popular aspirations, every scheme for the introduction of parliamentary and representative institutions, was baffled by the Mazzinian clubs, whose rule, supported by conspiracy and assassination, was the most cruel and absolute of despotisms, yet destitute of that stability and force which make some despotisms respectable. They threatened the church with spoliation, the clergy with death, the young with atheism. They undermined the authority of all government, not merely of this or that particular form, but of all forms. Italy appeared to be rushing towards anarchy. It was time to cry, Halt! Pius resolved to yield not another inch, but, without withdrawing any reasonable concession, to put what remained of his authority upon a firm basis. He invited Count Pellegrino Rossi to form a cabinet.

Count Rossi was an Italian by birth, a Swiss by adoption, a Frenchman by subsequent choice, an old Carbonaro, an old conspirator, an old political exile. He was an ardent partisan of Italian unity, but he had seen the emptiness of some of his early illusions, and he had abandoned the secret societies. He had come to Rome in the time of Gregory XVI. as ambassador of Louis Philippe, charged with a negotiation for the removal of the Jesuits from France; in his diplomatic capacity he had been one of the most moderate advisers of Pius IX.; and after the fall of Louis Philippe he had remained in Rome as a private citizen. He accepted the task of restoring order; he reorganized the administration, negotiated with Naples, Turin, and Florence for the formation of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the Pope, arrested Gavazzi, who was preaching rebellion, and brought back some of the troops which his predecessors had sent away from Rome. The radical press speedily opened an attack upon him. The clubs began to prepare for his downfall. The 15th of November, two months after his accession to power, was the date fixed for the opening of the Chambers. He received more than one warning that the same day had been appointed for his death. The wife of the Minister of War wrote him that his life was to be attempted as he entered the Chamber. A Frenchman sent him a note to the same effect. A priest stopped him at the Quirinal and repeated the warning. The Pope had also learned of the plans of the conspirators and begged Rossi to beware. “They are cowards,” replied the count; “they will not dare to strike.” “The cause of the Pope,” said the intrepid minister to one of his colleagues, “is the cause of God. I must go where my duty calls me.” On the night before the opening of the parliament a corpse was taken from one of the hospitals and carried secretly to the little Capranica theatre. There a select band of conspirators rehearsed the assassination, and the chosen instrument of the vengeance of the societies, a young sculptor named Costantini, learned by repeated practice where to strike. They were waiting for the count at the entrance to the hall of Deputies. As he placed his foot upon the steps they gathered around him. One struck him on the side. He turned his head, and Costantini plunged a dagger into the carotid artery. The nearest priest was called, and Rossi lived just long enough to receive absolution. He had yielded to the fears of his friends so far as to post extra guards about the court and staircase; sed quis custodiet custodes? The assassin and his accomplices walked away unmolested and passed the night promenading the city with songs of triumph. The streets were hung with flags. The bloody dagger, decked with flowers, was exposed to the veneration of their party on the top of a tricolored standard, and held up before the windows of the weeping family of the victim. When the news of the awful crime committed on the stairs was carried into the Chamber, the deputies manifested no concern. “It is nothing, gentlemen,” said Sterbini; “let us to business.” When it was made known to the Pope he fell upon his knees and remained some time in silent prayer. “Count Rossi has died a martyr,” said he; “God will receive his soul in peace.”

The next day the Quirinal was surrounded by a menacing crowd demanding an immediate declaration of war against Austria, the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to devise a new form of government, and the surrender of all power in the meantime to a ministry headed by Sterbini. The Pope would not listen to them. Then they tried to burn the palace. A single volley from the Swiss Guard, fired over the heads of the mob, drove them back. But they returned in force, with an ultimatum, backed by cannon and the whole civic guard. Sharp-shooters occupied the house-tops or sheltered themselves behind the famous equestrian groups in the centre of the piazza, and poured a shower of balls into the palace windows. One of the papal secretaries was killed. A bullet entered the Pope’s chamber. The Holy Father called the diplomatic corps together and told them that he must yield. “But let Europe know that I am a prisoner here; I have no part in the government; they shall rule in their own name, not mine.”

His chief thought now was flight. But he was closely watched and the guards invaded even his private apartments. On the 22d of November, six days after the attack upon the Quirinal, he received from the Bishop of Valence in France a silver pyx in which Pope Pius VI. used to carry the Blessed Sacrament suspended from his neck during his painful exile. “Heir to the name, the see, the virtues, the courage, and many of the tribulations of this great pontiff,” wrote the bishop, “you will perhaps attach some value to this interesting little relic, which I trust may not serve the same destiny in your Holiness’s hands as in those of its former possessor.” The Pope looked upon this as a providential provision for his journey. The ingenuity of the Duke d’Harcourt, ambassador of France, and the boldness of the Bavarian minister, Count Spaur, aided by the quick wit of his pious French wife, finally arranged the escape. The Pope’s faithful gentleman-in-waiting, Filippani, collected the little articles absolutely needed on the route, and at night carried them under his cloak, one by one, to the residence of Count Spaur. Meanwhile, it was announced in Rome that the count, accompanied by his family, was going to Naples on a diplomatic errand. The countess started first in her travelling carriage with her son and his tutor, giving out that her husband, detained a few hours in Rome by important business, would overtake her at Albano. Towards evening on the same day (November 24, 1848) the Duke d’Harcourt visited the Quirinal in state, and, being admitted to a private official interview with the Holy Father, began to read to him a series of long despatches. He read in a loud tone, so that his voice could be heard by the guards in the ante-room. If they could have seen what passed as well as they heard, they would have been very much astonished. For no sooner had the duke begun than the Pope retired to an inner chamber and transformed himself into a simple priest. He put on a black robe, an ample cloak, and a low, round hat, and, accompanied by Filippani, he reached the grand staircase by a private door, passed the guards unsuspected, and found himself in the street. Filippani had a carriage in readiness, and drove with his august master to the church of SS. Peter and Marcellinus, beyond the Colosseum, where Count Spaur was waiting with another conveyance. The Pope entered it; the count took the reins; they passed out by the gate of St. Giovanni, near the Lateran, the sentries being satisfied with the count’s declaration of his name and quality; and late in the night they reached a certain fountain on the Appian Way, where the countess was to meet them with the coach and four. When she drove up a few minutes later she was terrified at finding the fugitive surrounded by an armed patrol. Count Spaur was answering the questions of the soldiers, and the Pope and a trooper stood side by side against the fence. The countess did not lose her presence of mind. “Come, doctor,” she exclaimed, “jump in; you have kept us waiting”; and bidding good-night to the patrol, the party drove off at full speed. The Pope was the first to speak. “Courage!” said he; “I carry the Blessed Sacrament in the same pyx in which it was borne by Pius VI.” They crossed the Neapolitan frontier at daylight, and as soon as they were safe beyond the Pontifical States they all recited the Te Deum. They reached Gaeta in the afternoon. There Cardinal Antonelli joined them in disguise, and Count Spaur, posting on to Naples, with a letter from the Pope to King Ferdinand, resigned the care of the Holy Father to the secretary of the Spanish embassy. Refused admission to the bishop’s palace because the bishop was absent, the Pope and his companions took up their quarters at a poor inn, and there they were placed under surveillance by the military commander, Gen. Gross, who suspected them as spies. The general was questioning the countess and the cardinal next day, when he was astounded by the arrival of the king and queen with three vessels of war and a guard of honor. Count Spaur had reached Naples and delivered his letter to the king in person about midnight, and his majesty, after spending the rest of the night in preparations, embarked in the early morning to do honor to his illustrious guest. And during the year and a half spent by the Pope in the Neapolitan dominions, either at Gaeta or Portici, there was no possible mark of respect which King Ferdinand failed to show him. His purpose had been to embark in a Spanish frigate for the Balearic Islands, the scene of his brief and absurd imprisonment in 1823, but Ferdinand persuaded him to remain in Gaeta, where the royal palace was prepared for his occupation. There the diplomatic body gathered around him, and the cardinals assembled after escaping from Rome by various stratagems and disguises.

And how was it in Rome? The ministry of Sterbini, the parliament, and the authorities left by the Pope disappeared with equal suddenness, and the government passed into the hands, not by any means of the Roman people, but of Mazzini with the secret clubs, and of Garibaldi with two or three thousand soldiers of fortune, brought into the city from other parts of Italy. They pronounced the deposition of the Pope, and declared a republic with an executive triumvirate. Nominally the triumvirs were Mazzini, Armellini, and Saffi; in reality the head of the administration was Mazzini alone. Wherever the pagan democracy triumphed, even for a few days, the result was the same. Religion, the rights of property, and common morality suffered together and personal liberty vanished. Private estates in Rome were confiscated to the uses of the triumvirate under the guise of forced loans. The goods of the church were seized. The shrines and altars were stripped bare. Confessionals were burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The houses of the cardinals were sacked, convents were assaulted. Profane rites were celebrated in St. Peter’s at Easter and Corpus Christi; the papal benediction urbi et orbi was travestied by a suspended priest; the canons of St. Peter’s were fined for refusing to take part in the impious ceremonies; the provost of the cathedral of Sinigaglia was put to death for a similar cause. The clergy were hunted like vermin, cut down in the public roads, dragged from hiding-places. The convent of St. Callisto was turned into a slaughter-house, where one of the Roman priest-catchers used to shut up his victims, and kill them at pleasure without the formality of trial or sentence. He killed fourteen there in one day. Two vine-dressers, accused of being Jesuits in disguise, were torn to pieces on the bridge of St. Angelo. Murder and pillage stalked hand in hand through the city. There soon ceased to be any real government at all in Rome, until on the 2d of July, 1849, the French army restored the papal authority after the horrors of a severe siege, in which foreigners, not Romans, manned the defences. Anywhere else in the world the quelling of such a revolt would have been followed by wholesale condemnations to the galleys and the scaffold. But nothing could conquer the kindness of Pius IX. His restoration, like his accession, was followed by an act of amnesty. It left in exile the guiltiest of the leaders; and care was taken to give the re-established government as much strength as the situation demanded. Some restrictions were certainly necessary; several priests had been assassinated since the surrender of the city; two attempts had been made to burn the Quirinal; and placards menaced with the vengeance of the societies all Romans who should welcome the Pope on his return.

Nevertheless, the Holy Father’s journey home in April was a continuous triumph, and his entrance into Rome was celebrated with frantic demonstrations of delight. He confirmed many of the most valuable of his political reforms, and resumed his old life of charity and devotion. The next ten years of his reign are commonly described as a period of severe reaction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pius IX. has never been an absolutist, never ceased to favor all true liberty, never believed that nations can be governed in the nineteenth century by the methods which prevailed in the ninth. From his accession down to the present day he has not only been the kindest ruler known to history, but he has invariably granted his people the most liberal institutions and the fullest measure of personal freedom which the incessant activity of the secret conspirators would allow. The enemies of Italian liberty are the dagger and the bayonet. It is mere cant and bigotry to assume that everything calling itself a republic, whatever its true character, is entitled to the sympathy of a free people.

When Charles Albert was defeated by the Austrians, Mazzini declared that the war of the kings had ended and the war of the peoples was about to begin. The war of the peoples had failed in its turn, and now the secret societies went back to a conspiracy of the kings. They found Victor Emanuel a more useful instrument than his father, and with him they made a compact whose terms we can gather plainly enough from the event. As the destruction of Christianity was the avowed purpose of the secret societies from the very beginning, so the first service which Sardinia must render them in payment for the crown of Italy was a systematic attack upon the church in the Sardinian territory. The method of these attacks is always the same. They begin by silencing the clergy, dispersing the religious orders, and giving an anti-religious character to public education. In Sardinia the government went so far as to found a state school of heretical theology, and to impose it upon the episcopate by force. In the university of Turin it was taught that the state is omnipotent over the church, that the temporal power of the Pope is incompatible with the spiritual, that marriage cannot be proved a sacrament; and the government prohibited the appointment of any clergyman to a benefice who had not followed the condemned theological course at this university. For warning their clergy against such heresies the bishops were imprisoned and their revenues were seized. Priests were arrested for preaching “insubordination.” Convents were suppressed without warning, and even without law. Nuns were turned into the streets in the middle of the night. Clerics were pressed into the army. Religious communities engaged in teaching were treated with especial rigor. Church property was confiscated and priests were reduced to beggary. Thus so early as 1849 did the Sardinian government join the pagan conspiracy, and lend itself for a price to the work of emancipating the people from all religious belief.

It was not until 1859 that the plot was ripe, and then, to the dismay of the great Catholic party in France, an accomplice of Victor Emanuel presented himself in the person of Napoleon III. There was no reason to wonder at such an unnatural alliance. Napoleon, whose empire was built upon revolution, and who held despotic power by the double and doubly false titles of massacre and counterfeit suffrage, was always treacherous to the Pope. After the fall of the Mazzinian republic in 1848 he attempted to impose upon the Holy Father a policy in the interest of the revolutionists, and that was the cause of the Pope’s long delay at Portici; Pius IX. would not return to Rome until he could return without conditions. He declared that he “would sooner go to America; he knew the way thither already: or he would take refuge in Austria.”[46] Napoleon was compelled to yield. Then came the demonstration of Count Cavour at the Congress of 1856, made, undoubtedly, with Napoleon’s connivance. Cavour hurled “the Roman question” into the midst of European politics by his proposal for the separation of the Legations from the Pontifical States, and their government by a lay vicar; and although the subject was postponed, the mere discussion of it served a practical purpose. “It is the first spark,” said Count Cavour’s own newspaper, “of an irresistible conflagration.” Count Rayneval, the French representative at Rome, refuted the charges brought by Cavour against the papal administration, but his able report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs was suppressed in Paris, and only saw the light through the pages of a London daily paper. Two years later (January 14, 1858) Orsini made his attempt upon Napoleon’s life, and from his prison he warned the emperor that the Carbonari held him to his ancient engagements. “So long as Italy shall not be independent the tranquillity of Europe and that of your majesty will be but a chimera.” From this time there was no more mystery about Napoleon’s purposes. He had a long private conference with Cavour at Plombières, and on the 1st of January, 1859, he made the famous unfriendly remark to the Austrian ambassador at the Tuileries which proved the signal for the Franco-Italian war. A month later appeared his pamphlet, Napoleon III. and Italy, in which he denounced the civil government of the Pope as incompatible with modern civilization, and proposed anew the double-headed confederation of Gioberti, with the King of Sardinia as military chief and the Sovereign Pontiff as honorary president. And Piedmont, in the meantime, played her part astutely. For a long time her agents had been busy among the Italian states. A circular signed by Garibaldi, who was now a general in the Piedmontese service, gave instructions to the conspirators:

“1. Before hostilities have commenced between Piedmont and Austria you are to rise with the cry of 'Italy for ever! Victor Emanuel for ever!’ 2. Wherever the insurrection triumphs, he among you who enjoys most public esteem and confidence is to take the military and civil command, with the title of provisional commissioner, acting for King Victor Emanuel, and to retain it until the arrival of a commissioner sent by the Sardinian government.” But it is unnecessary to quote proofs of the plot; Mazzini himself laid it bare when he attacked the government on account of its prosecution of the authors of the abortive revolt at Genoa, in 1857: “Monarchico-Piedmontese committees exist at Rome, Bologna, Florence, and several cities of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom; and there are secondary centres in several other towns. I could name to you the persons, several of them deputies, who are the agents between the poor dupes and the personages of the government.” In Florence the plot against the Grand Duke of Tuscany, which resulted in his abdication after his troops had been bribed to desert him, was matured in the very house of the Sardinian ambassador. In Parma the Sardinian agents instigated the expulsion of the Duchess Regent, who was yet so popular that her subjects spontaneously recalled her, and Victor Emanuel had to drive her out a second time. In the Papal States the Sardinians stood upon no ceremony, but, when the insurrection took place, they boldly marched in troops to sustain it.

Before the peace of Villafranca all Central Italy was in the hands of the Piedmontese commissioners. By the terms of that treaty these commissioners were to be withdrawn. The amazement of Europe, therefore, was profound when, even before the signatures to the convention were dry, Victor Emanuel was found to be setting up provisional governments in Parma, Modena, Tuscany, and the Romagna, and getting ready to play the favorite French farce of the plebiscitum. As it was managed in one state it was managed in all. The Romagna has a million of inhabitants. The Sardinian agents prepared voting lists, restricted to the large towns where the revolutionary party was strong and bold, and put on these lists only eighteen thousand names. Of these not more than a third voted. The total vote for and against annexation represented, therefore, only three-fifths of one per cent. of the population. And this is called a plebiscitum! Nevertheless, on the 18th of March, 1860, the Legations Parma, Modena, and Tuscany were declared annexed, like Lombardy, to the Sardinian monarchy, and the king, assured of the countenance of the emperor, made preparations for the invasion of Umbria and the Marches.[47] It was a comparatively simple process; in this case Sardinia frankly took the coveted provinces by force of arms. The expedition was concerted at Chambery between Napoleon and the Piedmontese general Cialdini, and in closing the interview the emperor is reported to have said, Faites, mais faites vite!—almost the very words which our Lord spoke to Judas: “What thou doest, do quickly.” On the tenth anniversary of this interview Napoleon, a prisoner in the power of the great German Empire which he had done more than any other one man to create, ceased to reign.

We are near the end. A fortnight after Sedan the Piedmontese army, 60,000 strong, appeared before the walls of Rome to seize the last of the temporal possessions of the Holy See. Defence was impossible. The pontiff instructed his little army to resist only until a breach had been made in the walls. Then he went to pray in the venerable Lateran basilica, the mother-church of Christendom. He visited the neighboring chapel of the Scala Santa, and made on his knees the painful ascent of the twenty-eight marble steps from the judgment-hall of Pilate which our Saviour’s blessed feet had pressed. In the little chapel at the top he implored the pity and protection of Almighty God for the afflicted church. Then, followed by the acclamations of a crowd of affectionate subjects, and blessing them as he went, he entered the Vatican, and Rome has never seen him since.

The troops of Victor Emanuel made themselves masters of Rome the next day, September 20, 1870. The king followed them in time and established his court in the Quirinal. And since then, in Rome as in the rest of Italy, the pagan revolution has gone steadily forward to the suppression of Christian education, of monastic and charitable orders, and, as far as possible, of all divine worship. When Garibaldi rode on horseback into the church of Monte Rotondo and ordered his prisoners to cover their heads, which they had bared out of respect to the sacred place, he only gave emphasis to the sentiment which pervades the whole movement. The convents are empty; the churches are desolate; libraries are scattered; great seminaries of theology are broken up; Christian education has been driven from the school-room; there are hundreds of priests who go hungry and in rags; there are nuns in Rome whose whole income is three cents a day; the bishops have been robbed of everything and live on the charity of the Pope; pious processions are prohibited; members of religious orders who survive the suppression of their houses are forbidden to receive novices; the father-general of the Jesuits is an exile from Rome, and his nearest representative lives as a private lay person in hired lodgings. Today a bill is pending in the Italian parliament, and has already passed one branch of it, to punish bishops, priests, religious writers, and journalists for what is styled “disturbing the public conscience” and the “peace of families.” The Italian government has pretended to guarantee the freedom and independence of the Sovereign Pontiff in the exercise of all his spiritual functions, but now it proposes to prevent the publication of his encyclicals and allocutions; to condemn him not only to perpetual imprisonment, but to perpetual silence; to prosecute the bishops if they transmit his instructions to the faithful, and the priests if they preach against any heresy sanctioned by the state. To censure, by speech or writing, any law or institution approved by the civil authority is to be treated as a felony calculated to “disturb consciences.” Our divine Lord passed the whole period of his ministry on earth in disturbing consciences; the history of Christianity, the labors of missionaries and reformers, are nothing else than a record of the disturbance of consciences. But the pagan revolution has no toleration for Christianity. Close the confessionals, tear down the pulpits, burn the Bibles, break the tables of the law; the sleeping conscience of Italy must not be disturbed.

Thus the conspiracy of the kings has moved on towards the subjugation of the church. The secret societies are only using the kingdom of Italy and the despotic empire of Germany for the accomplishment of their anti-religious purpose, and when that is done the kings, in their turn, will be the victims of the deep-laid and long-cherished plot for the abolition of “subordination” and worship. Let nobody imagine that they are inactive or that they are satisfied with national unity. Mazzini never pretended that their work was done when a king was set up in the Pope’s palace. He died conspiring against Victor Emanuel and urging Italy to press on to “the goal of the revolution.” Nor did his projects die with him. The anniversary of his death was celebrated last March by democratic demonstrations all over Italy which the government was helpless to suppress. “A funeral march, a national hymn, and a few short, earnest words from some well-known and esteemed local republicans and capi-popolo,” says an English liberal journal, “declaring the commemorative ceremony to be not merely a token of remembrance, but 'a promise,’ was all that took place; but the fact that these things did take place on the same day throughout the whole of Italy is one of great significance. In many instances the authorities did their best previously, by warnings and even by threats, to prevent these demonstrations, but we have heard of no case in which they ventured upon any attempt to put them down by force.”[48] The flags which the associations carried were “free from the stain,” to use the popular phrase—that is to say, they did not show the arms of Savoy; and the letters read and addresses delivered spoke openly of a “time for action” which was yet to come. And while the clubs were thus parading and declaiming the following circular was distributed among the rank and file of the Italian army:

“Free citizens! Brother Carbonari! Every sect, every family, every individual is free to investigate, as best he may, the road which leads to heaven; but it belongs to the Carboneria to indicate and open up the way to the kingdom of liberty, to the triumph of justice, to social amelioration upon earth. The Carboneria, in its principles, in its development, and in the means which it proposes to employ for its purpose—i.e., for the amelioration, economic and moral, of mankind, for the diffusion of liberty, and for the perfect equalization of society—is the one association which can boast of the right of nature and the most perfect justice. All other associations, because based on privilege and ambition, either miss their aim or become useless. Persuaded of this, the apostles of our principle have devoted themselves to propagating and defending it with ardor, defying dangers, condemnations, and calumnies of the most deadly kind. Many were the acquisitions which our association made in a short time in every branch of social science, in the arts, and in commerce, and now all our aspirations are turned towards you who compose the army—the material force of nations. Soldiers! remember that you are sons of the people, free citizens, and at the same time the obstacle to the common weal and the hope of all. Do you wish to serve tyranny, privilege—in a word, the oppressors? Remember that you are sons of the people; that force alone dragged you from the bosom of your desolated families; that, slaves of a stern discipline, you are forced to shoot down the oppressed, to protect the oppressors; and do not forget that to-morrow, wounded and crippled, you will return to the ranks of the people whom you charged with the bayonet, and that in your turn you will then be charged and oppressed. Remember that before being slaves you were free, and that before serving the despot you were citizens. The Carboneria expects you among its ranks; come and range yourselves by the side of thousands of other brave ones, officers and graduates, who do not disdain to stake everything to preserve themselves true sons of the people, generous citizens of our common country.”

II.

We have endeavored to follow thus far the progress of that general revolt of the world against the divine authority which has marked the pontificate of Pius IX. and embraces the Holy Father’s heroic life of constancy and suffering. But simultaneously there has gone on a contrary movement—a clearer development and consolidation of the authority of God’s church over the minds of the faithful; and herein we trace his glorious life of triumphant action. For his attitude towards the revolution has not been one of mere passive resistance. He has fought a stout fight for the imperilled truth. It is a time of corruption and unbelief, when the world is lifted up with satanic pride to defy Heaven, and society is sacrificing all the guarantees of order, and even the elect are sorely tempted. History will record that the great mission of Pope Pius IX. was to expose the fallacies and illusions of these evil days, to stamp every error as it arose with the reprobation of the infallible judge, and, after empires, and kingdoms, and republics have been racked by a century of the pagan revolt, to prepare again the foundations of Christian civilization. “God has laid on me,” said he to the great assembly of bishops in 1867, “the duty to declare the truths on which Christian society is based, and to condemn the errors which undermine its foundations. And I have not been silent. In the Encyclical of 1864, and in that which is called the Syllabus, I declared to the world the dangers which threaten society and I condemned the falsehoods which assail its life. To you, venerable brethren, I now appeal to assist me in this conflict with error. On you I rely for support. I am aged and alone, praying on the mountain, and you, the bishops of the church, are come to hold up my arms.” “There is perhaps hardly any pontiff,” says Cardinal Manning, “who has governed the church with more frequent exercises of supreme authority than Pius IX.”; and surely there is something magnificent in the courage with which he has met every attack of the world by a new and bolder assertion of the everlasting truths against which the world is in arms. There is not a characteristic heresy of the time for which we Catholics cannot find in the utterances of this great pontiff a complete antidote; there is not a loss inflicted upon the church by her enemies for which we cannot trace a compensation in some clearer recognition of her spiritual power, some sublime restatement of her sovereign authority. Our Holy Father has healed divisions, abolished national and doctrinal parties within the pale of the church, and displayed to the universe the household of Christ one not only in the bonds of faith, but in unity of sympathies. Four times he has summoned the bishops to meet him at the tomb of the apostle. In 1854 more than two hundred bishops and cardinals assembled for the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—an act which, besides its importance in a doctrinal sense, had a special significance as illustrating the supreme authority of the see of Peter. In 1862, just after the first spoliation of the temporalities of the Papacy by Victor Emanuel, two hundred and sixty-five bishops assembled in Rome for the canonization of the martyrs of Japan, and their meeting, both for the circumstances under which it was summoned and the strong terms in which the prelates expressed their union with the Holy See and their absolute submission to its teachings, made a profound impression throughout Christendom. Five years later the revolution had made immense progress; yet in the midst of political disturbance the world not only saw five hundred bishops gather at Rome to celebrate the centenary of St. Peter’s martyrdom, and again to testify their devotion to Peter’s successor, but it heard the announcement of a general council, the first in three hundred years, called at a time when to the unaided human eye the papal throne seemed tottering to its fall. Here was an inspiring example of faith and Christian courage!

Cardinal Manning’s admirable sketch of the history of the Vatican Council,[49] now in course of publication, shows the reasons for calling that grand assembly, and the reasons especially for the definition of infallibility, its supreme and most glorious achievement; and it brings out in clear light the fact that it was with Pius himself that the idea of the council originated. If it could ever be said that a general council was the work of one man, the Council of the Vatican might be called the crowning work of the long life of Pius IX.—one which alone would place him among the most illustrious of all the Roman pontiffs, and make his reign a remarkable era in the history of the Catholic Church. The circumstances of the time which give such immense importance to the convocation of this council are summarized in the opinions of the cardinals to whom the Pope submitted the question as early as 1864, and we find an excellent synopsis of them in the papers by Cardinal Manning already cited. “The special character of the age,” say their eminences, “is the tendency of a dominant party of men to destroy all the ancient Christian institutions, the life of which consists in a supernatural principle, and to erect upon their ruins and with their remains a new order founded on natural reason alone.... From these principles follows the exclusion of the church and of revelation from the sphere of civil society and of science; and, further, from this withdrawal of civil society and of science from the authority of revelation spring the naturalism, rationalism, pantheism, socialism, communism of these times. From these speculative errors flows in practice the modern revolutionary liberalism which consists in the supremacy of the state over the spiritual jurisdiction of the church, over education, marriage, consecrated property, and the temporal power of the head of the church.” These and a multitude of other prevalent errors Pius IX. had condemned in the Syllabus and Encyclical which Cardinal Manning elsewhere refers to as “among the greatest acts of this pontificate,” summing up the declarations of many years, and giving them “a new promulgation and a sensible accession of power over the minds not only of the faithful, but even of opponents, by the concentrated force and weight of their application.”[50] But it was expedient that the declaration should be published again with the united voice of the whole episcopate joined to its head. Thus the council was almost unanimously approved as a sovereign remedy for the disorders of the time, an encouragement for the faithful, a cure for dissensions, an antidote for evil tendencies within the church, an impulse to the new and nobler life which even amid the political and social confusion had already begun to spring up among the Catholic peoples. And so, even while the pagan revolution was preparing its last assault upon the pontifical throne, an astonished world witnessed this most majestic demonstration of the authority, the unity, and the power of the church, and the whole body of the faithful were filled with courage and fresh enthusiasm. Driven from his capital, robbed, and insulted, the captive of the Vatican, whose voice rings out clear and firm above the din of the century, whose strong arm sustains, whose saintly example inspires, is yet victor over the world in the council and the Syllabus.

It would be pleasant, if space allowed, to follow the course of his beautiful private life. It is a model of devotion and simplicity. In his great palace he occupies only a plain bed-chamber with a bare stone floor, and a working-cabinet with little furniture except a table and two chairs. He rises, summer and winter, at half-past five. He says Mass, and hears a second Mass of thanksgiving; or if sickness prevents him from celebrating the Holy Sacrifice, he does not fail to receive communion. His hours of work are long and regular. His fare is plain, even to meagreness. Every day he takes exercise in the Vatican gardens, and one of his favorite resorts is a beautiful alley of orange-trees, where the pigeons come to feed from his hand. One day he was discovered with three cardinals, playing “hide and seek” in the gardens with a little boy. Yet with all his gentleness he has a keen and caustic wit. The author of a pious biography sent his book to the Pope for approval. The pontiff read till he came to these words: “Our saint triumphed over all temptations, but there was one snare which he could not escape: he married”; and then he threw the book from him. “What!” said he, “shall it be written that the church has six sacraments and one snare?” Of a Catholic diplomatist whose conduct and professions were at variance he said: “I do not like these accommodating consciences. If that man’s master should order him to put me in jail, he would come on his knees to tell me I must go, and his wife would work me a pair of slippers.” During the French occupation of Rome a certain French colonel was guilty of so gross an offence to the Pope’s authority that the Holy Father demanded his recall. Before his departure he had the effrontery to present himself at the Vatican and ask for a number of small favors, ending with a request for the Pope’s autograph. The Pontiff wrote on a card the words which our Lord addressed to Judas in the garden, “Amice, ad quid venisti?” (“Friend, wherefore hast thou come hither?”), and the colonel, who did not understand Latin, showed it to all his friends as a testimonial of the Pope’s regard, until somebody unkindly supplied him with the translation. It is the etiquette of the Vatican that carriages with only one horse must not enter the inner court. This rule was enforced one day in 1867 against the Prussian ambassador, Count von Arnim, and Bismarck, for purposes of his own, endeavored to make a diplomatic scandal of the transaction, instructing the ambassador to close the legation and quit Rome instantly unless he was allowed to drive with one horse to the very foot of the papal staircase. But Bismarck was no match for Pius IX. The Pope caused Cardinal Antonelli to write that “His Holiness, taking compassion on the difficulties of the diplomatic body, would in future allow the representatives of the great powers to approach his presence with one quadruped of any sort”—avec un quadrupède quelconque. It is believed that the Prussian minister never availed himself of this permission in its full extent.

The newspapers bring us bad news from time to time of the Pope’s health. Let us not be alarmed. He comes of a long-lived family. His grandfather died at ninety-three, his father at eighty-three, his mother at eighty-eight, his eldest brother at ninety. “I am in the hands of God,” he said to an English gentleman; “I shall bless my hour when it comes. But, my son, when I take up certain newspapers nowadays, and do not find in them an account of my last illness and my end, it always seems to me as if the editors had forgotten something.”

A VISION OF THE COLOSSEUM, A.D. 1873

O God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance, they have defiled thy holy temple: they have made Jerusalem as a place to keep fruit.—Ps. lxxviii.

I had been idly reading, through the quiet afternoon,

A poet’s passionate verses, falling softly into tune

Of even, measured rhythm, and of fine, melodious words,

Rippling along with easy grace like careless song of birds;

Now warblings, half unconscious, like the happy songster’s trill

Poured from some wind-swayed bough when all the woods are still;

Now shriller notes that rose above harsh, grating sounds of war,

Loud clarion-notes, above the drums, proclaiming peace afar—

Loud pæan sounds triumphant that Italy was free,

United, and one mighty realm from smiling sea to sea;

From Sicily’s smoke-crowned peak to Savoy’s Alpine chain

One flag met every rambling breeze that breathed o’er hill and plain;

And haughty Rome, in truth, the Cæsar’s city now once more,

The perilous reign of Peter passed for ever safely o’er.

“Io! triumphe! onward! All ye guarding eagles, come!

And with its ancient glory fill your old imperial home.”

I, sighing, closed the volume. Ah! for me how sadly dim

The poet’s glowing setting of pale Freedom’s Roman hymn,

Whose music, as I heard it, only direst discord made.

The martial beat of rattling drum, the trumpet’s mellowing shade,

Hid all the sweeter utterance of a happy people’s voice

Or sound of pealing church-bells bidding kindly skies rejoice.

I heard above the loudest note the dull, persistent sound

Of forging iron fetters—even riveted while crowned,

Sweet Freedom saw, indignant, built her frail and crumbling throne

Of consecrated marble newly stolen, stone by stone.

“Io! triumphe! onward! But the shouting could not drown

The psalm of homeless friars, weary exiles, marching down,

Chapel and cell denied them; for of these the state has need.

And from the cross’s folly must St. Francis’ sons be freed!

I heard in plaintive chorus nuns sad Miserere sing,

As ceased for them for ever their old convent’s sheltering—

Let them seek aid from Him on high whose faithful sheep they are;

The horses of the hero-king seek not their help so far!

I heard, above th’ exultant fife, the loud-voiced auctioneer

Strike down the church’s garment 'mid the idle jest and jeer

Of souls that trembled not to see the sacred chalice borne

By hands that would have helped of old to press the twisted thorn,

Who would for thirty pieces once their loving Lord have sold—

Why not his spouse’s raiment for twice that, glittering gold?

I heard the heavy rustle of quaint, figured tapestry

By pious fingers cunning wrought in days of chivalry.

Loud chimed the strangers’ clanking coin that paid the moneyed worth,

But faint the modern anthem’s notes proclaiming Freedom’s birth!

Of wandering peoples, too, I heard the tired and restless tread,

Their little harvest grown too scant for even daily bread,

Fair Freedom’s added burden grown too heavy to be borne;

While Italy, sad-hearted, watched her children sail forlorn

To seek across the western sea the life she could not give;

For her cannon must be cast, and a nation she must live.

A nation crowned! Ah! royal state is very heavy dole;

All too quick the world’s pulse beats to heed plaint of weary soul.

Still with triumphant pæans did the poet’s verses ring:

“Shout, Italy, our Italy! all-joyous anthems sing!

Clang out, sad-voiced Roman bells! hail Piedmont’s Victor,—king!”

“Miserere, miserere,”
Sounded church and convent steeple;
“In thy mercy spare us, Saviour,
Leading back thy erring people.”

And as the clanging belfries trembled strangely with the sound,

The Miserere drifting to the peoples gathered round,

Methought the quiet afternoon had faded from my sight,

And I, beneath a Roman sky, alone with deepening night,

Stood in the Colosseum’s shade, with many a wondering thought,

No touch of moonlight falling on the walls the Romans wrought;

The calm stars, gazing earthward, seemed to give nor light nor shade;

No torches’ fitful splendor through the lonely arches played;

And, even as the shade was deep, so deep the silence fell,

So calm the night it scarce could wake the wind-harp’s sighing swell;

No beaded aves drifted from cowled pilgrims of the cross,

No murmur of atoning prayers pleading the nations’ loss;

No tourists’ idle laughter broke the silence of the scene,

While the shrouding arches sheltered my thoughts of what had been.

Years, centuries had vanished as my wingèd thoughts flew fast

To days when Rome imperial o’er the world her robe had cast;

O’er the wild, barbarian legions I saw her eagles shine,

While her nobles quaffed Greek learning in draughts of Grecian wine—

Expounding, too, with easy art, the Christians’ foolish faith:

How traitorous to Cæsar’s state was every Christian breath.

And then I saw the glitter of their perfumed robes no more,

As gleaming wings of seraphs stroked my eyelids softly o’er.

Then I heard the sweet intoning of the Christians’ matin psalm,

And I saw them lowly kneeling before the mystic Lamb:

Maid patrician bent in prayer with the dark slave of the East,

Egypt’s sage, Juda’s captive, meeting at the angels’ feast.

Before that holy altar all one sacred likeness wear—

His who, on the cross outstretched, all our sin and weakness bare:

Subtle Greek before the cross laying down his pride of art;

Falling meekly peace divine on some savage Scythian heart;

Hapless Jew, haughty Northman, Roman proud, and cowering slave,

Bound together by the blood of Him who died all men to save;

One by the bond of suffering, one in the voice of prayer

That rose with solemn sweetness through the catacombs’ dull air:

“Miserere, miserere,”
Rose the sad and earnest pleading;
“In thy mercy spare us, Saviour,
Unto thee the nations leading.”

Lo! as entranced I listened, there mingled with the song

A sound as if of many steps passing the streets along,

And the ancient Roman arches 'neath which I dreaming stood

Grew peopled with the city’s fierce and restless multitude.

What noble game should fitly while the idle hours away,

What gracious pastime fill with joy the Roman holiday?

Should some strong-limbed barbarian lay his life down in its strength,

That the day for Roman matrons should have less of weary length?

Nay, daintier sight the maiden tells, binding her mistress’ zone:

To-day, by Cæsar’s lions, Christian maid shall be o’erthrown!

Within the dread arena pale and firm the martyr stood—

A strange and dazzling sight she seemed amid the soldiers rude;

So slight the little, childish form, so young the radiant face,

Whence streams of holy glory flooded all the pagan place;

The happy lips half-parted with a love that fain would speak,

And the eyes to heaven uplifted beneath the forehead meek—

The eyes whence earth had vanished, heaven’s shadow resting there,

The glimmer of its shining falling softly on her hair.

Ah! happy maid, that, listening, heard above the tumult wild

The loved voice of the Father calling home his little child;

The voice of the Belovèd bidding sweet his loved one come:

“Arise, my Dove, my Beautiful”—it sounded o’er the hum

Of wondering crowds who could not guess whence came the martyr’s strength,

Her heart with joy nigh breaking that it should rest at length

On His whose love had bought it with a price exceeding far

The spoils of all the nations gracing Cæsar’s triumph-car.

One little grain of incense still might save the martyr’s life,

But one little breath for Cæsar still win release from strife—

Unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, to God the life he gave;

Less duty could she offer Him who died that life to save?

And then the vision faded, and once more I stood alone

Where thought of sainted martyrs seemed to consecrate each stone,

And stars as calmly watching o’er as once in days bygone

When Cæsar’s dearest pastime won his slaves a deathless crown.

“Miserere, miserere,”
Seemed the night-wind lowly sighing;
“Call thy erring sheep, O Saviour,
Dearest Lord of love undying!”

Soft then I saw advancing through the darkness’ mighty shade

A tall and stately figure in wide, trailing robes arrayed,

The fair, white arms in longing stretched, as if in woe to seek

The comfort of the broken heart, the strength of all the weak—

Christ’s blessèd cross with arms outspread, as if to mutely plead

For mercy for the sinner, from tender hearts love’s meed;

Of mightiest love the symbol true, the link ’twixt heaven and earth,

The sign by which earth’s frailest one is cleansed for heavenly birth.

In vain! No craving hand can touch that sacred symbol now,

Its holy vision bring no rest to world-tossed, aching brow;

The modern Cæsar has no need to mark where martyrs fell:

“Unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s”—that word they kept too well.

And murmuring monks but echo, their chaplets telling o’er,

The words these stones repeated in the Roman days of yore;

To earthly science dearer far the walls the pagans built

Than the precious blood of martyrs for love of Jesus spilt.

Perchance beneath these stones might lie rare treasures of old Rome—

The cross in Christian kingdom must not wander from its home!

“Miserere, miserere,”

Seemed the very stones outcrying;

“In thy mercy spare the nations.

Heed, O God! the prisoners’ sighing.”

A sound of low lamenting then filled all the silent place,

Whose darkness won unearthly light from out the stranger’s face—

A face so fair not Paphos’ queen could claim a grace so rare;

Ah! only she, the much-desired, such peerless mien could wear.

And low I heard her murmuring: “Ah! me, woe, woe is me!

So weary are my ears with sound of shouts that speak me free.

Free! Am I free? Upon my head rests weight of royal crown,

And Piedmont’s soldiers guard me, fearing lest I lay it down.

Italy! Am I Italy? That name indeed I bear;

And among the nations standing a nation’s crown I wear—

Proud empires that salute me fair, green lands beyond the sea,

Crying aloud: 'Shout, Italy! Thank Victor thou art free;

Thy peoples shall no longer 'neath the tyrant’s scourge bend low,

And, too, thy seemly garment no unseemly rent shall show;

Among thy peers come thou once more to take thy place and name,

Fair Southern queen, King Victor has ta’en away thy shame.’

“O gold-haired northern peoples! know ye not the sound of chains?

Ne’er heard ye clink of German spur along my Lombard plains?

O rosy-cheeked barbarians! do ye deem that I am free

Because my rulers speed you when ye prate of liberty!’

When ye the wide arms shorten of the world-redeeming cross

Since too far its shadow falls, and ye deem that shade your loss!

Far, far across the western seas I hear their poets sing,

While Freedom’s joy-bells pealing, loud, exulting anthems ring:

'Rise up, dear Italy unchained; thank Victor thou art free,

And bend, oppressed, at Peter’s throne no more thy trembling knee.

Thy sons shall waste in convent cell no more their manhood’s strength;

See! open wide, their prison-doors: free men they are at length!

Dark tyranny and priestcraft prostrate fall before thy king;

Thy children freemen rise once more beneath his sheltering.’

“O strong-armed western people! in your home beyond the sea,

Bearing even as your birthright the grace of liberty,

List not the songs such poets sing: they know not me or mine;

Studded with cruel thorns for me each laurel wreath they twine.

A mournful queen I am, alas! crowned in another’s place—

The mighty One from whom my face hath won its look of grace.

I sit as a usurper where I fain would kneel and pray,

Crowned with Rome’s earthly circlet from her forehead stol’n away!

The world’s imperial mistress once, now queen of love and peace,

Holds she her life and liberty but as earth’s monarchs please?

Fain would they on her gracious brow my coronet have set,

Its lustre dimmed with Savoy’s loss, with Naples’ tears all wet!

The handmaid of her Maker, fair with lustre not of earth.

Should she to Piedmont’s Victor bend her brow of heavenly birth?

The mother of all peoples where the cross’s light is shed,

Was my dull, narrow diadem fit crown to grace her head?

In her old palace I sit throned, crowned with her earthly crown,

With jealous care watched ever, lest I cast the honor down.

I see my children wander wide in exile from their own,

And, when they ask for living bread, my masters give them stone.

I sit beside St. Peter’s chair; like his, my hands are bound;

My eyes weep bitter sorrow at your pæans’ wild, glad sound;

Beneath the heavy cuirass that is girded on my breast

I bear the wreath mysterious St. Peter’s hand hath blessed.

Upon the cannon rests my hand craving to lift the cross,

And 'neath Sardinian colors I bewail the blind world’s loss.

“Miserere, miserere,”

Seemed the weary voice outcrying,

“Spare thy heritage, O Saviour!

Hearken thou the prisoners’ sighing.

“O credulous Western people! cease shouting I am free.

My masters have no knowledge of the truth of liberty,

Who murmur with ignoble lips my old and honored name,

And seek to rebaptize me with unholy rites of shame.

Are ye drunk with Freedom’s dregs that ye have forgot her face,

And bend before th’ unworthy thing men show you in her place?

Stretch not your hands, God-fearing race, to welcome such as these:

God, who your shepherd is, and judge, gives not to such his peace.

“Miserere, miserere,
Mighty Lord of all the living,
In thy mercy spare the erring,
Sacred Heart of love forgiving!”

“The great arched walls sent echoing back the sad, indignant plaint,

The light from that fair, mournful face grew evermore more faint,

Till, fading in the darkness, light and shadow both were gone,

And I sat where crimson sunset with southern splendor shone,

Lighting the western city with a flood of harmless fire,

With a glory, quickly fading, enwreathing mast and spire;

Whence no mellow bells pealed earthward, sounding the angel’s call,

Nor Miserere drifted from roof and tower tall;

The busy craft went sailing up and down the crowded stream—

Upon my lap the poet’s book, the conjurer of my dream.

Vision and sound had vanished, only still dim echoes fell

Of pleading voices rising on the night-wind’s scarce-felt swell:

“Miserere, miserere,

Hear, O God! the prisoners’ sighing;

Spare thy heritage, O Saviour!

Dearest Lord of love undying.”

THE DOOM OF THE BELL.

Two men were sitting in a garret at the very top of one of the craziest old houses in Bruges—not a house dating from the fifteenth century, such as those we admire to this day, but a house that was already two hundred years old when those were built. It stood on the brink of the canal beyond which are now the public gardens that have displaced the ramparts of the once turbulent and independent city. Then the houses crowded into the wide fosse of not too fragrant water, and leaned their balconied gables over it. This was not in the busy or the splendid quarter; it was far from the cathedral and the Guildhall. And in those prosperous times of the Hanseatic League, of the Venetian and Genoese merchant-princes visiting and marrying among their full peers of the city of Bruges—the times of the grand palaces built by those royal and learned traders—these two men I speak of were poor, obscure, and with little prospect of ever being anything else. Yet one of them had it in him to do as great things as the Van Eycks, and to take the art-loving city by storm, if he could only get “a chance.” It was the same in the year 1425 as it is now, and men in picturesque short-hose and flat caps were marvellously like those we see in ugly chimney-pots and tight trousers. The rivalry of other artists—none very eminent—and the ungetable patronage of rich men stood in this young painter’s way, and he got disheartened and disgusted. This garret was his studio, his bedroom, and his kitchen. It was cheap, and the light could be managed easily and properly to suit his painting; but it was not one of those elaborately artistic studios, a picture in itself, which we associate with the idea of the “old masters.” The things that were there had evidently drifted there and got heaped up by accident—homely things most of them, and disposed with the carelessness natural to a man who had little belief or hope in his future. There was an air about the whole place as well as its owner that seemed to say as plainly as any words, “What is the use?” But the other man was a contrast to him. He was much older; a wiry form, and eager, small eyes, and an air of resistance to outward circumstances, “as if he could not help it,” but not in the sense of what is popularly called an “iron will,” were his chief distinguishing marks. He was neither artist nor merchant, and he lived “by his wits.” In those days, just the same as now, that meant something bordering on dishonesty; and such men were known as useful, but scarcely reputable. This individual was seated on a low trunk or chest of polished wood, but not carved, nor even adorned with curious hinges or iron-work; the other stood opposite, leaning on the high sill of a window in the gable, looking down into the canal.

“Peter,” said the latter after a pause, “have you heard of any one dying lately in the great houses, or, for that matter, in the rookeries?”

“No, not dying—at least, not lately,” said the other slowly.

“Not dying?” said the first, laying the same emphasis on the word as his friend had done, and not showing any lack of understanding or sign of surprise.

“Well, I mean she recovered; but she was pretty near death, and of course will be again as soon as it is safe. It put some of his lordship’s plans out a little when he heard how badly Simon had done his work. But you know it was not at his house, but in a kind of prison, and she was put there on a charge of stealing her mistress’ Genoese pearl-embroidered robe, and it was said the lady begged as a favor she might not be publicly executed for the attempt, but allowed some time to repent and prepare; and when she was ready, she was to be told that one day, within the week, she would be poisoned by something in her food, which she could not taste and which would give her no pain, but put her to sleep—for ever. But no one believed that this was her mistress’ request, nor that she ever stole anything, of course. Every one knows that poor Dame Margaret is a cipher in her husband’s house—a worse victim of my Lord Conrad’s than any one there, many as they are; and he is just now out of reach of punishment, being, by the Count of Flanders’ influence, a member of the government, a councillor, and I know not what besides. But it seems Simon did not do his work aright, and the poor girl is still there, and no doubt, in a week or two, the experiment will be quietly tried again and with success. Jan, are you listening?”

“Yes,” said the artist as he turned round with absent look and a gesture, as if he had unconsciously been picking off some buttons from his sleeve and dropping them in the canal below.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

“Peter,” said the other abruptly, “is Simon your friend?”

“Well, we have had dealings together sometimes. He sells me clothes now and then; you know he has a good deal of such stuff on his hands.”

“If I could pay him,” said the artist bitterly, “I should not need any go-between; but I have nothing. I want something he could give me, and, if I had it, I should not need any patron, and would take none, short of the Count of Flanders himself.”

“Riddles again,” said Peter quietly; “poverty makes you mysterious.”

“I’ll tell you plainly what the riddle is, if you’ll help me.”

“For friendship’s sake?”

“Oh! no, indeed. Is there one in all Bruges would do it, or I expect it of him?”

“Well, well, do not croak; but you know by experience that it is hard to live.”

“If you will get me what I want of Simon, you shall have one-fourth of my future reward and Simon one-fourth.”

“Too mean terms, those, Jan,” said Peter quietly, but intently watching his friend’s face.

“Very well, each a third, then; I knew you would want no less. But, look you,” he added, brightening up, “no one can share the fame, and I shall be known all over Flanders and Brabant, and France—ay, even Italy and Germany; and who knows if the Greek merchants will not carry my name to the court of Constantinople itself?—and you two poor wretches will have nothing but a pitiful handful of gold.”

“Quite enough for me, at any rate,” said Peter composedly; “it will be more than I ever had before. But do not let us 'count our chickens before they are hatched.’ What is it, though, that you want to work this miracle with?”

“Only a vial of her blood after the girl has been dead four hours.”

Peter betrayed no emotion.

“Rather an unusual request,” he said meditatively, “and one that savors strongly of witchcraft, which you know is scarcely less dangerous than heresy. You remember what happened at Constance scarcely more than ten years ago?”

“Nonsense! What has heresy to do with the mixing of my colors? And who but a leech will find out the mixture? And after all, if a fool were to use this potion just mixed as I shall mix it, and paint a picture with it, his picture would be only fit for a tavern-sign, and no one could tell the difference. If you need the ingredients, you need the skill more.”

“Why, Jan, you are getting enthusiastic—a miracle, that, in itself. I thought you had made up your mind that you would never do anything that would get known.”

“Well, I have a feeling, since you mentioned this case, that I shall be known before I die, and known by this means too. Can you get me what I want?”

“I dare say I can. But shall I tell the old sinner Simon that I want it for you, or say it is for a leech?”

“Why lie about it?” said the young man fiercely.

“Prudence, you know,” said the other, perfectly unabashed.

“No; tell him the bare truth, but swear him to secrecy. If he tells it, he shall forfeit his share.”

“He could get twice as much for denouncing you.”

“Let him! Where is his interest to denounce me? He is not a fiend, and he knows it is hard to live.”

“He did, but may be he has forgotten it in his present position. All the grandees know him now.”

“But you forget, Peter, that his own business is more dangerous than my undertaking could be, even taking it for granted I should be suspected of witchcraft, and he would scarcely like to draw attention on his own delicate doings.”

“So far true,” said Peter. “I respect your shrewdness; you can talk sense sometimes. I will get that vial for you some time this week or next.”

“Do not forget the exact time after death—four hours. The perfection of the mixture would be gone if you did not attend to that. I shall come with you to the door, and wait for you and the vial, any night and any hour you mention.”

“Very well,” said Peter, as he got up and stretched himself. “I suppose your larder is empty?”

“Oh! I forgot. You can have what there is—cheese three days old, and some fresh brown bread, and two eggs, new-laid yesterday morning, which my friend the washerwoman gave me for sitting up at night with her sick boy. She would make me take them, and I am glad now I need not eat them myself. I should feel mean, if I did; and yet, if they stayed there till to-morrow, hunger would drive me to it. You are welcome to them.”

Meanwhile, Peter had silently helped himself to all the articles mentioned except one “hunch” of bread, and left the garret with a cool “Thank you.” Jan turned back to the window, and stayed nearly an hour looking down into the drowsy canal with its fringe of dark, huddled houses, each, as he thought, a frame for a picture full of the same agony of hopeless aspirations and submission to grim and sordid circumstances as his own. But he saw through glasses of his own staining; for many of those wretched, crazy, but beautiful houses held pictures of a bright home life and love that looked no higher or farther for happiness, and was, in truth, the outcome of a mind more philosophical than the future glory of Flemish art, staring into the flood from his garret window, could boast of possessing.

Three months went by, and no one saw the young artist, save the man who sold him his meagre provisions, Peter, and his friend of the eggs. Five days after the conversation we have recorded Peter and he were walking home at two o’clock in the morning through the streets, where no one but the watchman had leave and license to be, calling out the hour when the chimes struck it. It was bright moonlight, and the two men would gladly have dispensed with the beauty of the night, much as it enhanced the charm of the great mansions they passed, the carved doorways, the delicate balconies, the ponderous, magnificent iron bell-pulls, the lions’ and griffins’ heads on the many bridges over the narrow canals. Even Jan passed hurriedly by, standing nervously back in a doorway if he heard the clear cry of a watchman, starting as a loose stone rattled under his feet in the pavement, and even when his companion ill-naturedly put his hand in a fountain and noisily disturbed the water with a “swish” that made the other turn pale and look around in horror of being pursued.

As the weeks went by and the young man worked on alone, feverishly and battling with his own superstitions as well as the fear of being denounced by his two associates, an odd change came over him. Peter noticed it about one month after the day they had procured the vial of blood. Jan was taken with a pious fit that day, and insisted on spending some miserable pence he had on candles offered for the soul of the poisoned girl, and which he, with genuine devoutness, put on the iron spikes provided for the purpose in the church of Notre Dame. That day, having spent all in this way, he fasted altogether and nearly fainted at his easel; but when he left off work Peter saw that a startled, expectant look was in his eyes, which he directed furtively every now and then to one particular corner of his room. When questioned he hurriedly turned the conversation; but the scared look grew more and more intense as time went on. At last, one night, the young man asked Peter seriously and with great trepidation to stay and sleep with him.

“I believe I am getting nervous,” he said, with a laugh that was anything but genuine. Peter made no objection, but in the middle of the night he was awakened by Jan. The poor fellow was in a violent cold perspiration, and, pointing excitedly to the same corner, cried:

“There she is; and she never says a word, but only looks at me reproachfully! She has been there every night since the first Month’s Mind!”

“Pshaw!” said Peter, “I see nothing there, Jan; you should be bled—that is all. You have been overworking yourself.”

But nothing would persuade the artist that the ghost of the poisoned girl was not there, silent and reproachful; and there, day after day and night after night, he saw her, and, though he longed to speak to her, he never dared.

Three months were over and his picture was done; but he was only the skeleton of his former self, and he looked, as Peter said, like what the Florentine woman had said of Dante—“the man who had gone down to hell and come back again.” His bitterness was gone, so was his hopelessness, but there was no healthy joy or youthful enthusiasm in their place; he seemed to have grown old all at once, except for the feverish, eager haste to show his picture and win the name that should darken that of the national pets and the popular favorites. Where to show it? was a question Peter put more than once, but Jan waived it as not worth any anxiety. He should write a notice, and post it on the church doors and those of the Guildhall and the Exchange, to the effect that a new and unknown painter had a picture for sale and exhibition at such and such a place; and if the public did not care to come there to see it, they might see it once on next market-day in the Grande Place, where the artist would show it himself, free to all.

The subject was “Judith and Holofernes”—a common subject enough in those days, but the artist thought that no one had ever treated it in the same way before. When we see it in the market-place and hear the comments of the people, we shall understand in what lay the difference.

The day appointed by the artist came. All the rich and learned men had noticed the placard on the church doors, and the connoisseurs and critics were on the alert. This unpatroned and self-confident painter stung their curiosity, and the merchants, native and foreign, were also eager to see and, if they liked it, “buy up” the new sensation. The people, too, had heard of the exhibition, and many crowded earlier than usual to the market-place to get a glimpse of the mysterious picture being set up by the artist.

No one did see it, however. A good many stalls, booths, and awnings were up long before daylight, and no one noticed the stand of the new-comer, put up in a corner, and screened all round with the commonest tent-cloth. As soon as dawn made it possible to see things a little, the stand was found to be open, and a picture, unframed, was seen set up on trestles, and some coarse crimson drapery skilfully arranged round it, so as to take the place of the frame which the artist was too poor to buy. A few loungers came up, and, fancying this was the screen to some mystery-play to be acted later in the day, sauntered away again, like uncritical creatures as they were. Presently a priest and a merchant came up, evidently searching for some particular booth, and soon stopped before the picture.

“Here it is,” shortly said one of them.

“So that is the picture?” said the other; and for a while they both stood in silence, examining it in detail.

“Wonderful!” said the merchant presently. “It beats the hospital 'St. John.’”

“There is a strange power about the drawing,” said the other.

“But the coloring!” retorted the merchant. “See the depth, the life-likeness, the intensity; and yet there is nothing violent or merely sense-appealing. It is horror, but rather mental than physical horror.”

“True,” said the priest. “I wonder if he had a model.”

“Most likely, but there is more than he ever saw in any common model; the merit rests with himself alone, I should judge.”

“Well, do you think of buying it?”

“I am inclined to do so, but want to examine it more closely first. Besides, I see no one here to represent the painter, or even guard the picture.”

“Oh! I have no doubt there is some one hovering about—perhaps that countryman who looks so vacant. You know the professional tricks of our worthy artists!”

And with this he called the person in question, who surely looked vacant enough to be in disguise.

“Can you tell me what you think of this picture, friend?” he asked.

“Very fine, messire.”

“You do not think it like one of Hendrick Corlaens, do you?”

“I never saw that, messire,” bashfully said the countryman.

“But you think this is fine?”

“Very, very.”

“Why do you like it?”

“It seems like life.”

“Like death too?”

“Yes, messire.”

“How far did you come this morning?” asked the merchant, fancying his companion’s shrewdness had overshot the mark this time.

“Forty-three miles. I started before midnight from Stundsen.”

“I think,” said the merchant to his brother-critic, “we shall make nothing of this man. He must be one of my brother-in-law’s men at Stundsen. He is quite genuine in his stupidity.”

And the pair moved nearer the picture, while others came up and stopped, till there was soon a little knot of admirers talking in whispers. The crowd grew as the day went on. In the side street leading into the Place the doors of Notre Dame opened to let out the flood of worshippers that had flowed in since dawn from the country, and who now rushed from their devotions to their business. Noise was uppermost, trade was brisk; the sun got hot and men got thirsty. It was soon a riotous as well as a picturesque scene, and a spectator on that balcony of the curiously-carved corner window on the same side of the Place as the Guildhall could scarcely have told which stalls the hurrying masses most besieged, so tangled was the web of human beings jostling and jolting each other along the uneven pavement. A good many had stared and gazed at the picture. It was the subject of many comments and disputes that day; men quarrelled over its merits as they drank their sour wine, and women talked of it in whispers over their bargains. Some children had screamed and kicked at first sight of it; altogether it had not failed to be known, seen, and talked about. Our two friends of early morning had hung about it all day and overheard most of the remarks of the crowd. Some people had been disappointed in finding that it was not the sign of a play representing the slaying of Holofernes, but only a picture; a Venetian and a Greek, daintily dressed and speaking some soft, foreign tongue—a wonder to the sturdy Flemish peasants from the dykes and canals by the sea—lounged near the unpainted railing that protected the picture from the crowd. No one could see behind the picture, but many thought the artist was hidden within the closely sewn curtains, that never flapped in the breeze like the rest of the market awnings. These two and the first critics listened in eager silence to the judgment of the crowd, put forth in short sentences at long intervals. On coming up one woman said to her companion:

“Why, I thought they always painted Judith with black hair; this one has hair the color of mine.”

“Perhaps it was his betrothed he painted,” said the other, “and in compliment to her he made it a portrait.”

“Then I should not like to be he. A ghostly bride he would have.”

“But look at her eyes; they seem like a corpse’s just come back to life.”

“Pshaw! how could a corpse come back to life? You mean a ghost.”

“No—Lazarus, you know. I can fancy how frightened and reproachful he might have looked when he woke up and found himself in his shroud.”

“I think he would look glad and thankful. But come away. It seems as if I should dream of that face.”

“Yes; it makes me feel very strange the more I look at it.”

And the two women moved off.

Presently another voice was heard in a muffled tone.

“See the blood in Holofernes’ throat. It looks as if it were moving.”

“Judith looks too weak and small to kill him,” said another.

“So she does,” said a third, and he added, in a lower tone: “I once had a cousin very like that picture.”

“Is she dead?” asked a woman, a stranger to the speaker.

“Yes,” said the man, with some surprise.

“I thought no live person could remind you of this face,” answered the woman, as if in explanation.

The two couples of critics glanced appreciatively and with a smile at each other, and the Greek said to his friend:

“Your boors are no bad critics, after all. I think the barbarians rather beat us in painting.”

“Beat you!” laughed the Venetian. “Speak for yourself. But it is your religion that has fossilized your art; otherwise you would have been—”

“No,” said the other thoughtfully, “I think you mistake; I doubt if we have the gift you, and the Flemings also, have for painting. Our literature is as far above that of this northern people as heaven is above the earth, and our sculpture, of course, is unrivalled; but they have the gift of music, and of architecture, and of painting—the two last marvellously developed. And in the first I think your people—I do not mean Venetians, but some of your other Italian neighbors—have just now reached a good climax. At Milan I heard some chanting that would put us to shame, and even here I have heard something not unlike it. Yes, I cede the palm to the barbarians in the arts of Euterpe and—”

“But in architecture yours is the peer of any northern style,” said the Venetian.

“I doubt it,” said the Greek. “There is a strange impression comes over me in these vast, sky-high, delicately-carved cathedrals, dim and resonant, that comes nowhere else—not in our gold-colored, mosaic-paved, dome-crowned churches, nor your St. Mark, the daughter of our St. Sophia.”

“Every one knows how liberal are your views,” said the other, with a smile.

“Yes?” asked the Greek, evidently in innocence. “But I am only fair to others. I would rather be a Greek than a barbarian, as the adage of one of our old heathen philosophers has it; but I can see that God has not rained every blessing on one spot, and that my native land, as he did on the Garden of Eden before Adam fell.”

“Hush!” said the Venetian, interrupting him. “Some girl has fainted.”

Some little stir was taking place in the crowd; it was a girl who had fainted, and an old woman, strong and powerful, was holding her.

Among the many questions tossed to and fro and never answered, our four friends all managed to hear the words of the old woman to her nearest neighbors.

“Yes, that is the portrait of her sister and my granddaughter, just as if the poor lost girl had sat for it herself. But then this must have been painted since she lost her rosy color. And I believe the painter knows what became of her, and where she is, if she is alive; and, God forgive me! I always accused the Lord Conrad of Schön of her ruin and disappearance. I will know, too, if this painter is to be found anywhere in Flanders. Oh! yes, Agnes is very well; she will be herself again directly, nervous little thing!” And the old woman, with a kind of savage tenderness, shielded the face of her granddaughter in her bosom, while the girl slowly revived.

Some people hinted that the painter was hidden in the closed tent behind the picture, and others brought out shears to cut the curtains; but the priest here interposed.

“I think, my friends,” he said in a clear, authoritative voice, “that you had better leave this matter to the proper authorities. Messire Van Simler and I will see that this good woman is heard, and, if need be, helped to find her granddaughter, or any news of her death and fate. It would be an unwarrantable act to cut these curtains open: if there is no one there, you will feel like fools, the dupes of the childish trick of an unknown painter; if you find the person you are looking for, you may do him a mischief and come yourselves under the eye of the law. I advise you to let the matter rest. And you, my good friend, here is an address you may find useful whenever you wish to make further inquiries. It would be best to take your charge home.”

The manner rather than the words of the speaker took effect at once, and the group dissolved to make room for other sight-seers, all gaping, all admiring, and all ending by feeling uncomfortable and leaving the stand with muttered words of equal wonder and fear. But it is impossible to follow each comment, and we have yet other scenes to look at before we close the history of this picture.

Among the crowd that day had been Peter and Simon, and the former, familiar as he was with the painting, had ceased to feel impressed by the weird, indescribable beauty and awe that were its very essence. But he had been, in a business-like way, alive to everything connected with what was to him the instrument of future success, and the fainting scene and its close were especially observed. He noticed the drift of all the remarks made on the picture; he had foretold it himself—for he was nothing if not worldly-wise—and he carefully scanned the faces of the four critics who had so pertinaciously lingered round the stand all day. He knew them all for enlightened men, above the nonsense of the age, good art-critics, and men born to be masters of their kind. Even the young Venetian had the making of a statesman in him; the Greek was as simple-minded as he was generous, and, though his countrymen had a bad name at Bruges for conventional sins of which not half of them were really guilty, he was, even with the most ignorant, a signal exception. The other two were trusted native citizens, bosom friends, patrons of all that was good, learned, and improving, and, what was more, powerful in the council and civic government. The first, by the way, was a canon of the cathedral, by private inheritance a rich man, and, by dint of charity to the starving and liberality to men of letters, raised above the scandal that attended on rich ecclesiastics. These four were representative men, and though each a representative of the best type of his own class and nation, still no less entitled to be called representative men.

Peter noted the way Messire Van Simler went that evening; the canon he knew well by reputation. Then he came back to the Place and helped a young peasant to lift and pack the picture, leaving on the planks in front of the booth the address of the artist and a notice that purchasers were asked to meet the painter at his own studio any time each day before dark. The peasant seemed slim and tall for a Flemish countryman, but his cap concealed his face, and his loose vest was well calculated to increase his seeming bulk; still, when he got to the studio in the old garret over the canal, and threw off his cap, he proved to be the person you must have suspected—the painter himself. He said nothing, and Peter did not offer to speak; but the former, as soon as he came in, glanced hurriedly into one corner and then back at the picture. Over their scanty supper the two exchanged a few monosyllables as to the result of the show, but each was uneasy and spoke as if compelled by the suspicion of the other. Next morning Peter went to Van Simler’s house before the latter was out of bed, and was received during the merchant’s ample breakfast. No one came to Jan’s garret the first day, and he stayed at home alone with his work, now and then retouching it, as if drawn to it by a spell he could not master; but each time he worked at it he seemed more ill and nervous. Towards dusk he heard a footstep on the stair, and opened the door to let in some light on the break-neck place, full of corners and broken steps, where some stranger was evidently groping his way. It was the Greek. He greeted the painter with grave earnestness and more interest than is usual with a purchaser.

“I have come,” he said after the first civilities, “to buy both your pictures and you, and pack both at once, as my ships will be in port by the night after to-morrow night, and it needs time to meet them. They cannot wait—at least, that one cannot which happens to be most convenient for you to go in. Have you any objection to go with me to Greece?—any tie to detain you here?”

Jan looked into the corner before he answered, and shuddered. “I fear I have,” he said unwillingly. The Greek looked fixedly at him.

“I will not keep you any longer than you like, and you probably like travelling? There are scenes in Greece and the East that will delight you, if you have a liking for Scriptural subjects; and the journey need not be longer than the interval between this cargo from here and the next cargo back.”

Jan said nothing.

“You see I am bent on having you as well as your picture,” the merchant went on; “but if you insist on refusing me your company, I will take the picture at once. I have men below ready to carry it away, and I will give you your own price at once, in gold coin.”

And Jan still gazed into the furthest—and empty—corner.

“I have reasons for my haste,” said the Greek, slowly, at last. Jan turned inquiringly.

“Good reasons,” said his visitor gravely and gently, “which I will tell you when we are at sea, if you will trust me till then; if not, I will even tell you now, though the proverb says that 'walls have ears.’”

Jan seemed to need no immediate explanation, but said:

“Take the picture, and welcome, and believe in my gratitude, though I cannot put it into words; but I can take no gold for the picture.”

“Why, you invited purchasers to come here to you!”

“I have learned to-day that I cannot sell it.”

“Well,” said the Greek, with a look of intelligence, “I think you and I understand each other, then, and I may as well take you and the picture too.”

“No,” said Jan, “you do not understand me, but I understand you and am grateful. If I am in danger, it matters little; I prefer meeting such a danger as you fear for me to seeing what I should see always, on the ship, in the East, as well as here—or at the stake.”

“Your mind is—preoccupied, my young friend,” said the merchant. “But let me take the picture; at least, it is better to have the evidence put out of the way in time. Let me call to my men.”

“Yes, but no gold for it,” said Jan without emotion, as he pushed away the purse on the table. “Take the picture; there will be only one face then, and I shall not be torturing myself as to whether the likeness is faithful enough or not.”

The Greek bent out of the window and whistled to two men sitting on the narrow stone-work of the canal; one of them struck a flint, lit a pine torch, and, beckoning the other to follow him, came up the winding stairs. Jan said not a word, and the picture was packed and carried away, while the merchant lingered yet, pressing gold, protection, and future patronage upon the benumbed artist. Even the hint of fame could not stir the young man.

“I have done my life’s work,” he said gloomily. “I shall never paint the equal of that picture again, and I do not wish to,” he added with a shudder; “and for the sake of my reputation I must not paint anything below that standard.”

“But why should not you do even better?” said the Greek.

“I thought you knew,” said the young man, in puzzled uncertainty.

“I know nothing, and my suspicions are too vague to shape my judgment on the merits of this particular work of yours. I gathered all I do know, or even suspect, from the remarks of the people to-day. I am used to watching indications of men’s fancies, prejudices, passions, say even superstitions, and I thought it a pity that such people as we heard to-day should have it in their power to end or mar the career of an artist of your genius. We want some young, rising painter—one who can rival the Italians; one who can show that there is a future for art, that it is progressive and improvable; one especially who will defy conventionalities—for I own that your independent treatment of a 'Judith’ fascinated me. But if I cannot prevail upon you to accept my services at present, you will not refuse to take this address; it will find me, no matter where I may be, and it will be even a personal safeguard for you in my absence and during the interval that may elapse before I hear of your appeal.”

“Thank you a thousand times for your unprovoked and generous interest!” said Jan more warmly than he had spoken before. “I shall never forget it. God grant my life or death may be guided and determined by the highest Power! I should not trust myself to decide wisely, if I had the choice offered me; but if it is ordained that I should live long, I prefer your being the instrument of my salvation.”

The merchant left, and Jan stayed alone all night; he was stonily calm, watching, thinking, waiting as if for an expected event, and never breaking his fast through the long, dark hours. When early morning came, two men in gray cloaks opened his door and respectfully ordered him to come with them to Van Simler’s house, which he did without surprise and without remonstrance. Here he found the canon, who with Van Simler told him briefly that they thought it for his good to be taken into the country to the castle of Stundsen, belonging to the merchant’s brother-in-law. They did not tell him why, and it did not even occur to him to ask. As he passed from the large dining-hall where this short interview took place to a room furnished with Spanish leather and carved oak—his room, he was told, for a few hours—he thought he recognized the Greek anxiously and quickly open a door that led to the passage, as if to assure himself of the presence of some expected person.

Van Simler and his friend, meanwhile, had a short and significant talk, a few words of which are here set down to explain facts that may look to the undiscerning reader like the conventional tricks of modern mediævalists, to whom plots and kidnapping are “daily bread.” “Now,” said the merchant, “if that scoundrel Peter goes no further, there is every hope of getting this obstinate young genius out of the city in safety; but he may try to get two prices and hint the matter to Conrad Schön.”

The canon shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, in that case,” he said, “all would be in vain, for Count Conrad has the sovereign’s ear; and you know the hobby the Count of Flanders has lately bestridden.”

“The youth ought to have gone with the Greek; but the latter says he believes him half-mad, which accounts for his staying in the jaws of the lion.”

“I have heard of Jan the painter before,” said the priest, “and, had he been a different person, I should have gone to him myself; but, from my general knowledge of his character, any one would do better than one of us, and I am glad the Greek forestalled me. Why did not you keep Peter under lock and key when he came here?”

“It was a mistake, I own,” said the other; “but still, if I had, there was Simon in the secret.”

“Simon is a fool, and nothing of this would have occurred to him.”

“I doubt about his being a fool; at any rate, he is a dangerous one.

“He is a fool in such matters as these, though dangerous enough in his way, as you say. Now, our Greek friend has just left the house, I see, and there is nothing to detain me here just now. You take the transport business in your hands? Well and good; while I attend to any foolish charge made in the city. I expect I shall see old Mother Colette before dark to-night.”

There is no need to go through the details of the few days that followed. In one word, Peter was more powerful than Jan’s four protectors put together, but only because he had Conrad Schön at his back, and behind him a greater “presence” yet—no less a person than the Count of Flanders, who had lately taken a mania about witchcraft. It was easy to play upon his vanity and tickle his supposed superior sense of discovery, and Conrad had reasons for diverting to the young artist the opprobrium which even he, with all his power, could not fail to have brought upon himself in such an independent and proud burgher-city as Bruges for the wrong done to the orphan daughter of one of her citizens and an attendant of his wife; for there was still a lingering in Flanders of the old knightly feeling of the earlier days of chivalry, which made it the duty of a knight to consider every house-maiden within his walls as his own daughter or sister, and protect, and even defend, her as such.

The dark accusations of Conrad and his informant against the defenceless painter were but too readily listened to, and, before his friends could conceal him, the sovereign had already sent to demand his person. We will pass over the mock examination which the count held, more with a view to satisfy his own curiosity than to assure himself of the prisoner’s guilt; over the honest but bitter malignity with which old Mother Colette, an unconscious tool sought out by Jan’s enemies, testified against the man who, to make such a startling and mysterious likeness of her lost granddaughter, must have been intimately acquainted with her; and, lastly, over Jan’s strange apathy and silence, his refusal to deny the charges brought against him, and his seeming relief at being condemned to die.

He never told any one the reason of all this, and the secret would have died with him, if Peter, years afterwards, when the picture again came to light and became famous, had not made known the hallucination of the painter, to which was really due the success others had stupidly attributed to forbidden practices. The last thing that concerns us is the strange sentence and fanciful doom pronounced by the Count of Flanders, the carrying out of which will take us up into the belfry of the Guildhall, just above the market-place where the unlucky picture had first roused the ignorant suspicions of the mob.

Here, where swings the largest bell of the famous carillon, we find the artist once more. The great dark mass hangs dumb beside him; very little light is here, but enough to see by dimly, and make out some of the maze of beams and iron-braced stays that uphold the old bell. Even some of the inscription is visible; its gilt letters in relief gleam out of the dimness and naturally fix the eye in that kind of magnetic gaze which some say is favorable to sleep. Jan was half crouched in one corner, wondering why he was there and how long it was intended he should stay; the two men who had brought him had simply told him that the count had sent him up there to see if he could rival the penance of St. Simeon Stylites, for a few hours at least. Presently the bell began to stir and sway softly, slowly; one dull, muffled tone came out as the tongue touched the outbent lips of the mighty bell; the next stroke came louder, the next swing was wider, and Jan’s head already throbbed with the unwelcome noise. Now the monster was alive in earnest. Warming to its work, it swung further and further; it tossed its base upwards, till the beams groaned and creaked, and all kinds of hideous minor noises seemed to be embroidered on the constant dull echo between each stroke. A strange wind blew in Jan’s face; it was the breath of the bell, whose relentless beat grew more and more regular, more and more monotonous, as it went on. The artist dared not move; one hair’s breadth nearer the terrific engine would be his death, one blow of its lips would be more effectual than any stroke of axe or pile of faggots. He shrank close to the wall, but, as his body just cleared the bell in its mad flingings and tossings, his mind seemed to be struck by it at every toll, almost absorbed in it, drawn to it with fatal curiosity. Was that the bell whose sound had been so majestic, so solemn, so beautiful in his ears as a child, so grand when it rang out above the others—eighty of them—that chimed on the great church holidays and welcomed the victorious sovereign when he came back from war? Was this the heart of the great angel that poetry and popular belief had endowed the belfry with—this terrible, maddening, brazen-tongued, relentless engine? It only just missed touching him each time it flung itself on his side of the beam-chamber; if it were to swing only a little more fiercely, as it seemed easy for it to do, one blow would crush him. Already the air seemed to suck him in under the bell, into some dark vault, no doubt—some bottomless pit; had his conductors known, when they put him there, that it was time for the bell to toll, or had they forgotten him? How long would this go on? His brain could not stand it much longer, he felt, but to scream was useless; the great, dread voice hushed all other sound. It seemed presently as if the gilt lettering got brighter; it took the shape of a glaring yellow eye; now redder, like fire, now alive, now like the eyes in his “Judith,” that the woman had said were the “eyes of a corpse just come back to life.” But had bells eyes as well as tongues? he asked himself helplessly. He remembered learning about the Cyclops and their single eyes in the middle of their foreheads; now he really saw a worse monster, with an eye of flame set in its huge, black, bulging lip. Was that the gold the Greek had offered him? Surely it was that, and no eye. Of course his fancy had betrayed him. But how could the gold have got there and got stuck to the rim of the accursed bell? How long had he been there, and when were they coming to fetch him? But they could not get in while that fiend was tossing and bellowing in these narrow walls. What was that other noise now?—a whirring of a thousand wheels! Where? It seemed all round; and now the bell appeared to him in a network of wheels, all going round faster than the eye could follow—a mass of moving air formed of many hazy circles intertwined; he knew they were wheels, but could not actually see them. He dared not hold his ears and head with his hands, for between each fling of the bell there was not time to lift his hands; and if they were caught—Some one was there now—come to bring him away. How did he get in? But it was not a man; it had long, fair hair and a misty sort of covering. He knew the face. Was there an angel of the bell, after all, who was going to stop the great tongue and deliver him? No; that face was a dead face—Judith just as he had painted her, just as he saw her in the corner of his room; and this was his room, and he had been dreaming of the bell. Scarcely—he could not dream of such a noise; then the devil must have got into his room and changed everything. But the clangor never stopped, and never spoke either louder or softer—one eternal, dreary, vexing, maddening ring. He would go mad, no doubt, if he stayed there another quarter of an hour; how long had he been there? Now he was fascinated by the unerring accuracy of the strokes, and, in a trance, expected feverishly the next dull boom, and mechanically counted on his fingers till the next was due again, and so on for five minutes. Suppose he should hang on to the tongue; would it make a feather’s weight of difference in the time or the sound of the stroke? He wondered how the bell sounded to those in the Place; they did not heed it at all, most likely, or some thought it must be getting near their time for dinner, while pious women were reminded to say a prayer, and some gleeful child would clap its hands and count the strokes. He could count the beats of his heart and the throbs in his head. He was not mad yet, he hoped, and his thoughts came regularly, and he saw pictures burned into the air one minute and gone the next; if he could have put them on canvas, they would have made his name and fortune. He was sure he could catch their shading; they looked as if fire had been made liquid and colored. It was better than any of the windows in the cathedral, famous as they were through the art-world for their undiscoverable secret of vivid, jewel-like coloring. But one picture followed the other so soon that, had he painted them all, it would have taken him twice the threescore years and ten of an ordinary life, and they would have filled every Church in Flanders fuller than twenty chapels in each could require. What was the coloring of “Judith,” with the pitiful chemical combination for which he had risked so much, to these rich, mellow, miraculous tones, with a thousand new, unnamable shades, and shadows that looked more like the depths of a dark-blue Italian lake than the darkness of common air? But through all these meditations of a second’s length, though they seemed like the reveries of hours, the boom of the pitiless bell went on, crashing through the brain of the prisoner, shattering each new picture which the last interval had stamped on his fancy, sounding to him now like a roaring fall of water, now a ploughing avalanche, now a thunder-clap, now the fall of a burning house, now the thud of earth upon a coffin, now the blow of a massive cudgel on his own head. Instinctively he cowered lower, and a beam struck him on the back with a sudden violent blow that made him stand upright and remember that the bell was there, but no cudgel; but as he rose he had stretched out his hand, blindly feeling for support, and touched the great rocking monster. A thrill went through his frame; he looked upward and vaguely wondered if this was the end, and he saw his “Judith” again, a shadowy form among the rafters. The next feeling of consciousness was that of lying flat on his back and a strong, cold wind wafting across his feet; he put up his hand to lift his head a little and press his left temple, and then— The bell had only tolled for a quarter of an hour. As soon as it stopped the same men who had taken Jan up came again and found him dead, lying in a cramped position on his side, and one leg still stretched out beneath the now silent bell.[51]

WILD ROSES BY THE SEA.

Untrimmed, uncared for, filling all the ways

That stretch between the shadow of the pine

And sea-washed rock where in the soft sunshine

The sea breaks white through all the long June days,

The fair wild roses, flushed like Eastern skies

When sinks the sun to rest in radiance calm,

Their pink bloom lift amid the sweet-bay’s balm

And shine a welcome true to loving eyes.

Sweet June’s rich gladness in the rosy flush,
As if rejoicing with our human souls,
While solemn melody from wave-beat rolls,
Whose endless anthem knows not any hush:

And ever answering from the pines sweep down

The wailing chords the wandering wind doth wake—

Sad undertones that through June’s singing break,

But cannot dim her roses’ radiant crown,

Beyond whose jewelled zone spreads on and on
The long, low level of the endless sea,
Blue with the shadow of infinity

From cloudless skies, in sparkling light, dropped down;

With here and there a sail, in shade and light,

Wind-seeking, bearing careless o’er the crest
Of summer waves the whiteness of its breast—
A moment’s dazzling vision on our sight:

Earth, air, and sea, with mirth unsullied filled,

With happy sunshine from June’s roses flushed.

We hold our rose-leaves all to-day uncrushed,

Our cup of spring-time joyousness unspilled.

But spring-time passes, rosy petals all

Drop down and mingle with earth’s earlier dead,

Though faithful sweet-bay still breathes balm o’erhead,

And ocean’s anthem e’er doth rise and fall.

Almost unfelt the summer hours die,
Green leaves grow russet on the salty shore,
The crimson vines droop rocky crevice o’er,

And wild ducks’ marshalled columns southward fly.

Low asters gleam with delicate light amid
The massive sunshine of the golden-rod;
A stray Houstonia shines above the sod

And lifts to gold-spun skies its pale blue lid.

The autumn’s glory lavishly is spread,
But summer dieth, loving sung to sleep
By western wind and murmur of the deep,
The softened sunshine on her gently shed.

Where are our roses?—that rare gift of June

That filled to perfectness our human life,

That hushed with silent touch all earthly strife,

That voiceless sang to keep our hearts in tune.

Lo! crowning each rich, sun-browned stem

Where once its rose the summer’s sunrise flushed,

Where shone our coronal of joy, now crushed,

Stands, round and firm, a deeper-tinted gem.

Rich summer faileth, and true-hearted June,

For whom birds sang, and perfect blessedness

Filled every grass-blade with a sense of bliss,

Tells o’er her beads for one to die so soon.

Her rosary strung around the rose-crowned shore,

Our pure June gladness, gathered into prayers,

The sweet-bay’s incense ever upward bears,

While we, 'mid loss, seem richer than before!

DIVORCE, AND DIVORCE LAWS.

Of the many evils now arrayed against society, none is greater than that threatened by the frequency and facility with which divorces are obtained. This bane of our day, if not plucked up by the roots, will inevitably bring on the country disasters tenfold greater than the bitterest political strifes. Already its incursions into our midst have cast a blight on our morals, have infected all classes of society, have rudely shaken our best institutions, and, if not checked, will prove a greater scourge than in our apathy we dream of. Yet it continues to grow among us day by day; it rears its head higher and higher each moment; it strikes deeper root on all sides; its hideous mien is ever becoming more familiar to us; some even smile over its attendant disclosures of depravity as pleasant tidbits of scandal with which the morning papers agreeably enliven the breakfast-table, while few reflect over the awful magnitude of the danger with which it is fraught. So dulled, indeed, has become the public conscience in this respect, so slow its apprehension of the mighty evil pressing on us, that scarcely has a warning voice been lifted against this social hydra, which goes on tightening its coils more closely around us every moment. It is not alone our crowded cities that are poisoned by its breath, but it has invaded the stillness of hillside and hamlet, and no part of the land is a stranger to its presence.

In olden times a special act of Parliament was required in England to legalize a remarriage during the life-time of husbands and wives, but so tedious and expensive was the proceeding that few cared to avail themselves of the privilege; whereas of late days and in our land so simple and easy has become the severance of the marriage-knot that the mechanic as well as the millionaire figures before courts and referees, and multitudes now throng this new high-road to social ruin.

Chief among the evils resulting from the laxity of our divorce laws is their active warfare against society. The family, as known among us, is a creation of the church wrought out through the indissolubility and sacredness of marriage. It is the nursery of society, the hope of the state, and the cradle of its destinies. While it remains pure and intact, so long will our sound social institutions flourish, so long will a healthy public sentiment live among us, ready to rebuke the shortcomings of the powerful and to lighten the burdens of the poor, to frown upon official corruption and to encourage disinterested public action. Indeed, this is a point we need scarcely insist upon. All moralists and sociologists allow that the family is the parent of society, as the seed is of the crop and the acorn of the oak. They agree that with its extinction we are at once driven on the breakers of socialism, communism, and free-love—in a word, that society ceases to exist. Now, divorce is the entering-wedge which the law supplies for the ruin of the family; it is as the priming to a loaded gun. Once give the world to understand that marriage is but a simple compact by which two persons of opposite sexes agree to live together conditionally for a time, and the permanency of the family is destroyed; the sacredness of conjugal love is degraded before the law into mere sexual desire; that institution which Christ blessed and declared to symbolize his own union with the church becomes at the best a system of stirpiculture, and nuptial altars are converted into shambles of licentiousness. Let the cause be what it may bestowing on either party to the marriage contract the right to annul it, and the cohesion of family ties is fatally weakened. This fact our court records ominously demonstrate every day. Applications for divorce, based on the special enactments of each State, are constantly filed, in which release from marriage is sought in accordance with the provisions of the law. In Indiana, for instance, mere incompatibility of temper is made the ground of petition; and in only very few cases do we find adultery or grossly cruel treatment alleged as a reason. The easier conditions of the State law are naturally enough invoked, whatever may be the true inner grounds of disagreement. The law of the State offers a means of escape from an onerous condition, and, either through the perverse temper of the litigants or the legal skill of counsel, the circumstances of the case are readily adapted to the requirements of the law. Thus the law in reality supplies to those who are weary of wedlock the means of escaping from it, while apparently striving to hedge in its interests. This fact will for ever and essentially stultify divorce laws. No matter how ingeniously framed they may be, how buttressed with conditions and exactions of proof, such are the peculiar relations of married life that, given on the side of the law the possibility, and on the side of the husband or wife the desire of escaping from a yoke that has become galling, and mere legal restrictions melt as wax before the sun.

As has just been said, the court records constantly prove this. Let us examine the facts in New York State, where adultery is the only recognized ground on which absolute divorce can be procured. A husband desires to free himself from married thraldom. He consults a convenient friend or an accommodating lawyer. (Happily, there are not many such, but we all know that one can work an infinity of mischief.) A conspiracy is entered into against the wife; detectives are set on her track; her incomings and outgoings are narrowly watched; her innocent visits are painted over with the color of criminality; her letters are intercepted; she is lured into the paths of temptation; and such proof, devised with devilish cunning, is soon obtained as brands that woman with the most infamous of crimes. The picture is not of the imagination; the revelations of the law attest its terrible reality every day, and so defiant of public opinion have some discreditable practitioners become that they take no pains to cover up the tracks of their infamy. Indeed, it was with something like surprise that a short time ago a lawyer in New York City listened to the scathing words which debarred him from future practice in our courts, because of his participation in a conspiracy to prove an innocent woman an adulteress.

Circumstantial evidence is all that the law requires in these cases. As a rule, indeed, none other can be furnished. Now, this evidence, proposing to establish what is after all but the semblance of crime, since the facts necessarily elude ocular proof, is such that by asking for it the law seems to invite those who are desirous of so doing to weave around innocence itself a web of circumstances calculated to immesh it in the appearance of guilt. Thus the law defeats its own intent and places a premium on sin. It aggravates the evil it endeavors to estop. Like the smitten eagle, it is forced to—

“View its own feathers on the fatal dart

Which winged the shaft that quivers in its heart.

Keen are its pangs, but keener far to feel

It nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.”

Two hundred divorces a vinculo, obtained in the State of New York in the course of a single year, give point to these remarks. And in most of these cases, it must be remembered, the defendants denied the charge and were convicted only by such evidence as, though necessarily deemed sufficient by the court or referee, is essentially and of its nature such that it might have been manufactured. But if these attempts on the part of husbands to take advantage of the laxity of our divorce laws by blasting the character of their wives excite our honest indignation and disgust, infinitely more heinous must appear the conduct of some wives in their efforts to procure evidence against their husbands. Our readers must here pardon a few details which the cause of truth compels us to set down, but which we will couch in as few and modest words as possible. What we are about to state proves the truth of the holy proverb that when woman falls “her feet go down into death, and her steps go in as far as hell” (Prov. v. 5). There is a fashionable physiology which denies the physical possibility of absolute continence without serious impairment of health. The easy votaries of sensuality do not hesitate to uphold this odious doctrine in so-called scientific treatises, and to proclaim with Dr. Draper that “public celibacy is private wickedness.” We call this fashionable physiology; for the mass of intelligent non-Catholics make open avowal of it. Indeed, the doctrine is essentially non-Catholic, and has been acted upon by all rebels against the church from Luther to Loyson. Swedenborg condemns celibacy as a crime against nature. From being a purely religious doctrine, however, it has recently come to be regarded as a scientific tenet. Pseudo-science now shelters it under its ægis, and it is as much the vogue to believe in it as it is to accept the other views of so-called advanced modern scientists. It is this very notion which supplies to many a recalcitrant wife the weapon with which she has succeeded in breaking down the law and bringing irretrievable ruin on her family. If, as the writer has taken pains to assure himself, the inner history of our most notorious and disgraceful divorce cases could be read in the light of broad day, the facts would appears as follows:

A faithless wife, impressed with the doctrine just stated, takes such steps as will, in her belief, compel her husband to compromise himself. He then is watched, snares are set about his feet, he is encompassed by enemies, and, alas! sharing as he does the views entertained by his wife, he soon furnishes such evidences of wrong-doing as justify a recourse to legal proceedings. We have stated the case briefly, but at sufficient length to indicate the lowness of the depths to which human nature, deprived of grace, can sink, and how ingeniously the law has constructed a pitfall for itself. One author says that “such stratagems are of frequent occurrence,” and the mournful testimony of our tribunals is overwhelming in proof of the appalling frequency with which this repulsive drama is enacted. But to wade through the putrescent mass of evidence were to make the cheek grow crimson and burn, so that a scant allusion to it is all that decency can permit. What we especially desire to impress upon our readers is the fact that the imagination is here powerless to compete with the reality, and that human ingenuity has exhausted itself in the contrivance of the most abominable devices in its successful efforts to overreach a stupid law. But it is not alone in thus inviting infraction of its provisions that the law of New York State is weak and faulty; it is, in addition, guilty of contradicting itself in a matter of vital importance. Marriage is either a contract for life or can be limited by previous mutual consent. Now, the law denounces such limitation as immoral and strictly forbids it. But does it therefore recognize marriage as in reality a contract for life? We emphatically answer in the negative, and for the following reason: It is of the nature of a contract that all its essential terms and conditions be such as to come within the jurisdiction of the authority appointed for the purpose of directing its fulfilment. But if the authority be so crippled as not to be able to take cognizance of conditions admitted to be essential to the proper fulfilment of the contract, the latter must be regarded as null and void, or binding only in foro interno. All outside authority, all outside jurisdiction over it, is at an end. This is precisely what happens in civil marriage. Ostensibly the law recognizes it as a contract for life; indeed, openly proclaims it to be so; even provides a penalty for its violation as such; and yet, by admitting its dissolubility on certain conditions, leaves it in reality as much the subject-matter of temporary stipulation as a lease or a business copartnership, and, in addition, baits it with the temptation to commit an enormous crime. What is there to prevent two persons from entering into a civil marriage with the understanding that they should live together for a certain time, be as other married persons before the law, sharing its protection and enjoying its privileges, and then separate by complying with the conditions on which the law allows a separation? The case is entirely possible—has, indeed, occurred time and again—so that we are forced to admit that among us the law virtually treats marriage as a temporary partnership, however much it may insist upon its being regarded as a life-long contract, and is thus guilty of the inconsistency of declaring a certain thing to be what it in reality treats as quite another.

Nor can it be contended, as against this argument, that the law will not grant a divorce where connivance is attempted; for the case, typical of thousands, supposes that neither party desires to reveal such connivance. Nor is it of any avail to affirm that the party proved to be guilty is debarred the right of contracting a new marriage. Technically the law so reads, but practically it is powerless to enforce its provision. In such a case, indeed, it may be said that love laughs law to scorn. Its hope to punish a transgressor of the sort is as futile as the

“Desire of the moth for the star.”

It is proper to assume that the purpose of the law is to punish the criminal partner and to restore to the injured one privileges which ought not to be forfeited because of another’s guilt. These two objects represent the policy and expediency of the law; and in view of its entire failure to work them out wisely and effectually, we will show that the law is neither politic nor expedient. We will grant, indeed, that the law is competent, in all cases coming under its notice, both to punish the wrong-doer and partially to redress the wrong; but what is the use, if, instead of effectually repressing the wrong, it tends rather to encourage its commission? And such is indeed the anomalous condition of the law, both as it reads and as it works. The easier and more numerous the terms on which the marriage contract can be dissolved, the greater, of course, will be the number of divorces sought; but whether it be for one reason or many, once given a gateway from marriage bonds, and none who are desirous of escape will find much trouble in passing through the portals which the law has flung open. The facts, as attested by the courts of Connecticut and Indiana, prove the truth of the first part of this proposition; for nowhere are cases looking to the absolute severance of the marriage tie more frequently argued, and in no other States are so many divorces granted. The reason obviously is because the conditions for obtaining such concessions are there easiest of all. Where the conditions for procuring divorce are more onerous fewer applications are made; and the facts, as occurring in New York State, verify this sum in proportion and thus prove the second part of our proposition.

In the State of New York adultery is the sole condition of divorce, and just in proportion as such a crime is less frequent than mere family jars and broils, so are divorces less frequently sought. The proposition is therefore true that the permission to dissolve marriage begets a demand to that effect in proportion to the ease with which it may be obtained. The corollary of this proposition is that, the more easily divorce may be obtained, the less regard is had to the obstacles which may stand in the way of its coming at our beck. Should marriage be declared to be absolutely indissoluble, and come to be viewed as such by the masses, few would dream of assuming its responsibilities in the hope that, should time render it irksome, they could slip the noose and again soar “in maiden meditation fancy free.” On the other hand, they would be disposed rather to approach the matter with deliberation, to take to heart the conditions of the contract, and seriously to study the surroundings of a state which is to endure till death. It is for this reason that the church advises her children to ponder long and deeply the consequences of the step they are about to take when proposing to cross this moral Rubicon. If Cæsar felt that, the traditionary river once crossed, fate had marked him for her own, or Cortez that, his ships ablaze, all hope of return was gone, more still does the church insist that sacramental marriage is a step that cannot be retraced. Divorce laws ignore these considerations, and make light thereby of that social institution on which all others depend for their perpetuity. They forget that—

“Marriage is a matter of more worth

Than to be dealt in by attorneyship.”

With siren voice they lure the unwary and unreflecting to a fate fraught with untold possibilities of unhappiness. The result is that persons take less account of the solemn nature of the contract. It suits their humor at the moment to get married, and little they reck of the future. Carpe diem. The rosy present bounds the view, and there is no thought of to-morrow. Time enough for the disillusioned groom to wail:

Miseri quibus intentata nites—

when “marriage vows have proved as false as dicers’ oaths,” and bitter hate succeeded the short-lived joys of the honeymoon. And why should it be otherwise? Is not the potent panacea of matrimonial ills ever within ken and reach? What need is there to cloud the golden prospect with thoughts of possible future wrangles and rancor, and in advance study to avert or mitigate them, since, should they come along, a benignant law is at hand to end them? We are convinced on the best of grounds that the frequency of divorce suits has its root in the neglect of duly considering the conditions essential to the happiness of married life. Were Dante’s words written over marriage portals:

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’intrate,

a deal of curious prying, at least, would precede the decisive steps and few would rashly fly to a “bourn whence no traveller returns.” But when the law points to an easy escape from the consequences of a heedless step, what necessity can there be for heeding? Plenty of prior deliberation and a close scrutiny of its obligations would not have failed to render marriage tolerable, at least, for many who now fret and fume 'neath its galling yoke because they had flown to it in a wanton hour as to a flower to gather sweets from. Festina lente—or, as Sir Thomas Browne quaintly translates it, “Celerity should be contempered with cunctation”—would be a valuable maxim to hold up to the giddy gaze of our modern youth who woo and wed with more sentimental sighs than sober sense; better, by all means, than the cynical “Don’t” of Douglas Jerrold. The knowledge that what God hath joined together no human authority must put asunder, alone can stop those unhallowed unions which curse society by the filthy disclosures they occasion, and blast the happiness, both temporal and eternal, of so many.

At the time when this question was widely discussed in England, and so many eminent authorities opposed the project of law which now rules in the British realms, and which is in the main identical with our own State law, Lord Stowell held the following language, which goes at once to the kernel of the matter and shows a keen appreciation of the worst results of easy divorce. He says: “The general happiness of the married life is secured by its indissolubility. When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften, by mutual accommodation, that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands and good wives; for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties it imposes.” The church in surrounding marriage with that solemnity which it possesses in the eyes of Catholics, and thus giving greater prominence to its indissoluble character, has thereby supplied to her children the means of softening a union so binding, and from the crucible of suffering offers to both husband and wife a purer gold. In the schedule of conditions essential to the procurement of the best results from marriage she holds to our gaze a larger and deeper culture than current philosophy dreams of—a culture that appeals to the intellect through moral sense, unlike that modern culture which is addressed to the intellect alone. It has almost passed into an axiom in political economy that self must sink out of sight where the interests of many are concerned; and so the church teaches that men and women, having reached that period when the duties of married life ought to be assumed, should thenceforth devote to the service of society those labors they had hitherto bestowed on the prosecution of their individual aims. The culture proceeds from this. Tolerance of each other’s shortcomings on the part of husband and wife is strongly inculcated. A gentle forbearance of mutual peculiarities is enjoined, whereby the noble disposition to forgive the countless trifles of manner, thought, and action which might offend a morbid or fastidious idiosyncrasy is fostered. Thus the Catholic wife or husband, in view of the indissoluble nature of marriage, is taught to round off angularities, to tolerate oddities, to adapt individual views and feelings to special requirements, and to hold all subject to that higher and holier law which tells us that self should not be consulted where duty is concerned.

How many bickerings and misunderstandings, how many of the heart-burnings, how much of all the unhappiness that now mars and disfigures married life, might be avoided if these large and liberal views more generally prevailed! Petty jealousies, the offspring of our baser nature; furtive suspicions, exaggeration of faults, imputation of wrong motives, misinterpretation of harmless actions—in a word, the hundred-and-one incentives to disagreement which beset each day’s path—could find no room in a household harboring this pure and enlightened conception of marriage. We know that the will is as much the subject of discipline as the intellect, and we likewise know that as it is tried, as temptations beset it and are repelled, as suffering is endured without repining, as petty torments, numerous in proportion to their smallness, are patiently borne, the whole character comes forth from the ordeal smoother, sweeter, more spiritual, and stronger, with a life that is not likely to die. Marriage, rightly conceived, is a training-school where many salutary lessons are taught. Its tendency is to strengthen the will, to soften the heart, to remove asperities of character, to evoke the tender and gentle in our nature, and to beget a happiness all its own. Wrongly understood and blindly sought, it is full of perils, not, indeed, imaginary, but real with that terrible reality which court calendars daily reveal in sickening colors.

Thus the standard by which the Catholic Church measures marriage makes it yield a higher culture, more generous, large, and abiding, than can flow from the gross conception which represents it as a contract to be rescinded at will. The Catholic view promotes among the married that freedom of action which loves to borrow the consciousness of doing right from the conviction that the right is freely courted and the wrong freely spurned, and thus paves the way for a nobler plane of conduct. That irritability which inheres so deeply in our nature is what unfits most of us for companionship. It seeks to fasten on others the blame which is our own, or holds them responsible for grievances which are the necessary outcome of human life. If not controlled, it either causes entire estrangement and forfeiture of affection, or leads those towards whom it is manifested to deceptiveness and the employment of crooked ways to reach legitimate ends. A narrow and illiberal life is the result. Darkness and trickery prevail where all should be light and freedom. Evil accumulates on evil, till both parties seek through divorce to free themselves from a yoke that has become intolerable. The shrew will nag and the tyrant husband domineer because a narrow selfishness, bred of this unrestrained irritability, has usurped the place of a large-hearted and gentle forbearance. The knowledge of these possibilities is the most effective armor against their actual occurrence; for it demonstrates in advance the necessity of patience and a tolerant spirit; it hints at a delicate regard for the feelings of others; it leads to a vivid introspection of self, and inclines to a mezzotint view of actions not our own; it discriminates between true love, which is self-sacrificing, gentle, and forgiving, and the counterfeit presentment of love, which is lurid passion, fire without light. And this knowledge is best guaranteed by the conviction that marriage is indissoluble. Urging this view of marriage and the study of these things, the church implicitly holds that a liberal toleration of individual action is essential to the happiness of married life, and that the ignorance which accompanies intolerance must be dispelled ere the ideal picture of married bliss can meet the gaze. Thus Christian freedom goes by the golden mean, on one side of which is domestic tyranny and on the other the rampant license of immorality. Unlike the generality of guides, however the church possesses the means of enforcing her enlightened views, of imparting wise counsel, and offering helpful advice in concrete cases through the Sacrament of Penance. Those who have derived their notion of the confessional from the scurrilous writings of Michelet, the senseless diatribes of Gavazzi, or the eminently vulgar flings of some sensational preachers will be a little startled by this proposition. But let those whose knowledge of the tribunal of penance has been fashioned in the school of bigotry and ignorance consult any intelligent Catholic, husband or wife, and they will find that the web of falsehood in which they have been caught is such that they should blush at their own simplicity for having become entangled in it and held “faster than gnats in cobwebs.” They will find that all those virtues which, even to the commonest understanding, shine clearly forth as the basis of contentment in married life, are here inculcated; that here on the heat and flame of distemper cool patience is sprinkled; that chafes are healed and rankling barbs plucked out; and that magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and love brighten afresh at the latticed crate of the confessional.

But notwithstanding that the church has exhausted prudence and employed every means which common sense could suggest in compassing the integrity of marriage, she seeks not in these the ultima ratio of her action. To her marriage is a sacrament, bestowing grace on those who approach it worthily, and sealing married life with a supernatural impress. This sacramental notion of marriage it is which elevates, purifies, and sanctifies the relation, enables the church to mitigate the evils with which human perversity leavens it, and gives her control where the most restless plotters for the regeneration of society have acknowledged their utter powerlessness to act.

During the controversy which marked the adoption of the Divorce Bill in England its opponents, when twitted with their inconsistency in rejecting the Catholic notion of marriage as a sacrament and still insisting upon its inherent indissolubility, fell, through their reply, into an error which, in proportion to its prevalence, has led to a wide-spread misconception of the grounds on which the Catholic Church claims marriage to be indissoluble. A prominent writer at the time said: “The opinion of the Roman Church itself does not found the indissolubility of marriage on its character as a sacrament, but only conceives the obligation to be enhanced by that circumstance”; and in confirmation of the assertion he quotes the words of the Council of Trent, which are to this effect: Matrimonium, ut naturæ officium consideratur et maxime ut sacramentum, dissolvi non potest. Now, if the words ut maxime be allowed to bear their proper meaning, they certainly prove that the Tridentine fathers intended that the indissolubility of marriage should, before all and above all, rest upon and grow out of the sacramental character of the contract. Ut maxime, if meaning anything, means as far as it is possible, pre-eminently; and so the church regards marriage as naturally indissoluble, but especially so when viewed as a sacrament. The fact proves that the opponents of the bill had little else to fall back on than the falsely-advanced statement that the Catholic Church, the most strenuous advocate of indissolubility, sought the reason of her opinion in the nature of the contract rather than in the character of the sacrament.

But, apart from the declaration of the Council of Trent, the whole history of the church exhibits beyond peradventure her higher estimate of marriage as a sacrament rather than as a contract. She holds it to be, in a mystical sense, the symbol of our Lord’s union with the church, and surely no higher character could attach to it. But this symbolic meaning of marriage rests altogether on its sacramental phase, so that the church views it as a sacrament supernaturally, as a contract naturally, her higher regard for it being in the former sense. The English indissolubilists, therefore, could in no manner object to the proposed Divorce Bill; for, denying marriage to be a sacrament, they surrendered the strongest reason for proclaiming it to be indissoluble. If, as even Gibbon admits, the church has lifted woman from the lowest degradation into which she could be plunged, in which she was the mere slave of man and the toy of his passions, to her present position of respect and independence by investing matrimony with the holiness of a sacrament; and if the church has by the same means purified home-life and cemented its affections, is there not danger that, by dragging down marriage from its high estate, woman may again come to be regarded “not as a person,” as Gibbon says, “but as a thing, so that, if the original title were deficient, she might be claimed, like other valuables, by the use and possession of an entire year”? Such was the law in pagan times, and such it may be again if we list too readily to those modern renovators of society who call marriage tyranny and a “system of legalized prostitution.” Not in vain did St. Simon, Fourier, Le Roux, Fanny Wright, and their co-workers inveigh against Christian marriage. We are now reaping the fruits of their unholy crusade against it. Their labors are to-day blossoming in Oneida County as well as in Utah, in the general rush all round to snap uncongenial ties, and in the woful spread of an evil too base to be mentioned. These form the goal to which such pestilent agitations tend; and if some well-meaning advocates of innovation have not kept step with the leaders, it is not because their principles restrained them, but rather because they have not quite broken away from the influence of early teachings. Marriage, once stripped of its supernatural character, and reduced to the level of a contract, becomes as much the subject-matter of speculation as political systems. Reformers object to this feature of it or to that, and suggest endless modifications. Plato contended that there should be no such thing as marriage proper, and that all children should be surrendered to the state. To-day, in the light which the Gospel has shed on the question, civilized states tolerate a condition akin to that which the Athenian philosopher advocated. And just as Plato, by the sheer force of his commanding intellect, imposed his views on many both in his own time and subsequently, so, it is to be regretted, the skill and eloquence of some modern opponents of marriage are such that they have succeeded in winning hundreds to their standard.

It is a law of our nature that great intellectual force is never unproductive; that it triumphs over many obstacles; and, no matter what may be the cause on the side of which its influence is cast, it is always attended with at least partial success in the achievement of its aims. Now, we have witnessed the most strenuous efforts of powerful minds enlisted in the attempt to abolish marriage. We have had eloquent pleas for socialism, phalansterianism, etc., and it could not but be that these labors were destined to bear issue of some sort. That issue we are contemplating at the present moment; for these assaults on marriage have lowered the general conception of its obligations, its sanctity, and its importance to society. They have lured to a mere mockery hundreds who, when scarce the marriage-kiss has impressed their lips, besiege our courts with petitions for divorce. The influence of pernicious doctrines is deeper and wider than their authors imagine. It does not consist alone in the fact that they draw disciples and beget neophytes; but they weaken faith in what they assail, and thus engender the most pitiful lot of man—scepticism. This is precisely what we now complain of. Our neighbors round about us emphatically eschew the doctrines of the illuminati, of Heine and of Prudhomme, yet they more or less admit that there is some reason in what has been so well said, so forcibly and so eloquently urged. The consequence is that their faith in the true order of things is shaken; they are dissatisfied; they declare the doctrine of indissolubility to be rigoristic; and, provocation given, qualms are brushed aside and they hesitate not to fly to the ready remedy of the law. We may thus set down to the erratic speculations of a few self-appointed social reconstructionists many of the matrimonial miseries and scandals we now deplore. And the leaven is working not alone in the United States, but in every country where the same low estimate of marriage prevails, and where the law is the ready tool of those who desire escape from shackles of their own forging.

In England, where law machinery is more cumbersome than among us and its processes more tedious, not quite so many divorces are obtained, but still the number is on the increase. The English law is much the same as that which rules in New York State, and it is interesting to inquire what reason there can be for the greater percentage of divorces in New York than in England. We hinted that the administration of English law is slower, but that fact is not sufficient to account for a difference so marked. All the influences already enumerated as tending to favor the multiplicity of divorces are as actively at work over there as among ourselves, and hence we must strive to find the explanation of the difference in the different character of the social systems of the two countries. In England society is stratified with such extreme nicety that seldom, if ever, a waif is borne from one stratum to another. Lines are sharply drawn between classes, and the fact is well recognized; for the lowly do not seek to soar, nor do the higher ever entirely lose their social grade. Hence marriages are contracted only between those whose tastes by birth and education agree, whose general views are more apt to harmonize, and whose sympathies mainly run in the same channels. They come to the altar (we employ the word in its current sense) with a better understanding of what each expects from the other, with fewer doubts to frighten them and stronger hopes to sustain them, and hence subsequent collisions and estrangements are less frequent. In our country society has not quite passed out of its formative stage, the elements have not settled into their allotted planes. It still is like an estuary in which the conflict of opposing tides brings to the surface what had just lain at the bottom, and drives to the bottom the bead that had glistened for a moment on the brimming top; in a word, social stratification is not yet complete among us. The result is a tendency to the intermingling of incongruous forces. In the social ferment which is going on some rise suddenly from a lower depth and crystallize in their new plane by marriage, some fall and remain below on the same condition. Here wealth is a potent escort to lead its possessors higher up than they could hope to reach without the aid of this glittering talisman. A little veneer and a resolute lack of shamefacedness often enable those whom suddenly-acquired riches have lifted above their former level to hold their new station till marriage has assured it to them and given them a title to their position. But rapidly as wealth lifts in the social scale, more rapidly still does poverty drag down, and we have not yet fully developed, though happily we are fast coming to it, that public sentiment which refuses to behold loss of caste in loss of wealth. Till then a lower social level is the certain bourn of those who have fallen from opulence, just as a niche higher up in the social temple awaits the nouveau riche.

We are not sticklers for the social classification of aristocratic countries, but simply for that which is founded on cultivated taste, refinement, and general intelligence; and we contend that where the social condition is such as to permit the barriers between vulgarity and refinement to be broken down, no matter though the former may vie with Crœsus or the latter appear in the tattered garb of Lazarus, matrimonial misalliances will be the result. December and May are no more fitly mated than platinum and lead—i.e., sixteen and fifty make no more suitable alliance than refinement and its opposite.

“For in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose lives do bear an equal yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments, of manners and of spirit.”

—Merchant of Venice.

Till, therefore, this social ferment has settled and all the elements have reached their allotted planes, there to remain, misalliances will continue to occur, and misalliances, we know, are a fruitful source of separation. There may be more satisfactory and truthful explanations of the fact we are endeavoring to account for, but of this we are convinced: that, for whatever cause, antagonistic social conditions operate more frequently against happiness in married life in this country than in Europe.

Space will not allow us to pursue the discussion of this question much farther, so we will devote the few remaining lines to the consideration of the leading objection which is constantly urged against absolute indissolubility, and which may consequently be taken as a strong argument in favor of divorce. Divorce, it is contended, favors morality; for, whether law intervenes or not, passion will assert its supremacy, and it is better to let those depart in peace and with the sanction of the law who cannot live together than have them burst their bonds illegally and contract new relations in despite of the law. By so permitting, the advocates of divorce hope to stem the torrent of evil which they say deluges some European continental nations where the proportion of illegitimate births is wofully excessive. The same thing, they maintain, is especially true of Spain, Italy, and, in a word, of all Catholic countries. Wherever divorce is not sanctioned by law dissoluteness, they affirm, is far greater than where divorces are granted. So the statistics seem to prove; and, in a spasm of virtue, believers in mere statistical figures denounce indissolubility as a stepping-stone to lust. We will grant the reliability of statistical reports for the nonce, and prove by them that, so far from immorality abounding in those countries where divorces are prohibited, a greater amount of immorality really exists in divorce countries, with the added immorality of a law which cloaks it. We know that passion, blind and impetuous, is the reigning force which orders the actions of those who contemplate emancipation from marriage bonds. Certainly they do not act under the inspiration of grace. When, therefore, they break loose from their unsuiting partners, it matters little to them whether the law approves or disapproves of their action, provided they can act with impunity. This impunity is guaranteed in most cases in countries where divorce is permitted, and new marriages, having all the seemingness of virtue, are contracted with the sanction of the law. In Catholic countries this is not permitted; new post-marital relations are branded as adulterous and their issue illegitimate. Is it any wonder, then, that illegitimacy is more prevalent in those countries where divorce is unknown than where caprice or crime can sever old bonds and weld new ones, all with the countenance of the law?

The only difference is that adultery and its consequences are called by their proper names in the former case, whereas in the latter an anti-Scriptural law retrieves them from stigma. And as there is in the human heart a disposition to do more frequently and more extensively what the law allows than what it prohibits, we may be sure that there are many more pseudo-marriages contracted in countries where divorce is permitted than there are adulteries where it is prohibited. Were, then, the mask of the law removed, we should find in the former more infamy and crime than even in those Catholic countries where the record of morality is lowest. There is one Catholic country in which divorce is a thing known only in name, and yet where even the illegitimacy which affects not to seek shelter behind the law is very much less than in the adjoining country, where divorces are frequently obtained. In Ireland the courts are most rarely troubled with such applications, and yet illicit relations on the part of married persons are fewer than in any country of Europe. Does not this fact evidently disprove the claim that absolute indissolubility is unfavorable to morality? While the Catholic Church holds to view on the one hand the indissolubility of marriage, and on the other the precept of conjugal chastity, and while even in one country she has established a higher rate of morality under those rigid conditions, it is evident her wisdom in this trying matter has been attested by the facts.

But the attempt to bolster up divorce morality by an appeal to statistics is radically wrong. It is based on the supposition that the end justifies the means; that it is better, for the sake of avoiding the scandals incident to adulterous cohabitation, to legalize it, and thus exhibit to the eyes of society a whitened sepulchre rather than hold to view the rottenness of “an enseamed bed.” It is the duty of moralists and teachers of religion rather to stem the torrent of vice and pluck the brand from the burning than attempt to cloak over and extenuate by legal devices what is essentially and for ever wrong. There are times, indeed, when separation is the only hope for two unfortunates whom an unlucky fate had thrown in each other’s way; but separation does not imply remarriage, and theirs it is, while reaping the fruits of an enforced singleness, to reflect that they are answerable for the consequences of their own deliberate action, while their case may serve as an example to others. Let the beautiful conception of Christian marriage more abound; let men and women learn to view marriage as something holy, in which the husband is the protector, the wife the comforter, and we may meet with more marriages in which, while the husband faithfully performs his allotted rôle, the wife embodies the beautiful picture of her drawn by Washington Irving: “As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and has been lifted by it in sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils and bind up its shattered boughs, so it is beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependant and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart.”

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES.
A free translation.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus laments the Judgment of Paris.]

STROPHE.

My doom was sealed, my lot decided,
Not now, not now, but long ago,
When first the all-beauteous Dardan boy,
By that pernicious goddess guided,
Laid Ida’s stateliest pinewood low,
And built his ships, and sailed from Troy,
To seek her gift—the richest, rarest—
That wife most fatal; yet the fairest.

ANTISTROPHE.

A netted deer our country lies:

One sinned; and all partook his ruin!

O fatal, fatal was the hour,

Fatal the contest and the prize

How ill adjudged for my undoing,

When in green Ida’s mountain bower

That awful Three—my bane—contended:

Even then our golden reign was ended.

EPODE.

And haply some Achaian bride
Even now, by far Eurotas’ wave,
Widowed like me, like me is mourning!
Perhaps some mother by her side
Laments for those she could not save,
The early lost, and unreturning;
Raising her withered hand to tear
Her last thin locks of whitening hair.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER XIII.
“OUR LADY OF SNOW.”

“To-morrow comes the flower of the festivals,” the Signora said on the morning of the 4th of August. “It is our beautiful basilica’s birthday, and the loveliest of birthdays, too—just a sweet little poem.”

“Let us give ourselves up to it entirely,” Isabel proposed, “and see if we cannot imagine ourselves back in the middle of the fourth century. I really do not like to look at all these things as an outsider.”

“We must, then, shut the world out for two days,” the Signora replied. “I would like it, if you are agreed. I have found, indeed, that it is impossible to enter into the spirit of these beautiful beliefs of the old time while one is having much social intercourse with people about, even goodish people. It reminds me of seed scattered on good but shallow ground, which the fowls come and pick up. You think, you meditate, you pray, you begin to find yourself impressed; glimmers of light steal in, and your soul is on the point of being enriched; when in comes some friend, who means no harm, who has, perhaps, a faith like a dry branch with one green leaf at the end, and immediately all is discord. If you utter what is in your mind, it is like pearls before swine; if you listen in silence, and with sufficient attention to enable you to answer intelligently, it is more than likely that the religious impression you have received will be much weakened, if not entirely effaced. One understands, in such a case, the profound wisdom of the philosophy of silence, which even the pagans knew, and recollects the admonition of our Lord: “Let your speech be yea, yea; no, no.”

“Still, I should think,” Bianca observed dreamily, “that one might be so settled in that way of feeling and thinking as to influence others, instead of being influenced by them.”

“Very true, you dear little visionary!” replied the Signora, pinching the pretty ear so near her, from which hung a pink coral fuchsia. “If one were a great saint, and never touched earthly things except with conspicuous recollection; or a great egotist, constantly impressing on everybody that one is a very exceptional being and cannot possibly be approached in the ordinary manner; or some one, like a clergyman or a nun, who by their very profession impress those who approach them with the consciousness of different and loftier interests. But we common mortals are overrun by the many. You have seen the breakwater of a bridge, have you not, built of stone, and thrusting a sharp point up the stream to part the waters, that they may not rush against the broad side of the piers and sweep them away? Well, for one person to keep a firm stand against the influence of many, it is necessary to put forward, and keep forward, a very hard angle of the character. However, I will not preach any more about it, my dear friends. I will simply say that till the day after to-morrow we are in retreat. We will go up now to the church, and refresh our minds in relation to the legend, and look at some of the treasures there, if you like. Then we can read the whole over here at our leisure. I have a kind friend there—my patron with St. Nicholas—who has a superb illustrated description of the church, which he has offered me any time I may wish for it. I will ask for it to-day. By this means we shall be ready to assist intelligently to-morrow at the festa of Our Lady of Snow. And, by the way, what a charmingly fresh thought for the season is that of snow! I call for the yeas and nays.”

An unanimous yea was the reply, and they prepared themselves immediately to go to the church.

They had, of course, seen already all its more evident beauties; but such a temple can be studied for years without exhausting its attractions, and there were several of its more celebrated gems which they had quite passed over. After having heard Mass, then, they went first into the Sistine Chapel to see the Tamar. This beautiful figure is painted in one of the pendentives of the cupola—a space shaped like an inverted pear. She sits with her twin boys standing on the seat at either side of her, their lovely heads filling the rounded-out space. The most exquisite charm of the figure is the transparent veil which floats about the head and shoulders, and through which her face, with its large, drooping eyelids, is perfectly visible.

From there they visited the grand loggia to look once more at the mosaic story of the miraculous snow. This grand mosaic, made in the fourteenth century by the order of two Colonna cardinals, was once on the open façade of the church; but Benedict XIV., in the eighteenth century, building the new façade, enclosed them in the grand loggia from which the popes gave benediction, and of which they form the lower side. In the centre of the upper half of the picture the Saviour sits enthroned, the right hand giving benediction, the left holding a book open at the words, “I am the light of the world.” At either hand above an angel swings a censer, at either side below an angel adores. Four figures—the Blessed Virgin and saints—stand at right and left, the symbols of the four evangelists over their heads. The lower half, separated by the large, round window that lights the eastern end of the church, has, on the left, two pictures—one the sleeping Pope Liberius, the other the sleeping Giovanni—over both of whom hovers the same vision of the Madonna directing them to build her a church where the snow shall fall the next day. On the right side is Giovanni telling his dream to the pope in one picture, and beside it the pope, in grand procession, coming to the hill-top where, from above, the Saviour and Virgin send down the snow. So quaint, so full of faith, so exquisite in meaning, this visible story is one of the most eloquent sermons ever preached.

Opposite the mosaic picture, and seen through the graceful arches of the portico, was that living picture of St. John Lateran looking down the long street, the blue mountains melting far away, the nearer palm-tree, and the piazza with its beautiful column and statue.

“I have a little special treat for you this morning,” the Signora said as they went down into the church again. “It has no special connection with the Madonna delle Neve, but it will not disturb your visions of her. Here, however,” pointing to an altar near the sacristy door, “is the story again, and here is buried that Giovanni Patrizio who was found buried under, or in front of, the grand altar.”

It was the chapel of Santa Maria delle Neve, with a painting over the altar where the Virgin appears to Giovanni and his wife, and points them to a snow-capped hill.

Then they went into the sacristy, where one of the canons joined them, and had some precious vestments brought out for them to see; among them a cope of stuff such as one does not find any more, thick, rich, and dim, and threaded with gold, with the short fringe of mingled crimson and gold so thick as to round up almost like a cord—the cope given and worn by St. Pius V. Almost more precious, if one could choose, was the chasuble given and worn by St. Charles Borromeo—long, and with a slight, graceful point in the back. It had been proposed, the sacristan told them, to have this made a model for chasubles now on account of its graceful form, but no change had yet been made.

“This is worn on the festa of San Carlo, though it is crimson,” he added, “because it was his. Sometimes strangers exclaim, when they see it, that San Carlo was not a martyr.”

They touched reverently the sacred relics, and kissed the fastenings that those saintly hands had touched; then, with a more human admiration, examined a marvellous flounce of lace given the church three hundred years ago by the Prince Colonna of that time—a web of such fineness that the spiders might have woven the thread, and of such beauty of design that only an artist could have imagined it.

Before leaving the church they paused in front of the closed cancella of the Borghese Chapel to look at the bas-relief over the altar, wherein Our Lady of Snow again repeats her story. All was still in the church. Choir and High Mass were over, and only here and there lingered some custode, or assistant, putting the finishing touches to the preparations for the festa which would begin with first Vespers that afternoon. The pavements shone newly polished, the candlesticks were like gold, the gilt bronze angels that hold the great painted candles stood on the marble rail of the confession, the draperies were all up. In the chapel itself the benches of the choir were prepared, the altar glittering with its most precious ornaments, the two great hanging lamps at either side swinging faintly, as if impatient for the music to begin. All was peaceful; and a tender shade and coolness in the air veiled the glittering richness of the place.

“I cannot tell you how mysterious that picture seems to me,” Bianca whispered, pointing to the square veiled case bordered with jewels, and supported by gilt angels in the middle space over the altar. “The two veils that are to be removed in order to see it, and then the depth at which it is set, and the mere dark outline that is all one can see inside the golden border—it all impresses me with a sense of mystery and awfulness. I wonder what the face really looks like, and if any one has seen it.”

“Why, you have seen my engraving of it, my dear,” the Signora said; “and I presume that is a faithful copy, taken when the features were more distinguishable. That has a noble, serious look which impresses me. And no wonder you look with awe at this. If it were not painted by St. Luke even, it is embalmed by memories not less sacred. Twelve hundred years ago St. Gregory the Great carried this very picture in procession through the city, in a time of terrible pestilence, and set it on the altar of St. Peter’s. It was on the open façade of this church till Paul V. built this chapel to contain it. Ampère says that angels have been heard chanting litanies about it. It is held by all here in the most tender veneration. I have never heard any one describe it, and do not know who has seen it near. I have heard somewhere that only the chapter of the basilica and the Borghese family have the privilege of going up to it. Madonna mia, what a privilege it would be!” she sighed, looking up at the closed jasper gates.

They stayed a little longer, then started to go home; but as they were going out a boy came to tell the Signora that Monsignore M—— begged to speak with her. The others went on, but she turned back, well content; for a call from Monsignore M—— always meant something pleasant. This prelate was no less distinguished for position than for his virtues; and, finding the Signora a stranger and somewhat lonely when she first came to Rome, he had done her many kindnesses—was, in fact, her Santa Claus.

“Do you guess what little devotion I want you to make on the eve of our festa?” he asked, meeting her with the confident smile of one who knows he is going to confer a great pleasure.

“I know it is something delightful, Monsignore mio,” she replied, “but I cannot say just what.”

“Well, I want you to visit the antique Madonna,” he said.

She looked at him, uncomprehending.

He pointed to the veiled shrine in the Borghese Chapel, near which they stood. “Don Francesco will be here in a moment with a candle,” he said. “I prepared all, because I knew you would want to go. I could not invite a party, you know; but you belong to the church and have a special devotion to our Madonna.”

The Signora could not reply. Such a swift fulfilment of her wish moved her too deeply for words. She kissed the hand of her kind friend, and looked across the church to the tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament with the almost spoken thought: “I am going to see your Mother.” To visit that sacred shrine was to her as near to seeing the Mother of God face to face as one could come on earth, without a miracle.

Presently appeared the custodian, bearing a lighted candle and a bunch of keys; he opened a small door beside the chapel. They ascended a narrow, winding stair, without any light except the one they carried, and passed a long, arched corridor where the walls almost touched their elbows at either side, and the vault just cleared their heads above. This corridor was between the side wall of the chapel and the wall of the adjoining sacristy. Another door opened, and they entered a cross corridor leading to one of the balconies of the chapel—one of those beautiful gilded balconies the Signora had so many times wished to get into. She stepped into this now, and looked down through the chapel, out into the church, and across to the Sistine Chapel, the columns, pictures, and gilded arches of the basilica set like a picture in the great arched entrance of the Borghese.

Going on then, Don Francesco opened a strong, locked door, that showed another door immediately within, closing the same wall. These led into another of those narrow white corridors running between the walls of the chapel behind the altar. Turning then into a third short corridor leading toward the chapel, they faced still another door, over which were painted the arms and tiara of Pope Paul V., who built the chapel.

This door unlocked, they found themselves in a little chamber directly behind the grand altar, with the miraculous picture, set in a box cased in metal, right before them. It stands a little back from the screens that cover it in the chapel, and there is space enough at either side for a person to slip in in front and see the picture face to face. Two iron hooks that barred the passage were taken down, and the Signora went in and found herself in front of this most venerable image.

The picture is painted on panel, and, though dim, is still distinct on so near a view, the rich, soft colors coming out as one gazes—a long, oval face full of serious majesty, with large eyes, and a mantle dropping over the forehead. But this mantle is now almost hid; for the head of the Mother, and of the Babe that looks up into her face, and the outline of their shoulders, are closely filled in with gold and gems. But for this nothing but a dark square would be distinguishable from the chapel. The outline is so clearly made, however, as to give a perfect idea, when looked at from below, of a crowned woman with a crowned child in her arms.

If, in the presence of the picture, one can think of jewels, these are worth looking at. They are the gems of a cardinal and of a pope—stones of immense value set in pure gold. Besides rubies and amethysts, in the centre of the Virgin’s crown is a large emerald surrounded by diamonds, and from the jewelled chain at her neck hangs a cross made entirely of large sapphires.

The Signora took the candle in her hand and held it before those faces, and the clergymen with her knelt, one at either side of her.

After a little while they rose, the Signora kissed the floor before the picture, and the case that held it, and they turned away. On leaving she observed that this little chamber behind the altar was quite covered with frescoes. Then came the low corridors again, and the narrow stairs; one more peep from the gilded balcony, and at length she stepped out into the church again, bewildered and enchanted.

“I will tell them nothing about it,” was her conclusion as she went home. “They might feel hurt at being left out. It shall be a little secret of my own.”

They went to first Vespers and to the High Mass next morning, but the finest part was the Vespers of the day, to which they went early, and were so fortunate as to have chairs in the chapel near the altar. The chapter came in in procession from the basilica, singing as they came, and the place was soon crowded.

Nothing was wanting to make the scene perfect; the magnificent chapel, the beautiful dress of the canons, who all wore purple silk soutanes, with rich lace on those picturesque little cotte of theirs, and the music—each was in harmony with all the rest. Then, as the music went up, down through the cupola, glowing with the colors of Cavaliere d’Arpino, and faintly veiling the frescoes of Guido Reni, came the soft and loitering snow of blossoms, flowery flake by flake. They were lost one instant against the white band of Carrara marble—cornice, capitals, figures, and flowers—under the arches, then green of verd-antique, and red of jasper, or the colored mantle of one of Guido’s saints threw them into relief again. Little by little the mosaic of the pavement grew dim under that exquisite snow-fall, which seemed, as it came down, to toss on the music in mid-air.

The light up in the cupola grew red with sunset, and the chapel below began to show softest shades and pale gold lights from the candles, and the pageant slowly dissolved like a bouquet that parts into flowers, each flower showing more beautiful separated than when massed together.

Going out into the basilica, where it seemed almost evening, so strongly contrasted were the lights and shades, the Signora silently pointed out to her friends the long, red-gold bar of sunshine that came in at a window of the tribune and lay the whole length of the nave, looking so solid one felt like stepping over or stooping to go under it, as if it were an obstacle. It was her very idea of the bars of the tabernacle which the Jews bore with them.

“If only the church should be lifted and borne to Paradise now, when it is all bathed in flowers and full of incense and music!”

They lingered yet, unwilling to go. Monsignore M—— came out of the sacristy and brought them all some of the blessed blossom-snow. People were gathering it up from the floor of the chapel, and, it having fallen also in the tribune, little boys were slyly vaulting over the railings, snatching it up unseen by the custodi, and scampering out again. The lights went out, the cancelle were closed, and finally our friends were forced to go home.

They stood a moment outside the church door before descending the steps, the two girls expressing their delight with feminine enthusiasm. Mr. Vane had but one word: “There is a certain Protestant hymn that used to make me feel, when I was a boy, very loath to go to heaven,” he said. “But, remembering it now by the light of this festa, I think heaven couldn’t be better described than as a place——

“'Where congregations ne’er break up,

And Sabbaths have no end.’”

A few days later they made their little visit to Genzano, stopping one day in Albano on the way. It was the feast of the Holy Saviour, in which again an antique and venerated picture had a prominent part. They reached the town just in time to see the procession go from the Duomo bearing the picture up to the little church of Santissimo Salvatore on the hill.

“What are those military bands playing for?” Mr. Vane asked, as they sat in the loggia of their apartment, after having rested a half-hour.

“They are playing for the Lord,” said the Signora.

He stared a little, but, finding her perfectly serious, said after a moment: “Well, I don’t know why they shouldn’t; only I am not used, you know, to hearing fifes and drums on any but military and civil occasions.”

“This is a military occasion,” the Signora replied gravely. “It celebrates Him who is the God of battles and the Lord of hosts. It is a civil occasion, too, in honor of the King of kings, the Lawgiver of the universe, the Prince of peace.”

“You are right!” he said emphatically; “and I need not ask now why they are firing cannon.”

They went out just at sunset and took their places on the steps of the little church to which the procession was to come, catching glimpses of it in the distance as it appeared in some turn of the ascending way.

The slope of the street just in front of them had been swept, and two men were sprinkling it in a very primitive fashion. One trundled along a cart with a little barrel of water on it, and the other dipped in a small wooden bucket and scattered the water from side to side. He did it very dexterously, however, showing practice. Nearer the steps the street was paved with a mosaic of flowers, and all the houses by which the procession was to pass were decorated in some way, with flowers, pictures, and lamps to light later, some already lighted and showing faintly through the gloaming. All the windows and little balconies and elevated door-steps near the church were filled with women and children, every face turned toward the winding street up which a cross was glittering and a sound of music coming. A banner came in sight after the cross, and then a crucifix with its canopy, and then banner after banner, and crucifix after crucifix, showing in air over the wall that wound with the street. At one turn were visible the tops of the tallest heads; then, a little farther on, the whole heads of men, and the flowing locks of the boys of the choirs; and, lastly, they came into full sight near by, the inferior persons marching in lines at each side of the street, leaving hollow spaces where there was no banner or crucifix to be carried, the clergy walking in the centre. As the picture of the Holy Redeemer came along, borne on the shoulders of four men, all the crowd about sank on their knees. The picture was carried up the steps and placed on a table set there to receive it, and there were prayers and hymns before dropping the curtain over it and taking it into the church.

The sun went down and one large star burned in the west. It was easy to imagine an angel hand and wings above, and golden chains dropping down to a lamp of which that star was the flame. All the lamps, many-colored as the rainbow, were lighted in the windows, throwing their light, as the twilight deepened, in a strong splash, here and there, on a leaning face intent and praying, on a mantle of vines, on a bit of carving, a rough stone balcony, or a stair climbing up into the dark. One little arched window, with a vine over it, held a single beautiful face of a young woman, and a single lamp that shone on her black hair and eyes and perfect features, motionless there in prayer, till she looked like a cameo cut in pink carnelian.

The prayers ended, and some one drew the curtain before the lovely face of the picture. As he did so a chorus of exclamations burst from the kneeling crowd, and several women burst into tears.

“What do they say?” Mr. Vane asked in surprise. “What is the matter?”

“They say, 'Grazie, Santissimo Salvatore!'—Thanks, most holy Saviour,” she replied.

He smiled faintly and repeated after them, “Grazie, Santissimo Salvatore!” and it seemed that his eyes glistened in the candle-light.

“I am glad it touches you,” the Signora said as they went to their lodgings. “Some, even Catholics, think it superstitious; but it is no more so than it is a superstition for us to kiss and weep over the pictures of our friends.”

The next morning they went up to early Mass in the pretty Capuchin church, at the head of its long avenue of overarching trees, loitering slowly home again when the Mass was over.

“Now,” said the Signora suddenly, spying a man with a large basket—“now I will show you what figs are. You have not known before.”

She beckoned the man and asked how many he would sell for a soldo. He replied, “Twelve.”

“You may give me eight dozen,” she said. “Each of you dear people are to have two dozen and to carry them yourselves. Out with your handkerchiefs! That is the fashion. Don’t be scrupulous.”

“They don’t look as if I should wish to eat two dozen,” Bianca remarked doubtfully. “They look to me like little bits of green apples.”

“Please to defer your judgment,” remarked her friend; “and what you do not wish to eat I will take.”

When they had reached home and were seated at the breakfast-table, the Signora took one of the little figs, with some ceremony and much anticipated triumph, and, lacking a fruit-knife, peeled its green skin off with the handle of a tea-spoon. All their eyes were watching the process; and when it was ended, and she pushed out the little teaspoonful of delicious fruit for Mr. Vane to have the first, the others were convinced by only seeing. It was a rich, deep red, of the consistency of solid old preserved strawberries, but with the fig flavor.

After breakfast was over they went out to visit the gardens of the Cesarini palace, for which they had a permit. These are laid out and kept by a Swiss gardener, and are a wilderness of flowers and trees and fountains on the level and down the hill-side. After wandering about the upper part for a while they descended a slowly-winding path, bordered by hydrangeas in full flower, that stood shoulder-high and dropped their great balls of amethyst bloom toward the earth, and came out into a little terrace where the trees and shrubs left an open front. A long bench at the back, and a richly-carved antique capital of a column near the wild-vine parapet, gave them seats, and before them was the whole verdant amphitheatre, with Lake Nemi at the bottom, and the town of Nemi half up the opposite bank, like a little white flower painted half way up the inside of a green cup. And down from the flower, like its white stem, dropped a white stream, cascade after cascade, to the lake, its motion petrified in the distance.

Tall white cloud-shapes marched round the hill-tops and looked over—shining shapes that seemed to hold Olympian deities within their folds, “impenetrable to every ray but that of fancy.” The amphitheatre sloped steeply in a green cone rich with orchards and vineyards, and pressed in a waving line around the water. Opposite the little terrace in which they sat, as in a box at the opera, the shore made a green heart in the water, and from behind one curve of it a boat, tiny in the distance as a black swan, slipped out and moved across the view. The lake lay like an emerald half-fused, its shaded greens touched in places with a soft purple bloom or a silvery lustre, and catching now and then a melting image of some cloud-cap higher than the rest. There was a sound of mellow thunder from some direction—Jupiter Tonans driving through those driving clouds.

They sat there silently drinking in the beauty of the scene, speaking only a word or two now and then, waiting till it should be noon and they should hear the Angelus from Nemi. When it came, a dream of a sound, touching with the outermost wave of its song the party of strangers across the lake, they stood up and said the prayers together. Then, bidding adieu to Nemi and its lake and the beautiful garden, they went slowly away.

That afternoon they went back to Albano, and the next evening returned to Rome. They had only one other excursion to make—that to Monte Cassino. Certain affairs were calling Mr. Vane to America, either for a longer or shorter stay, to go with only his daughters, or to have a nearer companion yet, and the end of their visit was approaching. It would soon be September, and in October they must start. Besides, it was found that, subject to her father’s approval, Bianca had promised to marry early in the spring, and some preparations must be made for the wedding.

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

TO POPE PIUS IX.
A JUBILEE OFFERING, JUNE 3, 1877.

I.

To-day the scattered peoples of the earth—
Haply the monarchs may not all forget—
Pay unto thee, great Pope, their willing debt
Of love sincere—blest debt of heavenly birth!
We kneel afar, a people of to-day,
Whose life but doubles in its hundred years
Thy long episcopate of many tears;
But none the less we love, nor ceaseless pray
That He who leadeth Joseph like a sheep

May bless thee with fair length of glorious days,

May give thee yet triumphant voice to raise

When men, with happy tears, shall vigil keep

Of that great feast when Christian Rome no more

In chains shall stand a world’s awed gaze before.

II.

Eudoxia’s church—where Michael Angelo
Hath Moses wrought in terrible array—
With faith’s most loving rites keeps holiday
In holy thought of those long years ago

When, 'neath its roof, the throng devout drew near

To see thee made a shepherd of the sheep,

Thy crook receive, that thou shouldst bravely keep,

Thy flock e’er leading by the waters clear.

“St. Peter of the Chains”—prophetic name!

Beneath this title was thy charge begun;

As Peter’s self thy hands his chains have won,

With these, his years. When shall God’s angel claim

Thy liberty, the prison gates fling wide?

Christ in his vicar no more crucified!

III.

O happy senses of the Virgin Blessed
Standing the cross of Calvary beneath—
So winning martyrdom without its death—
Queen of all martyrs evermore confessed!
O happy Pontiff! wear’st thou not to-day

Beneath the triple crown one wrought of thorn?

So crowned for love thou hast unfailing borne

To thy pure spouse the faithless would betray?

Art thou not martyr, too, by that deep woe
Thou sharest with our Queen Immaculate?
About thee rise the cries of blinded hate,
Thou seest afresh the wounds of Jesus flow;

His cross thy palm, his words sublime thine too—

“Father, forgive; they know not what they do.”

IV.

As said Lacordaire, of the rosary,
That love must ever its own speech repeat
That, ever murmured, groweth e’er more sweet,
So, seeking long some gift to bring to thee

On this high day that keeps thy years of gold—

Some thought that shall heart’s dearest service prove—

Find I but one e’er-echoing word of love
That doth all else I seek most fair enfold.
Too great thy deeds for my poor verse to tell
That need the Tuscan’s speech of Paradise;
Even to think them, tears are in my eyes
And sorrow stifles the Te Deum’s swell—
Tears for so dear a feast seem gift unkind,
But love in every falling bead is shrined.

V.

As, when our Lord doth rest in solemn state
On altar for his worship set apart,
And from the fulness of each faithful heart
The fairest flowers to him are consecrate—

Pure lilies, that with fragrant breath pour forth

The speechless worship human love must give;

Red roses, in whose flush love seems to live—

As, 'mid this wealth, some gift of little worth,

Some penance-hued, frail-blooming violet,
Is brought by humble soul with love as great
As lies within the lilies’ lordlier state—
Each cancelling so little of love’s debt—
So I, my father, 'mid thy lilies place

My rue, thy blessing shall make herb-of-grace.

THE PRESENT STATE OF JUDAISM IN AMERICA.

Judaism, in its purity, is not a false religion. It was revealed and established by God, and nothing which comes from him can be untrue. Judaism, as it now exists here and in Europe and Asia, is, on the one hand, overladen and almost smothered by the inventions and additions of men, until the original deposit of the truth is with difficulty discerned; on the other hand, it is refined and explained away until it has become little better than a system of worldly morals. To-day, in Europe, Jews, and the descendants of Jews who have lost their ancestral faith without becoming Christians, are powerful in the cabinets of kings, in parliaments, in the money exchanges, and in the world of journalism. In America, while they have as yet, perhaps with a single exception, taken no leading part in the political affairs of the country, they have become a power in finance, and are beginning in a quiet way to influence, and to some extent to control, journalism. The ability of the race is unquestionable, and their virtues, as a race, are many. They are prudent and thrifty; they are charitable to each other, and their charities are not always confined to their own people; they are seldom guilty of crime, although when a Jew does become a criminal his offences are apt to leave little to be desired in the matter of completeness, audacity, and cruelty; they are excellent parents, and the domestic virtues among them are cultivated to a high degree; their women are for the most part chaste; their men are seldom cruel creditors, even when their defaulting debtors are Gentiles. They have their faults and objectionable peculiarities; among certain classes of them these imperfections are especially noticeable; but, as we shall show, the rising generation of Jews in America will probably become tolerably well Americanized, and will, to some extent at least, cease to be an unpleasantly peculiar people.

To Catholics the study of the changes which have taken place and are now occurring among the Jews should be invested with peculiar interest. We cannot forget that the Holy Scriptures of the Jews are a portion of our Holy Scriptures; that Our Blessed Lady was a Jewess, and that our Divine Lord willed to be born a Jew according to the flesh; that he made himself subject to the ceremonies and rites of the Jewish law, which was then the divine law, and consequently his own law; that the first drops of his precious blood were shed in the Jewish rite of circumcision; that his chosen apostles, and among them the first pope, were all Jews; that the Catholic Church at its first organization was wholly composed of Jews; and that the first Christian martyr was a Jew.

When Jesus Christ had finished his work on earth and had ascended into heaven, the Jewish law was fulfilled but not destroyed; it remained in full force and effect, subject only to such modifications as God himself, speaking through the infallible mouth of the church which he had established, should ordain in matters of ritual, sacrifice, and outward observances. The code of laws given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, and engraved by the divine hand upon tables of stone, is as binding to-day upon all of us as it was binding upon the Jews on the day when Moses came down from the mount bearing the sacred tablets in his hands. The devout Jew who to-day, with reverently covered head and contrite heart, stands in his synagogue and listens to the reading of the law, hears the same words that Jesus of Nazareth read when, as was his custom, “he went into the synagogue and stood up for to read.” True, hearing, he does not hear the full meaning of the divine words; seeing, he does not see how they have been fulfilled; his understanding has not been opened to know that the Messias for whom he still yearns was the Jesus whom his ancestors crucified on Calvary, and that, on the altar of the church which, perhaps, stands next door to his synagogue, this same Jesus, risen, glorified, and descended again from heaven, stands ready to receive and bless him.

But the Jew, ignorant of this and still clinging fast to the faith of his fathers, has an infinite advantage over all the other non-Catholics in the world. His religion, as we have said, was revealed by God, and therefore is not false in its essence, however much it may be overlaid and hidden by the innumerable superstitions and additions with which successive generations of rabbis and doctors have encumbered it. It is not a revolt against the Catholic faith nor a contradiction of it; for not only did it exist before the Catholic Church was established, but it was revealed by God, and he cannot contradict himself. The Jew errs only because he cannot or will not see that the Catholic Church is the lineal heir and rightful possessor of the church of which Adam was the first, and Caiphas the last, high-priest; and as for his sin in this hardness of heart and blindness of eye, God will judge him. Outside of this, and outside of the human additions which have been made to his creed, he believes what God spake unto Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, and his religion is entitled to respect because it is of divine origin. But the origin of all the other non-Catholic religions in the world is human or diabolical. They are revolts against the authority and teaching of the church which Jesus Christ established in the world; to the earthly and visible head of which he gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven; to the words of which he enjoined all men to render obedience; on which he has bestowed the inestimable grace of perfect unity; and which the Holy Spirit keeps ever in the truth. The Jew can say with truth, “God founded my church”; but the Protestant can only say, “Martin Luther, or King Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, or John Knox, or John Wesley, or Alexander Campbell, or Jo Smith, or the devil founded my church.”

Judaism, however, although divine in its origin, ceased to possess the divine sanction from the moment when our Lord had completed his work on earth and ascended into heaven, and the Holy Ghost descended to preside over the organization of the church from which he has never since departed. The Jewish religion, thus deprived for ever of the divine sanction, was at once deprived of its divine authority and became a merely human organization, subject, like all other human things, to corruption, change, decay, and disintegration. These processes have been going on within it for eighteen hundred years, and they have now reached a most advanced stage.

Prior to the crucifixion and ascension of our Lord the essential unity in faith of the Jewish people had been preserved. The lawyers, the doctors, and the Pharisees had added much to the law of Moses in the way of laying heavy burdens on the people; they took tithes of annise and cummin; they made broad the edges of their phylacteries, and they were famous for making long extempore prayers, in which latter respect they resembled too closely some of our esteemed Protestant brethren. But the essential and divinely-given articles of the Jewish faith remained unimpaired, and in these essentials the unity of the people was complete. The process of change and disintegration commenced immediately after the establishment of the Christian Church and what may be called the formal transfer to her of the guiding and enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit. But for many centuries this process was slow and its progress excited little or no attention. The Jews, until a very recent period in their history, were a persecuted people; and persecution tends to make men cling closer to that which is the cause of the persecution. There were times in the history of the Jews when their only city of refuge was Rome; when the popes, alone of all the sovereigns of the earth, stretched forth over them a protecting arm and permitted them to dwell in peace and security. Within the last century, or less, all this has been changed: nowhere in all Europe now, save in Bulgaria and one or two other provinces, are the Jews persecuted; they have obtained equal political and social rights; they are cabinet ministers, premiers, members of parliament, eminent journalists, and autocratic bankers. With this prosperity have come the marked evidences of that disintegration in matters of faith to which allusion has been made. And here in America, where the Jews have been always free, these changes have now become more signal and wide-spread than in any other country.

To show how this has come about, it will be necessary, in the first place, to explain briefly the nature of the additions which have been made by the Jewish doctors to the divine law; the effect of these human edicts and precepts upon the minds of those Jews who retain their faith; and their contrary effect, upon other minds, in promoting and disseminating the spirit of infidelity which is now so widely prevalent among the Hebrews. The strictly “orthodox” Jew to-day is more burdened than were ever any of his ancestors by practically endless rules, observances, rites, and ceremonies, while his “reformed” or “ultra-reformed” brother has not only shaken himself free from all, or nearly all, of these human inventions, but has emancipated himself also from the letter and spirit of the law of Moses and from the bonds of the faith.

The books of the Jewish law as they now exist are the Old Testament, as we call it; the “Mishna,” or Second Law; and the “Gemara,” or supplement to the “Mishna.” These two latter books, taken together, form the “Talmud.” But the “Mishna” is the explanation of the Old Testament; the “Gemara” is the explanation of the “Mishna”; and there remains behind or above all these the mystical and mysterious “Cabala,” which contains within itself the sum and essence of all human wisdom, and of such portions of divine wisdom as men are permitted to know. The “Cabala,” properly speaking, is not a book, and has never been wholly committed to writing. The “Cabala”—and the meaning of the word is the “tradition”—is a divine, sublime, secret, and infinite science, treating of the creation of the universe, of the esoteric meaning and significance of the Mosaic laws, and of the secrets of God. No trace of its origin is to be found. Moses, David, Solomon, and the prophets are said to have been masters of it. It was taught to successive generations, but with the utmost secrecy and only to a select few, who were deemed worthy to receive this priceless knowledge. Those portions of it which are written are brief, obscure, and full of abbreviations and initials, to be understood only by the initiated. They resemble the manuals of Freemasonry—pregnant with meaning to the members of the craft, but unintelligible to all who have not the key of the cipher. He who is a perfect master of the “Cabala” is so wise and potent that he not only can work wonders, but may exercise almost creative powers. Nay, even an imperfect and surreptitiously-obtained knowledge of its mysteries enables one to perform miracles. He who can place certain letters in a certain way, and pronounce them in a certain manner, may suspend the operation of the laws of nature and command the angels of God to do his will. The Cabalists, however, claim that seldom, if ever, has their divine science been used by unworthy men or prostituted to selfish purposes. The penalty for such a sin is eternal death; it is written in one of their books that “he who abuses the crown perisheth,” and this is understood to refer to those who possess themselves of this knowledge and then use it for selfish purposes. The true Cabalists study their science not for gain, but for the sake of obtaining profound knowledge. They apply their rules to the letters and words of the Mosaic law, and ascertain thereby its hidden significance, drawing from every word or sentence an esoteric meaning, often full of sublime intelligence, and as often pregnant only with absurdity.

Emanuel Swedenborg seems to have been an unfledged Cabalist; it is probable that he became in some manner acquainted with a few of the outward formulas of the Cabala, and that he based on these his wearisome treatises upon the secret meaning of the Scriptures. Certain it is that nothing which Swedenborg imagined is not to be found in the Cabala. Fortunately, a knowledge of the Cabala is not necessary for salvation; on the contrary, knowledge of it is a special perfection which every one is not able to attain, and for the want of which no one is to be blamed.

The “Mishna” contains the oral or traditional laws transmitted from Moses, through a line of which the personality of every member is known, to the Rabbi Jochanan, who lived at Jerusalem at the time of the destruction of the second Temple. It was compiled by Rabbi Jehuda Hanasi in the latter half of the second century. The “Gemara,” or supplement to the “Mishna,” is a wonderful book, containing thirty-six treatises upon history, biography, astronomy, medicine, and ethics, interspersed with legends, aphorisms, parables, sermons, and rules of practical wisdom. The oral or traditional laws in the “Mishna” are claimed to be of divine authority; and the passages in both these books which seem to be absurd in the letter have a secret meaning understood best, if not exclusively, by the Cabalists. The morality taught in these writings is not to be despised. For example, it is laid down that men should not use flattery or deceit in business affairs; they should not be boisterous in their mirth nor permit themselves to sink into abject melancholy, but should be reasonably and gratefully cheerful; they should be neither greedy of gain, nor slothful in business, nor over-righteous in fasting and penance; all that they do they should do for the glory of God; they should love every Israelite as themselves, and they should be kind and charitable to the stranger; they must abstain from inward and silent hate, and if aggrieved by a neighbor they should make it known to him, affectionately asking him to redress the wrong; they should be especially solicitous to comfort, aid, and protect the widow and the orphan, not merely if these be poor, but because they have suffered and their hearts are laden with grief. There are three mortal sins—idolatry, fornication, and bloodshed; but calumny is equal to all three. Every one who professes the true faith must believe that there is a Being whose existence is inherent, absolute, and unconditional within himself; who has no cause or origin, and like whom there is no other; who is the first producer of all things; in whom all creatures find the support of their existence, while he derives no support from them; and that “this Being is by men called God—blessed be he!” There are six fundamental principles of the faith—the creation of all things by God out of nothing; the pre-eminence of Moses as a prophet and lawgiver—a pre-eminence so great that there never has been and never can be another equal to him; the unalterableness of the law which he gave; the dogma that the proper observance of any one of the commandments of the law will lead to perfection; the resurrection of the dead; and the coming of the Messias. But upon this excellent foundation has been built up that structure of ceremony, ritual, observance, and false and narrow philosophy which has become unbearable to so many of the Jews in this country and in Europe, and from the yoke of which too many have escaped by throwing aside all faith, while others have contented themselves with taking refuge in the half-way houses of “reform.”

It is difficult to estimate with accuracy the number of Jews in the United States. But the census of 1870 affords us some valuable data upon which a calculation may be based. In 1850 there were 36 Jewish synagogues in the United States, with sittings for 18,371 persons, and having a value of $418,600. In 1860 there were 77 synagogues, with sittings for 34,412 persons and a value of $1,135,300. In 1870 no less than 189 Jewish “organizations” were reported; there were 152 synagogues, seating 73,265 persons and valued at $5,155,234. Now in the city of New York there are 26 synagogues, and the Jewish population of the metropolis is not less than 75,000. This would give an average of some three thousand souls to each synagogue; and if we took this average as a basis of calculation, we should have a Jewish population in the whole of the United States amounting to 456,000 souls. But we have reason to believe that this is much less than the actual number. We have received from two high authorities estimates of the Jewish population in the republic; both are avowedly only estimates, but they have been made with care. One of them places the number of Jews in the United States at “one in thirty of the whole population,” which would give a total of 1,600,000 souls; the other reports the number to be “almost exactly 1,000,000 souls.”

According to the census of 1870, there were no Jewish synagogues or other Hebrew organizations in Arizona, Dakota, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington Territory, or Wyoming. But, in point of fact, there are many Jews in all, or nearly all, these States and Territories. The following table will show the number of Jewish organizations in the United States, the number of their synagogues, with their sittings and their value, according to the census of 1870:

| Organizations. | Synagogues. | Sittings. | Value.
Alabama | 2 | 2 | 1,650 | $30,000
Arkansas | 1 | 1 | 300 | 6,500
California | 7 | 7 | 3,600 | 314,600
Colorado | 1 | — | — | —
Connecticut | 5 | 3 | 1,850 | 105,000
Dist. of Columbia | 2 | 1 | 800 | 18,000
Georgia | 6 | 5 | 1,400 | 52,700
Illinois | 10 | 9 | 3,950 | 271,500
Indiana | 5 | 4 | 1,900 | 113,000
Iowa | 5 | 1 | 150 | 1,900
Kansas | 2 | 1 | 300 | 1,500
Kentucky | 3 | 3 | 1,500 | 134,000
Louisiana | 5 | 5 | 2,200 | 75,000
Maine | 23 | 23 | 7,315 | 36,400
Maryland | 5 | 4 | 2,750 | 650,000
Massachusetts | 5 | 2 | 1,500 | 33,000
Michigan | 5 | 3 | 1,300 | 51,000
Missouri | 4 | 4 | 2,100 | 217,100
New Jersey | 1 | 1 | 300 | 8,000
New York | 47 | 33 | 21,400 | 1,831,950
North Carolina | 1 | 1 | 200 | 500
Ohio | 7 | 7 | 4,000 | 360,584
Pennsylvania | 15 | 14 | 7,750 | 681,000
Rhode Island | 1 | — | — | —
South Carolina | 3 | 3 | 900 | 91,200
Tennessee | 4 | 4 | 1,100 | 21,000
Texas | 1 | 1 | 400 | 6,000
Vermont | 8 | 7 | 1,890 | 35,300
West Virginia | 1 | — | — | —
Wisconsin | 4 | 3 | 750 | 8,500
Totals | 189 | 152 | 73,265 | $5,155,234

A careful examination of this table discloses some remarkable contrasts which are not without their significance. While the synagogues in North Carolina, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, and some other States are small and cheap structures, costing only from $500 to $2,800 or $3,000 each, those in Georgia have cost, or are valued at, an average of $10,500; in Alabama and Maine, $15,000; in Illinois, $30,000; in Connecticut, $35,000; in California, $45,000; in Pennsylvania, $49,000; in Ohio, $51,500; in Missouri, $54,000; in New York, $60,000; and in Maryland, $162,000. These instances exemplify to some extent the comparative wealth and religious zeal of the children of Israel in the different States named, and many of our readers, we suppose, will learn with surprise that there are far more Jews in Maine than in all the other New England States put together; and that the Jews of Maryland are apparently very much more wealthy and zealous than their co-religionists in any other part of the republic. But we must now trace the history of the settlement and progress of the Jews in this country, and set forth the outer as well as inner causes which have tended to work changes in them: to Americanize them to a great extent; to remove or soften the prejudices formerly cherished against them; and to weaken, modify, or destroy, in a degree which cannot yet be accurately determined, their own religious faith.

Jewish emigration to this country began at a very early period in its history, but only within the last thirty years has this emigration assumed perceptible dimensions. The Jews who came to the United States prior to 1848 were for the most part members of a low class; they were chiefly of Polish, Russian, Portuguese, or Spanish birth; they were either poor or pretended to be poor; they were peddlers, dealers in old clothes, pawnbrokers, money-changers in a small way, and petty merchants. From all social intercourse with the rest of the community they were cut off; they did not seek that which probably would have been denied them had they asked for it; the traditional prejudice against the Jews which exists so generally among the Gentiles was not diminished by the appearance, the actions, and the general reputation of these children of Israel. They were supposed to be exclusively devoted to trade and to money-making, and to be quite devoid of any scruples as to the means by which they might get the better of the person to whom they sold or of whom they bought. A Hebrew writer of some note many years ago remarked that the Jews, as a race of people, were more widely and generally known and less generally appreciated than any other class upon the earth; that the peculiarities which have marked them as objects of dislike were by no means original in their character, but were the fruits of centuries of oppression and degradation; and that they needed only a few years of existence in a free country, where equal rights would be accorded to them, and where they might in peace and security manifest the virtues which were in them, in order to win for themselves not only the toleration but the active esteem and respect of their fellow-citizens. The truth of this remark has been amply substantiated by what has occurred in England, France, Germany, and other portions of Europe; while in this country the Jews have succeeded in Americanizing themselves to a very great extent, and in obliterating in a marked degree the peculiarities which formerly served to point them out as a wholly separate and foreign people. That this process has been accompanied by the partial loss of their religious faith is unquestionably true, but it is not clear whether they have become Americanized because they have to this extent lost their faith, or whether they have lost their faith because they have become Americanized.

The Jews in America at the present moment are divided into five classes—the “Radical Orthodox,” the “Orthodox,” the “Conservative Reformed,” the “Reformed,” and the “Radical Reformed.” There is a wide gulf between the first and the last of these classes; but the shades of difference between a Radical Orthodox Jew and an Orthodox Jew, or between a Conservative Reformed Jew and a Reformed Jew, are somewhat difficult to define. The Radical Orthodox Jews are few in number, and are said by their co-religionists to be daily growing less. They are chiefly of Polish, Austrian, or Hungarian birth; they for the most part are in humble and obscure walks of life; they form no associations with Gentiles; they accept as the rule of their life the Mosaic law interpreted by the “Talmud” and the “Cabala”; they do not welcome Gentiles, or even Jews of later views, to their synagogues. We believe there is but one synagogue in New York belonging to this school of Jews, and in which one may witness Jewish worship as it was performed a thousand years ago. The children of the Radical Orthodox Jews—especially the male children—do not adhere closely to the faith and ritual of their fathers; and some of the fathers themselves, as they become rich in this world’s goods, manifest a disposition to affiliate themselves with one or other of the less rigorous sects. Some of them are content to join the ranks of the Orthodox Jews, who hold most firmly to all matters of dogma, and to all the essential rules of life laid down by the law of Moses, but who at the same time dispense themselves from the strict observance of a certain number of the more onerous observances and regulations enjoined by the rabbinical writers.

The line of demarcation between the Orthodox Jews and the Conservative Reformed Jews is vague and undetermined; but the Reformed Jews are very much advanced. They hold themselves bound no longer to obey the ceremonial and dietary laws laid down by Moses and his successors, and their faith in the predictions of the prophets has almost wholly faded away. The higher class of the Hebrew community for the most part belong to the Reformed sect; but these congregations are also largely composed of the well-to-do middle-class Jews. Nearly all of the Jews of American birth are found in the ranks of this sect or in the one of which we have yet to speak; and very many of the German and English Jews resident here are also members of the Reformed synagogues. They openly avow their desire and ambition to become thoroughly Americanized, and to cease in all respects to be regarded as an alien and foreign people. They still retain their belief in God, but this belief is in too many cases vague and ill-defined. The expectation of the coming of the Messias in any literal sense has, with rare exceptions, ceased to be entertained among them. They will not confess that the prophecies of his coming were fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and their philosophy has led them to the conclusion that these prophecies do not now remain to be fulfilled, save in a metaphorical sense. The Messias is indeed to come—but not as an individual. Humanity as a race, elevated, happy, prosperous, blessed with long life, health, and earthly comfort, is the Messias; the prophets saw him and were glad, but it was reserved for the children of this generation to discover what was the hidden and real meaning of their predictions concerning him.

A learned Jewish scholar has thus expressed this phase of Jewish thought: “The majority of intelligent Israelites have long since abandoned the wish of building up an independent national existence of their own. The achievement of higher conditions of human life they are disposed to regard as the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy, and the furthering of this end, in intimate union with their fellow-men, as the highest dictate of their religion.” These are weighty words; and there is abundant reason to believe that they truthfully represent the dominant tone of thought among the American Jews. The latest sect among them—the Radical Reformed Jews—go to the root of the matter and have the full courage of their opinions. They have the goodness to admit that there is, or may be, a God, but they deny that he has ever revealed himself to man save by the law of nature, and that God is himself nature. In other words, these Jews have become Pantheists. Benedict de Spinoza was excommunicated and denounced by the forefathers of those who now revere and extol him. The most eloquent and gifted, if not the most learned, of the Jewish rabbis in America has become the leader of this sect, and has left the magnificent synagogue which was built for him, only to draw after him into new paths a large proportion of his former congregation. They are extremely wise in their own conceit; they prate of the necessity of doubting all things; they deride the rites and practices of external religion; they say they worship God, but inasmuch as God, as they insist, is only nature, and nature is part of themselves, in worshipping God they worship themselves. We are told that many of those Jews who still maintain their connection with the Conservative Reformed or Reformed congregations are by conviction in full sympathy with the Radical Reformers. The laity are far in advance of the rabbis of each sect. The rabbis are for the most part men of foreign birth and foreign education; there are, we believe, not a dozen rabbis of American birth in the whole Union. The almost universal tendency of thought and practice among the younger Jews is in the direction of that phase of infidelity of which we have spoken; and the elder members of the race take little care to counteract in any effectual manner this apostasy. The education of Jewish children in this country is left pretty much to take care of itself. There are few, if any, Jewish schools, and none at all of a high character. The Jewish children for the most part attend the public schools, where they either are taught no religion at all or listen to such vague and disjointed utterances concerning the truths of Christianity as the caprice or the prejudices of the teacher may lead him to pronounce. In some instances the children of well-to-do Hebrews among us are sent to receive their education in Unitarian academies; in others the sons of wealthy American Jews are educated in the German universities, from whence they return full-blown infidels. Intermarriages between Jews and nominal Christians are not rare; and the children of these unions are, as a rule, educated in the religion of the mother—if she happens to possess any.

We have said that the Jewish laity is in advance of the rabbis in the matter of what is called “reform,” but which is too generally nothing but destruction. The position of the rabbis is a peculiar one. They are not priests, for they no longer offer sacrifice. They are not even the sons of priests; the hereditary character of their office has long since been lost; they are rabbis, or, in other phrase, teachers, not by hereditary descent nor by divine selection or consecration, but merely by their own choice and the good-will of their neighbors or friends. The last high-priest of the Jewish Church who had any divine sanction for the title which he bore was Caiphas, and his office was taken away from him, in the sight of God and in truth, on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost descended to dwell until the end of time with the Christian Church. Since that day there have been no priests of God upon the earth, save the priests of the Catholic Church; and consequently since that day there have been no true Jewish priests. The altars of the Jews have crumbled away; their sacrifices have ceased; the sons of the tribes of Aaron and Levi have abandoned even the pretence of belonging to a priestly order. In the place of the priests have come the rabbis, who are mere ministers or teachers. They are to the Jews what the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant ministers are to the respective Protestant sects. They are a little less than some of the Protestant ministers claim to be; for some of these do set up in an uncertain way a vague and altogether fallacious pretence to the possession of “orders” and to having been empowered to perform priestly functions. The rabbis make no such pretence, and their position, such as it is, is confessedly invested with only purely human sanction. They are teachers, but do not claim that they have a divine authority to teach. They are subject to the will and caprice of the congregation to which they are attached; they are like school-teachers, whose tenure of office depends upon the pleasure of the school commissioners. Some of them have sought to put themselves at the head of the reform movement, and have succeeded, but only on the condition that they should keep pace with the advance of the laity. The younger German rabbis have been most prominent in this respect. They have effected an organization among themselves, as well here as in Germany, and have managed to act together with something approaching to unanimity. Destitute, however, of any rule of faith and practice higher than their own will and whim, and having no central or supreme authority to which they can appeal, they lack the essential bond of unity, and some of them are constantly wandering off in one direction or the other. They began their work of reform by modernizing the ritual of the synagogue, and eliminating from it, little by little, those portions of it which, directly or indirectly, assert the dogmas that are inconveniently opposed to the new ideas whereof they are enamored. Among the regular prayers of the synagogue, for instance, were supplications for the bringing back of the chosen people to the land of their fathers, the restoration of the throne of David, and the coming of the Messias. The new philosophy, as we have shown, teaches that the Messias is not to come in any literal sense; that inasmuch as modern progress is best subserved by democratic or republican institutions, the establishment of a monarchy of any kind is not to be desired or prayed for; and that the return of the Jews as a nation to Palestine is not to be wished, even if it were feasible.

It became advisable, therefore, to reconcile theory with practice, and to cease pretending to pray for that which was either impossible or undesirable. If it were absurd to believe any longer that the Messias was to come as a personal king and redeemer, to lead back his people to the Promised Land, and to elevate them as the rulers and princes of the earth, then it was something worse than absurd to continue the repetition of the prayers imploring the hastening of his coming. If the Books of the Law and of the Prophets are not the veritable word of God; if they contain merely ingenious and beautiful myths, symbolical poetry, and a code of moral and dietary rules which, in some respects at least, are no longer either necessary or advisable to be obeyed, it is dishonest to pretend to regard these writings with devout reverence, and to insist upon any one governing himself by them. By this course of reasoning the German rabbis, often pushed further than they cared to go by the laity who were behind them, sapped the foundations of faith among the common people of the Jews, and prepared them for the downward path which so many of them are now treading.

Having thus reviewed the present state of Judaism in America, we may ask ourselves what is likely to be the future of what was once the church of God, but has now fallen to the level of a mere sect. It is clear that the Jews, here as in the Old World, and more rapidly here than in the Old World, are losing the faith of their fathers. Judaism, divine in its origin, but no longer invested with the divine sanction nor inspired or guided by the Holy Ghost, is undergoing the same process of disintegration and decay which the Protestant sects are suffering. Judaism, now wholly human, like Protestantism, is leading its adherents to infidelity. Every day, as Protestants see this, the devout and pious among them turn to the one church which Jesus Christ established in the world, and in her bosom find refuge, peace, and salvation. The number of conversions from Protestantism to the holy Roman Catholic Church, here and in Great Britain, is continually on the increase. But nothing is more rare than the conversion of a Jew. They are rapidly parting with their own faith, but very seldom do they embrace any form of Christianity in its stead. In a few years the great majority of Jews in the United States will probably have ceased to be Jews, save only in name. But how many of them will become Catholics? All roads lead to Rome; but very few Jews have made that journey. A Jew who becomes a Catholic is a most excellent Catholic; he seems to desire, by the fervor of his faith and the burning zeal of his charity, to make some reparation for the sins of his people. Jews should be the best Catholics in the world; and God has told us, through the mouths of Jewish prophets, that the time will come when they will be all that they should be. The word of God is sure and cannot fail. He has told us that the day is coming when the Jews shall ask him, “What are those wounds in the midst of thy hands?” and when he shall reply, “With these was I wounded in the house of them that I love.” In that day he “will pour out upon the house of David the spirit of grace and the spirit of prayers; and they shall look upon him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for an only son, and shall grieve over him as the manner is to grieve for the death of the first-born.” In that glorious day God has promised that he will destroy the names of idols out of the earth, so that they shall be remembered no more; and that he will take away the false prophets and the unclean spirit out of the earth. He will bring back the captivity of Juda and the captivity of Jerusalem, and “will build them as from the beginning”; he will cleanse them from all their iniquities, whereby they have sinned against him and despised him; and he will so crown them with blessings that all the world shall be amazed thereby. “It shall be to me a name, and a joy, and a praise, and a gladness before all the nations of the earth that shall hear of all the good things which I will do to them.” “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will perform the good word that I have spoken to the house of Israel and to the house of Juda.” When the Jews become Catholic Christians, Jerusalem shall “be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name,” and the Jews shall become “a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord and a royal diadem in the hand of God.” Then they shall no more be called forsaken, and their land shall be no more called desolate; “but thou shalt be called 'my pleasure in her,’ and thy land inhabited.” Then shall the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass be celebrated by Jewish hands in the Holy City where Jesus Christ first offered up the ever-living Sacrifice, and then shall the Jews eat the heavenly Bread and drink the sacred Blood which have so long been given to us Gentiles and rejected by them. “The Lord has sworn by his right hand and by the arm of his strength: Surely I will no longer give thy corn to be meat for thy enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine for which thou hast labored; for they that gather it shall eat it, and they that have brought it together shall drink it in my holy courts.” Wonderful are these words; full are they of a meaning at once mystical and clear. The Jews, in God’s own time, will become Catholic Christians, and, united with the whole body of the faithful on earth, they shall eat the divine Bread which is the life of the world. The abandonment of their traditional faith will continue to lead them more and more to the abandonment of all their distinctive national peculiarities and practices, and they will become merged in the great body of the children of men. Then such of them as God may choose will have given to them the grace of faith, and as individuals, and not as a nation, will they become Catholic Christians. We know that in the vision of St. John the Apostle he saw one hundred and forty-four thousand of the children of Israel, of every tribe twelve thousand, who had come out of great tribulation, and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. We are certain, then, that before the end of the world at least this number of Jews will have been converted. It may be that the number represents only those who belonged to the church while it was yet mainly composed of Jews. If so, let us hope that those of the once chosen people who yet remain may be found, or at least many of them, in that great multitude which no man can number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues, which St. John also saw, standing before the throne and in the sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their hands, crying with a loud voice “Salvation to our God who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb.”

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.
FROM THE FRENCH.
CONCLUSION.

July 30.

This morning I was in a sort of mortal sadness. I opened the “Book of those who suffer” at these words: “You have willed, O my God! to separate me from her to whom I have so often said that I should wish to die the same day as she. This desire has not been granted, and thou hast condemned me to survive.

“She is at rest; and never have I more fully realized than in this my exceeding grief the meaning of that beautiful Christian word, quies—rest.”

I said this with all my heart, and I have comprehended.... O Kate! I loved you too much for this world. Bless me from on high, and visit me with Picciola. It seems to me that the divine Goodness must permit that.

August 2.

“The present war is the natural and necessary consequence of the great apostasy of the sixteenth century and the principles of the Revolution!” O my God! if this might be a holy war! But I fear; for France is so guilty! Prayers are being offered in all the dioceses; the emperor has put himself at the head of the army. May God save us! We needed a St. Louis, if we were to deserve victory. Do you remember, Kate, how much we admired these words of Bossuet? “War is often a salutary bath, in which nations bathe and are regenerated.” Oh! how you must pray, all our kind friends in heaven.

August 4.

Amélie has bidden us adieu; she is a charming creature. Her mother will not accompany her. She fears her own weakness; and she is a veritable Spartan.

On the 2d of August took place a first engagement at Saarbrück; our troops were victorious. May this success augur well! They say that there is a terrible effervescence in minds. Our Bretonnes are praying that their sons may soon return.

Arrival of our Parisians! Alix and Margaret have all the grace of the twins; my godson is magnificent. I like to feel that we are together in these troubled times. How I pity mothers!

August 7.

Terror, anguish, defeat—these are the synonyms of this date. Two days ago we were beaten at Wissembourg; yesterday at Forbach. We are waiting for news. Our reverses are a chastisement; the French government is withdrawing its troops from Rome. Is it, then, to secure success that France abandons the Pope? Oh! it is not France which acts thus; she is too profoundly Catholic for that; but she will be none the less certain to undergo the penalty for this cowardice. Kate, pray for France! The Prussians are upon our soil, and civil war is also feared.

August 13.

Horrible details are received of the battle of Reichshoffen. Marshal MacMahon behaved with admirable heroism. He would not quit the field of battle after witnessing this odious butchery—40,000 against 150,000! Lord, O Lord! have pity. There must have been some treason there. The cuirassiers and chasseurs of MacMahon sacrificed themselves to facilitate the retreat. The newspapers make one weep. Kate, what is said in heaven?

My Guy is charmingly beautiful; and when he is twenty years old an enemy’s cannon-ball will have the right to carry him off!

August 21.

Dear Kate, I bless God for having placed you in the peace of eternity before these murderous struggles, in which your heart would so often have been wounded! Ah! it seems to me that it is a great favor to be taken from this earth before the calamities which are impending.

A subscription has been set on foot, in order that all France shall offer a sword of honor to MacMahon. Marshal Lebœuf, General-in-Chief, is replaced by Marshal Bazaine; the army is falling back on Chalons. There were brilliant affairs on the 14th, 15th, and 16th. But what agitation in the country! The republicans consider the moment favorably for their triumph, and René declares that the Prussians of France are still more to be dreaded than the Prussians of Germany. Montaigne said: “There are triumphant defeats which equal the finest victories.” Our troops are sublime. Fresh levies are being made, companies of francs-tireurs are organized; will France be saved? Catholic La Vendée is rising en masse.

August 24.

The Prussians are at Saint-Dizier. It is said that in the partial engagements the losses are considerable on both sides. The enemy is bombarding Strasbourg. Read heart-rending details. Povera Francia! They say that two sons of Count Bismarck are dead; it is the justice of God passing by! Oh! when we think of so many families who are suffering from the disasters of invasion, who see their homes invaded and their days in peril, how ardent are our prayers!

That which I dreaded is come upon us. René and his brothers are going! O my God! guard them from danger. I love France too well to hinder René from defending her. The fear of afflicting me held him back. God aid us and have at the English! as our Breton ancestors used to say. The English of to-day are the Prussians.

They leave us, five brothers, all valiant and strong, courageous as lions. Ah! if they should not return. I believe in presentiments, and something tells me that all hope of happiness is at an end for me. “Give all to God,” a saintly priest wrote to me. Fiat! Take all, my God, but leave me thy love!

Do you remember, Kate, my mother’s stories of the heroism of our grandfather? Do you remember that Georgina whose name I received, who said to her brother, “Go and fight without thinking of me. God and his angels will guard me; think of your country!”

Could I be less courageous than she? Pray for me, holy soul in heaven! What shall I do without him?

August 26.

Levies are being raised en masse. Men will not be wanting, but soldiers cannot be made at a moment’s notice, especially in our days. It is said that Bazaine is blockaded in Metz with 70,000 men, and that he has before him 200,000 Prussians. MacMahon is going to his relief with an equal number of heroes. The French have burnt the camp at Chalons. What will be the issue of this frightful struggle? The ministry which has caused all our misfortunes has resigned; a clear understanding is most important, and time passes away in useless discussions. General Trochu, a Breton, is Governor of Paris.

To-day we shall be left alone....

August 29.

It is over. René has taken with him all my heart, and I feel a strange sense of suffering. My mother has been sublime. O these adieux, these last embraces! Who would have said that we should come to this?

Protect them, ye holy angels! Bring them back to us soon with the return of peace! There are wounded everywhere; my mother has asked for ten, to whom we shall attend ourselves. It is terrible to see these mutilations. O war! how I hate it.

The army of Prince Frederick Charles is marching upon Paris; there are no official tidings of our soldiers. Phalsbourg, Toul, Metz, Strasbourg are all undergoing the horrors of bombardment. Where shall we go? Prayer alone will save us. There is much patriotic eagerness in the populations; the loan of 750,000,000 has been covered with astonishing rapidity. What will become of the capital? What chastisement will visit it for having erected a statue to Voltaire?

A visit—the Comtesse de G—— and her two daughters, friends of Lucy. What a difference between the two sisters! The younger calm, gentle, and placid, like a beautiful lake, seraphic and tender; the elder ardent and enthusiastic to exaggeration, impassioned for the cause of good, peace, and right, but like a volcano.

Kate, tell me that you pray for us, and that God will have pity upon his people!

August 31.

A letter from René! Alas! his presence was so sweet to me. Gertrude and I do not quit the chapel, except for the wounded. Mary and Ellen, Marguerite and Alix, multiply their prayers. Arthur has made his mother give him a Zouave’s uniform; thus equipped, he drills the children at the school. You should hear him say how he wants to join his father and fight with him. Our savage enemies commit revolting atrocities. How truly are they the sons of the Teutons!

Berthe’s family is in Switzerland.

September 4.

Lord, save us; we perish!

The public journals speak in an ambiguous manner of triumphs with respect to which a terrible silence had been observed in official quarters; a great battle was imminent.... The day is come, and its events are brought to light. Povera Francia! The emperor and 40,000 French prisoners, MacMahon grievously wounded, and a capitulation—it is horrible! My God! hast thou abandoned France? The public consternation cannot be described. It was said yesterday that, owing to a crypt whose existence was generally unknown, the women and children had been able to quit Strasbourg, so valiantly defended by General Uhrich. The enemy aims his murderous projectiles especially at the cathedral—that unequalled marvel in stone. Horrible! horrible! It seems as if hell had vomited innumerable legions of monsters upon France. There were 550,000 in this last three days’ battle. How will all this end? “Arise, O Lord! and deliver thy people, for the time to show mercy is come!”[52]

September 6.

The republic is proclaimed. Paris is in a state of delirium. Did not Joseph de Maistre say: “The French Revolution has been satanic; if the counter-revolution is not divine, it will be a nullity”? Read the Univers yesterday—so Christian, so right-thinking. Louis Veuillot calls Prussia the Sin of Europe. Will the republic save us? The enemy is at Soissons. We see now the result of twenty years of despotism.... “MacMahon is dead!” said a workman on the boulevards with a journal in his hand. At these words arose a general cry: “Honor to MacMahon!” This report is contradicted, and Mme. la Maréchale set out yesterday to join her husband. O this wound! What Frenchman would not give his life to heal it? No army left! Bazaine is still blockaded in Metz, bombarded by the Prussians. MacMahon had done wonders, but was unable to effect his junction with Bazaine. He was thrown back by the enemy upon Sedan, and a bridge not having been destroyed, notwithstanding his orders, he was surrounded by a network of the enemy; grievously wounded, he placed the command in the hands of General Wimpffen, who capitulated. MacMahon would never have done this—never! Without a miracle, France is lost. It seems as if one were suffering a bad dream in reading that, owing to our woods, the enemy slaughter us without mercy, whilst our blows fall on emptiness, and that on the fatal day which annihilated our army our artillery was for a quarter of an hour playing upon a regiment of French cuirassiers.... The Angelus is ringing. O Angelic Salutation! with what anguish Christian hearts yesterday repeated you, on this beginning of a new era of which no one can tell the form or the duration.

September 7.

A line from Adrien to reassure us all. Alas! who does not tremble at this hour? Kate, protect us! Some members of the Left have, themselves alone, made the republic and seized the reins of government. Can the enemies of God regenerate a people? “The Keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” Napoleon I. (Louis Veuillot, the valiant heart, tells us) used to say that the general who dared speak of capitulation ought to be shot; what, then, would be the deserts of him who surrenders? Poor France, humiliated, vanquished, deprived of her noblest children!

September 8.

On this festival of your nativity, O Our Lady of Victories! succor us. No courier from Paris, which must be invested. The Garde Nationale is being organized; the scheme is to oppose the whole of France to these Vandals of the nineteenth century—barbarous hordes who seem to be impelled by some irresistible force into the heart of our unhappy country. How French I feel myself in these days of sorrow! Dear Kate, is it true, as we believe, that all our saints of France, headed by St. Remi, Charlemagne, St. Louis, and Joan of Arc, are prostrate at the feet of the Eternal to obtain the pardon which would save us?

September 11.

In the frightful catastrophe of Sedan our soldiers were in want of munitions and had not eaten for four days.

I send daily a long bulletin of news to my devoted Margaret. Has not Marcella also something to fear? Poor Italy! Poor France! We can but have either a shameful peace or a pitiless war.... Laon is threatened with the fate of Strasbourg. Alas! these poor cities, besieged and heroic. “Country of my brethren and of my friends, may the words of God for thee be words of peace: 'May peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy towers!’ O my God! save thy servants who put their trust in thee!”[53]

Every man under arms, every woman at prayer! This decree makes me bless the republic. And René—where is he?

September 13.

Laon must have ceased to exist; the commander has had the citadel blown up. They say that Garibaldi, the insulter of Pius IX. and the king of vagabonds and bandits, is coming to succor France; is not this the depth of humiliation? “How long, O Lord! wilt thou delay to succor us? O God! be thou our judge, and defend our cause against this pitiless nation; deliver us from these men, who are full of injustice and deceit!”

The enemy is six leagues from Paris. M. Thiers has set out for Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London. The United States have offered their mediation. We are assured that the foreign powers desire peace, but what proofs do they give? Russia is preparing formidable armaments, doubtless finding the present moment opportune for taking possession of Constantinople. The excommunicated king is adding to his crimes in annexing to his own the last remaining States of the church.

We are told that the republican world boasts greatly of the circular of Jules Favre and the letter of Victor Hugo.

I do not know from whence there comes to us a copy of a revelation announcing that from the 20th to the 29th all will be over, and that France will be delivered by a stranger. O feast of St. Michael the Archangel! be to us a day of salvation. But, Lord, does France deserve it? Ah! she is no longer the eldest daughter of the church, since she consents to the odious spoliation of Italy, and since every sort of hatred is let loose against religion. Do they not say that at Lyons the Visitandines have been driven from their convent? We deserve every misfortune and disgrace. Louis Veuillot, calm in the midst of so many storms, gave yesterday a beautiful article, in which he predicted the near approach of the triumph of the church; and today, the splendid history of Judas Machabeus. Save us, O Lord! we who are thy people. “God gives to his church the flotsam of every wreck, as he gives her, sooner or later, the laurel of every triumph.”

It is said that Paris will be destroyed. “Unless the Lord keep the city, he that keepeth it watcheth in vain!”[54] Hope! hope! Prayer will save us!

I knew yesterday that Réne was alive. O Kate! pray for us.

September 17.

O surprise! O joy!—if I dared to say so.... Margaret here! Kind, dear, and perfect friend! she could not remain away from us during these troubles. Lord William and Emmanuel have come with her. What an exquisite proof of affection! How we have wept together! O dear Kate, dear flower transplanted to heaven! your native soil, how much we have spoken of you. How René will be touched at hearing of this arrival! My mother and sisters give a festive welcome to my belle Anglaise, who is English only in name, being as Catholic, as Irish, and as French as we are.

Communications are interrupted, or are on the point of being so. The line of Orleans is cut. The Paris Journal is here, however, with frightful accounts of the barbarity of the Prussians. Save us, my God; have pity on those who are fighting pro aris et focis!

Margaret has brought me a bit of the soil of Ireland, and some flowers gathered from our mother’s grave.

September 19.

What is happening to-day, twenty-four years after the Apparition of La Salette? We are melting away in prayers. My mother has obtained from the bishop the most liberal permissions for benedictions. Our good curé is dying ... of old age and grief. The love of their country is a robust plant among the Bretons.

Dear Kate, we speak of you with Margaret. I told her that I continue to write to you; she was touched at hearing it. How kind it is of her to have quitted her home to share our anguish and our dangers! The province will be invaded—that is certain. No news of René; but who does not feel courageous at this time? Ah! assuredly, in face of the extent of our disasters, selfish anxieties disappear, and the soul grows, in her prodigious faculty of suffering, to compassionate all the present miseries, all the crushing misfortunes, all the deaths. How long, O Lord! will thy hand be heavy upon us? O mysterious depths of the designs of God! O militant church! O venerated Pontiff, the purest glory of our age! O Rome, invaded like France! I have just read an admirable pastoral letter of Mgr. Freppel, the illustrious successor of Mgr. Angebault in the see of Angers. He sees a reason for hope in this community of sorrows between the mother and the eldest daughter. O Pontiff!—is not this title become a bitter derision? The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church, and we are surely not far distant from her signal triumph; but how many tears, it may be, and how many martyrdoms, before that hour! Italy, France, Ireland—the three countries of my heart, lands that are mingled in one in my enthusiasm and love, daughters of God, and the privileged ones of his heart—you cannot perish; God will fight for you, and we shall bless him for ever!

Kate, beloved sister, tell me that you hear me, that your soul touches mine. Be René’s guardian angel!

September 21.

Our life is strange. Beneath all it has a wonderful serenity, a confidence in God which defies everything; on the surface it is a sort of fever, passing from the wildest hope to the most complete discouragement. Gertrude has appointed us her aides-de-camp—Margaret and myself. There is much to do around us. Our Bretonnes have need to be consoled, and there are sick and dying. The good abbé multiplies himself with admirable self-forgetfulness; our pastor is dying, happy to be called away at the present crisis.

I have a letter from René—a kind, long, sweet letter, from which I cannot take away my eyes. He only speaks to me vaguely of the war, so as not to increase my alarm. Every ring of the bell makes us start; the gallop of a horse makes us run to the windows. My mother never quits her psalter and rosary; Mistress Annah faithfully keeps her company when we are not there; Mary and Ellen, with the other dear young ones in the house, are our sunshine. The courageous Margaret talks politics with Lucy, the abbé, and the doctor, organizes plans of defence, creates fortresses, and finally expels the enemy. Lord William was just now reading to us in the Paris Journal of the 18th details of deep interest relating to the affair of Sedan—“the Waterloo of the Second Empire, and the greatest disaster of modern times.”

September 25.

Jules Favre has made an appeal to William and Bismarck. France is very low. The result has been the affirmation of the exorbitant demands of the conquerors. The struggle is to be pushed to extremities. Regiments are to be formed of National Guards. Here none are left but old men. No official news. It is said that the enemy has been repulsed at Versailles, that Nantes is burnt, that headquarters are at Meaux; they said yesterday at Rheims: “O Clovis! why are you not there with your Franks?” The Prussians are burning Rouen. When, then, will the terrible work of these executioners of Heaven be ended? William wants Alsace and Lorraine, Metz, Strasbourg, Toul, Verdun, and Mont Valérien. Ah! we also, we shall say with the Bishop of Orleans that which was said by Louisa of Prussia—a magnanimous soul, to whom the life of her four sons was less dear than the honor of her country; a believing and valiant woman, who beheld so violent and devastating a storm pass over her kingdom that Prussia was on the point of being erased from the map of nations: “I believe in God; I do not believe in force. Justice alone is stable. God prunes the spoiled tree. We shall see better times, if only each day find us better and more prepared.” The son has not inherited the sentiments of the mother. It is said that it was Prince Albert who commanded the burning of Bazeilles; this fearful barbarity would suffice for his reprobation in the memory of men. “The Hebrew people saw Deborah and Judith arise in the day of its affliction; Gaul, St. Geneviève; and France of the middle ages, Joan of Arc.”[55] Who shall save modern France? Whose arm shall God raise up to avenge her? “But now thou hast cast us off, and put us to shame: and thou, O God! wilt not go out with our armies.... Arise, O Lord! Why sleepest thou?”[56]

Rome is invaded by the republican troops; they leave the Pope the castle of Sant’ Angelo and the Leonine city, with magnificent assurances of security. O the time of deliverance, the hour of salvation!—soon, doubtless, soon. The church cannot perish. Gentle Pontiff, Pius IX., Vicar of Christ and his representative, like him crucified in heart, given gall to drink, overwhelmed with insults, your powerless children join their supplications to your own, and God will arise, mighty and terrible, to confound your enemies—you who have loved justice and hated iniquity!

Letter from René, hastily written in a cottage. Our Blessed Lady protect his devotion! “Our help is in the name of the Lord!” O church of Jesus Christ! how happy are thy children in the midst of their distress. What ineffable consolations in thy sacred prayers! I live in the Psalms, I nourish my soul with them; every feeling of the heart is there so marvellously expressed, and in incomparable language.

September 27.

Louis Veuillot, the intrepid defender of the Catholic faith, a few weeks ago wrote as follows: “God will have pity on us. Justice will not exceed mercy. We shall not be scourged beyond the needs of our future well-being; we shall find in the cup of chastisement a healthful beverage. The love of their country raises hearts above vulgar vexations. They are willing to be ruined; they are willing to die. But these abject and senseless things mingled with our tragedies, these intoxicating songs when the earth is being watered with generous blood, these statesmen who ask for prayers and authorize blasphemy, these blasphemies beneath the falling thunderbolt, these assassins of the pavement and these orators in the tribune—all this revelation of the stupid crowd which will not be saved—it is these things which keep souls under the millstone, which suffocate and grind them down.” How well this great mind describes the deepest sufferings of all that is still Christian in this nation of crusaders and martyrs! The admirable demonstrations of the Bretons and Vendéans console one for the irreligion of the greater number. Why has not all Europe risen to defend in the Pope the cause of outraged sovereignty? The sacrilege of Victor Emanuel has met with no resistance.

“Be to us, Lord, a place of defence against the enemy!” We are on a volcano—the volcano of popular passions; if the hand of God does not arrest them, what will become of us? Confidence! confidence! “Infidel France is abased and humiliated, and is not yet willing to repent; eucharistic France will pray, will arise, and increase in greatness!”[57]

O beloved soul gone hence before me, and who art myself! offer to God our prayers.

October 2.

Toul has surrendered, after a splendid resistance worthy of a better fate. The 29th—the looked-for 29th, the feast of the glorious Protector of France—has brought us another sorrow more: the capitulation of Strasbourg! O dear and beautiful cathedral, which I loved so well! “There is nothing left but ruins,” writes one of Berthe’s cousins. Why does the Lord delay to help us? Will not our other fortresses be also forced to give themselves up into the enemy’s hands? What will become of France? William is at Versailles; he lay down, booted and spurred, in the bed of the great king who so imperiously dictated laws to all Europe. Who will redeem us from all our humiliations?

Margaret and Lord William have apprehensions which will only too soon, alas! be verified. La Vendée is rising at the call of Cathelineau and of Stofflet—two illustrious names. Ah! who will merit for us that we shall be saved, when the public papers lavish outrage and abuse against everything that is holiest in the world—against the church of God, his priests, his pontiff, the glorious Pius IX.? Who shall restrain thine arm, O Lord! when scarcely a voice is raised to recall to conquered France that thou art the Salvation of the nations?

October 7.

The gentle Bishop of Geneva used to say: “Alas! we shall soon be in eternity, and then shall we see of how small account were the affairs of this world, and how little it mattered whether they were accomplished or not.” Adrien sends us long details. My soul is in anguish. O Kate! pray for us. I went yesterday with Margaret to the cemetery; we stayed there long. A splendid moonlight illumined the golden crosses surmounting the marble columns beneath which our doves repose. A feeling of profound peace took possession of my soul in the midst of this striking contrast—the calm and tranquillity of this field of death with the tumult and agitation of actual life in our poor France.

October 8.

The journals give accounts, only too faithful in their details, of the battle of Sedan, the catastrophe of Laon and of Strasbourg. It is horrible—this destruction, these savage attacks! Of how many valiant defenders are we not deprived, while the enemy’s forces are going to strengthen the army now besieging Paris! William is at St. Germain; he desires to be present at the bombardment of the brilliant capital which gave him so splendid a reception three years ago. To the shame of humanity, Europe remains unmoved in presence of our misfortunes. America sends an insignificant number of volunteers. O divine Justice! wilt thou not avenge us? Who shall tell the story of this sanguinary epic? Who shall recount this unheard-of intermingling of shameful cowardice and prodigies of courage, of base treason and sublime devotion, of reverses and successes equally impossible? Who shall tell posterity that the most loyal and generous of nations, the people which has been eager in its succors to every misfortune, has found no defender in the day of its calamities? And who shall make known to France that her success is a consequence of her repentance, that there is something greater than victory, more decisive and more powerful than the most formidable engines of war—the protection of Him who holds in his hands the destinies of nations? Deus, Deus, quid reliquisti nos?

October 10.

Two melancholy, dark, and rainy days, such as always depress my soul. Garibaldi has arrived at Marseilles with a thousand volunteers—doubtless the scum of Italy. Mgr. de Saint-Brieuc summons all Bretons to the defence of their country. “No, France will not die! This cry from the heart of forty millions will pierce heaven and awaken all the echoes of the earth!” Paris has provisions for two months; but after? Surely all France will rise, and, as soon as she feels herself strong enough, she will meet these barbarians, to whom all has been successful hitherto! What bloodshed! What ruins! What opprobrium! Will not God raise up some hero from this soil which has given so much to the world? Anna Maria Taigi predicted that the Council would last eighteen months, that Pius IX. would die towards its close, and the gentle and venerated Pontiff would see the dawn of a new time. Does not this mean that soon the trials of the Papacy will cease? “The church cannot perish; but God has not made to nations the same promises of immortality.”

O Kate and Mad, my two idols! I think of you. To-morrow we go to Auray, all together; the abbé will say Mass for us there, if we can arrive before noon.

October 14.

I have prayed much, thought much, suffered much, hoped much, loved much, during these four days!

A prediction, said to be from Blois, assures us of definitive success. Alas! we were in need of saints; this republic of lawyers makes me afraid. My mother quoted to us yesterday an old prophecy from the works of Hugues de Saint-Cher, Cardinal-Dominican of the thirteenth century: “There will be four sorts of persecutions in the church of God: the first, tyrants against the martyrs; the second, heretics against the doctors; the third, lawyers against simple people; and, lastly, Antichrist against all.” We are in the third. There is no unity; there is impotence, and therefore nothing succeeds.

A terrible rumor which will only too soon be confirmed—Orleans is invaded. M. de Bismarck’s plan is to ruin France in detail, in order that it may for a long time be impossible to her to avenge herself. But vengeance belongs to God, and he will take it! The journals gave us so much hope! What a spectacle—two nations slaughtering each other, and a land which God created so fair covered with blood and ruins! Send us, O Lord! legions of angels; fight for the cause of civilization and right; save France, and may there no longer be amongst us a single soul which does not by its worship glorify thee!

The news from Metz is reassuring in that direction—Metz, which has been our ruin! The inhabitants are admirable in their patriotism, and engage to defend the city if Bazaine and the one hundred thousand men can make themselves an opening. Without a miracle, however, can the aspect of events undergo a change? Bitche continues to resist. O my France! must thou, like Ireland, also be crucified?

Evening.—An enigmatic despatch, in negro language, announces that the army of the Loire has been compelled to retire before superior forces, and that St. Quentin has repulsed fifteen thousand of the enemy. Garibaldi declares that fifteen thousand Italians will march at the first signal. The six thousand Pontifical Zouaves will form a splendid regiment, under the leadership of a hero, M. de Charette. Oh! how these words rend my soul: Garibaldi, Pontifical Zouaves. What an assemblage! May God pardon France! How will all this end? Phalsbourg holds out, and other towns; but to see the enemy always in imposing numbers, to know that everywhere they make crushing requisitions, that each day brings fresh mourning, is a deadly sorrow! What part of our soil will remain unpolluted by the passage of these emissaries of death?

Orleans is in the enemy’s power—Orleans, the key and the heart of France—Orleans, the Queen of the Loire, the faithful city, the town saved from Attila by St. Aignan, from the English by Joan of Arc! A great battle is imminent.

Our venerated pastor suffers no more. This morning, at three o’clock, one of our farmers, who, with Mistress Annah, was sitting up with him, came to let us know that he was sinking, and we reached him in time to receive his last blessing. O Kate! draw us also. The words of the divine Office for to-day are admirably suitable to our distress: “I am the Salvation of my people, saith the Lord; in whatsoever affliction they shall be, I will hear them when they shall call upon me, and I will be their God for ever.” “If I am in trouble, thou, O Lord! shalt preserve my life; thou shalt stretch forth thy hand against the fury of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me!”

October 20.

O my God! if it were declared that these avenging hordes are to carry fire and sword through the whole of France, if our sanctuaries and our relics protected us not, still would we hope in thee, whose love is greater than our misdeeds, and we would bless thee for ever.

No news from Rheims.

October 22.

Twenty thousand Prussians have invaded Chartres, the city of Mary, famous for its pilgrimage and for its splendid memories. Will they not defile its cathedral? Horror! The churches of Nancy are changed into stables. O my God! so many profanations, and still always triumph.

October 26.

Read the circular of M. Jules Favre to the French diplomatic agents. O statesman! your eyes, then, are not opened, and you perceive not that, chastised for our crimes, we cannot be saved but by the help of God.

They write to us from Orleans: it is lamentable! Poor, dear city! who shall restore it to us? O misguided France! what firm and Christian hand shall take thy helm and steer thee into port? At the beginning of this century, and up to the close of its first half, what noble characters, what ardent Catholics defended the cause of liberty! And now, alas! how this oracle of the Holy Scriptures makes me fear: “A kingdom is given over from one people to another, because of its injustice, violence, and crimes.”

Kate, what is said in heaven? O dearest sister, my other mother! protect René and pray for France.

October 30.

Bazaine has surrendered; 120,000 troops, 20,000 wounded, cannon, flags, and Metz, the strongest of our citadels, the heroic city—all is Prussian! It is, then, finished. It seemed as if all French hearts had there their hope—not the last, which can be only God. The circular of Gambetta begins by a sursum corda: “Lift up your hearts! lift up your souls!” It is well, but whither? You say not, “Up to God,” nor do you pronounce that saving name.

Ah! France has deserved this shame of being again vanquished, of seeing all her citadels fall one after another, until the day when, repentant and humbled, she will implore the divine aid. Schélestadt has also capitulated.... Gertrude is ill and keeps her room. The blade has worn out the scabbard, the body has been broken down by the soul. O my God! wilt thou take from me also this elder sister—this admirable saint, my model and consolation? “Weep for France, dear sister,” she said, “not for me. I have given all to God; I do not fear. I offer for my country my last sorrow—that of not seeing Adrien once more....”

This unexpected blow crushes me. Pray for us, Kate!

November 1.

“Heaven is opening. O Jesus! have pity upon France.” And thus she died.... It is, then, true! Henceforth I must seek her in heaven with you, dear Kate, and all our dear ones who have taken wing from hence.

What an example she leaves us! Not a complaint: she owned to me that she had long been suffering. What austerity of life! What renunciation of her own tastes! What love of poverty! “She was too near heaven to remain below,” my mother says. Margaret is very unwell, because of so many emotions. O this life and this death; these adieux, this generosity of heart, these last lines traced for Adrien, for her brothers! A few minutes before her departure she said to me: “You will come soon.”

I scarcely know where I am; my soul is in a chaos of sorrows, but the love of God prevails over all. I am writing this by her funeral couch. Three days ago she went out with us. She fatigued herself too unsparingly; she never shrank from trouble. Kate, welcome her and bless your sister! Gain strength for me, and, if I must die without once more seeing René, obtain that I may know how to say, Fiat!

Mourning in the family, mourning for the country—for everything, mourning!

November 7.

I feel ill.... Anxiety is killing me. O Kate! O Gertrude! remember us on high. The day before her death Gertrude said: “Prayers, prayers! Oh! the Lætatus of the angels must be so beautiful.... I hear it!...” Mary and Ellen at her request sang her an Irish melody on the love of one’s country. “Georgina, to pray, to suffer—this is everything!”

What words! And how well I understood her at that moment, when all was passing away from this valiant and strong soul who had fought the good fight! Poor Adrien!

Troops have been levied en masse, from twenty to forty years of age. The Lamentations of Jeremias apply to us in our calamities! Who shall number the widows and the orphans? May God protect us! The sadnesses of the present life complete my detachment from this world by discovering to me its nothingness. The details respecting Metz throw me into stupefaction. My mother has heroically borne the great trial; she herself closed the eyes, so bright, so beautiful, of her eldest daughter. She insists that Lord William shall take Margaret away, because the enemy is certain to come upon us also. “Well, then,” says my friend, “we will defend you!”

November 10.

The Univers is here, edited at Nantes. Yesterday it contained a magnificent page, vibrating with Catholic faith, addressed by Louis Veuillot to General Trochu. The illustrious convert of Rome has, then, quitted the country of his heart and is present at the agony of that Paris whose corruptions he has so energetically denounced. I have been glad (if one may use the word) to find, in this believing journal, an expression of the indignation of my soul against those who have dared to give to that gouty fetich, Garibaldi, the rank of a French general at the moment when Piedmont was consummating its sacrilegious attacks against Pius IX. There is fighting at Orleans. O Joan of Arc!

Kate dearest, we all suffer. What has become of all our hopes? No, they are not destroyed; they had heaven for their object.

November 13.

I dare not make a complete narrative of our disasters, and I know not how to speak of anything else. “Revolutionary France is no longer the France of Christ. She has kept the name, but repudiated the heart. O France, France! nation of so many centuries, of such men, and of so much glory, crouched beneath the boot of Flourens, before the sword of the Prussian.” These are the words of Louis Veuillot. Paris is wrought upon by rioters, the dregs of the Revolution. Bismarck is said to have uttered the pride-inflated words that “there is nothing but Prussia in the world: there is no more Europe!”

“Let us,” cries Louis Veuillot—“let us examine the inexorable logic which rolls us in the mire, and see by what hands it has been possible to lay prostrate a nation which is proud of having no more thought of God! O mockery! O derision! And this is France!”

We know nothing of the absent.... Uncertainty—the cross of crosses!

November 16.

Orleans is delivered. Cathelineau, the morning of his solemn entry, went with his Vendéans to hear a Mass of thanksgiving. In hoc Signo vinces. Marseilles and Lyons, the Queen of the Mediterranean and the city of Notre Dame de Fourvières, are agitated by violent intestine struggles. Pazienza! Speranza! Oh! what need has my soul of these two sources of strength to bear up beneath this hour of unutterable anguish! René and Adrien are wounded! “Remember, my daughter, the sacrifice is short and the crown eternal,” my poor mother says to me, wounded to the heart like myself. Where are they? The date is torn off the letter, which has been brought us by an unfortunate soldier with an amputated limb, who has faced a thousand dangers to come and die in his own part of the country. I wish to go—but whither? Kate, inspire me!

November 22.

My anxiety has brought on fever.... Yesterday was a great day in the religious history of France. Mgr. de la Tour d’Auvergne convoked the whole church of France to a solemn act of faith. At one and the same hour, in all the sanctuaries of this nation, bent beneath the strokes of the divine Justice, Mass was said to obtain pardon. O Lord! if only so many prayers and tears might obtain peace. “All for God and our country!” cried Cathelineau, before that altar[58] where joys so pure were granted me. “Let official France make her act of penitence!” says the Univers. Alas! it does not appear that this thought occurs to her. O these dates, these memories, my whole life in my remembrance! I examined myself this morning and had to acknowledge my own weakness. My God! wilt thou require of me this sacrifice? I would desire to submit, but my heart!... Dear and sweet friend, chosen for me by the best-beloved and most devoted of sisters, return, return! O fatal war! I comprehend the words of Rousseau: “The man who has lived longest is not he who can reckon up the greatest number of years, but he who has felt most what is life.”

There are presentiments.... My soul is crushed. Ah! these hours, these days which are passing by—what are they for France?

The Duke of Aosta, son of Victor Emanuel, is named King of Spain by the Cortes. Into what hands is Europe yet to fall? The diadem of Charles V. and of St. Ferdinand in the family of the excommunicated King of Italy; these two countries of noble memories thus fallen, and France defended by Garibaldi; the insulter of sanctity, the blasphemer of Jesus Christ, made a French general! O blindness, O impiety of a government which pretends to be a regenerator! And this, too, in the age in which we live, in the century of Pius IX. and of the Immaculate Conception!... Deluges of rain for weeks past. Our unfortunate youth of France decimated by misery and cold!

Wrote to Marcella and Lizzy—two lovely, beloved, and poetic souls.[59]

November 26.

The Lord gave him to me; the Lord hath taken him away! Thou hast willed it, my God; thou hast taken back this life which was so dear to me. I adore thy will!

November 29.

Is this dying life deserving of a single regret? And yet I weep! My God! thou pardonest these tears—thou who didst weep over us. Oh! if I had at least had his last look.

It is a week ago this evening since I knew of my misfortune. O my God! that unusual stir, those sinister noises, and the entrance of Raoul, Edouard, and Paul. Dead—both dead! I would see that dear face once again, to try and restore its warmth by my kisses!

December 1.

Kate, I can write no more.... A widow! Can you comprehend this word and the desolation which freezes my heart? All my soul was devoted to him, placed in him. Miserere mei, Deus! Friend so dear, so loving, so heroic, so kind, obtain for me that I may follow you to the home where separation is no more. O you who stood on Calvary, Our Blessed Lady! pray for us. Have pity upon my distress!

He is dead! The heart which loved me has ceased to beat! And if only France were saved, and my mourning might win her salvation!

And still I must live, move about, spend myself in attendance on the sick, when I feel as if the heavy stone which hides him from me were weighing down my soul. O the destruction wrought by death! Thus one single year has taken all from me!

Prayed for two hours yesterday by this newly-closed tomb. O Lord! I spoke to him, I understood him, I comprehended that thou requirest holy victims to disarm thy justice.

O France! which I loved so much.

December 25.

Margaret leaves us suddenly. Her father-in-law is dying. God be praised for having left her with us during these days of trouble!

I am still weak in the inferior part of my soul, feeling every hour an increase of bitterness and depression. “You will come soon!” This farewell of Gertrude’s resounds continually in my ears. Nevertheless, if the pain of a long life should be in store for me, if her words were symbolic only, if I must grow old, I pray the Author of all good to permit that the unending mourning of my heart may overflow in tenderness towards all who suffer, that I may wipe away or comfort tears—I, who henceforth can only live in tears.

Christmas, feast of gladness, of the birth of Jesus, and of love; the anniversary of Edith’s death!

January 1, 1871.

Spent this day in the church and cemetery. O René! how I hear you still. I seek you now in heaven. Pray for France, and also for me, who cannot accustom myself to widowhood.

O ye almost infinite delights enjoyed in the intimacy of that noble heart! can I think upon you and not die?

Dear René, dear Kate, it is before God that I weep; it is on these pages concealed from all that I write my regrets. Does God permit this, or is it cowardice?

January 4.

Edouard has this morning put René’s pocket-book into my hands. My name is on every page. Observed these words, which I have read a hundred times over: “If I die, comfort her, ye good angels who guided me to her!”... Oh! it is more than I can bear—emotion and regrets so deep.

January 6.

He is at rest. Eternal felicity of rest in God, thou art become his inheritance. I loved him so much, and, alas! I could not secure his happiness! Just now I opened my book of Hours at this Psalm: “Cantate Domino canticum novum, quia mirabilia fecit.” I seemed to obtain a glance into heaven, and this friend, so ardently and faithfully loved, was smiling upon me.... Rapid flashes of light, after which the darkness thickens and the loneliness grows more oppressive!

January 13.

May God console the mothers, the widows, and the orphans!

If I had time to think of self in this chaos of nameless events, I should feel myself unfortunate beyond all expression. O Lord! the happiness of loving thee, of possessing thee in heaven, is well worth some years of Calvary; and although mine appears to me at times so difficult to climb, thou knowest that it is no more for myself that I weep, but that the sufferings of René’s country alone fill my heart. My poor France, so glorious whilst she still served thee, wilt thou efface her for ever from the book of nations, or wilt thou restore her power? Fiat voluntas tua! Turn us to thee, O Christ! who didst die to save the world, and, for the sake of so many hearts that turn to thee, shorten our woes!

January 18.

Heard for the first time the complete account of his death.... My brothers are on the point of setting out again; they are of a race in which self-devotion is hereditary.

O René! how proud I am of you—dead on the field of honor, after receiving your God that morning; and dying in defence of France! Ah! I would fain be a Sister of Charity, to have a right to receive the last sigh of our courageous defenders.

Often had you said to me: “It seems to me that I should have strength to love God even to suffering martyrdom!” And the hour came when it would have been permitted you to remain quietly at home; but your country was in mourning, and you went forth, a soldier for right, a soldier of God! Ah! then I felt indeed something which broke within me....

Do you, on high, remember her who loved you better than herself? Do you call to mind those delightful days when heavenly love shed a ray from on high upon our love? Do you remember our conversations, in which the thought of eternity was always present? Ah! we both knew well that our happiness was not of this world.

Yesterday I dressed the wounds of an unhappy victim of this war, which posterity will call inexplicable. What a horrible wound! The man was a Vendéan and a Catholic. He saw tears in my eyes, and thanked me with a hearty and naïve simplicity. He regrets his wife, whom he wants to see. Poor woman!—or rather, happy woman; for she will see him!

January 25.

A letter from Karl, addressed to René. O my God!

The enemy is approaching; France is agonizing. René, Kate, Mad, pray for us!

February 2.

Miserere nostri, Domine!

I return to these pages on a day of cruel disappointment. Paris has capitulated! The Prussians occupy the forts; the army has been made prisoners of war. There is an armistice of twenty-two days. There were elections on the 8th for a constituency. How many sorrowful events have taken place!—the bombardment of Paris, the defeat of Chanzy at Mans, the civil discords.... One must despair, were it not that God overrules all, and that if he punishes he is ready to pardon. The question is whether France is to be or not to be!

Edouard writes. He hopes that the Prussians will not advance so far as to the sea. Margaret and Marcella—what do they think at this time, at this Gethsemani of France?

“O my God! I am as thou wert, falling prostrate from weakness, when another had to carry thy cross!”[60]

Si vous pouviez comprendre et le peu qu’est la vie,

Et de quelle douceur cette morte est suivie![61]

February 12.

Prayer and charity fill up our time. Alas! there is still room for regrets. Everything revives them; to-day it is a passage from Montaigne: “We were seeking one another, and our names were intermingled before we had made acquaintance. It was a festival when I saw him for the first time; we found each other all at once so bound together, so united, so well-known, so obliged, that nothing was so dear to each of us as the other. And when I ask myself whence comes this joy, this ease, this repose that I feel when I see him, it is because it is he and because it is I; this is all I can say.”

O René! it was thus that we loved, and thus our love will be eternal.

February 18.

The fatherland of our soul is God! Trial is not sent only as an expiation to purify us, but also to detach us from earth and raise us near to God. “Jubilate Domino, omnis terra; servite Domino in lætitia!” O my soul! do thou serve the Lord with gladness. Lift the veil; behind your troubles and sorrows God is there, who counts them all, and whose love will change them into an unknown weight of glory! Beati qui lugent! Heaven! heaven!

I was thinking this evening of the motto of Valentine of Milan: Plus ne m’est rien, Rien ne m’est plus[62]. Is this sufficiently Christian? From this world’s point of view, from the frivolities of life and of all that charms the senses, oh! nothing is anything to me. But one’s country, the church, the poor, one’s family!

O Jesus, who seest my tears! remember that thou hast said: “All that you shall ask the Father in my name, he will give you.” May thy adorable will be done! He who believes, hopes, and loves—has he the right to complain? Can the soul whom thou dost protect call herself abandoned? Will the heart that is rich in thy love feel despoiled and desolate? Draw me to loftier heights, O Christ, my King!

February 21.

Belfort has capitulated! Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem. Must we say with Dante: Lasciate ogni speranza? How empty and desolate earth appears to me! My God, show thyself; let thy power shine forth in our behalf! I will hope in thee against all hope. “Every soul is the vicar of Jesus Christ, to labor, by the sacrifice of himself, at the redemption of humanity. In the plan of this great work each one has a place marked out from eternity, which he is free to accept or to refuse.” René, Kate, Gertrude, you all understood this! O my God! have pity upon France. I offer myself as a holocaust to thee. I accept every sacrifice; I give myself up; take with me all who have in like manner devoted themselves: let not France undergo the fate of Ireland; let her not be crushed by Protestantism, but leave her her faith and love.

March 1.

Peace is declared, but at what a price!—five milliards, Alsace, and Metz; the occupation of Champagne until the payment of the indemnity, the entry into Paris of thirty thousand men on this very day. O the Alsatians! To think that henceforth they belong to the Vandals who have ruined their territory, made a desert everywhere, brought mourning into every home—what infinite grief! No! the Prussian will not be their master; the heart of Alsace is too French; the yoke of the enemy may weigh down bodies but not souls. We have here a friend of Berthe’s, a young wife and mother, who ever since this morning has been in the chapel, weeping in despair. Poor Alsace! Terrible alternative—the mother-country sacrificing her more unfortunate sons to purchase the others!... Where is Joan of Arc? Where are even the women of Carthage! Lord, save us!

MADAME DE T—— TO LADY MARGARET.

March 20, 1871.

God be with us!

Dear Lady Margaret, our so dear, beautiful, and perfect Georgina has departed from us for ever!

I cannot leave to any one else the sorrow of acquainting you with this fresh bereavement.... Shall I have strength for it? I feel as if my heart were enclosed in the tomb where my children rest.

A pernicious fever has carried from us this most lovable creature, who has been amongst us like an apparition from heaven. She is now reunited to him whom she so loved and mourned, and she who had “unlearnt happiness” is happy now! This thought is necessary to sustain those who remain. You know what she was to me—the most loving, devoted, and piously amiable of daughters; you know what she was to all—an adviser, a comforter, and a light. And all this in a few hours has vanished from us. Who shall console us for the loss of this angelic child, the very sight of whom was a consolation?

Dear friend, she thought of you; she murmured your name in her last prayer. God, the church, France, Ireland, and all those who loved her, by turns were on her lips; the voluntary victim of charity, she accepted death with gladness. You who were her sister, kind Lady Margaret, would that you had been with us at that time which was at once both sweet and cruel! Ah! tears are not permitted to me; the place of angels is in heaven.

Do not think of returning to us until peace is definitely established. Alas! only a few days since we were forming a project to go and take you by surprise. Henceforth I quit Brittany no more—my Campo Santo, as my beloved daughter called it.

Oh! how she must pray for our sorrows on high.

On the morning of the last day she twice repeated to me these beautiful words of the Père Lacordaire: “However hard may be the separations of this world, there always remains to us Him who is its author, who has given and who removes us, who never fails, in whom we shall all be one day reunited by the faith and charity which he has given us.”

And a few minutes before breathing the last sigh she said: “Mother, I asked that I might die for France; it was a sacrifice, because of leaving you. Now all regret has disappeared from my heart; I am going to see Mad, Gertrude, Kate, René—and God!”

May she call me soon also!

Dear and kind friend, I would comfort you, but I am powerless. Let us love and pray.

My remembrances to Lord William; kisses to Emmanuel, the treasure whom she so much loved, and to yourself, the expression of the maternal affection of my desolate heart.

COMTESSE DE T——.

Madame de T—— survived this last affliction only a few months, and the Campo Santo received yet another tomb. May these delineations of love so pure and Christian, and of resignation so sublime, benefit at least some souls! This is the editor’s sole aim.

The premature end of Lady Margaret has unfortunately only too soon facilitated the sorrowful task of the friend who has been desirous of revealing to loving hearts the private life of her dear Georgina, this poetic flower of Ireland, transplanted to the soil of this our France, which became the second country of her heart, and which she loved even to death.

PROSE AND POETRY OF ANCIENT MUSIC.

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils:

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.

—Merchant of Venice.

Music, in its most general sense, is the art of producing melodious sounds, and, from its power over the passions, it is called the sentimental art. In the mythology of Greece it was cultivated chiefly by the Muses, from whom the term music is derived; but, although dear to all of them, it was presided over by Euterpe, who is always represented with a flute in her hand. The great divinity of song and instrumental music, however, was Apollo, who is mentioned in the Iliad as delighting the immortal gods with the sweetness of his notes; for he was the inventor of the lyre and leader of the Pierian nine, whence he is called sometimes Citharœdus and sometimes Musagetes, in both which characters very fine statues of him have come down to us from antiquity. The worship of the Muses began early in Greece, and the favorite resort of these divinities of intellectual pleasure was the flowery border of the rills that murmured down the sides of Mount Parnassus, while their chaste grove and sacred fountain of Castalia was on that part of the Parnassan range called Helicon. Here their statues were seen and described by Pausanias, and afterwards removed by Constantine to his new capital on the Bosporus.

Pagan authors ascribed the origin of music to fanciful occurrences, or, at best, to chance and natural operations. Thus, according to some, it was a gift to man of this one or that of their national divinities; but, according to others, the babble of running waters, the warbling notes of birds, mountains that echoed, winds that sighed through the forest trees and

Fill the shade with a religious awe,—

in a word, the general song of nature inspired Apollo and the Muses, who were no more than shepherds of Arcadia, to please the world with music; for

The birds instructed man,

And taught him songs before his art began;

And while soft evening gales blew o’er the plains,

And shook the sounding reeds, they taught the swains;

And thus the pipe was framed and tuneful reed.

—Lucretius.

But Christian writers believe that Adam, the first man, being endowed by the Creator with every sort of knowledge, excelled in music as well as in the other arts and sciences. With his fall this knowledge was weakened, while in his descendants many things were lost and all things became obscured. That music has in some way a heavenly origin all are agreed—even the Hindoos, who say that its effects are produced in us by recalling to memory the airs of Paradise, which we heard in our state of pre-existence; even the Greeks, whose fables are founded on the corruption of primeval traditions, and whose invocation to music is:

O art divine! exalted blessing!

Each celestial charm expressing!

Kindest gift the gods bestow!

Sweetest good that mortals know!

But the writer in the English or, perhaps, in any other language who has most poetically stated the case of music, and given us a Christian view of it, is Newman, in the last of his Oxford University sermons. “Can it be,” he asks, “that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends, in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of angels, or the Magnificat of saints, or the living laws of divine Governance, or the divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man—and he, perhaps, not otherwise distinguished above his fellows—has the gift of eliciting them.”

The ancients urged in favor of music three principal benefits to mankind: its effects in softening the manners of men, thereby promoting civilization and raising a people out of the barbarous and savage state; its effects in exciting or repressing the passions; and its effects as a medicinal power to cure diseases. Thus Polybius ascribes to the cultivation of this art the refinement of the inhabitants of Arcadia, and to the absence of such a discipline the roughness which characterized the citizens of Cynæthæ; thus Homer places a musician near the person of Clytemnestra as a guard upon her chastity, and, until he was away, Ægistus, who then wronged her, had no power over her affections. The subduing influence of music was again tried with success many ages after by the Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay, who used to play upon guitars and flutes to attract the melody-loving Indians from their forest haunts towards the village communities which they had established on the banks of the Parana.[63] Lycurgus regulated the music of Sparta, and his laws were set to measure by the celebrated musician Terpander; while Plato not only attributed an instructive virtue to music, but maintained that a people’s music could not be interfered with without altering their form of government. This civilizing influence of music is beautifully illustrated by the old legend of the Greeks, that when the workmen toiled on the walls of Thebes, Amphion played so sweetly on a lyre borrowed from Mercury that the stones did move of themselves. This, of course, is an allegory, to signify that by his musical talents, poetical numbers, and the wisdom of his counsel Amphion prevailed with a rude people to submit to law, live in society, and raise a defence against their neighbors.

Since two things greatly contribute to the effects of music, its powers of imitation and of association, the ancients gave it a large measure of influence over the passions. Thus Plutarch relates that Terpander appeased a violent sedition among the Lacedæmonians by the aid of his lyre, and that Empedocles prevented a murder by the soothing sound of his flute; and the painter Theon, having brought one of his works, which represented a soldier attacking an enemy, to be exhibited on the public square, would allow the veil to be withdrawn only after his attendant musicians had wrought up with military airs the crowds that gathered before it. Hence Plato wrote that a warlike air inspires courage, because it imitates the sounds and accents of a brave man, and that a calm air produces tranquillity in the soul on the same principle; or, as Burke says, “The passions may be considerably operated upon, without presenting any image at all, by certain sounds adapted to that purpose, of which we have a sufficient proof in the acknowledged and powerful effects of instrumental music”; for it counterfeits by sound some quality or state of the mind. Thus, rage is loud, anger harsh, but love and pity are gentle; consequently, loud and clangorous music stirs up the stronger passions, while a smooth measure imitates the gentler emotions of the mind. The wonderful influence of martial music on the ardor of soldiers in battle has been remarked by many writers on military affairs, and opera-goers must confess the bad tendency of sensuous music. Shakspere knew it well when he wrote of the fellow

Who capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

The effects of music on the heads and hearts of men were so strongly perceived by Plato that he banished from his model republic the Lydian and Ionian modes, because they excited the lower instincts, but retained the severe Doric and Phrygian measures on account of their manliness and decency; and some of our best English poets have recorded their testimony to these same effects. We subjoin a few examples, taken almost at random:

And ever against eating cares.

Lap me in soft Lydian airs.

—Milton.

Music alone with sudden charms can bind

The wand’ring sense, and calm the troubled mind.

—Congreve.

Chiron with pleasing harp Achilles tamed,

And his rough manners with soft music framed.

—King.

Timotheus to his breathing flute and sounding lyre

Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.

—Dryden.

Now wild with fierce desire,

My breast is all on fire!

In soften’d raptures now I die!

Can empty sound such joys impart?

Can music thus transport the heart

With melting ecstasy?

—Cunningham.

Music! the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heav’n we have below.
Music can noble hints impart,
Engender fury, kindle love,
With unsuspected eloquence can move,
And manage all the man with secret art.

—Addison.

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung,
The Passions oft, to hear her spell,
Thronged around her magic cell,

Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting,

Possessed beyond the Muse’s painting:

By turns they felt the glowing mind

Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined.

—Collins.

Music the fiercest grief can charm,
And Fate’s severest rage disarm;
Music can soften pain to ease,
And make despair and madness please;
Our joys below it can improve,
And antedate the bliss above.

—Pope.

Association of ideas, which has so large a share in the operations of the human mind, often contributes much to the effects of music; for, as Shakspere says:

How many things by season seasoned are

To their right praise, and true perfection!

Thus, music that has been heard in an agreeable place or that was played by some one near and dear to us, or music that is connected with the trials and triumphs of our native land, will awaken sentiments of love or melancholy, or sympathy or ardor, on the principle of associated ideas. This is feelingly expressed in the 136th Psalm in the persons of the captive Hebrews, in whom the sound of music which they had listened to in happy days would have awakened too keen an anguish.[64] In more modern times we have had public illustrations of the same principle in those simple melodies called ranz des vaches, which are such favorites with the mountaineers of Switzerland, and are played upon a long trumpet or Alpine horn. The sound of these tunes, and the rude words set to them, which are expressive of scenes of pastoral life—the shingled cottage, the dashing waterfall, the bleating of sheep, the lowing of herds, and the tinkling cow-bells—sometimes recalled so vividly to the native in a foreign clime the memories of his own land as to produce a disease called nostalgia, that often showed itself among the Swiss soldiers in the Neapolitan service;[65] for

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds;

And as the mind is pitched, the ear is pleased

With melting airs, or martial, brisk, or grave;

Some chord in unison with what we hear

Is touched within us, and the heart replies.

—Cowper.

The belief of the ancients that music was auxiliary to medicine is attested by a great number of writers. Chiron the Centaur, who educated Achilles, was careful to unite instructions in the healing art to those which he gave on music. Plutarch tells us that Thales of Crete delivered the Spartans from a plague by the aid of his lyre; Athenæus quotes Theophrastus as authority that the Thebans cured epilepsy by the notes of a flute; Aulus Gellius says that music will rid a man of the gout; Xenocrates employed music in the cure of maniacs; while the judicious Galen gravely speaks of playing the flute over the suffering parts of the body; and the idea that music is the sovereign and only remedy for the bite of the tarantula still lingers in Southern Italy. The Tyrrhenes always hired a flute-player to perform while they flogged their slaves, to give them some relief under the lash; and there was usually an arch-musician on board of the triremes—in which the rowers’ strength and endurance were more severely taxed than in smaller vessels—not only to mark the time or cadence for each stroke of the oar, but principally to cheer the men by the sweetness of the melody; whence Quintilian takes occasion to remark that music is a gift of nature, to make us the more patiently to support labor and fatigue.[66]

Among the nations of antiquity Egypt was long thought to be the mother of ancient civilization; and the Egyptians were well acquainted with music, for representations of musical instruments have been discovered on some of their oldest monuments, such as obelisks and tombs. But they never popularized music, because they thought that it had the effect of making youth effeminate; yet Strabo says that their children were instructed in one, and only one, special kind of music, of which the government approved. Like every other profession, that of musician was hereditary. Egyptian music was originally grave and in solemn accord with the stiffness of the kindred arts, which were hampered by strict hieratic rules, and almost exclusively devoted to the service of religion. When the country fell under the sway of the Greeks, music became of a gayer and less moral sort, being as much or more employed at banquets and on other profane occasions as in the temples and beside the bier. The Ptolemies encouraged Greek music, and the musical contests introduced into Egypt by this race of splendid princes were all of Hellenic origin. Athenæus relates that at a grand Bacchic entertainment given by Ptolemy Philadelphus over six hundred musicians formed the orchestra. Musical talent was hereditary in the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the father of Cleopatra was surnamed Auletes, or the flute-player, from his excessive attachment to this instrument.

We have little knowledge of music as a science among the Hebrews, but there is abundant proof of its practice. They had music on their festival days, whether domestic, civil, or religious, and professional musicians were attached to the royal court; but the art was systematically studied in the schools of the prophets, and received its highest application in the Temple, where it entered largely into divine worship.

The music of the Greeks has engaged the attention of many learned men, but is so difficult a subject that no one understands it; and it is as easy to imagine how the Pyramids were raised as to conceive what Greek music was like.

Music enters largely into the mythology of Greece, and strange legends—some of which are pure myths, others the exaggeration of facts—have been made up about it. The Muses were extremely jealous of their musical talents, and whoever ventured to compete with them was punished. Thus the impudent Sirens or sea-nymphs lost their wings, and the lovely daughters of King Pierus were changed into birds.[67] Two of Apollo’s contests are famous for their mournful ending. One was with Marsyas, a ranger of the woods, who, having found the flute which Minerva threw away because it distorted her handsome features, rashly challenged the divine Apollo to a contest between this instrument and the lyre, the condition of which was that the victor might do what he wished with the vanquished. The Muses decided in favor of their leader, and the miserable mortal was tied to a tree and flayed alive. A statue of Marsyas, bound and suffering, was generally placed by the Greeks, and afterwards by the Romans also, in the vestibule of their halls of justice, as a warning not to go into litigation hastily, and, above all, not to dispute with the gods—i.e., bring religion into court.[68]

Another triumph of Apollo was over Pan, a dilettante of music and inventor of the reed-pipes, which he called syrinx after the beautiful Arcadian nymph whose adventure with her tuneful lover is well known from Ovid. Midas, King of Phrygia, was chosen umpire, and, deciding in favor of Pan, was disgraced by having his ears changed into those of a donkey. Poor Midas contrived for a time to conceal his mishap by wearing day and night a cap of a peculiar form;[69] but as no man is long a hero to his valet, his body-servant, while trimming his hair one day, pushed up the bonnet a little and discovered the deformity. The secret so embarrassed him that, fearing he might unwittingly divulge it, he dug a hole in the ground beside a meandering brook and whispered therein: “Midas has ass’s ears!” He then filled it up and thought himself secure against himself; but, alas! on the very spot a tell-tale reed grew up, which, as the breezes rocked it to and fro, murmured the fatal secret, “Midas has ass’s ears.” While this fable may signify one of the ways by which the ancients believed nature to have drawn man’s attention to instrumental music—for travellers tell us that in some parts of the world there are plants called vocal or singing reeds, which emit a sweet strain when moved by the wind—it may also be a myth to insinuate that music is a sort of language; and as such, says Metastasio, it has the advantage over poetry which a universal language would have over a particular one, for music can touch all hearts in every age and country, but poetry speaks only to the people of its own age and country. One of the Greek stories of sublimest significance, and which mysteriously enters into early Christian art under the discipline of the secret, is the Orphic legend. Orpheus, presented by Apollo with a lyre and instructed in its use by the Muses, was able to tame with his sweet notes the wild beasts that gathered around him, and to enchant even the trees and rocks of Olympus, which started from their places and followed the sounds that charmed them:

Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage

But music for the time doth change his nature,

as Shakspere remarks. That some animals are amenable to the influence of harmony is certain—hence the success of the Hindoos with their deadly cobras; and some recent botanists are of opinion that the growth of flowers, and especially roses, is stimulated by music. But whatever slight foundation of fact there may be in the wonders of the historical Orpheus, it fades into obscurity beside the noble conception of the mythical Orpheus, whose history seems based on a traditional knowledge of the happy state of man in Paradise when all things of earth were subject to him:

Till disproportioned Sin

Jarred against Nature’s clime, and with harsh din

Broke the fair music that all creatures made

To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed

In perfect diapason, whilst they stood

In first obedience, and their state of good.

—Milton.

Music is mentioned with a degree of rapture in more than fifty places of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Lacedæmonians had a flute blazoned on their standards, and the military airs composed by Tyrtæus continued to be played in the Spartan army until the end of the republic.

The Pythagoreans and Platonists not only supposed the soul of man to be a substance very like a disembodied musical instrument of some sort, but believed the universe itself and all its parts to be formed on the principles of harmony; hence their not altogether imaginary music of the spheres which enters into their systems of philosophy:

Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

—Merchant of Venice.

And this idea of a close connection between music and the heavenly bodies was still lingering in the minds of some philosophers as late as the eleventh century of our era, when Psellus the younger, treating of music and astronomy, describes the former as symmetry and proportion itself, which reminds one of Hegel’s profound and intelligible definition that “music is architecture in time”! Pythagoras especially is said to have regarded music as something celestial and profound, and to have had such an opinion of its powers over the human affections that he ordered his disciples to be waked every morning, and lulled to sleep at night, by the dulcet notes of the lyre or the flute.[70]

The love and cultivation of music formed so much a part of the discipline of the illustrious men who sprang from the school of Pythagoras that almost every one of them left behind him a treatise on the subject. Plato, in the seventh book of his work on laws, says that children in a well-ordered commonwealth should be instructed for three years in music, which reminds us of the commendable efforts made of late years in Great Britain and the United States to make music a necessary part of popular education, in which connection the late Cardinal Wiseman wrote an interesting letter to the Catholic Poor-School Committee of London in 1849 about “the importance of introducing music more effectually into our system of education.”

In the third book of Plato’s Republic music is treated of at considerable length with reference to education; “for whatever is concerned with the art of music ought somehow to terminate with the love of the beautiful.” But to seize the full meaning of this passage we must remember that, in the doctrine of the Academy, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are reciprocal terms, and consequently that music should elevate to the contemplation of the great Godhead—Goodness itself, Truth itself, Beauty itself.

Eloquence was thought by the ancients to be so intimately connected with music that the orators of Greece and Rome had a flute-player standing at a proper distance behind them while they spoke, who kept up an undertone of musical sound, now swelling as the speaker rose with his theme, now gently falling when, as in panegyrics on the dead or in pleadings for mercy, he sought the chords of sorrow or sympathy in the human heart. Musical contests of flutes, trumpets, and other instruments were among the attractions at the public games of Greece; and the profession of music was so highly honored, and often so remunerative, that many musicians lived in splendor. There was Dorion the flute-player, who lived like a Sybarite and was a frequent guest at the table of King Philip of Macedon; there was Ismenias of Thebes, who was sent on an embassy to Persia, and (like the late Duke of Brunswick) had a passion for collecting jewels which his enormous wealth enabled him to gratify to the utmost. He once reproved a smart agent for not having paid as much for a pearl as it was worth, saying that it belittled him in the jeweller’s eyes not to have given, and the gem in his own eyes not to have cost, its full value, and sent him back with the surplus money. The flute which he bought at Corinth for three talents (about $4,000) must have been encrusted with precious stones. Amœbeus, the harper, received an Attic talent (about $1,000) for every appearance on the stage. But although proficients in music were highly honored and rewarded, the mere makers of musical instruments enjoyed no greater esteem than did other artisans, and we know that the comic poets of the time often ridiculed the celebrated orator Isocrates because his father had been able to give him a liberal education with money made by manufacturing flutes. Not only men but women also publicly exhibited their musical accomplishments; they belonged, however, mostly, if not exclusively, to the class of Hetairai. Such was the famous Lamia, whose skill as a flute-player, hardly less than her personal charms, won the heart of King Demetrius.

Passing over to Italy, we can only mention the Sabines and Etruscans, who early cultivated music, and from whom the Romans derived their knowledge of the art; the former giving them their profane, and the latter their sacred, music. At a later period the genius of Greece banished her ruder rivals and monopolized the art in Rome. It was a general custom among people of rank, towards the end of the republic and under the empire, to keep a private band of musicians; but in the earlier days of Rome music, being almost exclusively devoted to religion, either in the temples or at burial rites, was under government control; hence it was forbidden in the Twelve Tables to have more than ten flute-players at funerals, and the Salii, who were priests of Mars, were obliged, in their annual procession through the city, to accompany their stately tread by a sort of music made by striking their rods of gold on the metal shields which they carried in the hand. The most important body of musicians at Rome, and the recognized officials of the art, were the tibicines, or pipers, who formed a college, and on one occasion brought the religious affairs of the city to a stand-still by seceding in a body, after some real or fancied grievance, to the neighboring town of Tibur (Tivoli).

The “ambubajarum collegia” of Horace, and the Syrian musicians satirized by Juvenal, were held in contempt by the Romans as not delighting the soul with exalted harmony, so much as exciting the instincts to sensual gratification.

THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU.

“We shall be happy to see you at Rathdangan Castle, sir,” said Sir Geoffry Didcote. “If—aw—you come down on Saturday and—aw—stop till Monday, we shall—aw—be pleased”; stroking his finely-shaven chin at each “aw.”

I accepted with a gratified alacrity. We had won the rubber trick by trick, and, although the honors were against us, I had somehow or other managed to establish a long suit commencing with the king, and had ended by lugging in all the poor relations, including a miserable deuce of diamonds, for which I contrived to secure as good a berth as that held by any member of its illustrious family. Flushed with victory, Sir Geoffry’s hospitality spread forth its arms and enfolded me within its embrace. This was a chance for a briefless barrister during the long vacation. Briefless! Why, I could not even command a nod from an attorney, much less that magic roll of paper whose cabalistic inscriptions are so readily deciphered by—the pocket. The Hall of the Four Courts was a most delightful club-room, where all the news of the day was freely discussed, from Mr. Justice Keogh’s latest witticism to the new street-ballad by Doctor Huttle; from Baron Dowse’s joke to Sergeant Armstrong’s wig. And as for Circuit, it was nothing more or less than a charming country excursion, where the wit and wine of the bar mess amply compensated for any little ennui the hours occupied in doing nothing during the day might have reasonably engendered. In vain I strutted across “The Hall” with a bagful of old French novels, endeavoring to appear as though absorbed in some pending case in which my dormant talent would be strained to the utmost limits of its capacity; in vain I caused myself to be called forth from the library as often as it pleased the porter to summon me for the sum of five shillings, with which I had retained his eminent services; in vain I buttonholed country friends. But why continue? The word “briefless” speaks for itself; and were it not for sundry remittances from a maiden aunt, my sole surviving relative, I should, bon gré mal gré, have been compelled to take the queen’s shilling or to seek employment from the Corporation of Dublin in the capacity of a street scavenger.

As yet I had made but little way in society. I could not talk Wagner or fall foul of Tennyson. I had not brass enough for a ballad or talent for a scena. Too nervous for anecdote, my modesty muffled me even in conversation. I was not a man’s man, nor yet a cavaliere servante. I did not hunt, fish, or shoot. In a word, I was somewhat of a dreary drug in Vanity Fair.

Why Sergeant Frizwig asked me to dinner I cannot determine; and why Sir Geoffry Didcote, after that excellent repast, took it into his head to invite me to Rathdangan Castle is a mystery unto this present hour.

The vulgar question of ways and means stared me in the face and almost out of countenance as I walked homewards. Rathdangan was distant from Dublin at least thirty-five miles, thirty of which could be traversed by rail. The cost of a conveyance from the station might or might not be a “crusher”; and then the tips to the retainers! Luckily, my aunt had forwarded a remittance of five pounds upon that very morning, sixty shillings of which still remained firm and true; and as she invariably impressed upon me, in addition to the necessity of obtaining briefs, the advisability of mixing in the best society only, I naturally calculated on a “tenner” upon receipt of the intelligence of my arrival at the Castle, inscribed upon the Didcote paper. My wardrobe was the next consideration, and this was of the scantiest description. The evening suit might pass muster in candlelight, but once turn a jet of gas upon it, and the whole fabric tumbled to pieces. The grease of countless dinners, the patches beneath the arms, the seams artfully blackened with ink, the frayed linings, would jointly and severally step into the witness-box and turn evidence against me. My shirts were singularly blue, and worn away from constant friction with the horny palms of the washerwoman, whilst the collars resembled those “sierras,” or saw-edged mountains, which the observant traveller recognizes upon entering the dominions of his most Catholic Majesty Alfonso the Twelfth of Spain. My walking-suit was presentable enough, consisting as it did of Thomastown frieze, and my boots, although machine-made, possessed the redeeming influence of novelty.

“I’ll risk it,” thought I. “The investment is a safe one, and the return will amply repay the outlay.” A new and unforeseen difficulty presented itself. The battered portmanteau which usually bore my “fixins,” whilst quite good enough for “the boots” of provincial hotels, was utterly unfit to be handled by the genteel retainers at Rathdangan Castle; and as nothing bespeaks a certain ton more than smart-looking luggage, I found myself under the necessity of investing in a new valise.

“There’s wan fit for Roosia, or Pinsylvania—no less,” exclaimed the proprietor of a description of open-air bazaar situated behind the Bank of Ireland, with whom I was in treaty for the desired article. “Its locks is as sthrong as Newgate, an’ ye might dhrop it from Nelson’s pillar an’ ye wudn’t shake a nail in it.”

This was a large black box strongly resembling a coffin, both in size and shape.

“Mebbe it’s a hair thrunk yer looking for? Here’s wan. There’s brass nails for ye! There’s hair! Begorra, there’s many a man in Merrion Square that hasn’t half as much.”

Informing him that I had no intention of emigrating just at that particular moment, and that I required a small, solid leather portmanteau, Mr. Flynn proved himself equal to the emergency.

“That’s solid enough, anyhow. Shure, ye’d think it was Roman cimint—sorra a less,” he cried, as he administered several resounding whacks to the article in question.

“What are you asking for this?” I demanded.

“What am I axin’ for it?” Here he fixed me with his eye, as the Ancient Mariner fixed the wedding-guest. “It’s worth thirty shillin’s.”

“Say twenty,” said I.

“I couldn’t if ye wor to make me a lord-mayor.”

“I cannot give more.”

“Well, here now: we’ll shplit the differ—say twinty-five.” And he spat upon what he elegantly termed “the heel of his fist.”

“Twenty,” said I.

“Begorra, yer a hard man! I suppose ye must have it.”

My preparations being now completed, five o’clock on the Saturday evening found me on the platform of the Amiens Street terminus.

“Hillo, Dawkins!” exclaimed Mr. Dudley Fribscombe, a brother barrister, whose father (in the bacon trade) allowed him five hundred a year. “Going as special, eh? A hundred guineas—you’re coining, by Jove!”

“No,” I replied with assumed nonchalance, “just running down to Rathdangan Castle to spend a few days with the Didcotes.” I never felt better pleased in my life. This fellow was always sneering at the poverty of his briefless brothers, and as his people happened to reside near Rathdangan, but were of course unvisited, my red-hot shot told with withering effect.

“Oh! indeed,” he muttered. “What an awful swell! Going second?”

“First,” was my sententious reply.

“Let us travel together.”

“All right.”

Now, my intention was to have taken a second-class ticket, but the tone of Fribscombe altered my mind. What a crisis in my destiny as I walked to the booking office! What a pivot in my fate!

Had I travelled second—but I will not anticipate.

“The smoking-carriage is full. Let’s get in here; I'll tip the guard to let nobody else pass,” said Fribscombe, carrying his idea into execution.

We ensconced ourselves snugly in the pet corners, and made a great display of luggage all over the compartment. My companion offered me a cigar, but I preferred my ebon meerschaum, bought of Hans Larsen himself at Lillehammer, and which I had colored with possibly as much delicate assiduity as Mr. Millais, R.A., bestows upon his delightful masterpieces.

We were about to “scratch,” as the last bell had rung, when the door was suddenly unlocked, thrown open, and a bundle of rugs bristling with umbrella-handles, a portmanteau, and a lady attired in the newest and presumably most correct thing in widow’s weeds were flung violently into the compartment. The whistle sounded, the door was banged to, and the train glided out of the station ere we could make any move in the direction of a change of seats.

“What an infernal sell!” muttered Fribscombe.

“Too bad!” I growled.

“That guard is a 'do.’ Half a crown thrown into the Liffy!”

“Would she stand it, Fribscombe?”

“Not she. If the dear departed smoked, it would remind her too forcibly of him; and if he didn’t smoke, she’d scream and call the guard.”

In the meantime the object of our solicitude had shaken out her draperies and snugly wrapped herself in a wolf-skin rug, the head and glass eyes of which reposed in her lap like the sporran of a Highlander. Her figure appeared to very little advantage in the heavy folds of her ribbed-silk, crape-laden cloak; nevertheless, it betrayed a youthful grace and symmetry. She kept her veil down, and from the posture she assumed—her head pressed back against the cushion—it became pretty evident that, if she were not en route to dreamland, she wished to indulge in a profound meditation.

“This train won’t stop till we get to Skerries,” said Fribscombe. “I think,” he added sotto voce, “that she is asleep, and a whiff or two of real Havana will not awaken her.”

“It’s much better to ask her consent, and I’ll do it,” I whispered.

She sat directly opposite to me, facing the engine. I leaned a little forward.

“I beg your pardon, madam; but may I ask if you have any objection to our smoking? If you have the slightest feeling on the subject, I beg to assure you that it will be no deprivation to us to wait until we reach Skerries.”

She raised her veil.

“I have no objection whatever,” she said in a low, sympathetic murmur. “I like the perfume of tobacco.” And, as if smitten by some sorrowful remembrance, she sighed and sank back, but did not lower her veil.

I mumbled some incoherent expression of thanks, scarcely knowing what I said; for my whole soul was focussed in my eyes as I gazed into one of the loveliest faces that I had ever beheld.

“You are not availing yourself of my permission, sir,” she observed, almost laughingly.

“'Pon my conscience! I forgot all about it,” was my reply.

Woman-like she felt the compliment, and woman-like she was grateful for it; she knew it to be genuine.

Somehow or other we drifted into conversation. There are some women who can trot a man’s ideas out for him, walk them gently up and down, canter, and, lastly, gallop them. Any little defects are concealed by the excellent hand which is over him; and were he to come to auction at that particular moment, he would be knocked down to the very highest bidder, be he ever so modest—namely, himself. This young girl—for she could scarcely have passed her teens—possessed this marvellous gift, and, as she deftly passed from subject to subject, I found myself, usually so dull, so reticent, so uninformed, discussing topic after topic—travel, music, the drama, literature, anything, everything—with a feverish facility, and offering decided opinions upon subjects even to approach which would have ordinarily been a matter of no little enterprise, doubt, and difficulty.

So deeply had I become absorbed that when Fribscombe, whose existence I had totally forgotten, suddenly awakening from a cosey slumber, shouted in a very excited tone: “I say, Dawkins, jump out, man! This is your station. We’re moving off,” I could scarcely realize the fact of its proximity, and that two hours had rolled by, compressed into so many minutes.

My first thought was to journey onwards with my fair vis-à-vis—I cared not whither; my second, that Fribscombe would laugh me to death at the “Hall.” With a sense of sorrow—I might almost say of agony—in my heart at the idea of parting from her, I seized upon my portmanteau, and just succeeded in alighting without accident as the train moved rapidly away.

I stood upon the platform like a person just aroused from a deep slumber. I was purposeless. The tide had receded, and the bleak barrenness of my shore life confronted me. The fair enchantress whose wand had conjured up a new order of being within me had departed.

“Ye’ll have for to come inside the station, sir. I’m goin’ for to lock the doore,” observed a porter, as he significantly pointed in the direction of the exit.

“Can I get a car over to Rathdangan Castle?”

“Sorra a wan, sir. Billy Heffernan dhrew two gintlemin over there that come be this thrain.”

“Will he return here?”

“Sorra a fear av him. Ketch him lavin’ a house where there’s such lashins as at the Castle! Ow! ow! sez the fox.”

“How am I to get across?” I asked in some trepidation.

“Shure, it’s only a nice little taste av a walk—nothin’ less.”

“How far is it?”

“Well, now, you might coax it into four mile, but, be the powers! it’ll fight hard for five.”

I could not refrain from laughing at this peculiar form of expression, although there was anything but mirth in my present position. To be late for dinner would be a high crime and misdemeanor, and nothing short of lèse majesté, even were I to accept the porter’s ultimatum and walk. I could scarcely reach the Castle in anything like time.

“Did they expect you, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Troth, thin, they might have sint a yoke for ye. They always does for the quollity.”

This was not complimentary, but, like many a speech of a similar nature, it contained a great deal of truth in it. Could Sir Geoffry have forgotten all about his invitation? It had been given hurriedly as the whist-table was breaking up. He had had his share of wine, if revoking twice might be taken as an index. Yes, the following morning had erased me from the tablets of his memory. What an ass to come all this way to be instructed by a common fellow in a corduroy suit. Served me right! I ought to have known better.

“What time does the next train go up to Dublin, my man?” I asked.

“What time?” he ejaculated.

“Yes, yes, what time?”

“In forty minits, if she’s not late; but she’s shure to be in time if I’m not here, bad cess to her!”

I sat down in the cheerless waiting-room, disgusted with Sir Geoffry Didcote, disgusted with myself, boiling with anger, and writhing with mortification, till the recollection of my fair travelling companion descended like oil upon the troubled waters of my mind, and the desire to discover who she might be became overwhelming. Fool that I was not to have gained even a solitary clue! She might be travelling to Belfast en route for Scotland, or she might have alighted at the next station. The last thought induced me to question the porter.

“Did you see a handsome lady in weeds in the train that I travelled by?” I asked.

“Is it a widdy woman ye mane?”

“Yes.”

“Young?”

“Yes—very.”

“Purty?”

“Beautiful!” I exclaimed.

Here he winked facetiously. “I seen her. Me an’ her is acquainted.”

“Who is she?” I eagerly asked.

“She’s the widdy av a dacent, sober man be the name av O’Hoolahan, that died av the horrors av dhrink.”

“Poor thing!” I muttered half-aloud.

“Poor? Begorra, it’s him that left her warm an’ snug, wud three av the elegantest childer.”

“Three children!” I interposed, somewhat disconcerted. The name O’Hoolahan was bad enough, but three little O’Hoolahans!

“She left this parcel wud me.”

“When?”

“A few minits ago, whin she got out.”

“Got out? Where!”

“Out av the third class, foreninst the doore there.”

Pshaw! We had been talking of the wrong woman, and somehow I felt intensely pleased to think that my fair incognita was not the relict of the defunct O’Hoolahan and the mother of three little O’Hoolahans.

“Whisht!” suddenly exclaimed my communicative friend. “I hear a horse’s feet. He’s tearin’ along like murther—a rale stepper”; then turning to me: “Yer not forgotten. It’s from Rathdangan. Yer sint for. It’s Highflier, an’ Jim Falvey’s dhrivin’ him.”

These surmises proved to be correct.

“I’ve to beg your pardon, sir, for being late,” said Falvey, touching his hat; “but we cast a shoe at Ballinacor, and I done my best to pull up the lost time. Any luggage, sir?”

“This portmanteau.”

“All right, sir. Will you be pleased to jump in? You’ll only get over at the first dinner bell, if you do that same.”

Having tipped the loquacious porter, I sprang into the tax-cart, and the next minute Highflier was dashing at a hand gallop on the road to Rathdangan.

Mr. Falvey informed me that there was the “hoigth” of company at the Castle; that every room was full; Lord Dundrum and Captain Buckdash had arrived by the morning train, and the Bishop of Ballinahoo and his lady had just entered the avenue as he was leaving it; the partridge were plenty, and a covey might be found within “a few perch” of the west wing; Master James (the Didcote heir) was expected with two of his brother officers of the King’s Dragoon Guards; Miss Patricia’s collar-bone was now as good as new, etc. We then talked horses, and he was still hammering away at the pedigree of Highflier when we reached the entrance gate. This was castellated and partly covered with ivy. A stout old lady unlocked the ponderous portals, and, as she admitted us, dropped a courtesy whilst she uttered the cheery words, “Yer welkim, sir.”

Why do people keep gloomy-looking servants, dismal phantoms who reply to your ring with a sigh, answer your query with a sob, and wait upon you with a groan? Their depression is infectious, and although you may, with a naturally lively constitution, baffle the disease for a time, sooner or later you are laid low by it.

According to a time-honored maxim of the road, we kept a trot for the avenue, and just as we whirled up to the grand entrance the sound of a gong reached us.

“Jump out, sir. You’ve only ten minutes; that’s the second bell. There’s some of them in the drawing-room already,” cried Falvey, as he flung my portmanteau to a solemn-looking domestic, who gazed at me as though he were engaged in a deep mental calculation as to the length of my coffin and the exact quantity of linen necessary for the formation of a shroud. Following this grim apparition across a low-ceiled, wainscoted hall, in which a billiard-table of the present contrasted strangely with oaken furniture of the sixteenth century, and up an old oak staircase decorated with battered corselets, deeply-dented morions, halberds, matchlocks, steel gloves, and broadswords, along a wainscoted passage as dark as Erebus, and up a spiral stone staircase the ascent of which took all the breath out of my body, I was finally deposited in a little stone chamber in one of the towers of the Castle.

“Your keys, please, sir,” demanded my janitor.

“Oh! never mind; thanks; I’ll get out my things myself.” I feared the penetrating gaze of this man. I shuddered as I thought of the frayed linings and the inked seams.

“Very good, sir,” uttered like a parting benediction; and with a bow which plainly said, “We shall never meet at this side of the grave again,” the dread apparition vanished. The old saying, “More haste, less speed,” never exemplified itself more unhappily than in my case. With the thoughts of the last gong ringing through my brain, I vainly endeavored to open my portmanteau. My keys had got mixed up, and, as they were nearly all of a size, I had to travel round the entire ring before I could manage to induce one to enter the keyhole. Then, when I came to turn it, it got blocked and wouldn’t move either backwards or forwards. I withdrew it, whistled it, probed it with my breast-pin, tugged and strained until my backbone ached again, but without effect. What was I to do? Break it open. But how? I possessed no implements. Perceiving a bronze figure poised upon one leg on the chimney-piece, I resolved upon utilizing the outstretched limb of the harlequin, and, having inserted it in the ring of the key, I finally, to my unspeakable delight, succeeded in detaching the bolt.

Throwing open the portmanteau, I plunged my hand into the corner where I had deposited my brushes, but found that they must have shifted during the journey. I tried the other corner, with similar success. I then probed and groped in the lower compartment. Here was a pretty go. I must have forgotten to pack them, although I could have sworn not only to their having been packed, but as to the precise spot in which I had deposited them. Mechanically I drew forth my linen and laid it on the bed, in order to mount my studs.

I was somewhat astonished to find that the breast was most elaborately adorned with floriated needlework.

Some mistake of the laundress. I detest worked shirt-fronts, which are only worn by cads and shoddy lords, so I picked out another. If number one was embroidered, number two was done in fresco, and, in addition to the vast tumuli of birds, beasts, fishes, and flowers, an edging of lace played a prominent part. What could this mean? Surely I put up my own time-honored linen myself, and here were bosom decorations fit for a fop of the year 1815. Hastily turning out the contents of the portmanteau upon the floor, in order to realize my own property, what were my sensations in discovering that this pile of snowy drapery did not contain one single article of male apparel!

The truth flashed across me now in all its appalling reality: Heavens and earth! I had taken the young widow’s portmanteau for my own.

I do not know what the exact sensation of fainting comes to, but this I do know: that if I did not faint, I went within a pip of it. A cold perspiration burst out all over me, and I felt as if I was on board the Dover and Calais boat and about to call the steward. How could I appear to the assembled company? With what ridicule would I be overwhelmed when the true state of the case came to light! And then what would she think? She would write me down an ass—a donkey unfit to be allowed to wander from a thistle-grove. Her key would open my leathern “conveniency,” and the ghastly condition of my wardrobe would be laid bare, whilst I had profaned the sanctity of—but it was too dreadful to contemplate. How could I meet her? How could I look into that beautiful face again? How was I to recover my wandering wardrobe? My whole stock of clothes, save those I wore, were now in the possession of another, whilst in exchange I had received a commodity of no value to me whatever. On the contrary, my prize was worse than valueless—it was contraband.

Bang-ang-ang-ang-oong-ang! went the gong.

Let it go! What were its sounds to me? If I were starving, I could not descend in my present costume.

“Sir Geoffry Didcote begs me to say, sir, that he waits on you in order to enter the dining-room,” mournfully announced the dismal servitor.

“Please say to Sir Geoffry that I don’t feel quite well—that I will go down by and by.”

“Thank you, sir.” This was uttered as if he wished to say: “I am glad that you are dying. I knew how it would be—you couldn’t deceive me.”

The man had scarcely time to deliver my message ere Sir Geoffry himself panted and puffed into my apartment.

“My dear sir—aw—I hope—aw—that you are not—aw—ill. It would—aw—grieve me very much”—here he availed himself of my mirror to adjust his spotless white choker—“if—aw—upon your—aw—first visit you—aw—became indisposed.”

Honesty, thought I, is the best policy, and it saves a lot of trouble; so I made a clean breast of it to the pompous baronet.

“How very unfortunate—aw—for the lady! We will dispense—aw—with ceremony under—aw—the peculiar, not to say delicate—aw—circumstances of the case, and Lady Didcote will—aw—receive you in your—aw—present attire. You can telegraph—aw—for reinforcements, which—aw—will arrive on—aw—Monday morning.”

I could not see the force of this. I might easily telegraph for reinforcements, but would they come? Secondly, as my visit was to terminate upon Monday, reinforcements were not necessary, unless they could be brought up at once. I begged to be excused from attending table; but this he would not listen to, and, as he informed me that I was keeping dinner waiting, there was nothing for it but to descend with him.

I have, when a boy, been lugged into the school-room to suffer condign punishment; at a later period I have been forced into the presence of a young lady of whom I was deeply enamored; I have had to march up to the pulpit in Trinity College dining-hall to repeat the long Latin grace amid the muffled gibes of my peers; I have been placed in positions where my bashfulness has been ruthlessly tortured and my retiring modesty tried by fire and water; but never did I experience the pangs of the rack until the full blaze of that drawing-room burst upon my vision. The apartment appeared to swim round, carrying with it the form of a hooked-nosed dowager in a turban, who screwed an eye-glass into the corner of a wicked old eye, to have a good stare at the strange figure her husband had introduced into her salon.

A confused murmur of many voices, in which “Who is he?” “What is he?” “Stole a portmanteau,” “Highway robber,” “Police” smote upon my ear, whilst a general craning of necks in my direction announced the curiosity which my appearance had naturally excited.

I am aware that I bowed to something in blue drapery surmounted by a head, that it placed the tips of its fingers on my arm, that I mechanically followed a crowd of people towards an aperture in the wall which proved to be a door, that I plunged downwards upon a chair, and that then I came slowly to my senses. Having gulped down three glasses of sherry in rapid succession, I found myself seated beside a gaunt young lady of about five-and-thirty, so covered with pearl powder that she was only partially visible to the naked eye. On my right hand sat a portly dowager, who viewed with some alarm my inroads upon the sherry, and she appeared so interested in my movements that I fully expected to receive a temperance tract before the evening was half over. There were about twenty at table, all stiff, solemn, and ceremonious.

“So you have been robbed?” snappishly remarked the young lady in blue.

“Oh! dear, no; merely an exchange of portmanteaus.”

“How stupid!”

Now, whether this applied to me or to the fact, I was not in the position to say, so I merely rejoined:

“Very stupid of me and for me.”

“How so?”

“Why, I was the offending party.” And I endeavored to make myself agreeable by narrating the circumstances exactly as they had occurred.

“And do you mean to say that you opened the lady’s trunk, sir?” demanded my companion with great asperity.

“In mistake, madam, I assure you.”

The waspish lady waited until a portion of the ice which she was engaged in despatching had cleared two very shaky-looking teeth bound in gold.

“There are some mistakes, sir, which no gentleman should make.”

This was quite enough for me. To endeavor to make terms with this foe were worse than folly, explanation weakness, and concession cowardice. She gained nothing, however, by her viciousness; whilst I remained upon the field and prepared to bivouac, surrounded by sturdy sentinels in the shape of port, claret, and Madeira.

“The—aw—guard insisted upon his taking the old lady’s—aw—portmanteau.” And Sir Geoffry was proceeding to retail his version of the story when Lord Dundrum gaily exclaimed:

“Oh! by Jove, we’d better put the witness into the box. Let us cross-examine the lawyer.”

“With all my heart,” said I; “the absurdity of the sensation will redeem itself by its novelty.”

My story flowed joyously along, and peal upon peal of laughter greeted me as I described my sensations upon discovering the strange garments.

“So—aw—the widow was—aw—young?”

“About eighteen, Sir Geoffry.”

“And pretty?” added his lordship.

I devoutly kissed my second finger and thumb, and flung them in the direction of the ceiling.

“I’ll lay five to two he never hears of his portmanteau,” lisped Captain Buckdash.

“Shall I be at liberty to hunt it up?” said Lord Dundrum.

“Certainly. Are you on?”

“In tens?” asked his lordship.

“Ponies, if you but limit the period to one week.”

“Done, Buckdash! I’ll book it.” And the peer, producing a pocket-book, entered the bet, the terms of which he read aloud, and which the gallant captain pronounced eminently satisfactory.

“I’m afraid, my lord, that you’ll lose your money,” I observed to Lord Dundrum as we ascended to the drawing-room.

“I’ll give you the same bet, and that I’ll get your portmanteau, without any interference of yours, in less than a week—say five days.”

“You know the lady?”

“No.”

“You suspect who she is?”

“I have no more idea of who she is, where she came from, or where she is going to, than the man in the moon. Will you evince your sincerity by betting now?”

“The fact is, my lord, I cannot afford to bet.”

“Quite right,” slapping me on the shoulder. “Never do. It’s a doosid bad, pleasant habit.”

“And might I venture to ask how you purpose proceeding towards winning your money?”

“I’ll tell you. I have just ordered round a trap. I’ll drive to Ballynamuckle Station and telegraph along the whole line. If she’s local or a county swell, we’ll have her name and address to-night. If, on the contrary, she is not known along the line, she will have gone on to Belfast. I’ll set the police to work there, and put advertisements in all the papers on Monday morning. If Tuesday tells me nothing, I’ll put the wires in motion north of Belfast, and on Wednesday we’ll have a touch at Scotland. I feel certain, however, that we’ll find her this side of Newry.” And his lordship retired for the purpose of equipping himself for the road.

This bet was a lucky chance for me. Not that I cared much whether my wardrobe ever turned up again or not, but I longed to discover the identity of my fair acquaintance. I would at least enjoy the satisfaction of learning her name, and gain some knowledge of her surroundings, and then—pshaw! bow over my restored baggage and utter Vale, Vale, Vale to my three-hour dream.

In the billiard-room the menkind were assembled for pool. By a series of ghastly flukes I managed to clear the table and divided every pool. Captain Buckdash muttered something in reference to Dawson Lane, and one young fellow, whose lives were sacrificed to my ruthless cue with startling rapidity, offered to back me against some formidable player in the Guards, laying the odds. For the second time in this eventful day did I feel myself fit for the front rank. Lord Dundrum lounged into the room about eleven o’clock. He indicated by a look that he wished to speak to me, and, under cover of “splitting a bottle,” exclaimed in a low tone:

“It’s all right.”

My heart gave a bound.

“The portmanteau is found.”

“Where?”

“At Nobberstown, the next station but one. She evidently discovered your mistake; for she tumbled it out. It’s coming on.”

“And where is she?”

“Oh! hang me if I know or care. My ponies are safe. You can look her up.”

“Did she leave no message, no directions?” I asked eagerly.

“Don’t know,” said his lordship, as he chalked the top of his cue preparatory to joining in the pool.

Lord Dundrum was correct in saying that I should take up the running now. It was my business to make restitution and to deliver the white elephant left on my hands to its rightful owner. This task should be undertaken at once. I scarcely closed my eyes all night, thinking of the modus operandi; and when I came down to breakfast next morning I had resolved upon nothing more definite than a searching cross-examination of the employés at Nobberstown Station.

“I’ll thank you for a check, Buckdash,” said Lord Dundrum, as the gallant warrior entered the breakfast-room.

“For what?” asked the captain.

“For Mr. Dawkins’ portmanteau.”

“Wait till you get it.”

“I have it here.” And as he spoke he lugged my valise from beneath the table, accompanied by a roar of laughter from all assembled.

“A capital joke,” grinned the captain.

“A capital joke, indeed! Hand over the coin.”

Captain Buckdash turned to me.

“Mr. Dawkins, is this your portmanteau?”

“It is indeed,” I replied.

“The one which you left in the railway carriage?”

“Yes.”

“I am quite satisfied, Lord Dundrum. You shall have a check after breakfast; in the meantime will you kindly inform us how you managed to lay hold of it?” And he cracked an egg with a violence that almost crushed in the china cup.

I searched for some note or mark by which to obtain a clue to her identity, but in vain; my leathern “conveniency” was as bald as when I purchased it behind the Bank of Ireland. No message had been forwarded, not a line of instruction. This course appeared singular, inasmuch as it was unlikely that she would make no effort to regain her property; and why lose this most legitimate opportunity? Had she no desire to place herself in communication with me? Ah! there was that in her glance which gave this thought the lie. Heigh-ho! I was in love up to my eyebrows and badly hit. I was obliged to come face to face with myself, to place my hand upon my heart, and to plead guilty. I thought of the elder Mr. Weller, and of his opinion respecting widows, and voted him vulgar. My preconceived ideas upon the subject of relicts underwent a total change, and now a bashful maiden seemed but an insipid nonentity. I longed to quit Rathdangan, and, excusing myself under the plea of an important professional engagement, started for Nobberstown at cockcrow.

This station consisted of simply a “porter and a platform,” one equally intelligent as the other, and of the two the platform was “the better man.”

“Sorra a know I know,” was the invariable reply to almost every query.

“Did the lady alight here?”

“Sorra a know I know.”

“Did she give you no message?”

“Sorra a know I know.”

“No card?”

“Sorra a wan.”

“Who handed you the portmanteau?”

“Sorra a know I know.”

A thought now flashed across my brain: Fribscombe! He was not the man to lose a chance of talking to a pretty woman. He would have told her who I was, and it was through him that she had communicated. How asinine not to have thought of this before!

Chartering a jarvey, I started across the country to the family mansion of the Fribscombes, accompanied by the two portmanteaus.

“I never opened my lips to her. She dried up after you left, and pulled down the shutters.” This gave me a pang of the keenest delight. “I got out at Killoughter, the next station, and she went on.”

On my return to Dublin I caused advertisements to be inserted in several of the leading Irish papers; I also tried the second column of the Times and the Glasgow Herald, but, alas! with no effect.

Six months had glided away, during which she made no sign. The portmanteau maintained possession of a corner of my solitary apartment, and the image of its whilome proprietor defiantly held more than one corner of my heart; indeed, I may as well candidly confess that it was strongly entrenched in all four.

The summer assizes were over, and the briefless ones flitted hither and thither for the long vacation: some to Switzerland, with Mont Blanc in the distance—very much in the distance—others the passes of the Tyrol, sunny Spain, byways in Brittany, or the Highlands of Scotland. Connemara found its true believers, and Killarney its pious pilgrims. As for myself, I was perforce compelled to substitute the Dodder for the Rhine, the Dublin mountains for the Alps, and Sackville Street for the Boulevard des Italiens. My aunt had contributed the ten-pound note upon which I had hung in fond anticipation towards the building of Father Donnelly’s new church at Shinanshone, and the letter which conveyed this intelligence concluded with the following: “I don’t see your name figuring in any of the trials, good, bad, or indifferent. It’s all Macdonogh and Armstrong. What are you about, at all at all? At this rate of going you’ll never see a silk gown, let alone the bench. You might as well be on the Hill of Howth as in the Four Courts, if you don’t stir yourself. Let me see you cheek by jowl with Macdonogh and Armstrong during the coming winter, or I’ll know the reason why, and make my financial arrangements accordingly.”

I was seated one lovely morning in autumn gazing gloomily into the street, which was as empty as my own exchequer. Dreamy visions of the golden glory of ripening corn, of blood-red poppies, of fern-shaded dells, of limpid pools and purple-clad mountains mocked my aching heart. I sighed the sigh of impecuniosity, and railed at the inconsistency of a fortune which gave little Bangs, who hadn’t one idea to rub against another, a thousand per annum, a vulgar cad like Hopkins a bagful of briefs, and which left me high and dry in a front garret in Eccles Street, without a red cent to come into collision with a battered sixpence in my somewhat cavernous pockets. Heigh-ho!

An outside car, driven at a frosty pace, smote upon the drowsy stillness of the street, and my gloom was somewhat speedily dispelled by the sight of my friend Tom Whiffler’s honest and beaming face, and his expressive and expansive signals while yet a considerable distance from the house. Tom is always full of money, full of health, and full of the most boisterous and explosive spirits.

“Aha! you old cat on the tiles,” he shouted, “come down from your coign of vantage. I was afraid you were out of town. Somebody said you were on Circuit.” And standing upon the foot-board of the car, he burst forth with—

“Hail to our barrister back from the Circuit!

Honor and wealth to the curls of his wig!

Long may he live o’er his forehead to jerk it,

Long at a witness look burly and big!”

“Come up, for gracious sake!” I cried, as I perceived heads peeping from behind the partly-closed shutters of an opposite house, inhabited by a genteel family, who wished their little world to imagine them in Italy, France, Spain—anywhere but in Dublin—during the dog-days.

In a few seconds Tom bounded into the apartment. “This is a slice of luck to get you, old man. Come, now, pack up your traps, and we’ll have four days in the County Wicklow. I shall have the car in any case, and our hotel bills will be mere bagatelles which we’ll square up at Tib’s Eve. Lend me a couple of shirts and things; you can bring the baggage—a change for two—and I’ll do the rest. We’ve twenty-five minutes to catch the train.”

Five minutes found Tom upon one side of the car, myself upon the other, and, calmly reposing in the well between us, the neat little portmanteau of the fair unknown. I was compelled to make use of it, as Whiffler had no “leathern conveniency,” and my travelling-valise had been lent to one of “ours,” and was possibly at that particular moment strapped upon the murderous mound of luggage which encumbers the groaning roof of the Alpine diligence, or snugly ensconced on the grape-strewn deck of a Rhine or a Moselle steamer. It gave me more than a pang to remove it from its well-known corner. A chord had been touched which set all my memories vibrating, and I handled it with as much care and anxiety as though it were a new-born infant or a rickety case containing rack-rent or nitro-glycerine.

A glorious moonlight found us driving through the Vale of Clara en route to Glendalough—the sad, stricken valley of the Seven Churches. The hills, quietly entranced, lay gazing upwards at the gentle moon, who enfolded them in her pellucid beams as with a soft, sheeny mantle of light. The Avonmore far, far down in the valley musically murmured while she glided onwards to join the Avonbeg, who joyously awaited her coming in the sweet Vale of Avoca. The honest watch-dog’s bark bayed up the valley, and the perfume-laden air in its holy calm was as sweet as an angel’s whisper.

After “a square meal” of rasher and eggs which would have put the most elaborate chef-d’œuvre of the cuisine out of count, we strutted forth from the hostelry in the direction of St. Kevin’s Bed, and heard the oft-repeated legend of poor Kathleen’s fate from the lips of a very ragged but very amusing guide, whose services we were desirous of engaging for the morrow.

“Troth, thin, but it’s me father’s son that’s sorry not to be wud yez; but shure”—and here he lowered his voice—“it’s in regard to me bein’ in a hobble that I’m out in the moonlight.”

“What scrape have you got yourself into?” asked Tom Whiffler. “Whiskey?”

“Musha, thin, it wasn’t a dhrop o’ sperrits that done it this offer.”

“A colleen?

“Sorra a fear av all the colleens from this to Wicklow Head.”

“Mistaking another man’s sheep for your own?” laughed Tom.

“If ye wor spaikin’ airnest I’d make ye sorry for them words,” said the man in an angry tone; but brightening up, he added: “Av yez wor guessin’ from this to Candlemas ye’d be out every offer. I got into thrubble be raison av a saint, an’ I’ll tell yez how: A lot av ignoraamusses av English comes here in the summer saison, an’ nothin’s too holy but they’ll make a joke on it; but the divvle will have his own wan av these days. Well, sir, last Monday I was engaged for to divart a cupple of English, as bowld as brass, an’ that vulgar that the very cows turned their tails to thim as we thravelled through the fields—sorra a lie in it. I done me best for to earn an honest shillin’, but, on my word, wan av thim, a stout lump av a man, gev me all soarts av impidince, an’ whin I come for to narrate about St. Kavin he up’s an’ insults the holy saint to me very face.

“'There never was no sich man,’ sez he.

“'There was, sir,’ sez I.

“'It’s all humbug,’ sez he; 'an’ as for Kathleen,’ sez he, 'she was no betther nor—'

'“Ye’d betther stop, sir,’ sez I, intherruptin’ him; 'for St. Kavin was a holy man, an’ never done nothin’ but what was good an’ saintly.’ Well, sir, he up’s an’ calls the blessed saint a bad name, so I hot him betune th’ eyes an’ rowled him on the grass, an’ I planted his comrade beside him. An’ now I’m the worst in the world below at the hotel for bating two blackguards that done nothin’ but insult me an’ me holy religion; an’ that’s why I can’t go wud yez to-morrow.”

It was far into the “wee sma’ hours” when we parted with Myles O’Byrne and gained sanctuary in the double-bedded room which had been told off to us. The pale and gentle Luna was surrendering her charge to the pink and rosy Aurora, and we sought our couches in beautiful budding daylight.

“Where’s your portmanteau, Dawkins?” asked Tom Whiffler. “I want to get at my things.”

To my utter dismay, the portmanteau was not in the apartment. To ring the bell at this unseemly hour was but to alarm the entire hotel; so, slipping off my shoes, I descended to the hall in the hope of discovering it in a heap of luggage which lay piled in graceful profusion near the entrance. My search was vain, and, with secret forebodings of another mischance in connection with this unhappy valise, I returned to the room and retired to bed.

“I seen it in yer hand, sir,” observed the waiter the next morning whom I interrogated about the missing article—“a thick lump of a solid leather portmantle. I can take the buke on it, if necessary, sir. Here’s the boots; mebbe he can tell us something. Jim, did ye see a thick lump av a solid leather portmantle lyin’ about?”

“I did,” replied the boots, who was a man of much physique and very few words.

“Ye did?”

“Yis.”

“Where is it, thin?”

“Where it ought to be.”

“Where’s that?”

“Wud th’ owner.”

“It was not left in my room,” I exclaimed.

“It was left in number five.”

“Shure, number five’s gone,” cried the waiter.

“It’s news yer tellin’ us,” observed the boots with a surly grin.

“An’ is the portmantle tuk be number five?”

“Yis.”

“Phew!” whistled the waiter. “Be the mortial the fat’s in the fire now, anyhow.”

Here was a situation! My misgivings realized. My portmanteau gone, perhaps never to return. How could I face the owner? I never gave up the hope of meeting her and of restoring the property.

“Who slept in number five?” I asked.

“Number five is two faymales.”

“When did they leave?”

“They left for Father Rooney’s first Mass beyant at Annamoe.”

“Where were they going to?”

“To Lake Dan and Luggelaw.”

I proceeded to hold a council of war—consisting of the landlord, the waiter, the boots, two or three stable-boys, and the surplus population of the village—when it was determined to send a boy on a fast-trotting pony in pursuit of the fugitive luggage.

I was two inches on a mild Havana after such a breakfast as the tourist alone can dispose of, when the waiter burst into the summer-house situated over the lake, whither we had repaired to enjoy the “witching weed.”

“The portmantle is safe, sir, an’ number five is here with it an’ wants for to see ye, sir.”

“Well, I do not want to see number five, waiter, so just say—”

“I dar’n’t say nothin’, sir; she slipped a half a crown into the heel of me fist an’ towld me to hurry you up,” burst in the waiter, now in a white perspiration.

“I’ll not stir till I finish this cigar, at all events, and there is a good hour’s pull in it yet.”

“Och! murther, an’ she’s in such a hurry—such a dainty little craythur; an’ it was so dacent of her for to journey back the road with it.”

This last thrust failed to pierce my armor. The waiter was conscientiously working out his half-crown.

“She’s quite convaynient in the coffee-room, sir. I’ll show ye a short cut across the bog.”

I listened and puffed, puffed and listened.

“I must get back, sir. May I tell her ye’ll be over in five minutes, sir?”

“Tell her anything you like, my friend, but out of this till I finish my cigar I’ll not stir.”

Why I acted in this manner I was at a loss to determine. My anxiety for the valise almost amounted to pain; and yet here was the cause for worry removed, and I would not even trouble myself to walk a few hundred yards to the hotel to thank the lady for returning with it, which, as a gentleman, I was bound to do at any cost as to personal discomfort.

“Some frouzy old maid,” suggested Whiffler.

“Probably; or a strong-minded female doing Wicklow on a geological survey,” I added.

When I got back to the hotel, which might have been an hour or so subsequently, I found my portmanteau safely deposited in my room.

“Where is this lady, until I—”

“She’s gone, sir,” interrupted the waiter in a reproachful tone, “but she towld me for to give you this bit av’ a note,” handing me a piece of paper folded cocked-hat fashion.

I opened it.

“I have two regrets,” it said—the geologist’s handwriting was exquisitely feminine—“one, that I was inadvertently the cause of inconvenience; and the other, that I was denied the opportunity of claiming the portmanteau, as I imagine that I recognize in it one which I lost about eight months ago during a railway journey to the north.”

I was literally stunned. I gazed from the letter to the now astonished waiter, and back from his vacant countenance to the three-cornered billet, which, alas! told so much and yet so little. It bore no name, no initial, no monogram, no clue.

“Describe this lady’s appearance!” I shouted, clutching the waiter by his greasy collar, and imparting to him no very delicate shake.

“I never seen her; her veil was foreninst her nose the whole time she was spakin’ to me. The boy that attindid her is gone to the fair at Knockatemple.”

“Who saw her?”

“Barrin’ the masther, dickins a wan; for Mary, the chambermaid, started this mornin’ for Fogarty’s, of Glinmaloure. She an’ the misthress had a few words in regard to—but here’s the masther.”

The burly host presented himself; he had not encountered my enslaver, for the bill had been paid by the other lady.

“The red wan,” interposed the waiter.

“Just so, Mick,” said his master approvingly, and turning to me: “They have gone on to Luggelaw, sir, and intend to sleep at Enniskerry to-night.”

I unbosomed myself to Tom Whiffler, who immediately entered into the affair con amore. “We’ll hunt them,” he said; “we must catch them at Latouche’s Cottage. There is no exit from Luggelaw except the one.”

The road from the Seven Churches to Luggelaw is exquisitely picturesque. Behind lies that lake whose gloomy shore skylark never warbles o’er, with Lugnacullagh frowning sternly over its gloomy waters, and the round tower standing like a grim sentinel ready to challenge the approach alike of friend and foe. In front is the little village of Lara, with Castle Kevin perched upon a ledge of rock like an aerie’s nest, and stretching away in the distance the silvern beech-woods of Annamoe, while to the left the purple-crowned crags of Slonaveena seem almost to topple into the placid bosom of Lough Dan. It was a lovely summer day—one of those days that recall past joys, and in which the present is but a voluptuous dream.

At Roundwood we gained intelligence of the objects of our pursuit. The car had passed through about half an hour previously; the ladies had stopped at the hotel while the horse was being baited, and had indulged in that inevitable cup of tea which is at once the dissipation and the solace of the sex. The road to the first gate at Luggelaw is an ascent of three miles, which must of necessity be traversed upon “shanks’ mare,” and it is a blisterer. Not a vestige of tree, and with scarcely as much pasture as will satisfy the cravings of a few stunted sheep, the sun smiles grimly upon the entire roadway and scorches the luckless traveller whom destiny leads to the little lodge perched on the summit of the mountain. We were not spared, and coats, waistcoats, and neckties were cast upon the car, while we retained our pocket-handkerchiefs to mop our glowing faces, which resembled two very full and exceedingly dissipated-looking rosy moons.

Puffing, panting, blowing, mopping, by one supreme effort we gained the table-land which crowns the ascent, and, plunging towards an adjacent thicket of pines, took tremendous headers into the middle of it, where we lay gasping like a pair of stranded fish.

“Blow me,” exclaimed Tom Whiffler, “if I’ll ever climb Luggelaw Hill widow-hunting in July again. I wish you and your portmanteau and widow at Timbuctoo!”

A low, musical laugh quite near us; a rustle of female garments—my heart gave one mighty throb; for right in front of us, not two yards distant, with her large, lustrous gray eyes bent searchingly upon me, stood the owner of the peripatetic portmanteau.

To spring to my feet, to apologize for our déshabille—the car was as yet half a mile down the hill—to mumble some horrible incoherencies, was the impulse and action of half a minute.

She seemed puzzled to know how to act, but her friend, the “red wan,” cut the Gordian knot of the present embarrassment by a fit of loud, hearty, ringing laughter, which, maelstrom-like, sucked us one after another into it, and whirled us into an ocean of mirth before we knew where we were exactly, or what it was all about. There are some contagious laughs in the world, and she of the ruby locks was the fortunate possessor of one.

Two things establish instantaneous and easy communication with strangers—with women a baby, with men a cigar. Throw in a laugh, and, if the situation be a comical one, the laugh beats infant and tobacco. In this case it proved a talisman, and a very few words found us at our ease while I unfolded my tale.

I was i’ the vein and told my story well.

“Why did you not send it after me?” she asked.

“I had no clue,” I replied.

“I flung my card to the porter at the station.”

“It must have gone down the line; for the only reply I could awake in that self-same porter was, 'Sorra a know I know.’” And I devoutly dwelt upon all the bitter anxiety the hopeless efforts at restoration had cost me, to all of which I found a deeply-interested listener.

Before the sun had set on Luggelaw’s deep-wooded vale I learned much that satisfied me as to the past, and a something—inferentially only—that caused the white wings of Hope to flutter against my heart. Lucy Donaldson had been married to Captain George Middlecomb, of the Sixth Dragoon Guards, if not against her will, at least under the pressure of being talked into it. Captain Middlecomb had died within a year of their marriage of delirium tremens.

Need I say that we travelled up to Dublin as a party; that I became a constant visitor at Mrs. Middlecomb’s beautiful residence—Arcachon Villa at Killiney; that—

I suppose I should not divulge it, but, as I have written so far, I may as well finish the chapter. After all, I won’t. Those who have been interested, however, in the portmanteau may be pleased to know that it is now the common property of Lucy and the writer.

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

I.
ST. DOROTHEA.

The little martyr-maid of Cæsarea—
I do not a more lovely legend know.
Said young Theophilus, mocking: “Dost thou go
To join thy Spouse? If more than fond idea,
Send me, I pray thee, pretty Dorothea,

Of flowers and fruits that in his garden grow!”

The maiden meekly bowed her head; and so

She passed to death along the Roman Via.

A blooming boy, with hair like odorous flame,

Out-dazed the sword that slew her; the next morn

A blooming boy to young Theophilus came,

With three fresh roses and three apples: scorn

Melted in bliss. By crown and palm! we claim

To guess that fragrance, and are less forlorn!

II.
ST. CECILIA.

Two visions of divine Cecilia,
Born of Italian art, possess my mind.
One in the marble, at her tomb enshrined,
Reveals her as in catacomb she lay.
The budding maiden in her chaste array—
Ah! closely let that awful necklace bind

Clipt flower to stem!—to that cold sleep declined,

Was in warm marriage-bed a bud alway.

Her heart’s dear love starved for a Mystic Spouse;

She was not chary of sweet music’s gift
I see the listening rapture of her brows:
I hear her organ yearn, exult, and lift
Humanity to God! The heavens arouse,

And storms and seraphs o’er the white keys drift.

III.
ST. AGNES.

I was God’s maid, less woman than a child;
And yet they threw me in the common stews
Naked as I was born, for men to use.

The dear Lord saved his vessel, though reviled,

From outrage of a look: the Mother smiled—
Over my hot shame all my hair shook loose;
And, lo! it swept my feet in lengths profuse,
A bower of blinding awe to ruffians wild!

My life’s green branch they lopped with cruel sword;

But He hath kissed my hurts, and they are well;

And, walking in the meads of asphodel,
I kiss the scarred feet of my gracious Lord:
I lead his lambkins by my lily bell,

Where the pomegranates shade the softest sward.

SHAKSPERE, FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW.[71]

This elegantly-printed volume, published in England, though by an American author, has for its subject four distinct lines of inquiry; two of these—the validity of a theory which originated in this country a few years ago, that Bacon, Lord Verulam, really wrote the plays known as Shakspere’s; and, secondly, the extent of Shakspere’s legal knowledge—though carried through the work, are subordinate to the other two—the anti-democratic tone of the dramatist and the fact that he was a Catholic. These are the real issues of the book. Mr. Wilkes holds that Shakspere should not exert the influence in this country that he does in England, and he arraigns him at the bar of American public opinion to answer the indictment that he is always a strenuous upholder of royal authority, an advocate of the privileges of the nobility, regarding them as far removed above the ignobile vulgus, for whom on all occasions the poet manifests the utmost contempt. That a work teeming with constant lessons of this character is no fit guide for Americans he makes the real argument of his book. The second count is apparently intended to be no less damaging. Shakspere was a Catholic, and as such should exercise no influence on a Protestant community. His influence in England for three hundred years has not apparently won that country back to Catholicity, and the United States are probably as safe. Still, it may serve for a new agitation to get up a cry: “No Shakspere in the public schools!”

That Mr. Wilkes considers it a danger is seen by the fact that he uses toward Catholics every vile nickname drawn from the slums by religious hate to degrade us in the eyes of our fellow-men. Yet surely a Shaksperean scholar should not need reminding that to rob one of his good name is worse than stealing his purse, oft-times as bad as taking his life. Not only this, but he more than once represents the Catholic Church as actuated by a hatred of intense fury against the Jews, as an earnest upholder of the unlawful claims of aristocracy, as an enemy of popular rights, and as an excuser of perjury. While thus under a strong anti-Catholic bias or prejudice—stronger even than he at all conceives—he has attempted to understand Catholic terms and usages, and to enter into that world which to Protestants seems so strange and inconceivable—the world of Catholic thought.

The question as to the religious convictions of Shakspere is not a new one. No Catholic has ever read the great dramatist without feeling that he was strangely lacking in the usual anti-Catholic element, even if he did not impress him as often Catholic in thought.

Catholic writers in English periodicals, such as the Rambler and others, had already claimed Shakspere as a Catholic. All evidence, extrinsic and intrinsic, seems to sustain the position. His family belonged to the gentry on the father’s and mother’s side, and on both sides had adhered to Catholicity after the change of religion in England. The will of his maternal grandfather, Robert Arden, who died in 1556, is distinctly Catholic: “I bequeath my soul to Almighty God, and to our Blessed Lady St. Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven.” Of his father there is still extant a Testament of the Soul—not, as Mr. Wilkes supposes, a form drawn up by some chaplain of the family, but that Testamentum Animæ Christianæ which, in Latin and the vernacular, has for centuries been found in Catholic devotional manuals, and the copying of which, as a kind of formal act, has been maintained in many families—certainly was in the family of the present writer down to the nineteenth century. Shakspere’s father, too, was fined for non-attendance at the established church. So far as the families of his parents were concerned, he was evidently Catholic, and must in childhood have been familiar with the thoughts and language of English Catholics. How far in mature age he retained the impressions of youth, or how faithful he may have been to the teachings of his religion, we have no means of judging. The lightness with which moral obligations lay on him, his career as a wild but gifted man, give little ground for supposing him to have practised the religion he may still have professed.

In his dramas Shakspere constantly uses Catholic terms, speaks of Catholic clergy, religious of both sexes, rites and ceremonies with respect, and in many cases turns his ridicule upon the new order of clergy in England. The Shaksperes and Ardens had both held office under the Tudor kings, and the dramatist shows the utmost zeal for royal power as against the Pope. To a Catholic, now, this gives his position at once. His life was not a regular one; and he could scarcely, in those days of persecution, have been a firm, consistent, practical Catholic, although he clung to the faith, never abjured it, and had no liking for any of the new forms. His Bible reading was in the Protestant versions of the day, not in the Rheims and Douay, of which no influence has ever been detected in his plays. That he died a good Catholic needs proof; but Mr. Wilkes’ ideas of the meaning of the term are vague, since he tells us that Henry VIII. died a good Catholic.

The fact that Shakspere makes his characters—most of whom are Catholics in time or country—speak as Catholics is really no proof of his own Catholicity, any more than Longfellow’s almost constant correctness in his use of Catholic terms and familiarity with Catholic thought is proof that he is a Catholic. The fact is, we admit, suspicious; for during centuries Protestant writers seem to have made it a point to display the most intense ignorance of Catholic terms, usages, rites, and ceremonies, and equally a point to insist on talking about what they vaunt their ignorance of. But, going back to Shakspere’s time, we must bear in mind that the new religion had not yet taken any hold on the people at large; that the only religious terms and expressions that conveyed any definite ideas to their minds were those of the old faith sanctioned by the usage of centuries, and that the terms introduced by the various classes of reformers were diverse, new, strange, and, to the people, a mere ridiculous jargon. The coinage of a new religious vocabulary took time and skill. It was no easy task to shape Bible translation so as to avoid old ideas and thoughts. This new jargon rose to be a language when the King James Bible was imposed on the people after the Restoration. Though long vaunted as a well of English undefiled, philologists now admit that it is the language of no period of English history, of no district of English soil; it was a hash made to meet the pressing want, with obsolete words, terms drawn from every county of England, and new-coined expressions, all forced into the service so as to supply the English people with a new vocabulary of religious thought.

To convey religious ideas in Shakspere’s time, the readiest words were those familiar to the people. The dramatist employs them with no regard to the country or time. The pagan Hamlet refers to the Blessed Sacrament, Extreme Unction, the Mass, and Office for the Dead; they talk of confession and beads in the Comedy of Errors; of indulgences in the Tempest, and even in Troilus and Cressida; of fasting days in Pericles and Coriolanus; and christening is spoken of in Titus Andronicus. The anachronisms were apparently not noticed in his time, nor taken into account.

The system had not been adopted of entirely ignoring Catholic terms; there were no others, and Shakspere used what he had. One word seems to be avoided. The Mass is introduced only like Moore’s “neat little Testament, just kept to swear by.” It occurs only in the form of an oath, except in one instance, to which Mr. Wilkes devotes a chapter. Juliet, going to her confessor, asks:

“Are you at leisure, holy father, now,

Or shall I come to you at evening Mass?”

Mr. Wilkes goes into a lengthened argument to show that it was the custom at that time in England to celebrate Mass at night. He says: “I have found many illustrations from Catholic reviews and other reliable authorities of the practices of the hedge-priests, as they were called, in times of Catholic persecution, whose business it was to go in the darkness of the evening to the houses of the faithful to celebrate a nocturnal Mass.” We should be much pleased to see any such authorities. He cites only an article in the Manhattan Monthly last year, where a writer speaks of priests in Ireland “who often at dead of night fled to the mountain cave, the wooded glen, and wild rath to celebrate Mass for the faithful”; but travelling by night is one thing, and saying Mass at night is another. Again, there were no priests in England answering to the Irish hedge-priests. The priests in England found shelter in the houses of Catholic gentry; they had not a mass of poor and oppressed faithful among whom they lived. But neither in Ireland nor in England is there a single example that the writer has ever found of a Mass said in what may be called the evening—that is, between sunset and midnight—much less of its being so frequent an occurrence as to make Shakspere refer to evening Mass as an ordinary matter. Dodd’s History of the Church, Challoner’s Missionary Priests, the works of Father Parsons, Campion, and other Catholic writers of the time, never allude to any single case where such a Mass was said. Nor is there in any liturgical work reference to any such custom ever having obtained in England.

Mr. Wilkes seems to feel that the theory is not very solid. He next refers to the custom in some parts of saying a Low Mass immediately after the Sunday High Mass. “Shakspere may have considered the last or one o’clock Mass an evening Mass.” The play itself makes this untenable. It was late in the afternoon when Juliet went to the friar. When she comes back the nurse says:

“See where she comes from shrift with merry look”—

not half as charmingly as Longfellow describes Evangeline as most beautiful

“When, after confession,

Homeward serenely she walks with God’s benediction upon her.”

Then, a few lines lower down, Lady Capulet, in the same scene, says:

“’Tis now near night.”

This fixes the time too clearly to allow that any reference is made to a Mass about mid-day. “Evening Mass” is simply nonsense; but the phrase has charmed later writers, and several poets introduce the expression, just as poets and prose writers have all copied the Protestant Bible misprint, “Strain at a gnat,” instead of “Strain out a gnat.”

But the word Mass here is against all Catholic custom and reason. Juliet wishes to go to confession. She politely asks her confessor whether he is at leisure or whether she shall come again at a later hour. Would any one, under the same circumstances, propose to come to confession to the priest when he was saying Mass? It would be just the time when he could not possibly hear confessions. If he expected to say Mass soon, he would hear her then, and neither he nor she would think of putting it off till he had begun his Mass. Shakspere critics have boggled and blundered over this without seeing this incongruity, which to a Catholic is as patent as the day. What, then, does it mean? Juliet can ask only whether he will hear her then or whether she shall come later. Now, if we consider Shakspere to have written:

“Are you at leisure, holy father, now,

Or shall I come to you as evening wanes?”

the whole thing is as natural, consistent, and usual to Catholic ideas as can be. Then there is no such absurdity as evening Mass, or going to confession to a priest who is saying Mass. The dense ignorance of later times on every Catholic matter will easily account for the neglect to correct the palpable error in the actual text.

The fact that, while Shakspere speaks of religion as the monastic state, religious, monks, nuns, convents, monasteries, beads, penance, month’s mind, dirge, requiem, purgatory, indulgences, relics, shrines, the housel (Eucharist), christening or baptism, aneling (anointing), the cross, altar, holy-water, he nowhere in any of his plays speaks of the Mass (except in the oath “By the Mass”), is a strong argument against its use here. Convents and monasteries were abolished; relics and shrines were gone; no dirges or requiems resounded in the old church walls; allusions to them were simply allusions to something deemed past and gone; but there were nearly a thousand Mass-priests in England—men who carried their lives in their hands, over whom the severest edicts of the law were hanging like the sword of Damocles. To talk of the Mass as a service with respect was verging on high treason. Having avoided it everywhere else, he would scarcely introduce it here absurdly—no less absurdly to him than to us.

At that time, though the government was anti-Catholic, the state church was a mere matter of office. There was little zeal in its members—little more than conformity to law. The Puritans were active and zealous in spreading their doctrines; but the people were to a great extent still Catholic, and, with many nobles and gentlemen as leaders, and a greater number of priests than during the next two centuries, formed a power which was finally crushed by the Civil War. With this body Shakspere sympathized. He was not of the stuff to make a martyr. Ben Jonson and Massinger were, we know, Catholics, but not a single act of Shakspere’s is recorded that stamps him as a Catholic. He was not fined as a recusant, had no intercourse with known Catholics, in all arrests under the penal laws there is no allusion to him, even as using his undoubted influence with the great to shield some poor victim. With the mass of the people, at court and not at court, he ridiculed the new Gospellers, as we do Millerites or any other oddities. Against royal supremacy or the religion established by law, the Common Prayer, or the bishops who had been intruded into the old Catholic sees, Shakspere says nothing. His ridicule is never launched at them. His wit is turned, as was that of the court circle, at the Puritan element. The state church was respectable, but lacked earnestness, piety, and zeal: it was simply a state affair. Those whose minds and imaginations tended to effusive piety found themselves repulsed. Gradually they camped apart and formed new organizations. In Shakspere’s time the government and the government church laughed at them, when they should have used them to build up the Church of England. Just so in the following century they repulsed Wesley. Shakspere takes not a Catholic but the court-prelatic side; and there were no prophets on that side to see that James’ son was to die on the block and the Church of England be abolished by these very Puritans. That he had any direct idea of attacking Protestantism as a system, or making his dramas—with their coarse and often impure speech, such as then found favor with Elizabeth and her court—an arm against the Reformation, is absurd, and Mr. Wilkes, in going through play after play to note every praise of convents or religious practices as done with a direct view to elevate the Catholic Church, is extravagant. We have but to remember that Protestantism had then no institutions, no religious rites or practices, nothing absolutely for a poet or dramatist to employ as illustrations. Protestant poets and artists feel the poverty to this day, and in despair turn from cold, set formalism to Catholic themes, where poetry finds so many a subject.

Our American critic has endeavored to follow out Catholic thoughts, but not always successfully. Thus, in Richard III. Elizabeth addressing her murdered children:

“If yet your gentle souls fly in the air,”

and Buckingham:

“If that your moody discontented souls

Do through the clouds behold this present hour,”

are gravely put down as evidences of Shakspere’s recognition of the doctrine of purgatory, as though every believer in ghosts must be a believer in purgatory. There are some comical remarks about Shakspere’s familiarity with “the intricacies of the Roman Catholic faith,” because in Henry VI. we find:

“Although by sight his sin be multiplied,”

when surely the Scriptural injunction to pluck out an eye that leads one to sin might explain it without his getting tangled in intricacies. His knowledge of the marriage service also seems peculiar; the rituals we know are hardly the origin of Shakspere’s marriage form.

Mr. Wilkes is evidently led away by his theory in his forced Catholic interpretation of many passages of the dramatist; and his desire to show that the whole series of dramas was a device of the Catholic Church to attack Protestantism in England induces him to strain much to support his view, and often to jump at unwarranted conclusions, as in making Hartley, in the strange Girachy case, to have been a priest. A man might be hanged as a Catholic priest—as Ury was a century ago within sight of the spot where Mr. Wilkes’ office now stands—and yet not have been even a Catholic. There is no Catholic record of priest or layman suffering in connection with this affair.

Hence, while we admit Mr. Wilkes’ diligence and ability in studying Shakspere, we must regret that his judgment, like that of too many, has been warped by the old anti-Catholic feeling, to the extent of giving the plays a character which neither friend nor foe of Catholicity at the time dreamed of ascribing to them.

In treating the question of Shakspere’s legal knowledge, he is free from bias, and hence easily perceives and often exposes the exaggeration which induces learned men of the law to interpret much that any attendant at courts, whether as witness or juror, might easily acquire as proof of serious legal study. The length to which the legal argument has been pushed has led to similar claims by other professions; but a young man of such Catholic stock as Shakspere undoubtedly was could scarcely have attempted to obtain admission to the bar in those days.

Certainly, as Mr. Wilkes well maintains, the amount of legal knowledge and the use of legal terms manifested in the plays are not of the character that we should expect from one who had held such eminent legal and judicial positions as Lord Bacon. Nor is this, as he shows, the only difficulty. The style of the dramas and that of Bacon’s acknowledged writings are utterly different; the conception of thoughts and their clothing in language are both distinct. The ear attuned to Shakspere finds in Bacon a measure, an adaptation of words, a symmetry of his own, utterly at variance with the dramatist. Wilkes’ euphonic test has great weight; and he well and aptly cites Bacon to show that the chancellor made style a test of disputed authorship. If the Baconian theory is but “a bubble which has never floated among the public with any amount of success,” it has doubtless found some advocates, and Mr. Wilkes has strengthened the arguments against it.

His argument against Shakspere as one who worships a lord and despises the middle and lower classes has but the one fault: that it takes our modern American theories as the test—our theories, and not our practice; for after all personal liberty has, in a certain sense, steadily declined in America during the last century, and many of the rights possessed by individuals in Shakspere’s time, and enjoyed by our ancestors down to the Revolution, have been swept away in the name of liberty, while general and local taxation has reached a point that often amounts practically to confiscation of all revenue, and sometimes of the whole estate. In point of fact, the lower classes among us are more oppressed in person and property by official power, and less able to obtain legal redress, than they were in England in Shakspere’s time. The distinction of rank was then as absolute almost as that of the Hindoo castes, and the contemptuous style of the day in which the aristocratic portion treated their inferiors was caught up too readily by Shakspere. Mr. Wilkes develops this element steadily through the work, and makes it, as we have seen, the basis of one of his heaviest charges against the dramatist. He treats the point skilfully, and the subject affords a fine scope for discussion. For our own part, we think that he carries his theory too far, and that Shakspere may find an advocate who will relieve him from much of the obloquy and secure his claim to respect in America.

Shakspere literature is now a field so vast, and has won contributions from so many able minds and eloquent pens, that it requires some courage to produce a new work on the topic at large; yet Mr. Wilkes has certainly produced a volume that will take a prominent place among the Shaksperiana. It gives utterance to many new views; the whole treatment, being thoroughly American, is fresh and free from much of the conventional bias that is almost inevitable in England; while solid German learning, by its very seriousness and profundity, seems often to miss the point and finesse of the dramatist.

The Catholic part is so prominent that we could not but treat it plainly and frankly, addressing as we do more exclusively a circle of Catholic readers. We do so with no wish to be merely censorious, and with our recognition of the author’s evidently careful study and desire to treat the question fairly.

“He presents the volume,” he avows, “rather as a series of inquiries than as dogmatic doctrine, and strives,” he says, “to support them only by such an amount of controversy as is legitimately due from one who invites the public to a new discussion.”

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Essays and Reviews By Rt. Rev. J. L. Spalding, D.D. 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 355. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

The author of these essays has been recently raised to the dignity of the episcopate and appointed to the newly-created see of Peoria, Ill. His name and fame as an author, preacher, and orator are already widely known in this country. His Life of Archbishop Spalding, his illustrious uncle, will remain one of the landmarks of Catholic history and biography in the United States. By this important and valuable work the name of the learned and distinguished author is at present best known outside of the immediate circle with whom friendship and the round of daily life connect him. He has done, however, much more than this. He has used his great gifts incessantly and in whatever way they could prove of service to the cause which every word he utters and every line he writes proclaim he has alone at heart—the growth and strengthening of Christ’s church, the defence of Catholic faith and doctrine, and the spread of Christ’s kingdom on earth. With this view he has even gone down to that lowly, much neglected, yet most important field of editing a series of Catholic school-books—that issued by the Catholic Publication Society.

He has been a constant and most valued contributor to the pages of this magazine, and a selection of his articles—which, had he chosen, might have been much larger—goes to form the present volume of Essays and Reviews. As they come before us now in book-form we are glad to have this opportunity of saying publicly what we have always felt, not only in regard to these but also all other contributions from the same pen: that they are of the very best kind of that peculiarly modern, peculiarly favorite, and peculiarly difficult form of literature—the magazine article. Dr. Brownson used to say that there were not half a dozen men in this country who could write a really good review article. Whether that be so or not, we are sure that the veteran reviewer would not have excluded these essays from his category. And what we here state regarding them is only an echo of the general opinion, so far as it reaches us through the medium of the public press and the private verdict of excellent judges. The style is fascinating, glowing, brilliant. There are here and there passages of extreme beauty and eloquence. There is nothing like mere verbiage or redundance. There is a man behind it all—a man of knowledge, of wide yet careful culture, writing in dead earnest, observing the march of events while the history of the past is ever present to him, with power and courage to say what he means in a manner that all will understand. Not one of these articles fell dead. The leading one, “The Catholic Church in the United States, 1776-1876,” excited universal interest and attention not alone in this country but abroad, and a distinguished writer in the Correspondant made it the chief text of an important article on the United States. No history or historical sketch that we have seen gives so complete and profound a view of the history, the trials, and struggles of the Catholic Church in this country within the century as that article. The other essays are of a piece with it. Their very titles speak their timeliness: “The Persecution of the Church in the German Empire,” “Prussia and the Church” (three essays), “German Journalism,” etc. Perhaps the most valuable of all, however, are the three essays on the “Comparative Influence of Catholicism and Protestantism on National Prosperity,” for which M. de Laveleye’s well-known pamphlet furnished a text. They are eminently characteristic of the writer. He faces everything, shirks nothing. He takes up the subjects of “Wealth,” “Education,” and “Morality”—just the very points on which Protestant writers are in the habit of claiming superiority for Protestant over Catholic nations—and how he treats them we leave to the reader’s enjoyment.

We are often asked the kind of article needed for The Catholic World. We can recommend no better text-book to such applicants than this volume of Essays and Reviews; nor can we recommend anything fresher, better, or more interesting to Catholics generally who are anxious to defend their faith on points where it is often believed to be most assailable.

Magister Choralis: a Theoretical and Practical Manual of Gregorian Chant for the use of the clergy, seminarists, organists, choir-masters, choristers, etc. By Rev. Francis Xavier Haberl, cathedral choir-master, Ratisbon. Translated and enlarged (from the fourth German edition) by Rev. N. Donnelly, Cathedral Church of the Immaculate Conception, Dublin. Ratisbon, New York, and Cincinnati: Frederick Pustet.

This excellent and most timely work is one we have long desired to see. Many pastors of churches and their organists have been willing to do something towards the introduction of the holy chant in the divine offices, but the means of instruction have been almost wholly wanting. Very few organists and choir-directors in the United States have made any study whatever of the chant, and the greater number are not able to read even its notation. We have felt and lamented the difficulties in the way of those who, convinced of the claims of Gregorian chant, and wearied and disgusted with the wretched cheap concert performances they have been forced to endure at Holy Mass and Vespers, have longed to rid themselves of the “church music” nuisance and again hear the true song of the church resounding in the sanctuary. Even with ample pecuniary resources it would not have been enough to issue an order to the choir-director to organize a Gregorian choir, or even to sing some portions of the chant from the organ gallery. The work before us solves almost all these difficulties. Of course the organist will need to study the character of the chant in other works, that he may be able to appreciate its tonality and style, and to give it its true accompaniment, without which he would be more likely to produce poor music than good chant, or a detestable mixture of both, such as one commonly finds published in various Catholic “choir-books” and books of so-called “Services of the Catholic Church.”

We recommend to Gregorian organists the careful study of the harmonies of John Lambert in his harmonized Gradual and Vesperal, the Organum Comitans by Dr. Witt, and the Accompagnment d’Orgue pour le Graduel et Antiphonarium de Rheims et Cambrai, by Messrs. Dietsch and Tessier.

The only faults we have to find with Father Haberl’s work are, first, the rules as given for the Italian pronunciation of Latin, especially for the pronunciation of the word excelsis, which is directed to be pronounced egg-shell-sis! and, second, the rule on page 66 directing the elision of the last vowel of a word when followed by another vowel in the next word, in the verses of hymns; and we regret to see this rule carried out in the new Vesperal as published by Mr. Pustet. This rule may do for reading classic poetry, but, if we mistake not, such elision is absolutely forbidden in the recitation of the divine Office, whether read or sung. In all former editions of the Vesperal we have found an extra note provided for the superfluous syllable.

We cannot bring ourselves to sing or say

Sit laus Patr-ac Paraclito,

or

Quænam lingua tib-o Lancea, debitas

Grates pro merit-est apta rependere?

Christi vivificum namqu-aperis latus

Und-Ecclesia nascitur.

How is one to sing namqu-aperis? and what are we to think of clavor-aditus for clavorum aditus, and ill-hic for ille, hic? We would like to be referred to some authority on this subject. That this work has already reached the fourth edition in Ratisbon is a very encouraging sign of the restoration of Gregorian chant among our German brethren. May it find a wide-spread sale in our own country!

Golden Sand: A Collection of little Counsels for the Sanctification and Happiness of Daily Life. Translated from the French. New York: Sadlier & Co. 1877.

We have not seen for a long time a more charming little hand-book of daily piety than the modest volume of which a young lady, who is too modest to put her name on the title-page, has here given us an excellent translation. Miss Ella J. McMahon, to whom we are indebted for the publication of this version of Paillettes d’Or, has turned the simple and unaffected original into equally simple and attractive English. First published periodically in the form of tracts, these short chapters of practical counsels were afterwards collected in pocket volumes, and the book now before us, though it could be read through in a morning, contains the series for several years. It is addressed to people in the world, and it embraces rules for the sanctification of all the actions of life, for making home happy and the domestic hearth an altar of blessing and sacrifice. No one can read a few of its pages without feeling. “Here is something that just suits my case; the circumstances described here are just my own; the temptations are mine; the little trials are mine; nothing can be easier than to make the virtues mine, too.” Several chapters of the book, for instance, are devoted to what the author styles “The Angels of the Hearth,” and here is a description of “The Angel of Little Sacrifices”:

“Have you never seen her at work?

“Have you never at least felt her influence?

“In every Christian family and in all pious communities, as the image of his providence in the household, God has placed the angel of little sacrifices, trying to remove all the thorns, to lighten all the burdens, to share all the fatigues.

“She has for her motto these gracious words of an amiable saint: Good makes no noise, and noise effects no good.

“Thus she is like a ray of sunlight, lighting, warming, giving life to all, but inconveniencing no one.

“We feel that she is with us, because we no longer experience those misunderstandings of heretofore, those rancorous thoughts, those deliberate coolnesses which spoil family life; because we no longer hear those sharp, rude words which wound so deeply; because affectionate sentiments mount readily from the heart to the lips, and life is sweeter.

“Who, then, has absorbed that self-love which would not yield; that egotism which mingled with the most sincere friendship; that self-indulgence, in fine, which always sought ease?

“The angel of little sacrifices has received from heaven the mission of those angels of whom the prophet speaks, who removed the stones from the road, lest they should bruise the feet of travellers.

“And that of the angels who, according to the simple legend of the first Christians, scattered rose-leaves 'neath the feet of Jesus and Mary in their flight into Egypt....

“But, like them, she is oftener invisible; she does her work in secret.

“There is a place less commodious than another; she chooses it, saying with a sweet smile, How comfortable I am here!

“There is some work to be done, and she presents herself for it simply with the joyous manner of one who finds her happiness in so doing.

“It is an object of trifling value, of which she deprives herself to give to her who the evening before has manifested a desire to possess one like it.

“How many oversights repaired by this unknown hand!

“How many neglected things put in their places, without our ever seeing how they came there!

“How many little joys procured for another without his ever having mentioned to any one the happiness which they would give him!

“Who has known thus how to do good in secret? Who has known how to divine the secrets of the heart?

“Does a dispute arise? She knows how to settle it by a pleasant word which wounds no one, and falls upon the slight disturbance like a ray of sunlight upon a cloud.

“Should she hear of two hearts estranged, she has always new means of reuniting them without their being able to show her any gratitude, so sweet, simple, and natural is what she does.

“But who will tell the thorns which have torn her hands, the pain her heart has endured, the humiliations her charity has borne?

“And yet she is always smiling.

“Does sacrifice give her joy?

“Have you never seen her at work, the angel of little sacrifices?

“On earth she is called a mother, a friend, a sister, a wife.

“In heaven she is called a saint.”

Here is another example of the familiar and easy spirit, the clearness, the practicality of this admirable little counsellor:

“What is my Cross of To-day?—It is that person whom Providence has placed near me, and whom I dislike; who humiliates me constantly by her disdainful manner; who wearies me by her slowness in the work which I share with her; who excites my jealousy because she is loved more than I and because she succeeds better than I; who irritates me by her chatter, her frivolity, or even by her attentions to me.

“It is that person who, for some vague reason, I believe to be inimical to me; who, according to my excited imagination, watches me, criticises me, ridicules me.

“She is there, always there.... My efforts to avoid her are of no avail.

“A mysterious power seems to multiply these appearances before me....

“This is my most painful cross; the others are very small compared to this.

“Circumstances change, temptations diminish, positions improve, misfortune becomes endurable by habit, but persons who are disagreeable to us always irritate us more and more.

“How I Must Bear my Cross of To-day.—By not showing in any way either the weariness, the dislike, or the involuntary repulsion which her presence causes me. By obliging myself to render her some service, it matters little whether she knows it—it is a secret between God and me.

“To say nearly every day something good of her talents, of her virtues, her tact.... Something, certainly, I will find to praise.

“To pray seriously for her soul, and even to go so far as to ask God to love her and leave her with me.

“Dear companion, blessed messenger of God’s mercy, you have unconsciously the mission of sanctifying me, and I will not be ungrateful.

“Angel of a rude and appalling exterior, were it not for thee I would fall into humiliating faults. My nature disdains and repulses thee, but, oh! how my heart loves thee.”

There is an abundance of good advice which will touch directly upon a multitude of the commonest faults of good people—those apparently trivial sins and imperfections which cause so much unhappiness at home, which make family life so hard and bitter, and place so many obstacles in the path of perfection.

The book cannot fail to do good. It will be a favorite companion of the pious soul, an affectionate and never unwelcome monitor to the cold and careless.

Life of the Venerable Clement Mary Hofbauer, Priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. By a Member of the Order of Mercy, authoress of the Life of Catharine McAuley, Life of St. Alphonsus, Glimpses of Pleasant Homes, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

We have received advance sheets of this beautiful and most interesting life by the gifted author of the Life of Catharine McAuley. Father Hofbauer was one of God’s heroes, and the story of his life will be found full of interest and profit. He is fortunate in his biographer, whose clever pen seems particularly adapted to a style of literary work than which there is none more pleasing and useful. An extended notice will appear later.

The Lady of Neville Court. A Tale of the Times. By the author of Marion Howard, etc., etc. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

It is really refreshing to come across a simple, unaffected, yet most interesting story such as this. Its only fault is that happiest of faults—brevity. The characters are few, natural, well contrasted, and well developed; the situations well wrought up, yet by the most natural of means. The pathetic portions are indescribably touching, but constantly and happily relieved by bright dialogue or playfully humorous narrative. Richard O’Meara is a genuine Catholic hero, albeit a modern one; and Maud Neville as sweet and noble a woman as we have ever met with in fiction. The real art of the book lies in its genuine artlessness, and we trust the author may give us many such.

In the July number of The Catholic World will appear the first instalment of a new story, entitled Alba’s Dream, by the author of Are You My Wife?, A Salon in Paris before the War, Number Thirteen, M. Gombard’s Mistake, etc., etc. The story will be completed in three parts.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 148.—JULY, 1877.

THE EUROPEAN EXODUS.

We propose in the following pages to speak of the past history, the present condition, and the future prospects of European emigration to this country. We shall have to present many dry figures and prosaic statistics; but the investigation will lead us to regard the wonderful manner in which the wisdom and the love of God have been manifested in the control which he, as the ruler of all things, has exercised over this European exodus. Even out of those details of its course and progress which have seemed most deplorable, and have caused to many of God’s enlightened servants the greatest anxiety and grief, beneficent and grand results now begin to be discerned which are likely to secure the permanent establishment of the church in this land, and to prepare her for the magnificent task which, as we believe, she is destined to accomplish here—the salvation of the republic and of society from the utter ruin into which the arch-enemy of mankind would otherwise soon engulf them. The foolishness of men is sometimes the wisdom of God; and God, who governs all things sweetly, has chosen to turn the apparent folly of a large portion of the emigrants from Europe to the United States during the last twenty-five years into channels through which inestimable blessings have already flowed, and others, still more glorious, are yet to pass.

The great wave of emigration began to rise in 1840, reached its highest point in 1869-72, and, notwithstanding some fluctuations, continued to bring to our shores a colony every day until 1875. In that year it experienced a sudden and serious check, and has ever since steadily subsided, until now it has not only sunk to low-water mark, but has even seemed to be about to flow the other way. The official reports of the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York classify the passengers who arrive at this port from foreign countries as “aliens” and as “citizens or persons who had before landed in the United States”; and the “aliens” are subdivided into steerage and cabin passengers. It is safe to take the “alien steerage passengers” as persons who have come to this country for the first time with the purpose of residing here—in fine, as bonâ fide emigrants. The alien cabin passengers in most cases are tourists or visitors, although among them also are some emigrants. Now, the whole number of alien steerage passengers who arrived at the port of New York during the year 1876 was only 60,308, of whom 17,974 were from Germany, 12,728 from Ireland, 5,429 from England, 1,479 from Scotland, and 428 from Wales. The whole number of steerage emigrants from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland who landed at New York during this year was only 20,064—a much smaller number than arrived in any previous year since 1840. Indeed, in no previous year until 1875, when it was 34,636, had the number failed to be twice as great; in many years it was more than ten times as large. The following table will show the emigration of all classes from the United Kingdom into the United States at all our ports during the last thirty-six years:

1840 | 40,642
1841 | 45,017
1842 | 63,852
1843 | 28,335
1844 | 43,660
1845 | 58,538
1846 | 82,239
1847 | 142,154
1848 | 188,233
1849 | 219,450
1850 | 223,078
1851 | 267,357
1852 | 244,261
1853 | 230,885
1854 | 193,065
1855 | 103,414
1856 | 111,837
1857 | 126,905
1858 | 50,716
1859 | 70,303
1860 | 87,500
1861 | 42,764
1862 | 58,706
1863 | 146,813
1864 | 147,042
1865 | 147,258
1866 | 161,000
1867 | 159,275
1868 | 155,532
1869 | 203,001
1870 | 196,075
1871 | 198,843
1872 | 233,747
1873 | 233,073
1874 | 148,161
1875 | 92,489
1876 | [72]54,554

The 54,554 persons who, not being citizens of the United States, arrived in this country from the United Kingdom in 1876, embrace all those who came either for pleasure, or for business, or to remain. But during the same year 54,697 persons of Irish and British origin arrived in the United Kingdom from the United States; so that the emigration from this country to the United Kingdom exceeded the immigration into the United States from the United Kingdom by 143 souls. The English Board of Trade, in publishing these returns, says that “as regards North America, in fact, the records of 1876 are the records of a movement of passengers to and fro, and the so-called emigration is not really emigration.” We digress here, for a moment, to speak of one or two facts disclosed by the emigration returns of the British Board of Trade for 1876, which cast a side light upon a portion of our subject.

The total emigration from the United Kingdom to places out of Europe in 1876 was 138,222 persons; the total immigration into the Kingdom was 91,647 persons, showing an apparent loss of population of 46,575. But after deducting from both sides the persons of other than British birth, the net loss of population to the United Kingdom by emigration is reduced to 38,000 persons—a percentage scarcely worth mention when compared with the annual increase by births. As regards the emigration from that Kingdom to the United States, it is noted not only that it has become very small, but that its character has materially changed. Only 73 agricultural laborers sailed from England for the United States, but no less than 3,191 of this class sailed for Australia; while, on the other hand, “4,535 gentlemen, professional men, merchants, etc., and 10,874 persons of no occupation, have gone to the States, and only 1,106 of the first-named class and 2,753 of the second migrated to Australia.” The returns go on to point out that emigration from Ireland, and of Irishmen living in England and Scotland, has almost entirely ceased. “The total number of persons of Irish origin who emigrated from the United Kingdom in 1876 to places out of Europe was 25,976.” Of these 16,432 came to the United States; some of these were only visitors; but counting them all as emigrants, they would not number as many as arrived here in a single month in former years.

The gradual but steady decrease of Irish emigration to the United States is pointed out in these returns in a forcible and apparently exultant manner. From 1853 to 1860 the annual average of Irish emigration to this country was 71,856; during the ten years following it was 69,084; in 1871 it fell to 65,591; in 1874 it was 48,136; in 1875 it was 31,433; and last year it sank to 16,432.[73] “The Irish people,” says the Board of Trade with evident satisfaction, “do not at present migrate from the United Kingdom in any appreciable numbers, although they may emigrate from one part of the United Kingdom to another.” We cannot call the correctness of this statement into question; it is no doubt quite correct; and it is safe to conclude that, for the present at least, and probably for many years to come, Irish emigration to this country will be limited to very small proportions. Nay, there is some reason to fear that, unless a marked improvement soon occurs in the industrial affairs of our country, we shall be in danger of seeing too many of our Irish and Irish-American citizens leaving us to seek homes in Australia. The year 1877 is scarcely six months old, but it has seen three vessels sail from this port with American, Irish, and German emigrants for Australia. This movement is probably a wholly sporadic one, and too much importance should not be attached to it. But we are not yet in a condition to encourage emigration from this country nor to desire to see it under any circumstances. We wish still to receive many millions of people from the Old World, and, as we shall show, there is a strong probability that we shall obtain them.

Emigration from the Continent of Europe, while showing a decrease, has not diminished in such a marked degree as that from the United Kingdom. The whole number of alien emigrants who arrived at the port of New York during the thirty years ending December 31, 1876, was 5,604,073. Of these 2,920,397 were natives of Great Britain and Ireland; 2,665,774 were natives of the Continent; and the remaining 17,902 came from all the other countries of the earth. The following table will show the exact number of emigrants from each country arriving at the port of New York during the last thirty years:

FROM GREAT BRITAIN.

Ireland | 2,001,727
England | 732,922
Scotland | 157,578
Wales | 28,170
| 2,920,397

FROM AMERICA.

South America | 3,066
West Indies | 7,897
Nova Scotia | 1,611
Canada | 1,397
Mexico | 1,030
Central America | 289
| 15,290

FROM CONTINENTAL EUROPE.

Germany | 2,121,020
France | 107,710
Switzerland | 81,798
Holland | 39,069
Norway | 44,772
Sweden | 116,655
Italy | 42,769
Belgium | 10,096
Spain | 7,796
Denmark | 32,974
Poland | 11,291
Sardinia | 2,306
Portugal | 1,791
Russia | 22,124
Sicily | 339
Greece | 269
Turkey | 242
Austria | 21,677
Luxembourg | 1,076
| 2,663,774

FROM THE ORIENT.

China | 1,057
East Indies | 304
Arabia | 14
Africa | 191
Australia | 225
Japan | 175
Unknown | 646
| 2,612
| 5,604,073

We may remark that fourteen of the countries in this list are Roman Catholic countries, and that the emigrants from these number 2,212,963 souls. The proportion of Catholics among the emigrants from the other twenty-one countries would probably be, taking them altogether, not less than one-fourth of the whole number—597,772. This would give a Catholic emigration at the port of New York alone, during these thirty years, of about 2,800,000 souls. But we shall return to this part of our subject later on.

The emigration from Germany at the port of New York during the year 1876 was 21,035 persons, of whom 17,974 were steerage passengers; in 1875 the number was 25,559; during the twenty-eight years from 1847 to 1875 the average number of emigrants arriving from Germany at this port had been 75,000 annually. The severe and sudden check which emigration received in 1875 must be traced, in the case of Germany, almost wholly to the effects of the financial disasters which had occurred in the United States, and which had then begun to be heavily felt. The Germans are a prudent people; they are exceedingly well informed concerning the condition of affairs here, and they were well advised not to come to a new country at a moment when industry and trade were prostrated, when labor was superabundant and poorly paid, and when confidence and enterprise were so paralyzed that capital could find no productive or safe employment. The restrictive measures against emigration instigated and enforced by Prince Bismarck, and the financial distress which prevailed, and which still prevails, in Germany, had also their influence in discouraging and retarding emigration; but the principal cause of its decline in the case of Germany was the one we have mentioned. When that cause shall have ceased to act, as there is reason to believe it soon will do, we can expect with confidence a revival of emigration from Germany and the other Continental countries of Europe. Should the present war in the East become general and involve all Europe, the anxiety of the people to escape its horrors and burdens will increase the desire for emigration, but their facilities for seeking a new home will probably be lessened by the same causes. We must, in all likelihood, wait for the return of prosperity here and of peace in Europe before the great wave of emigration again rises to its former level. There is no reason to doubt that in due time it will again attain its former proportions; but the principal countries from whence we must hereafter look for our emigrants are Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Holland, and perhaps England. The emigration of the future, most probably, will to a large extent be composed of people possessed of some capital, and prepared to begin their new life under far more favorable conditions than those which surrounded the Irish and German emigrants of past years upon their arrival here. The latter, landing here too often with no capital but their muscles, their honest hearts, and strong but often uncultivated intellects, have accomplished the work to which they were ordained. Their successors will find much prepared for them, but they also will have their mission to fulfil.

Let us now endeavor to ascertain with as much accuracy as possible in what manner our foreign-born citizens have disposed of themselves, and what it is that they have done and are doing for us, for themselves, and for God. It appears that, according to the census of 1870, the whole number of foreign-born persons then in the United States was 5,567,229, of whom 62,736 were Chinese, 9,654 were negroes, and 1,136 were Indians. There were also 9,734,845 persons who had been born in this country, but whose parents were all of foreign birth, and 1,157,170 others the father or mother of each of whom had been of foreign birth. These 16,459,244 persons constituted, in 1870, the whole of that portion of our population which could in any way be classed as foreign or as being under the immediate domestic influence of foreigners. There remained 22,099,132 persons, who were not only native-born, but whose parents on both sides were natives. Let us deal, first, with the persons of foreign birth. In 1850 there were but 2,244,602 persons of this class; in 1860 they had increased to 4,138,697, and in 1870 to 5,567,229 souls. The following table will show their nationalities:

Ireland | 1,855,827
England | 550,688
Scotland | 140,809
Wales | 74,530
Great Britain[74] | 4,117
Germany | 1,690,410
France | 116,240
Denmark | 30,098
Holland | 46,801
Hungary | 3,649
Italy | 17,147
Belgium | 12,552
Luxembourg | 5,802
Austria | 30,506
Bohemia | 40,287
Norway | 114,243
Poland | 14,435
Portugal | 4,495
Russia | 4,638
Spain | 3,701
Sweden | 97,327
Switzerland | 75,145
Turkey | 301
Malta | 51
China | 63,042
Greece | 390
Greenland | 3
India | 551
Japan | 73
Africa | 673
Asia | 834
Australia | 3,111
Pacific Isles | 305
Sandwich Isles | 539
South America | 3,378
West Indies | 4,897
Mexico | 41,308
Cuba | 4,811
Atlantic Isles | 4,219
British America | 489,344
At sea | 2,612
Unknown | 2,135

We have omitted from the above table 9,654 negroes and 1,136 Indians, born outside of the United States.

Where now do we find these five and a half millions of foreign-born citizens? The greater part of them—4,193,971—were congregated in ten States, as shown by the following table:

TABLE OF TEN STATES HAVING 200,000 OR MORE OF FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION.

STATES. | 1870. | 1860. | 1850.
California | 209,831 | 146,518 | 21,802
Illinois | 515,198 | 324,643 | 111,892
Iowa | 204,692 | 106,077 | 20 969
Massachusetts | 353,319 | 260,106 | 164,024
Michigan | 268,010 | 149,093 | 54,703
Missouri | 221,267 | 160,541 | 76,592
New York | 1,138,353 | 1,001,280 | 655,929
Ohio | 372 493 | 328,249 | 218,193
Pennsylvania | 545,309 | 430,505 | 303,417
Wisconsin | 364,499 | 276,927 | 110,477
| 4,193,971 | 3,183,939 | 1,737,998

There were fourteen States each of which had an Irish-born population of less than 10,000 souls—to wit, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Virginia; nineteen States each of which had an Irish-born population of less than 100,000—to wit, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin; while Illinois had 120,000, Massachusetts 216,000, Pennsylvania 235,000, and New York 528,000 Irish-born citizens. Eighteen States had each a German-born population of less than 10,000—namely, Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia. Thirteen States had each a German-born population of less than 100,000—namely, California, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Texas; while Missouri had 113,618, Pennsylvania 160,146, Wisconsin 162,314, Ohio 182,889, Illinois 203,750, and New York 316,882. The following table will show the exact number of persons of Austrian, German, French, and Irish birth residing in each State in 1870:

States. | Austrian. | French. | German. | Irish.
Alabama | 99 | 587 | 2,479 | 3,893
Arkansas | 41 | 236 | 1,562 | 1,428
California | 1,078 | 8,063 | 29,699 | 54,421
Connecticut | 154 | 820 | 1,243 | 70,630
Delaware | 8 | 127 | 1,141 | 5,007
Florida | 17 | 126 | 595 | 737
Georgia | 34 | 308 | 2,760 | 5,093
Illinois | 2,099 | 10,908 | 203,750 | 120,162
Indiana | 443 | 6,362 | 78,056 | 28,698
Iowa | 2,691 | 3,130 | 66,160 | 40,124
Kansas | 448 | 1,274 | 12,774 | 10,040
Kentucky | 146 | 2,052 | 30,318 | 21,642
Louisiana | 433 | 12,288 | 18,912 | 17,068
Maine | 10 | 136 | 508 | 15,745
Maryland | 266 | 640 | 47,045 | 23 630
Massachusetts | 255 | 1,627 | 13,070 | 216,120
Michigan | 795 | 3,120 | 64,143 | 42,013
Minnesota | 2,647 | 1,743 | 41,364 | 21,746
Mississippi | 85 | 621 | 2,954 | 3,359
Missouri | 1,493 | 6,291 | 113,618 | 54,983
Nebraska | 299 | 340 | 10,954 | 4,999
Nevada | 157 | 414 | 2,181 | 5,135
New Hampshire | 9 | 59 | 436 | 12,190
New Jersey | 686 | 3,128 | 53,999 | 86,784
New York | 3,928 | 22,273 | 316,882 | 528,806
North Carolina | 13 | 53 | 904 | 677
Ohio | 3,699 | 12,778 | 182,889 | 82,674
Oregon | 53 | 308 | 1,875 | 1,967
Pennsylvania | 1,556 | 8,682 | 160,146 | 235,798
Rhode Island | 19 | 167 | 1,200 | 31,534
South Carolina | 10 | 143 | 2,742 | 3,262
Tennessee | 112 | 562 | 4,525 | 8,048
Texas | 1,748 | 2,226 | 23,976 | 4,031
Vermont | 2 | 93 | 370 | 14,080
Virginia | 56 | 368 | 4,050 | 5,191
West Virginia | 59 | 223 | 6,231 | 6,832
Wisconsin | 4,486 | 2,704 | 162,314 | 48,479
| 30,104 | 116,240 | 1,690,410 | 1,855,827

These four nationalities, then, account for 3,692,581 of the foreign-born population in 1870; and the remaining 1,874,648 had their birth in the other thirty-five different countries named in one of our preceding tables. A glance over the table just given will show still more plainly within what limits the great bulk of the Irish and German born population is found; and the reader will remember that we have shown that all but 1,373,258 of the entire foreign-born population were residing in the ten States of California, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In twenty of the States the persons of Irish birth exceeded those of German birth; in the remaining seventeen States the latter outnumbered the former. The excess of persons of Irish birth over those of German birth, however, was only 165,417. This was seven years ago. During these seven years the emigration from Germany has almost equalled that from Ireland, and for the thirty years last past, taken as a whole, the arrivals from Germany have exceeded those from Ireland by 119,293 souls. We shall probably not be far out of the way if we assume that the entire foreign-born population of the United States is at present about seven millions, of whom two and a half millions are of German, and nearly an equal number of Irish, birth. Let us, however, continue to confine ourselves for the present to the official facts in our possession, and proceed to follow up the 5,567,229 persons of foreign birth whom we know were among us in 1870.

One of the remarks most frequently made concerning the foreign-born population of this country is that it has a general disposition to congregate in our large cities, from which have come consequences highly prejudicial both to itself and to the community at large. These two assertions have been made so persistently and in such good faith; they have seemed to be so susceptible of proof and so apparently true; and they have chimed in so well with the sometimes latent and sometimes active prejudice against “foreigners” which is so often found in the breasts of the natives of every country, that they have passed current almost without challenge and have come to be regarded as axioms. Nay, not a few of our foreign-born citizens themselves, and even of the Catholic bishops and clergy, have often accepted these two assertions as true, and have not ceased to deplore the crowding of the foreign population into the large cities, regarding it as an almost unmixed evil, and pointing to it as the source of direful woe. No doubt they have had some reason on their side. A large proportion of the crime and misery of our cities is perpetrated and suffered by foreign-born citizens or by their children in the first generation. Had these citizens not been gathered together in the cities, but scattered at remote distances throughout the country, they might have been criminal and miserable, but their crime and misery would not have been so obtrusive and apparent to every observer. But, leaving this point for a moment to return to it in the light of the facts we are about to adduce, let us see what amount of truth there is in these two assertions. We may remark, in passing, that the truth of the first does not necessarily imply the truth of the second: it may be true that the foreign-born population has congregated to an apparently undue and unwise extent in our cities, but it may not be true that this has been by any means an unmixed evil either to the foreigners themselves or to the native-born.

POPULATION, NATIVE AND FOREIGN, OF THE LARGE CITIES, 1870.

CITIES. | Scotch. | French. | Austrian. | Belgian.
New York | 7,559 | 8,240 | 2,737 | 325
Philadelphia | 4,175 | 2,471 | 519 | 116
Brooklyn | 4,098 | 1,892 | 321 | 142
St. Louis | 1,202 | 2,788 | 751 | 254
Chicago | 4,195 | 1,417 | 704 | 392
Baltimore | 525 | 428 | 215 | 29
Boston | 1,794 | 615 | 124 | 31
Cincinnati | 787 | 2,090 | 554 | 46
New Orleans | 568 | 8,806 | 253 | 134
San Francisco | 1,687 | 3,543 | 470 | 139
Buffalo | 996 | 2,332 | 135 | 37
Washington | 298 | 191 | 26 | 8
Newark | 870 | 710 | 261 | 45
Louisville | 298 | 856 | 69 | 31
Cleveland | 668 | 339 | 2,155 | 16
Pittsburgh | 584 | 348 | 117 | 9
Jersey City | 1,175 | 276 | 69 | 43
Detroit | 1,637 | 760 | 161 | 233
Milwaukee | 423 | 189 | 574 | 79
Albany | 427 | 149 | 36 | 17
Providence | 575 | 72 | 5 | 1
Rochester | 428 | 475 | 39 | 4
Allegheny | 570 | 619 | 109 | 6
Richmond | 146 | 144 | 29 | 5
New Haven | 347 | 133 | 54 | 6
Charleston | 115 | 97 | 39 | 4
Indianapolis | 258 | 237 | 14 | 5
Troy | 462 | 88 | 14 | 7
Syracuse | 138 | 276 | 47 | 1
Worcester | 187 | 29 | 12 | 1
Lowell | 469 | 28 | 3 | 3
Memphis | 119 | 207 | 14 | 10
Cambridge | 298 | 100 | 9 | 1
Hartford | 359 | 92 | 20 | 6
Scranton | 366 | 64 | 4 | —
Reading | 35 | 77 | 36 | 2
Paterson | 879 | 237 | 48 | 21
Kansas City | 180 | 110 | 44 | 1
Mobile | 166 | 311 | 33 | 11
Toledo | 119 | 206 | 93 | —
Portland | 172 | 23 | 2 | 1
Columbus | 133 | 238 | 20 | —
Wilmington | 117 | 64 | — | 2
Dayton | 90 | 242 | 28 | 2
Lawrence | 691 | 4 | 9 | 2
Utica | 198 | 287 | 25 | 2
Charlestown | 89 | 29 | 1 | 2
Savannah | 72 | 99 | 5 | —
Lynn | 72 | 5 | 1 | —
Fall River | 382 | 3 | 4 | 2
Totals | 43,055 | 42,430 | 11,218 | 2,232

CITIES. | Native. | Irish. | German. | English. | Brit. Amer.
New York | 523,198 | 201,999 | 151,203 | 24,408 | 4,372
Philadelphia | 490,398 | 96,698 | 50,746 | 22,034 | 1,453
Brooklyn | 251,381 | 73,985 | 36,769 | 18,832 | 2,779
St. Louis | 198,615 | 32,239 | 59,040 | 5,366 | 1,986
Chicago | 154,420 | 39,988 | 52,316 | 10,026 | 9,528
Baltimore | 210,870 | 15,223 | 35,276 | 2,138 | 292
Boston | 162,540 | 56,900 | 5,606 | 5,968 | 13,548
Cincinnati | 136,627 | 18,624 | 49,446 | 3,524 | 1,175
New Orleans | 142,943 | 14,693 | 15,224 | 2,005 | 384
San Francisco | 75,754 | 25,864 | 13,602 | 5,166 | 2,237
Buffalo | 71,477 | 11,264 | 22,249 | 3,558 | 4,113
Washington | 95,442 | 6,948 | 4,131 | 1,231 | 211
Newark | 69,175 | 12,481 | 15,873 | 4,040 | 296
Louisville | 75,085 | 7,626 | 14,380 | 930 | 311
Cleveland | 54,014 | 9,964 | 15,855 | 4,530 | 2,599
Pittsburgh | 58,254 | 13,119 | 8,703 | 2,838 | 282
Jersey City | 50,711 | 17,665 | 7,151 | 4,005 | 556
Detroit | 44,196 | 6,970 | 12,647 | 3,282 | 7,398
Milwaukee | 37,667 | 3,784 | 22,599 | 1,395 | 792
Albany | 47,215 | 13,276 | 5,168 | 1,572 | 843
Providence | 51,727 | 12,085 | 592 | 2,426 | 1,038
Rochester | 41,202 | 6,078 | 7,730 | 2,530 | 2,619
Allegheny City | 37,872 | 4,034 | 7,665 | 1,112 | 152
Richmond | 47,260 | 1,239 | 1,621 | 289 | 42
New Haven | 36,482 | 9,601 | 2,423 | 1,087 | 336
Charleston | 44,064 | 2,180 | 1,826 | 234 | 32
Indianapolis | 37,587 | 3,321 | 5,286 | 697 | 297
Troy | 30,246 | 10,877 | 1,174 | 1,575 | 1,697
Syracuse | 29,061 | 5,172 | 5,062 | 1,345 | 1,167
Worcester | 29,159 | 8,389 | 325 | 893 | 1,960
Lowell | 26,493 | 9,103 | 34 | 1,697 | 3,034
Memphis | 33,446 | 2,987 | 1,768 | 589 | 225
Cambridge | 27,579 | 7,180 | 482 | 1,043 | 2,518
Hartford | 26,363 | 7,438 | 1,438 | 787 | 396
Scranton | 19,205 | 6,491 | 3,056 | 1,444 | 125
Reading | 30,059 | 547 | 2,648 | 305 | 26
Paterson | 20,711 | 5,124 | 1,429 | 3,347 | 128
Kansas City | 24,581 | 2,869 | 1,884 | 709 | 821
Mobile | 27,795 | 2,000 | 843 | 386 | 55
Toledo | 20,485 | 3,032 | 5,341 | 694 | 984
Portland | 24,401 | 3,900 | 82 | 557 | 2,017
Columbus | 23,663 | 1,845 | 3,982 | 504 | 190
Wilmington | 25,689 | 3,503 | 684 | 613 | 47
Dayton | 23,050 | 1,326 | 4,962 | 394 | 131
Lawrence | 16,204 | 7,457 | 467 | 2,456 | 1,563
Utica | 18,955 | 3,496 | 2,822 | 1,352 | 261
Charlestown | 21,399 | 4,803 | 216 | 488 | 1,119
Savannah | 24,564 | 2,197 | 787 | 251 | 63
Lynn | 23,298 | 3,232 | 17 | 330 | 1,133
Fall River | 15,288 | 5,572 | 37 | 4,042 | 1,324
Totals | 3,808,770 | 826,398 | 564,967 | 165,024 | 80,728

In fifty of the largest cities of the United States there was in 1870 a total native population of 3,808,770 souls; 826,398 persons of Irish birth; 564,967 of German birth; 165,024 of English birth; 80,728 natives of British America; 43,055 natives of Scotland; 42,430 natives of France; 11,218 natives of Austria; and 2,232 natives of Belgium—in all, 1,736,052 persons born in foreign countries.

The foregoing tables give the native population of each of these fifty cities, with the foreign population belonging to each of these eight nationalities.

The persons of foreign birth of other nationalities in the above cities would raise the whole number to about 1,800,000 souls.

It is to be noticed from this table, in the first place, that in these fifty cities, in 1870, the proportion of foreign-born to native inhabitants was almost exactly as 18 is to 38—1,800,000 to 3,808,770—while the proportion of foreign-born to native inhabitants in the entire Union was almost exactly as 5 is to 38—5,567,229 to 38,558,371. It must be confessed that on this showing there was an apparently or a really undue proportion of our foreign-born citizens congregated in the large cities. But it should be remembered that among the native-born population were the 10,892,015 persons who had been born here of parents, on one or both sides, of foreign birth, and who, to this extent, were quasi-foreign. If these be taken into account, the proportion of foreign-born and the immediate descendants of foreign-born persons to the rest of the population throughout the country in 1870 would have been as 16 to 38—16,459,239 to 38,558,371. This is really the more correct basis upon which to make the comparison; for without doubt a large proportion of the ten millions of persons born here of foreign parents were the children of the five millions of foreign-born persons; and it is perfectly natural that the parents and the children should be found living in the same localities. After giving to this consideration, however, all the weight to which it is entitled, the fact still remains that an apparently excessive proportion of our foreign-born citizens are to be found in the large cities.

Let us look still closer into the subject. The whole number of persons of Irish birth in the United States in 1870 was 1,855,827, and of these 826,398, or 44.4 per cent., were living in these fifty cities. There were 1,690,410 Germans, and 564,967 of them, or 33.4 per cent., were in the cities; 550,688 English, of whom 165,024, or nearly 30 per cent., were in the cities; 489,344 British Americans, of whom 80,728, or only 16.5 per cent., were in the cities; while 30 per cent. of the Scotch, 36.5 per cent. of the French, 36.7 per cent. of the Austrians, and 17.7 per cent. of the Belgians were in the same category. Our Irish fellow-citizens are the greatest sinners—if any are sinners in this respect—and after them, in a declining ratio, come the Austrians, French, Germans, Scotch, English, Belgians, and British Americans. The Irish, Austrians, French, and Germans are the Roman Catholic emigrants, and in the wisdom of God it has been ordained that they should be the ones most crowded into the cities. How have they performed there the work which he sent them to do?

Our cities are the centres of the intelligence, the culture, and the wealth of our country. They contain to a very large extent the brains of the republic. From them issue influences which sway, if they do not absolutely control, the thoughts and actions of the people. These influences are not, by any means, always altogether wholesome, but they are unquestionably potent. The newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals published in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Milwaukee have a circulation exceeding that of the similar publications of all the rest of the country combined. The serial publications of one firm in New York alone reach into the millions; the aggregate annual circulation of the New York daily and weekly journals is so large that mere figures expressing it convey but a faint idea of its extent. The publisher of a magazine in New York told the writer the other day that if the copies of his publication issued each year were stacked together, the column would be three times as high as Trinity Church steeple.

The social influences of the cities upon the rural districts are also powerful. The cities not only set the fashions in dress, but in political, moral, and religious thought and custom. The sturdy independence of the bucolic mind may yet boast of its existence, but it very often yields to the sway of urban ideas. A lady who had lived all her life in a small village, in which the only Catholic population consisted of a handful of poor Irish people, destitute of a church, and visited only at long intervals by a humble priest who celebrated the divine Mysteries in an attic over a liquor-store, not long ago came to New York, and was taken by her friends into one of our magnificent Catholic churches. The grandeur and beauty of the Mass were for the first time revealed to her; for the first time she obtained an idea of what the Catholic Church was and what it taught. By the grace of God her conversion followed, and, mainly through her exertions and her influence after her return home, her village is now blessed with a church, a resident priest, and a Catholic population composed largely of converts. In very many of our rural localities all over the Union the Catholics are few and poor; in too many of them the idea of a Roman Catholic in the minds of the natives is still associated only with the idea of an ignorant fanatic, who worships images, pays half a dollar to a priest to pardon him for a crime, and believes that the Pope is God. But when the country merchant of such a locality comes to New York to make his purchases, and sees the splendid Catholic churches here, and finds, perhaps, that the great importer with whom he deals, or the wealthy banker, or the renowned lawyer to whom he is introduced, is a Roman Catholic, and not unseldom an Irishman or a German, his eyes are opened and his mind is prepared for the reception of the truth. In a word, the congregation of foreign-born emigrants, the most of whom are Catholics, in our large cities, has had the effect of making the Catholic church in these cities a noticeable and a respectable fact, and of thereby accomplishing one of the preliminaries in the work which it has yet to perform in the republic. The influence of this fact is to be perceived, also, in the changed tone of the secular press with regard to the church. Respectable journalists, with few and decreasing exceptions, have become ashamed to repeat the vulgar and senseless slanders and the worn-out calumnies concerning the church, her ministers, her dogmas, and her sacraments which were so current twenty years ago. In communities consisting in an appreciable and often in a large proportion of intelligent, wealthy, and influential Catholics, the able editors do not venture any longer to amuse their readers with arguments based on the assumption that the church is the foe of knowledge and of education, and that her mission is to degrade, enslave, and pauperize mankind. In cities where the spires of dozens and scores of Catholic churches, tipped with the emblem of our salvation, point towards heaven; where Catholic hospitals, asylums, schools, and academies abound; where many of the most enterprising and wealthy merchants, manufacturers, and bankers are Catholics; where in the front rank of all the professions Catholics are found—in these communities it is no longer a social disgrace or a mark of singularity to be a Catholic, and a convert to the faith is no longer looked upon as a person of weak intellect or a slave to a benumbing and degrading superstition. We shall show, in the subsequent pages of our article, that for all this, to a very great extent, and under what seems to have been the direct guidance of God, we are indebted to the foreign-born population of the country, and that its accomplishment was made possible, humanly speaking, by their congregating themselves in the cities instead of dispersing in small bodies throughout the agricultural regions of the country. But we shall show, also, that, the work of God having thus far been accomplished, the time has now arrived when the future emigration to the United States should be directed towards the rural districts, under conditions which, until now, were practically impossible; and we shall seek to point out in what manner this new colonization may be best directed in order to promote the welfare of the emigrants themselves, the prosperity of our country, and the greater glory of God.

ALBA’S DREAM.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC.
PART I.

Once upon a time, some sixty years ago, on one of the bleakest points of the coast of Picardy, high perched like a light-house overhanging the sea, there was a building called the Fortress. You may see the ruins of it yet. It had been an abbey in olden times, and credible tales were told of a bearded abbot who “walked” at high water on the western parapet when the moon was full. One wing of the Fortress was a ruin at the time this story opens; the other had braved the stress of time and tempest, and looked out over the sea defiant as the rock on which it stood. The Caboffs lived in it. Jean Caboff was a wiry, lithe old man of seventy—a seafaring man every inch of him. His wealth was boundless, people said, and they also said that he had gained it as a pirate on the high seas. There was no proof that this was true; but every one believed it, and the belief invested Jean Caboff with a sort of wicked prestige which was not without its fascination in the eyes of the peaceful, unadventurous population of Gondriac. Caboff had a wife and three sons; the two eldest were away fighting with Bonaparte on the Rhine; Marcel, the youngest, was at home. A shy, awkward lad, he kept aloof from the village boys, never went bird’s-nesting or fishing with them, but moped like an owl up in his weather-beaten home. They were unsocial people, the Caboffs; they never asked any one inside their door; but the few who accidentally penetrated within the Fortress told wonderful stories of what they saw there; they talked of silken hangings and Persian carpets, and mirrors and pictures in golden frames, and marble men and maidens writhing and dancing in fantastic attitudes; of costly cabinets and jewelled vases, until the old corsair’s abode was believed to be a sort of enchanted castle. The stray visitors were too dazzled to notice certain things that jarred on this profuse magnificence. They did not notice that the damp had eaten away the gilded cornices, and the rats nibbled freely at the rich carpets, or that Jean Caboff smoked his pipe in a high-backed wooden chair, while Mme. Caboff cut out her home-spun linen on a stout deal table, the two forming a quaint and not unpicturesque contrast to the silken splendor of their surroundings.

Some five miles inland, beyond a wide stretch of gorse-grown moor, rose a wood, chiefly of pine-trees, and within the wood, a castle—a fine old Gothic castle where the De Gondriacs had dwelt for centuries. The castle and its owners, their grandeur and state and power, were the pride of the country, every peasant along the coast for fifty miles knew the history of the lords of Gondriac as well as, mayhap sometimes better than, he knew his catechism. The family at present consisted of Rudolf, Marquis de Gondriac, and his son Hermann. The Marquis was a hale man of sixty; Hermann a handsome lad of eighteen, who was at college now in Paris, so that M. le Marquis had no company but his books and his gun in the long autumn days. He was a silent, haughty man, who lived much alone and seldom had friends to stay with him. When Hermann was at home the aspect of the place changed; the château opened its doors with ancient hospitality, and laughter and music woke up the echoes of the old halls, and the village was astir as if a royal progress had halted on the plain; but when Hermann departed things fell back into the stagnant life he had stirred for a moment. It was natural that the young man’s holidays were eagerly looked forward to at Gondriac. But one August came, and, instead of returning home, Hermann joined a regiment that was on its way to the frontier. He went off in high-hearted courage as to the fulfilment of his boyish dreams. M. le Marquis, who had himself served in the guards of the Comte d’Artois, was proud of his son, of his soldier-like bearing and manly spirit, and kept the anguish of his own heart well out of sight as he bade the boy farewell. “I will come back a marshal of France, father,” was Hermann’s good-by.

Not long after his departure tidings were received of the death of Hugues Caboff, the old pirate’s eldest son. He had fallen gloriously on the field of battle; but glory is a sorry salve for broken hearts, and there was weeping in the Fortress that day—a mother weeping and refusing to be comforted. Old Jean Caboff bore his grief with an attempt at stoicism that went far to soften men’s hearts towards him—farther than his gold, which they said was ill-got, and his charity, which they called ostentation.

“Who may tell what will come next?” said Peltran, the host of the village inn.

“They say that M. le Marquis has been over to see the Caboffs,” said a customer, who dropped in to discuss the event. People felt for the Caboffs, but, there was no denying it, this sad news was a break in the dull monotony of Gondriac life.

“I saw his carriage at the foot of the cliff,” said Peltran; “he stayed full fifteen minutes up at the Fortress. Père Caboff conducted him down to his carriage, and Marcel stood watching them till it was out of sight.”

“It must have consoled them mightily to have M. le Marquis come in and sit talking to them in that neighborly fashion,” remarked lame Pierre, a hero who had lost a leg and an eye at Aboukir; “that, and poor Hugues being killed by a cannon-ball under the emperor’s own eye, ought to cheer up the Caboffs wonderfully.”

“Ay, ay,” said Peltran; “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

“M. le Marquis looked as down-hearted as if he had lost a child of his own,” observed Pierre; “may be he was thinking whose turn it might be next.”

“There goes Mère Virginie with the little one!” said Peltran; and all present turned their heads towards the window and looked out with an expression of interest, as if the objects in view were a rare and pleasant sight. And yet it was one that met them in their daily walks by the roadside and on the cliff—the little old lady in her nun-like dress, with her keen gray eyes and sweet smile, and the dark-eyed, elfin-looking child whose name was Alba. Alba was always singing.

“Is not your little throat tired, my child?” said Virginie, as the blithe voice kept on soaring and trilling by her side.

“I am never tired singing, petite mère! Do the angels tire of it sometimes, I wonder?”

“Nay, the angels cannot tire; they are perfectly happy.”

“And I, petite mère—am I not perfectly happy?”

“Is there nothing you long for, nothing you would be the happier for having?”

“Oh! many things,” cried Alba: “I wish I were grown up; I wish I were as beautiful as the flowers; I wish I had a voice like the nightingale—like a whole woodful of nightingales; I wish I lived in a castle; I wish I were so rich that I might make all the poor people happy in Gondriac; I wish everybody loved me as you do. Oh! I should like them all to adore me, petite mère,” cried the child, clasping her little hands with energy.

“Nay, my child, we must adore none but God; woe to us if we do!” said Virginie, and her face contracted as with a sudden pain. “But it seems to me, with so many wishes unfulfilled, you are a long way off from perfect happiness yet?”

“But I am always dreaming that they are fulfilled, and that does as well, you know.”

Yes, perhaps it did, Virginie thought, as she bent a wistful smile on the young dreamer’s face. Alba’s face was full of dreams—beautiful and passionate, changeful as the sunbeams, tender and strong, pleading and imperious by turns. How would the dreams evolve themselves from out that yearning, untamed spirit that shone with a dangerous light through the dark eyes? Would they prove a mirage, luring her on to some delusive goal, and leaving her to perish amidst the golden waste of sands, or would they be a loadstar beckoning faithfully to a safe and happy destiny?

The child gave promise of rich fruit; her instincts were pure and true, her heart was tender; but there was a wild element in her nature that might easily overrule the rest, and work destruction to herself and others, unless it were reduced in time to serviceable bondage. Who could tell how this would be—whether the flower would keep its promise and prove loyal to the bud, or whether the fair blossom would perish in its bloom, and the tree bring forth a harvest of bitter fruit?

“It will be as you will it,” a wise man had said to Virginie; “the destiny of the child is in the hands of the mother, as the course of the ship is in the hands of the pilot.”

“Then Alba’s will be a happy one!” Virginie replied; “if love be omnipotent here below, my treasure is safe.”

Hermann de Gondriac had won his epaulets. Every post brought letters to the castle full of battles and victories; and though the young soldier was modest in his warlike narrative, it was clear to M. le Marquis that Hermann shone like a bright, particular star even in the galaxy of the grande armée, and that now, as in olden times, France had reason to be proud of the De Gondriacs. If the boy would but calm his rhapsodies about Bonaparte! M. le Marquis’ patrician soul heaved at the sight of this enthusiasm for the upstart who had muzzled his country and usurped the crown of her lawful princes. But he was a great captain, and it was natural, perhaps, that his soldiers should only think of this when he led them in triumph from field to field.

So far Hermann bore a charmed life. Not so the Caboffs. One day, some eight months after the death of the eldest son, the second brother followed him—“killed gloriously on the immortal field of Wagram,” the official letter announced in its most soothing style. M. le Marquis’ carriage was again seen standing at the foot of the cliff, and Peltran informed the population that he had remained over twenty minutes this time at the Fortress.

“M. le Marquis is a true grand seigneur, and never begrudges any condescension for the good of his inferiors,” observed the old tory host. “This time it was only Marcel who accompanied him down the cliff. Old Caboff, they say, was more cut up by this last blow; still, grief ought not to make a man selfish and unthankful.”

“Just so,” said lame Pierre, who sat puffing in the bar; “and it’s only what those two poor lads had to expect; moreover, since a man must die, better be killed in battle than die of the small-pox.”

“All the same, it’s hard on the folks up yonder,” remarked a bystander, “and it isn’t their money-bags—no, nor even M. le Marquis’ good words—that can comfort them to-day.”

Soon after this M. le Marquis left Gondriac rather suddenly one morning. After reading his letters he ordered his valise to be got ready, and in an hour he was posting to X——. There he dismissed the postchaise, and no one knew whither or how he had continued his route. Gondriac busied itself in endless conjectures as to the purport and destination of this mysterious journey. Had M. le Marquis been summoned to Paris to assist the government in some political crisis? Had he gone over to England to pour oil on the angry waters there? For the king of England was full of wrath and jealousy against the great emperor, and it was well known at Gondriac that he was plotting foul play of some sort against France. Or, again, could M. le Marquis’ hasty departure have had any reference to M. le Comte? Perhaps M. le Comte was wounded or a prisoner; who could tell? So the wiseacres gossiped, adopting first one theory, then another.

A month went by without throwing any light on the mystery. Then the cold set in suddenly, and the gossips had something else to talk about. The cruel winter was down upon them, catching them unprepared, so how were they to face it? They were only in October, and the wind blew from the northeast as if it were March, keeping up its shrill, hard whistle day and night, and the sea, as if it were exasperated by the sound, roared and foamed and thundered, till it seemed like a battle between them which should make most noise. And it was hard to say who carried the day.

One night, when the battle was at its fiercest, the wind shrieking its loudest, and the sea rolling up its biggest waves, Alba sat at her window watching the tempest with thrills of sympathetic terror. Virginie thought the child was in bed and asleep hours ago, and she was glad of it; for the storm drove right against the cottage, and burst upon it every now and then with a violence that shook her in her chair and made the walls rock. She was knitting away, but between the stitches many a prayer went up for those who were out breasting the fury of the hurricane. Suddenly a sound came up from the sea that made her start to her feet with a cry. Boom! boom! boom! it came in quick succession, leaping over the rocks with a sharp, dull crash. The door of the little sitting-room was thrown open, and Alba stood on the threshold, white as a ghost, her dark eyes gleaming. “It is the signal-gun, mother!” she cried. “There is a ship in distress!”

“How came you up and dressed, child?” exclaimed Virginie.

“Mother, I could not sleep; I have been watching the storm. Hark! there it is again. Why don’t they answer it? Let us hurry down to the beach.”

“Of what use would we be there, my child?” said Virginie. “Let us rather kneel down and pray that help may come.”

“I cannot pray; I cannot stay here safe and quiet while that gun is firing! Hark! there it is again. Oh! why don’t they make haste? Mother, I must go! If you won’t come I will go by myself.” Alba, as she spoke, threw back her head with the wild, free movement that Virginie knew, and knew that she could no more control than she could check the flight of a bird on the wing.

“I will go with you,” she cried, and, wrapping a cloak round Alba, she flung another round herself, and then lighted her lantern, and the two sallied forth into the storm, clinging fast to one another for support until they got under the shelter of the overhanging cliff. Lights were glancing here and there, hurrying down from the cottages, and a few fishermen were already on the beach watching the distressed ship, helpless and hopeless. Presently old Caboff appeared, holding his lantern high above his head—an aged, shrivelled man, likely to be of little use in this desperate strait; but such was the prestige which his supposed antecedents lent him in the eyes of the panic-stricken group that of one accord they turned to him as to the only one who might give help or counsel. The night was pitch dark, and the blinding rain and deafening roar of the breakers seemed to make the darkness thicker. It was impossible to see the ship, except when the flash of the gun lighted up the scene for a second. In the lull of the billows—that is, between the heavy sweep of their rise and fall—the cries of the crew and the whistle of the captain issuing his commands were faintly audible. How was it with the ship? Had she struck upon a rock, or was she simply going down before the storm? It was impossible to say. On finding that her signals were heard and her position seen from land, she slackened fire, and the gun only spoke every three minutes or so. In the interval of unbroken darkness all conjecture as to the immediate cause of the peril was at a stand-still. Caboff said she had struck upon a rock; the others thought she was simply disabled and rolling in the trough of the sea.

“Can we put out a boat? Who is for risking it?” said Caboff, pitching his voice to a whistle that was heard distinctly above the roar of the black breakers clamoring for the moon. There was no answer, but heads were shaken and hands gesticulated in strong dissent.

Alba pushed her way into the midst of the group. “What does it matter what the danger is? Go and help them!” she cried. “If you don’t help them they will all perish!”

“We cannot help them, little one,” said an old fisherman. “No boat could live in such a sea. See how the waves run up in mountains to our very feet, and think what it must be out yonder! See, now the signal-gun lights it up! Look! again it flashes.”

It was an appalling sight while the flashes lasted. The waves, rushing back, left the side of the ship visible, and then, returning with a tremendous sweep, broke over her and buried her out of sight in foam. The stoutest heart might well recoil from venturing to put out in such a sea.

“Naught but a miracle could do it,” said one of the oldest and hardiest of the fishermen; “and we none of us can work miracles.”

“God can!” cried Alba, and she looked like the spirit of the storm, her dark hair streaming, the light of courage and scorn and beseeching hope illuminating her face with an unearthly beauty—“God can, and he does for brave men; but ye are cowards!”

“Gently, little one; men will risk their lives to do some good, but it is suicide to rush on death where there is not a chance of saving any one.”

It was Caboff who spoke, and his words were followed by strong approval from the rest.

“Ye are cowards!” repeated Alba passionately. “God would work the miracle, if ye had courage and trusted him. See, there is the light now!” She pointed to the sky, where, as if to justify her promise, the moon came forth, and, scattering the darkness, shed her full blue radiance over sea and shore. The storm was now at its height. The guns had ceased to give tongue, and the crowd stood watching the scene in mute horror, while the reverberating shore shook under their feet at every shock of the furious billows.

Caboff was right. The ship had struck upon the Scissors, and, caught between the two blade-like rocks, was rapidly falling to pieces. The deck was deserted. The crew had either gone down into the cabin to meet their fate or they had been swept away by the devouring waters. One man alone was descried by Caboff’s keen eyes clinging to the broken mast. “I will risk it!” cried the old pirate, after watching the wreck for some minutes intently. “I will risk it; my old life may as well go out in saving his. Come, boys, help me to push down a boat. I must have three pairs of hands. Who is to the fore?”

A dozen men rushed forward; the boat was at the water’s edge in a moment, and after a short scuffle—for now all were fighting for precedence—three men got into it, and the others, putting their hands to the stern, launched it with their might. A cheer rang out from the shore; but close upon it came a cry, piercing and full of terror. It was Marcel Caboff, who was flying down the cliff, and reached the scene just as the boat put off.

“Father! father!” cried the lad, and he fell on his knees sobbing.

“Don’t be afraid, Marcel,” said Alba, falling on her knees beside him; “he is a brave man, and God will protect him!”

Something in the tone of the child’s voice made him turn and look at her, and as he caught sight of the beam of confidence, almost of exultation, on her face, he felt his courage rise and despair was silenced. But what meant that shout?

The boat was no sooner borne out on the receding wave than it went down into the sea as if never to rise again; there was a moment of breathless suspense, and then the wave rose and tossed it violently to and fro, and flung it back upon the shore. The men who had launched it were still upon the spot, and rushed forward to seize the boat and help the brave fellows out again. One was so stunned by the force of the shock that he became insensible and had to be lifted out. Old Caboff refused to stir.

“It is madness to try it again,” said his companions. “A cork could not live in such a sea!”

“I will risk no man’s life,” said Caboff. “I will go alone. Here, my men, lend a hand once more!”

There was a clamor of expostulation from all present; but the old man was not to be moved.

“I will go with you, father,” said Marcel, stepping in and seizing an oar.

“You here, lad! And your mother?”

“She sent me to look after you. Allons! mes amis; push us out and say God speed us!”

But there was now a third figure in the boat. “Now we are three, and God will make a fourth!” cried Alba; then, turning to the men, “Push us out,” she said, “and then go home, lest ye take cold here in the rain!”

“Good God! the child is mad,” cried Virginie, rushing forward to snatch her away. But it was too late; a heavy wave rolled in and made the boat heave suddenly, which the men seeing, with one impulse put their hands to it, till the breaker washed under it and swept it out to sea once more. Virginie stood there like one turned to stone, watching in dumb horror the boat drifting away on to the seething waters. Alba was on her knees, her arms outstretched, her face uplifted in the moonlight, transfigured into an apparition of celestial beauty—a heaven-sent messenger from Him who can unchain the storm and bid the winds and waves be still. The rough men, subdued by the sublimity of the scene, knelt down like little children and began to pray.

Gallantly the little boat rode on, now drowned out of sight, now rising lightly on the crest of the wave, while the sea, as if enraged at so much daring, redoubled in fury and pitched it to and fro like a ball. Old Caboff, grown young again, worked away like a sea-horse. Many a time had he and Death looked into each other’s faces, but never closer than now; and it was not the old seaman who quailed. Marcel, feeble Marcel, seemed endowed with the energy and strength of an athlete. They were now close upon the sinking ship; but the peril grew as they approached it. There was a lull for one moment, as if in very weariness the hurricane drew a breath; then a huge wave rose up like a mighty water-tower, oscillated for a moment like a house about to fall, and, dashing against the boat, swallowed it up in an avalanche of foam. Five seconds of mortal suspense followed; not a gasp broke the horrible silence on the beach. But the boat reappeared and rode bravely on to within a stone’s throw of the ship. The solitary man on deck was signalling to them with one hand, while with the other he clung to the mast. At last the little skiff was close under the bows. Old Caboff threw up a rope-ladder; it missed its aim, once, twice, three times. “How the old fellow is swearing! I can see it by his fury,” cried one of the fishermen, stamping in sympathetic rage. “Ha! the poor devil has caught it. Bravo! Hurrah! He is in the boat!”

Then there was a cheer, as if the very rocks had found a voice to applaud the brave ones who had conquered the storm. Wind and tide were with them as they returned, the waves pitching the boat before them like an angry boy kicking a stone, until one final plunge sent it flying on the beach.

“Vive Caboff! Vive Marcel! Vive la petite Alba!” And every hand was stretched out in welcome. Then there was a pause, a sudden hush, as when some strong emotion is checked by another.

“Monsieur le Marquis!”

“Yes, my friends, thanks to these brave hearts I am amongst you and alive.”

He was the first to step from the boat; then he took Alba in his arms and lifted her ashore into Virginie’s. Marcel alighted next, and was turning to assist his father when M. le Marquis pushed him gently aside and held out both hands to his deliverer. But the old man still grasped his oar and made no sign.

“Mon père!” cried Marcel, laying a hand on his arm, “mon père!”

But old Caboff did not answer him. He was dead.

The grande armée was still winning famous victories, ploughing up sunny harvest-fields with cannon-balls, and making homes and hearts desolate.

“There is one comfort,” said old Peltran, sitting moodily in his deserted bar: “when things come to the worst they must get better.”

“They’ve not come to the worst yet,” observed a neighbor. “There’s lots of things that might happen, that haven’t happened yet; the plague might come, or the blight, or the grande armée might get beaten. We’ve not come to the worst yet, believe you me.”

“There’s one thing anyhow that can’t happen,” said Peltran: “there can’t be another recruitment in Gondriac, for there isn’t a man left amongst us fit to shoulder a musket; we are all either too old, or lame, or blind of an eye.”

“There’s young Caboff is neither one nor the other. To be sure, he’s not the stuff to make a soldier out of; but when they’ve used up all the men they must make the best of the milk-sops.”

“Marcel is a widow’s only son; he’s safe,” said Peltran.

“From one day to another the last reserves may be called out,” observed the neighbor; “it will be hard on the mother, after two of her sons going for cannon’s meat. It was a plucky thing of the old father putting out that night. I wonder if he knew for certain who was on the deck of the ship.”

“If he didn’t he wouldn’t have been such an ass as to put out,” said Peltran. “Why should he fling away his bit of life for a stranger that he owed nothing to?”

“For the matter of that, he owed nothing to M. le Marquis; the Caboffs, they say, are rich enough to buy up every inch of land in Gondriac.”

“Folks may owe more than money can pay,” retorted Peltran. “M. le Marquis was very kind to the old man when his sons were killed, and, whatever Caboff’s sins may have been, he had a fine sense of his natural obligations. It didn’t surprise me much when I saw how handsomely he paid off his debt to M. le Marquis.”

“They say that monseigneur swore to Mme. Caboff that if ever she asked him a favor, whatever it was, he would grant it,” said the neighbor.

“Very likely,” remarked the host. “M. le Marquis has a grand-seigneur way of doing everything. I hope the Caboffs will have the delicacy never to abuse it.”

Not many days after this conversation Mme. Caboff was to be seen walking across the moor on her way to the castle. She looked an older woman than she was; sorrow had broken her down, and it would take little now to destroy the frail tenure of life that remained to her.

This was the first time she had ever entered the castle. Under other circumstances the visit would have thrown the widow into some trepidation. She would have been pleasantly fluttered at the prospect of an interview with the great lord in his own halls, and would have been much exercised on her way thither as to what she should say to him; but her mind was full of other cares to-day.

M. le Marquis was at home. He had spent the morning over a letter from Captain Hermann de Gondriac, which contained a graphic personal narrative of the retreat from Moscow of that disastrous expedition from which, out of the fifty thousand cavalry who went forth, only one hundred and twenty-five officers returned. A pang of anguish and patriotic indignation wrung the old nobleman’s heart as he read and re-read the terrible story, but tears of deep thankfulness fell from the father’s eyes at the thought that his son was spared and was returning safe and unhurt with that decimated army of starved, exasperated spectres. The marquis was perusing the letter for the tenth time when Mme. Caboff was announced. He rose to receive her with a warmth of welcome that boded well for her petition.

“M. le Marquis, you made me give you a promise once—that night; do you remember it?” she said, holding his white hand lightly between her two black-kidded ones, and looking up into his face with the meek and hungry look of a dog begging for a bone which may be refused and a kick given instead.

“Remember it? Yes,” replied the Marquis, returning the timid pressure with a cordial grasp. “You are in trouble; sit down, madame, and tell me what there is that I can do to make it lighter for you.”

“My son, my last and only son, Marcel, is called out, M. le Marquis!”

“And you want to find a substitute for him. It shall be done. I will set about it without an hour’s delay.”

“M. le Marquis, it cannot be done; there are no more substitutes to be had. I would give every penny I possess to get one, but there are none left. The widows’ only sons were the last spared, and now they must go. Marcel has been to the prefecture, and they told him there was no help for it: he must join the new levy to-morrow at X——M. le Marquis, have pity on me! It will kill me to let him go; and, oh! it is so dreadful to see the boy.”

“He is frightened at the prospect of going to battle?” There was an imperceptible ring of scorn under the courteous tone of the aristocrat as he put the question.

“He is mad with delight, M. le Marquis; he has always been wild to follow his brothers and be killed as they were.”

“Brave lad! But he shall not have his wish; he shall not be made food for Bonaparte’s cannon,” said the Marquis. “Go home in peace, madame, and break the bad news to him as tenderly as you can.”

“Thank God! God bless you, M. le Marquis!” said the widow fervently. “But is it indeed possible? I can hardly believe in so great a joy.”

M. le Marquis was silent for a moment, as if making a calculation; then he said musingly:

“The emperor is in Paris to-day; I will start in an hour from this and see him to-night. He owes me something. I never thought to have asked a favor at his hands; but I will stoop to ask him that your son be exempted from the service.”

“O M. le Marquis!” Mme. Caboff began to cry with joy; but remembering suddenly that this great emperor was conquering the whole world and turning kings in and out like valets—for Gondriac heard of his fine doings and was very proud of them—it occurred to her that he might by possibility refuse a request proffered even by so great a man as M. le Marquis. “You think his majesty is sure not to refuse you, monsieur?” she added timidly.

M. de Gondriac was too well cased in his armor of pride to be touched by the poor woman’s unconscious insult; he smiled and replied with a quiet irony that escaped his visitor: “I think that is very unlikely, Mme. Caboff. Be at rest,” he continued kindly. “I pledge you my word that your son shall not be taken from you. Instead of going to-morrow to X——, he had better start off at once with a letter which I will give him to the prefect.”

He wrote the letter and handed it to Mme. Caboff.

It was late that evening when M. de Gondriac arrived in Paris. He drove straight to the Tuileries. Time was precious, and he had travelled in court dress, so as not to lose an hour at the end of the journey. It did not occur to him that there could be any delay in reaching the presence of the emperor. Petitioners of his class were not so common at the great man’s door that it should close upon them because of some informal haste in their demand for admittance. He handed in his card and asked to see the lord chamberlain. After some delay he was shown into the presence of that high functionary, to whom he stated his desire for an immediate audience of his majesty. The lord chamberlain smilingly informed him that this was impossible; mortals were not admitted into the august presence in this abrupt manner; but he—the lord chamberlain—would present the request at his earliest opportunity to-morrow, and communicate in due time with M. le Marquis.

“Things do not proceed so summarily at court,” he added graciously. The marquis felt his blood boil. This mushroom duke telling a De Gondriac how things were done at court!

“I know enough of courts to be aware that on occasions etiquette must yield to weightier reasons,” he replied. “Oblige me, M. le Duc, by taking my message at once to the emperor.”

There was something in his tone which compelled the obsequious courtier to obey. He withdrew, and returned presently with a face full of amazed admiration to announce to the visitor that his majesty was willing to receive him.

The emperor was standing with his hands behind his back in the embrasure of a window when M. de Gondriac entered. He did not turn round at once, but waited until the door closed, and then, walking up to M. de Gondriac, he said brusquely: “I have invited you many times, marquis, and you have never come. What brings you here to-night?” The speech was curt, but not insolent; it did not even sound uncivil.

“Sire, I am an old man, and it is so long since I have been at court that I have forgotten how to behave myself. My lord chamberlain was deeply shocked, I could perceive, at my breach of ceremony in coming to the palace in this abrupt way without going through the usual observances. My motive will, I hope, excuse me to your majesty.”

“Yes, yes, I will let you off easier than Bassano,” said the emperor. “But what do you want of me?” He had his hands still behind his back, and, without desiring his visitor to be seated, he turned to pace up and down the room.

“I have come to ask a favor of your majesty.”

“Ha! that is well. I am glad of that. Do you know, that boy of yours has behaved admirably,” he said, facing round and looking at the marquis.

“We are accustomed to fight, sire,” replied M. de Gondriac. “It came naturally to my son; he had, moreover, the advantage of drawing his maiden sword under a great captain.”

“I mean to keep him by me. I have appointed him on my own staff. We are not done with war. I am raising troops for a campaign in the spring.”

“Sire, I am aware of it; it is precisely about that that I have come to speak to your majesty. There is in my village a widow whose two sons have fallen in the service of the country; there remains to her one more son, a lad of nineteen....”

“And she is ambitious that he should share the glorious fate of his brothers; that is natural,” broke in the emperor.

“Sire, she is a widow, and this boy is all she has in the world. It is no longer possible to procure a substitute; therefore I come to crave at your hands his exemption from the service.”

“What! you would rob France of a soldier, when they are so scarce that gold cannot buy one? Is this your notion of duty to your country, M. de Gondriac? Is it thus you aristocrats understand patriotism?” The emperor confronted him with a flashing eye.

“My son has answered that question, sire.”

“Tut! And because, forsooth, your son has done his duty, you would have other men’s sons betray theirs! A peasant makes as good a soldier as a peer, let me tell you. Because your son condescended to share the glory of the grande armée you expect me to make you a present of a strong young soldier! I do not understand such sentimental logic.”

“Neither do I, sire. I was not putting forward the services of my son as a claim for this poor lad, but those of his two brothers who lost their lives, one at Wagram, the other at Friedland.”

“What better could have befallen them?”

“Nothing, in my estimation; but their mother....”

“France is their mother; she claims their allegiance and their life before any one. The man who puts his mother before his country is a fool or a coward!”

“This young man has not asked to be exempted; his mother came and besought me to have him spared to her, and, counting on your gratitude and generosity, sire, I have come to lay her petition at your feet. The boy himself is frantic to be off and die like his brothers.”

“Then he shall have his wish and France shall count one more hero. Tell his mother she shall have a pension. Give me her name, and it shall be done at once.”

“She is not in want of it, sire; she has wealth enough to buy a score of men, if they were to be had.”

“But they are not, and so her son must go.”

“This is your last word, sire?”

“Yes, marquis, my last.”

“Then I have only to crave your majesty’s forgiveness for my intrusion.” M. de Gondriac bowed and was moving towards the door, when the emperor called out:

“Stay a moment. What motive have you in pleading this widow’s cause so strongly?”

The marquis in a few words told the story of that memorable night when Caboff saved him at the cost of his own life. The emperor listened to the end without interrupting him; then he resumed his walk, and, speaking from the other end of the room, “You are naturally anxious to pay back so heavy a debt,” he said. “Would this feeling carry you the length of making some sacrifice?”

How could Bonaparte ask the question? Did not M. de Gondriac’s presence here to-night answer it exhaustively?

“I think I have proved that, sire,” he answered coldly.

The emperor was silent for a while; then, turning round, he looked fixedly at the marquis and said:

“I withdraw my unconditional refusal. I will let you know to-morrow on what terms I consent to exempt the son of your deliverer from dying on the field of battle.”

M. de Gondriac bowed low. “I have the honor to salute your majesty.”

“Au revoir, marquis.”

What did he mean, and what was this condition so mysteriously hinted at, and only to be declared after the night’s preparation?

M. de Gondriac was sitting over his breakfast next morning when an estafette rode up to his old hôtel, bearing a large official envelope stamped with the imperial arms and the talismanic words, “Maison de l’Empereur.” M. le Marquis broke the seal and ran his eye down the large sheet, and then tossed it from him with an exclamation of anger and contempt.

“Enter his service! Play lackey at the court of an upstart who is drenching my country in blood from sheer vanity and ambition—a usurper who is keeping my liege sovereign in exile, and the best part of my kindred in idleness, or else in a servitude more humiliating than the dreariest inactivity! A De Gondriac tricked out in the livery of a mountebank king like him! Ha! ha! M. de Bonaparte, when you give that spectacle to the gods, ... je vous en fais mon compliment!”

M. le Marquis laughed a low, musical laugh as he muttered these reflections to himself. But presently he ceased laughing and his face took a dark and troubled look. The emperor made his acceptance of this offer the price of Marcel Caboff’s exemption. If he rejected it, the lad must join. “Would gratitude carry you the length of a sacrifice?” When the question had been put to him, it seemed to M. de Gondriac that he had forestalled it; but the emperor evidently did not think so, and now he was putting him to the test. It was the severest he could have chosen. When Hermann de Gondriac took service under Bonaparte, the old nobleman considered his son was making a fine sacrifice of personal pride to patriotism; but the service here, at least, was a noble one, and rendered to France rather than to the upstart who had captured her. But this other was of a totally different order. Even in the bygone days, when France had a legitimate king and real court, the De Gondriacs had been shy of taking office in the royal household, preferring the service of the camp, diplomacy abroad, or statesmanship at home; to stoop now to be a courtier to Bonaparte was a degradation not to be calmly contemplated. If the tyrant had asked any sacrifice but this, M. le Marquis said to himself, he would have made it gladly; but this was impossible. It meant the surrender of his self-respect, of those principles whose integrity he had hitherto proudly maintained at no small personal risk and cost. Before he had finished his coffee, the question was settled, and he rose to write his answer.

Trifles sometimes affect us with the force of great repellant causes. The act of taking the pen in his hand brought before him vividly the last time he had held it: it was in his library at Gondriac; the widow sat watching him with a swelling heart, made glad by his promise solemnly given: “I pledge you my word that your son shall not be taken from you.” M. le Marquis laid down his pen and fell to thinking. “No, I can’t do it,” he said after a long pause. “I can’t belie the traditions of my race; I can’t stain the old name and turn saltimbanque in my old age.” He took up the pen and wrote to the emperor, declining his offer.

The next day the town of X—— was full of excitement. The new recruits were pouring in, sometimes in boisterous crowds, singing and hurrahing, sometimes in sober knots of twos and threes, sometimes singly, accompanied by weeping relatives, mostly women. There had been an official attempt to get up a show of warlike enthusiasm, but it had failed; people were growing sick of the glories of war, sick of sending sons and brothers and husbands to be massacred for Bonaparte’s good pleasure. The recruits were called out by name, and answered sullenly as they passed through the Mairie out to the market-place, where the sergeant was waiting to give them their first lesson in drill, showing them how to stand straight and get into position.

“Marcel Caboff!” called out the recruiting agent.

“Remplacé!”

“By whom?”

“Rudolf, Marquis de Gondriac!”

TO BE CONTINUED.

HIGHER.

I have lifted up my eyes unto the mountains, whence help shall come to me.—Ps. cxx.

Too late have I known thee, O Infinite Beauty! too late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient and new!—St. Augustine.

I.

'Mid wide green meadows, made more fair with flowers—

Tall, golden lilies, swaying in the sun,

Slight, clustering rue that web of silver spun—

I lingered dreaming through the day’s first hours.

About me men in work-day toil were bent,
Swift levelling the daisies’ drift of snow,
The clover’s purple sweetness laying low,

And ripened grain whose summer life was spent.

I sat where leafy trees a shadow wrought

Amid the broad, warm sunshine of the plain,

Where, undisturbed, poured forth the wood-birds’ strain

And fancy’s magic played with every thought:

A whole life centred in each daisy-round,

And work-day toil seemed but a slumbrous sound.

II.

Low rippling at my feet a loitering stream

Slipt, murmuring music to each listening stone,

Or flung its silver laughter where soft shone

The slant sunbeam breaking the shadows’ dream;

Betwixt the robins’ song the swift blue-bird

Flashed like a heavenly message through the shade

Where with the sunshine gentlest breezes played,

And quiet shadows to soft motion stirred.

Between me and the meadow’s smitten flow’rs

The fresh June roses wreathed the rude fence bars,

Frail elder trailed its galaxy of stars,

While butterflies sped by in golden show’rs—

Far, far beyond, the earth-haze shining through,

Rose the great mountains’ dim and misty blue.

III.

So far and strange those misty hills! so near
And intimate the little, shady nook,
The skies reflected in the merry brook—
Those distant heights so lonely and austere!
Scarce e’en the busy mowers of the field
Lifted their eyes to those dim gates of blue

Where all their gathered harvest must pass through,

Its grass and stubble be one day revealed.
As grew the day, more clear the summits grew;
Springing from shadow, radiant waterfalls

Flung trails of sunshine o’er the stern rock-walls—

Such sunshine as the valley never knew!

Paled the June roses, fading in my hand,

Tarnished the lowland river’s golden sand!

IV.

Then seemed to stir the trembling leaves amid,

To mingle with the robins’ cheerful call,
A low, sad voice, as if the hills let fall
Faint, wandering echoes of sweet music hid
In dark ravine, on solitary height.
I dropped my roses, gone their ravishment;
I passed the mowers o’er their harvest bent;

I sought those distant mountain-lands of light.

Wild, thorny brambles stretched across my way,

Sharp rocks were weary pathways for my feet,
Yet ever lured me on those accents sweet
Whose very sadness was my weakness’ stay,
With every step more intimate and near—

“Take heart, poor child! ’tis I; have thou no fear.

V.

“Take heart, and I thy faltering steps will lead

Above the earth-mists and the brier-strewn road

To my far mountain-tops, the pure abode

Of heaven-born stream, and fair enamelled mead

Whose flow’rs immortal fells not any scythe.

Long have I sought thee 'mid the withering flowers

Wherewith thou smiling crown’dst the fading hours,

Weaving fine fancies 'mid the murmuring blithe

Of lowland stream, and birds, and pattering leaves;

Long have I called thee, waiting for thy voice,

So faint it rose above the troublous noise
Of earthly harvesters among their sheaves;
Long have I waited thy dear heart to win,
So long desired to reign with thee therein.”

VI.

O sorrow-stricken Voice, so piercing sweet!

Blinding my eyes with tears, smiting my heart

Like some fire-pointed, swift-descending dart,

And giving strength unto my climbing feet

Seeking those dim and misty hills of blue.

Lo! the great mountains at thy music thrilled,

And all their deep recesses echoes filled—
Near and more near the sunlit summits grew!
The little birds that gathered, unafraid,
On berry-laden boughs beside my way
Mingled thy cadence with their roundelay—

Its joyousness grown sweeter through thy shade.

O Voice of love and grief, sad for my sin,

What ways were thine so poor a thing to win!

VII.

O thou Almighty Lord of life and death,

Thou that hast led me out the wilderness

And shown me thy great hills’ pure strength to bless,

Guard in my soul, lest still it perisheth!
The cross thou gavest still I strive to bear—
So light it grows that half, at times, I fear
My trust is lost, sign of thy service dear—

Dost thou bear all, dear Lord, for me no share?

So in thy steps to follow still I seek,

The wearing way thy patient feet have pressed,

The blood-stained way thy heavy cross hath blessed—

Dost thou hold me to suffer aught too weak?

E’en when I strive one little thorn to grasp

It turns to tender roses in my clasp.

VIII.

The very stones win smoothness from thy feet,
Beneath whose tread immortal flowers spring,
Holding within their snowy hearts no sting,
And breathing spices for love’s incense meet.
The lark, swift rising thy approach to greet,
The fulness of his heavenly song to pour
No higher than thy breast divine need soar,
There hiding life and song in joy complete!
Though sheltering trees o’ershadow not my way
To ward the sultry glow of noonday sun,
Yet 'neath thy cross the coolest shade is won
That dims no ray of that eternal day

That from yon unstained hills of peace doth shine,

Whereto thou leadest me, O Love Divine!

IX.

Yet many bitter tears I needs must weep,
Remembering the glimmer of the plain
Where nodding lilies and the bending grain
Seemed rarest treasure in their gold to keep;
Those thoughtless hours ere I learned to look
Beyond my roses to the misty hills—
The far-off pastures only God’s hand tills;
Where lost I in the laughter of the brook
And song of earthly birds that loving Voice,
That patient call, alas! too long denied.
Still in my heart in weeping woe must bide,
E’en in His breast who bids my soul rejoice,
The mem’ry of that day’s ingratitude
When God in vain for love his creature sued.

THE IRON AGE OF CHRISTENDOM.

Our period is emphatically one of historical studies, as we have had occasion to remark in a former article on the Life and Works of M. Ozanam. Among other illusions swept away by the light of truth which these laborious researches have let in upon the obscurity of the past, there is one great illusion about golden and iron ages. In respect to the Christian period, specifically, it is manifest that it is vain to look, in the apostolic, ante-Nicene, mediæval, or modern ages, for that ideal perfection in real, concrete existence which may have been in our imagination as a pleasing picture. There has never been an age of gold unmixed with baser metal for the church any more than for humanity in general. The analogy of the past, which is the only sure criterion we can apply to the future, forbids us to expect that there ever will be such a purely golden age on the earth. Moreover, those iron ages or dark ages, of Christian or pre-Christian, historic or pre-historic times, which have been imagined to precede or to interrupt the epochs of splendor and light, are seen on inspection not to have been all iron or all darkness. The progress of mankind towards its destination has been continuous from the beginning, although, in larger or smaller local extensions or numerical portions of humanity, there has been in various periods a stoppage or retrogradation of the movement, in appearance, and in respect to individual progress. The earth keeps its regular course, though men walk on its surface in an opposite direction, and they are carried with it unconsciously. The ship goes on and carries with it the passenger, while he is walking from the bow to the stern. Clouds, night, and eclipses are not a destruction or suspension of the irradiation of light from the sun on the earth, but its partial and temporary impediments. The ship which makes a long, dangerous, but successful voyage is making headway while plunging into the trough of the sea as well as while riding the crest of the waves; often is less delayed by beating against adverse winds than by calm weather and light breezes. The bark of Peter, freighted with the treasures of human hope and destiny, is steadily proceeding, under the guidance of her heavenly Pilot, over the waves of time, through calm and stormy seas, toward the port of eternity. Seldom does she seem to be in safety, and show the speed of her motion, to the uninstructed eyes of those who do not possess the sublime science of the stars and charts by which her celestial course is directed. “Never,” says Lacordaire, “is the triumph of the church visible at a given moment. If you look at any one point in the expanse of the ages, the bark of Peter appears to be about to be engulfed, and the faithful are always prompt to cry out: Lord, save us, we perish! But if you look at the whole series of times, the church manifests her strength, and you understand what Jesus Christ said in the tempest: Man of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”[75]

There is nevertheless a difference in the character of epochs. The epochs of Constantine, Charlemagne, Gregory VII., of the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, are seen in the retrospect to have a special light of glory about them. The seventh, tenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries present a dark aspect. The tenth century particularly, which we are at present bringing under review, is generally called “the iron age” even by our modern Catholic historians, and not without considerable reason, more especially in respect to the state and condition of the Roman Church and the sovereign pontificate. Nevertheless, the common notion, derived from compendious histories and the generalized statements which form the commonplaces of popular literature, respecting the tenth age of Christendom is not correct and is extremely confused. It was not an age of complete barbarism and universal ignorance. Ozanam says: “Indeed, letters did not, at any time, perish. The truth is that the period of complete barbarism, supposed at first to extend over a space of a thousand years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the capture of Constantinople, then gradually reduced to narrower limits, until it remained finally restricted to the seventh and tenth centuries, vanishes away under a more severe scrutiny.”[76] Cantù remarks: “This epoch is justly called the iron age, because of the cruel sufferings endured by individuals and nations; but humanity made a sensible progress in the face of these trials. We cannot, therefore, concur in the judgment of those who consider it the most unhappy period of the human race.”[77] We cannot make logical divisions of history into epochs exactly corresponding with the numerical notation of years and centuries. It would be absurd to suppose that at 12 A.M. of January 1, A.D. 900, to borrow Carlyle’s expression, “the clock of Time struck and an era passed away”; and that the same venerable old timepiece, from its corner in the parlor of the universe, struck again in just a hundred years, announcing the end of the iron age and the beginning of another of some different metal. The boundaries of epochs are not quite so determinate, and centuries, periods, epochs, run into one another, mix, blend, elude precise delineation. Cantù’s tenth epoch is not the tenth century, but the period beginning A.D. 800 and ending A.D. 1096. This period, between Charlemagne and the Crusades, far from presenting the aspect of a desolate waste to the eye, is crowded and variegated with events and persons of the most important and interesting character, and their history is one great act in the European drama, advancing it sensibly toward the consummation which we are still, in our own age, hastening forward and awaiting in the near or distant future. Within this great period are other and lesser cycles, embracing epochs, phases, temporary states of ecclesiastical and civil prosperity or adversity, alternations of various kinds, in Christendom, in Europe, or in portions of the Christian commonwealth, each having its distinctive notes. That part of it which is in the centre presents the characteristics of an iron age more distinctly marked than the preceding or following periods. The latter half of the ninth and the earlier half of the tenth century, taken together, really constitute the period which can with strict propriety be called the iron age. And within this century a period of about forty years, including the end of the ninth and the first years of the tenth century, was a sort of crisis in which Christian Europe seemed to have reached the dead-point in her progress, and, having passed it, went on again under the attraction of a new force.

This statement must not be taken as rigorously and uniformly applicable to all Europe and Christendom. The Greek Empire and the degenerate Eastern Church were in a state of hopeless decadence, verging toward a permanent downfall. England and Spain, on the other hand, passed through their worst times earlier, and were going upward and onward, led by great men and heroes—Alfred and the forerunners of Ferdinand and the Cid—just at the time when the rest of Europe was in the most disordered and disastrous condition. The crisis of the iron age affected chiefly the countries which had constituted the great domain of Charlemagne—France, Germany, and Italy. Its phases were various, in respect to time and other conditions, in these very countries. The whole panorama, as presented to our view in the pages of historical narrative, is as shifting, varied, apparently capricious, as mountain scenery in the changing aspects of light and shade, produced by sunshine, clouds, and moonlight, by transforming mists and sombre night. It is only when we rise to the logical order and sequence of events, trace effects to their causes, enlarge our scope of vision, ascend into the upper regions of a true philosophy of history whose atmosphere is the Christian idea and whose light is celestial faith, that a real order, harmony, and progression toward an intelligible and grand result are clearly discernible.

Some few general statements borrowed from this higher branch of historical science must be premised before we can come at a satisfactory view of our particular and immediate topic and set its details in systematic order.

The actual evils and miseries which afflicted the Christian people of Europe during the iron age were invasions of Saracens, Scandinavians, and Hungarians, incessant wars among greater and lesser princes, terrible famines and pestilences, and, in general, a state of turbulence, insecurity, social and moral confusion. This whole state of things was a relapse into the condition brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian irruption in the seventh century. The great reason why it occurred is found in the fact that Charlemagne’s great empire and power passed away and that no unifying, organic power succeeded it until Europe had passed through a period of transition. The Roman Empire had to pass away to make room for Christendom, and for a time its débris and the new material lying on the ground for a reconstruction made a state of confusion. Charlemagne’s fundamental work was solid and lasting, but he had to make some temporary structures which were showy but not substantial, and therefore fell down or were torn down; causing more disorder for a time, until they were cleared away to make room for the permanent and splendid walls to be built up according to the idea of the divine Architect. The European, Christian Idea is not that of one, uniform political western empire, ruled by an autocracy which continues or succeeds to the old, imperial Roman power. It is that of a community of nations, bound together by a common faith, common principles, international law, mutual alliance and amity, and preserving full scope for distinct and beautifully various forms of free, spontaneous growth and culture. Its regenerating, vivifying, and controlling spirit is Christianity in the Catholic organization. Its centre of unity and force is Rome and the spiritual supremacy of the pope. The political supremacy of an emperor—understanding by an emperor a universal monarch ruling subordinate kings set over dependent kingdoms—is incompatible with this true idea of a Christendom. Even, supposing this universal political sovereignty united with the sovereign pontificate of the Pope, it is incompatible with that true idea, partly for the same reasons, partly for different reasons from those which militate against it, supposing the two distinct powers to exist separately. It was necessary that the pope should possess his own separate sovereignty in a kingdom of moderate size. It was also necessary that some one powerful king should be endowed by the pope with a special, sacred pre-eminence among other sovereigns, as the protector of his civil princedom and of his spiritual supremacy. This was the meaning of Charles the Great’s imperial coronation. He was, in fact, really the king of almost all Europe. But this was temporary. His kingdom was divided. The imperial dignity was conferred on different sovereigns of France, Italy, and Germany from time to time, and for above thirty years remained in abeyance for want of a proper subject to receive it, until it rested at last on the head of the first of the Saxon line, passing thence to the Franconian house, and afterwards to the Hohenstaufen. The German emperors were, however, by election kings of Germany, and as such governed their states; whereas they were made emperors by papal consecration, and in that capacity were protectors of the Holy See and the church. The authority which they lawfully exercised as emperors in the city and principality of Rome was the authority of a civil magistrate who was not the head but the right arm of the pope, the real political sovereign in his own state.

The European crisis of the tenth century was a period in which the Carlovingian dynasty was going into decadence, and the new dynasties of France and Germany had not yet arisen. There was a great want of able sovereigns, and especially of men who were strong enough to fulfil the functions of the imperial office. To turn now especially towards Italy and Rome, it was the lack of a strong hand to preserve peace and order among the petty princes and states of Italy, and to protect the pope and the Holy See from the rebellions and intrigues of powerful nobles and contending factions within and around the Roman principality, which was the chief cause of the long obnubilation of the sun of Christendom—the Roman Church—during the tenth epoch. We propose to enter now more minutely into the exposition of the historical truth respecting this period, so far as it relates to the popes and the Roman Church directly and immediately.

The ordinary accounts of this epoch in Roman and Italian history produce a singular impression on the mind of the reader. It seems as if the gas had been suddenly turned off and all had become dark, or as if an express-train filled with passengers had all at once been stopped by an impediment in the middle of the night at an obscure way-station, to the surprise and chagrin of all on board when they awoke in the morning. One is puzzled and disgusted by a confused, disconnected story which reads like the record of crimes and disasters in a modern newspaper. The persons mentioned seem to have no reality or distinct character—to be like the spectres of dreams or the personified abstractions in parables. The very names of the popes, such as Formosus, Marinus, Lando, Romanus, have a strange, unpapal sound. They appear and vanish with marvellous rapidity, leaving no trace behind. When we read that the world was generally expected to explode in the year 1000, we are not surprised, but rather wonder why it did not, and are quite relieved to find ourselves safe and sound in the eleventh century, and hear those “whom the Lord hath sent to walk through the earth answer the angel of the Lord, and say: We have walked through the earth; and behold, all the earth is inhabited, and is at rest.”[78]

One great difficulty in picking the thread of history out of this snarl is the paucity of contemporary documents. Another cause of misunderstanding and misrepresentation has been the flippant and mendacious character of the most extensive and minute of the chronicles of the period, that of Luitprand. The same kind of gossiping, scandal-mongering centres which exist among us may not have existed in the tenth century. There were no newspapers filled with libels and calumnies, falsifications of news, reports of the army of detectives of the press. But there were the same violent factions, party animosities, intrigues, mutual denunciations, raising a cloud of smoke and dust like that which overhangs a battle-field, in even more virulent activity then than we now behold them in our modern political mêlées. All the condensed scandal, partisan vituperation, indecent gossip, and malicious calumny of the time in which he lived are collected in the memoirs of Luitprand, and from these have been infiltrated through succeeding times, leaving great stains which only the acid of criticism has been able to efface. Even Fleury says of him that he is extremely passionate, excessive both in his abuse and his flattery, and given to buffoonery to a degree which transgresses the bounds of decency. He was originally a subdeacon of the church of Toledo in Spain, afterwards a deacon of the church of Pavia, during which time he was sent by Berenger, King of Italy, on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople. Later he became Bishop of Cremona, but was a disgrace to the episcopate. He was a courtier of Otho the German emperor, who sent him on another mission to Constantinople, a violent adherent of the German party, bitterly hostile to the Italian party and all the popes who favored it, and a participator in the schismatical proceedings of Otho’s anti-pope. His credit is now entirely lost. But at the time of the revolt of Luther all the incriminations of the popes and the Roman clergy, whether true, false, or doubtful, were gathered up and made the most of to sustain the bill of indictment against the Holy See. The same stories, repeated by numbers of writers, produced the effect of concurrent testimony on the general mind of the readers of history. Baronius and other Catholic historians, not having sufficient materials for testing and correcting all these accusations, let a number of them pass uncontradicted or admitted their truth. Fleury and some others of the lowest Gallican school, who always write like advocates who have taken out a brief against the Holy See, have in their historical works neglected and perverted facts in a manner which is equally shallow and perfidious, and as contrary to sound criticism as it is to orthodox doctrine. It is only since the discovery of Flodoard’s Lives of the Popes, the critical and learned researches of Muratori, and the great modern advance of genuine historical science, that the tissue of lies depending solely on the worthless testimony of Luitprand has been swept away. A better appreciation of the great course of events and the essential facts of history is now possible, and even easy. Men of genius, learning, and conscientious devotion to truth have lighted up these dark, buried crypts of the substructure of Christendom, as the zealous archæologists of York have done in the old minster, whose foundations were laid in the very period we are describing.[79]

In regard to many particular events and certain individuals whose names figure in connection with the transactions of an obscure epoch we cannot expect to acquire a perfect certainty. Nor is there anything of moment depending on the discovery of the truth in such cases. We have to be content with a probability or with a doubt in thousands of matters of detail. There are a considerable number of popes of whom we know next to nothing. In certain instances it is not easy to determine whether an election of a given individual was valid or invalid. Of the truth or falsehood of the accusations made against several popes and other persons of high ecclesiastical or civil rank, and of the reports of assassinations and other great crimes, which are so frequent in this period of disorder, we cannot always form a certain judgment. There is enough, however, of that which is certain or fairly probable to show the connection, the continuity, and the identity of principles both with the foregoing and the following epochs, and to furnish ample material for the vindication of the cause of the Holy See and the Papacy. There is a sequence in the progress through the struggles of transition; there are great and good men, noble and heroic achievements, interesting and curious episodes—in fine, there is a human and a Christian character showing its lineaments in place of the cloudy spectre with distorted features which has heretofore scared the imagination.[80]

We begin our historical sketch with Pope Formosus, who was elected A.D. 891. This is one of the popes of whom we have said above that they seem in our common histories like a mere shadow of a great name without a personal reality. Besides, there is a certain cloud on his memory, arising from the fact that he was deprived of his see of Porto by John VIII., and that he was the subject of a great outrage from his successor, Stephen VI. A careful examination of his history shows, however, that he was no common man and was both a good and an able pope. As Bishop of Porto he was one of the most conspicuous among the Italian prelates. He left his see to become a missionary among the Bulgarians, where he labored zealously and successfully in the work of their conversion. There is nothing to show that his censure by Pope John VIII., which seems to have been chiefly occasioned by his taking an active part in a political opposition to the Emperor Charles the Bald, involved in it any moral dishonor. He was restored by Pope Marinus, and the indignities inflicted on his memory by his successor were a wanton and causeless outrage, which was condemned and repaired by a subsequent pope with the approbation of the Roman people.

Europe was just then in the depths of the disorders and miseries caused by the decay of the imperial authority and the degeneracy of Charlemagne’s successors. Berenger was king in Northern Italy, but Guido, Duke of Spoleto, and his son Lambert had been crowned emperors in opposition to him and to all the French and German claimants. Toward the end of the short reign of Formosus, which lasted less than five years, and after the death of Guido, the dissatisfaction of the pope with the conduct of Lambert and his mother, Ermengarda, induced him to summon Arnulph, King of Germany, to come to the relief of the Holy See and of Italy. He obeyed the summons, made a forcible entry into Rome, where the Lambertine faction had gained the upper hand and thrown Formosus into prison, and was by him crowned emperor. This was the beginning of the appeals of the popes to Germany for intervention in Italian affairs, and of the never-ending conflicts between the Italian and German parties in Italy, whose finale we have but just witnessed in our own day in the exclusion of Austria from her dominion in Venetia. We have no doubt that it was necessary, and on the whole productive of good results, that the imperial crown should be transferred to the German sovereigns. But, without delaying to consider this point, we simply take note of the fact that this was one of the great questions of violent dispute and contention which disturbed the Roman Church and the papal elections so long as there were Italian princes who disputed the imperial dignity with the Germans. Arnulph returned almost immediately to Germany. Formosus died and was followed to the tomb a few weeks after by his immediate successor, Boniface VI. The party of Lambert succeeded in obtaining the election of Stephen VI., the first of the popes who grievously dishonored the tiara. His violent and shameful conduct caused a temporary reaction in favor of the opposite party, by whom he was imprisoned and strangled. Lambert was, nevertheless, acknowledged by the three succeeding popes, Romanus, Theodore II., and John IX., and by two successive councils, and the pact between the church and the empire was solemnly renewed. These three pontificates filled only a space of three years and closed the century. The year 901 saw a new competitor for the imperial crown, which death had taken from Lambert’s head, in the person of Louis of Provence, who was actually crowned by Benedict IV., but very soon driven away by Berenger, who was still reigning in the north of Italy. Berenger was an able and warlike sovereign, in many respects worthy of admiration, and capable of filling the imperial office with honor to himself and advantage to Italy. Circumstances were, however, extremely adverse. He maintained himself in possession of a certain pre-eminence among the petty sovereigns of Italy, and carried on vigorously wars against the Saracen and Hungarian invaders. He was even crowned emperor in 915, but was never able to establish his authority on a solid and permanent basis, and at last, in 924, he was assassinated by a conspiracy of Italian nobles. With him the imperial office became extinct, and remained so until it was resuscitated, thirty-eight years afterward, in the person of Otho the Great.

The failure of the imperial power which had been instituted in the person of Charlemagne left the Holy See and all Italy a prey to contending, petty sovereigns, to powerful and mutually hostile nobles and factions, and to fierce heathen invaders. The Roman pontiffs maintained with difficulty a restricted, often merely nominal, civil sovereignty in the city and principality of Rome. Between the years 900 and 914 six popes succeeded each other: Benedict IV., Leo V., Christopher, Sergius III., Anastasius III., and Lando. Of the nine popes who came between Stephen VI. and John X., it is certain that nearly all were worthy of their exalted position, and the grave accusations made against two of the number, Christopher and Sergius, rest on uncertain testimony. The average length of their reigns being less than two years, and that of the longest among them only seven, most of the number had no time to make a conspicuous figure in history, and their annals are so scanty that very little is known of the acts of their administration.

The reign of John X., which lasted fourteen years, from 914 to 928, was of a different character. He was one of the great popes, and proved himself fully equal to the emergencies of the time and the difficulties of his position. For nine years previously to his election to the Roman See he had been Archbishop of Ravenna, and the extraordinary ability which he had exhibited in his government of that important church had pointed him out as one capable of making head, in conjunction with Berenger, against the perils with which Rome and Italy were beset at this most dangerous crisis in their destinies. In fact, he was obliged to do the work alone; for Berenger was unable to help him, having his hands full in fighting Saracens and Hungarians in Northern Italy. There was no hope to be placed either in Germany or France. The only resource for the pope was to place himself at the head of his own barons and in alliance with the neighboring princes, and to lead the war against the Saracens in person. For this purpose he formed a league among the princes of Southern Italy, and, obtaining also auxiliaries from the Greek emperor, conducted a short and brilliantly successful campaign against the Saracens, by which they were completely discomfited and finally expelled from that part of Italy. The entire reign of John X. was in conformity with its glorious beginning; but soon after the violent and tragical overthrow of the noble Emperor Berenger by the turbulent Italian nobles, a similar catastrophe ended the career of the great pope, his friend and compeer. Alberic, Count of Tusculum, and Theophylact, senator of Rome, had been the two most powerful supporters, and the former had been the chief subordinate leader, of the great military operations of John X. The almost exclusive glory and credit which the popular voice ascribed to John for the liberation of the country from the Saracens, and the great increase and concentration of the sovereign authority under his vigorous administration, stirred up the jealousy and discontent of these great nobles. The wife of Theophylact was the famous Theodora, the younger Theodora was their daughter, and another daughter, Mariuccia, commonly called Marozia, was the wife of Alberic. These women, but especially the last mentioned, were remarkable for their beauty, talents, and ambition. The stream of filthy tradition which has come down through the sewer of Luitprand and the popular romances of the period has transmitted to posterity the names of these women, stained with every kind of foulness and cruelty. How much of calumny and exaggeration there may be in these scandalous stories we cannot determine. It is certain that the family exercised a great sway in Rome for many years both before and after the great coup d’état in which the intrigues of Marozia culminated and collapsed, as we are about to relate. One year after the murder of Berenger, Alberic was killed in an unsuccessful assault on Rome, and Marozia married Guido, Marquis of Tuscany. The sister of Guido, Ermengarda, Marchioness of Ivrea, was another of the group of Italian princesses of that period, remarkable in all respects, except in the special virtues of Christian women. In 926 Marozia set on foot, with these two accomplices, a revolution in Italy, by which Rodolph of Burgundy, the successful rival and successor of Berenger in the kingdom of Italy, was chased out to make room for Hugo of Provence, the half-brother of Guido. After the coronation of Hugo at Pavia, Guido and Marozia took possession of Rome by force of arms and imprisoned Pope John X., who died a few months afterward, it is suspected by violence. Guido also died within a year from his usurpation, and Marozia governed the city alone with the titles of senator and patrician. After the two short, and perhaps abbreviated, pontificates of Leo VI. and Stephen VIII., she caused the younger of her two sons by Alberic to be elected pope under the name of John XI. Still unsatisfied, she aspired to become queen of Italy, and empress, and for this purpose contracted a marriage—which by the ecclesiastical law was null and void[81]—with her brother-in-law, Hugo, the King of Italy. The marriage was celebrated in 932, and the imperial coronation was expected to follow in due time. But the violent and imperious temper of the Burgundian Hugo ruined all these plans. Alberic, eldest son of Marozia by her first husband, Alberic of Tusculum, was a youth who inherited all the brilliant qualities of both his parents, and whose character was certainly not derived from his mother or due to her influence. One day at dinner the princely youth was acting as page to the king, and by accident or design poured too much water on his hands, for which he received a buffet on the cheek from his rude step-father. He immediately left the room in a towering passion, and, running out upon the piazza, summoned the people, with words of burning eloquence, to vengeance and rescue. The Castle of St. Angelo was very speedily taken by assault, Hugo was forced to save his life by flight, and Marozia, banished from Rome, repudiated by her husband, thwarted in her wicked schemes, disappeared from view, and, it is to be hoped, passed the rest of her days until her death, which did not occur later than 945, in doing penance for her sins.

Now followed one of the most curious and interesting of episodes in the history of Christian Rome. Alberic reigned during his whole life-time—a period of twenty-two years—as absolute sovereign of Rome, with ability, justice, and popularity. He was in harmony with the popes, a protector of his kingdom and of the Holy See, a munificent patron of religious orders, a benefactor to the church and religion. The period of his reign is like an oasis in the desert of the tenth century. It is true that he kept his brother, John XI., in an honorable yet strict imprisonment during his life-time. Yet, although there is nothing recorded to the discredit of this pope, Alberic’s conduct toward the succeeding pontiffs shows that he must have had strong reasons for his treatment of his brother. The elections of popes during his reign were free and peaceful, and the best men among the Roman clergy were chosen. By degrees the legal form of the administration was so regulated that the sovereign rights and titles of the pope were preserved; and although the actual civil government was entirely in the hands of Prince Alberic, it was administered by him as the pope’s temporal vicar, without discord between the two powers. As a provisional arrangement it worked well, but Alberic was too wise and far-seeing to think its permanent continuance possible or desirable. By a singular stroke of policy he prepared for the restoration of the real sovereignty to the one who had not ceased to retain the title and the right. His son Octavian was educated as an ecclesiastic, and the chiefs of the clergy and nobility were induced to make a solemn engagement before Alberic’s death to elect Octavian pope on the first vacancy of the Holy See. He was accordingly elected pope soon after the death of his father, although he was but eighteen years of age, and assumed the name of John XII.

Of the personal and private character of this youthful pontiff, who died at the age of twenty-six after a reign of eight years, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to form an exact and certain estimate. The accusations made against him during his life-time are atrocious, and they are still repeated by modern writers, although the most judicious and moderate historians soften them down considerably. The learned writer in the Civiltà gives his judgment that as a pontiff all his acts were laudable, and, as a king, worthy of one who was the son of Alberic. In respect to his private morals, he considers that the accusations of his political enemies and of writers attached to the German, imperial party—the almost sole remaining source of information respecting that period—are to be distrusted; but that it is difficult to exculpate him altogether from the reproach of having lived more as secular princes are wont to do than as became the holy state of a bishop. The salient point of his administration was the calling in of the King of Germany, Otho the Great, and the subsequent imbroglio between the pope and the emperor. Otho, who well deserves the name of Great, notwithstanding grievous errors and wrongs in his conduct toward the Holy See, had been reigning twenty years when he was summoned to Rome and crowned emperor. The return of the old disorders in Italy made his intervention necessary, but he carried it too far, and John XII., probably with good reason, and certainly acting in a way which was natural in a high-spirited and youthful sovereign trained in the maxims and sentiments of an Italian prince, joined with the other princes of Italy in opposition to the German domination. A struggle between John and Otho was the consequence. The emperor, misled by the bad advice of Luitprand and other bishops, attempted to depose the pope and substitute an anti-pope, who called himself Leo VIII., in his place. John XII. died suddenly before this conflict had any decisive issue, and Benedict V. was elected in his place, but was soon after carried away into Germany by Otho and kept in captivity at Hamburg. On the death of the anti-pope, which occurred in March, 965, a few months after the death of John, the Romans requested the restoration of Benedict V., which was granted by Otho. The pope, however, died on his journey to Rome, venerated and regretted even by the emperor and by all with whom he had come into personal contact, as well as by the Romans.

The emperor and all the various parties by which Rome was divided agreed together and concurred in the election of John XIII., who favored the German party in politics, and had, on the whole, a peaceful and prosperous reign of six years, sustained by the imperial power, although it was interrupted by one violent sedition, which was repressed and punished in the severest manner.

The close of the reigns of the Pope John XIII. and the Emperor Otho the Great was marked by one extraordinary and most interesting event—the marriage of the young Emperor Otho II. with Theophania, a Greek princess of distinguished beauty, intellectual accomplishments, and personal virtues. She brought with her as dowry all the Greek possessions in Italy, and was regarded as an angel of peace between the two empires.

The death of Otho I. in 973 was the signal for new outbreaks and disturbances in Italy. In Rome a struggle began between two powerful families: the Crescenzi, who were the great lords of the Sabine territory, and the Conti—that is, the Tusculan counts—who were the principal barons of Latium. The latter favored, while the former opposed, the imperial power in Italy. Crescenzio, or Cencio, the first leader of the Italian faction, is supposed by many writers to have been a grand-nephew of Marozia. He attempted an imitation of Alberic, though not by the same honorable means, and endeavored to gain possession for himself of the Roman principality. The pope, Benedict VI., who had succeeded John XIII. a few months before the death of Otho I., was assaulted and dethroned by armed force, imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo, and at last strangled. An infamous ecclesiastic, a partisan and accomplice with Crescenzio in his crimes, was intruded into the chair of St. Peter while he was still, in the language of Pope Sylvester II., dripping with the blood of his predecessor. This so-called Pope Boniface VII., who is commonly regarded as an anti-pope, was dispossessed, after one month, together with his patron, Crescenzio, by a counter-revolution under the counts of Tusculum, and fled to Constantinople. At a later period he returned and succeeded in seizing on the government for a brief period, but came at length to a most tragical and ignominious end. Crescenzio ended his days in a monastery. It is uncertain whether there was or was not a pope named Donus II. who reigned for a few months after the death of Benedict VI. Benedict VII., a nephew of Alberic, Count of Tusculum, and Bishop of Sutri, was enthroned, according to Mansi, on the 28th of December, 974, and governed the Roman Church during his pontificate of nine years in such a manner as to leave no stain upon his reputation. One of his first acts was to excommunicate, in a council of bishops, Cardinal Franco, the anti-pope. In 980 he was obliged to call upon the young emperor, Otho II., to come to his assistance in Rome. He came, in fact, during the following year, but, after an unsuccessful campaign against the allied Greeks and Saracens, died in his imperial palace at Rome, Dec. 9, 983, in the twenty-eighth year of his age—a prince whose character made him worthy of his father, but who was less fortunate in his destiny. His premature death and the infancy of Otho III. seemed to threaten both Germany and Italy with great disasters. Germany was preserved from these menacing evils by the sanctity and ability of two noble and heroic women—St. Adelaide, the widow of Otho the Great, and Theophania, widow of Otho II., and imperial regent in the name of her son, who was but three years old, yet universally recognized as King of Germany and emperor-elect. Rome, however, had still to suffer, and remained for another half-century to come the foot-ball of rival factions. The son of Crescenzio, called Crescenzio Nomentano, obtained the upper hand in Rome, recalled the anti-pope, Boniface VII., imprisoned and put to death John XIV., the successor of Benedict VI., and made himself patrician and governor of Rome. The sudden death of Boniface, however, and the universal hatred in which his memory was held, enabled the clergy and people of Rome to elect a worthy pope in the person of John XV. (April, 986), who held the see ten years, governing with great prudence and success, notwithstanding the great difficulties of his position. In 989 the empress-mother, Theophania, came to Rome and held an imperial court. It was expected that she would put an end to the tyranny of Crescenzio Nomentano, but she was deceived by his extreme cunning and hypocritical promises so far that she confirmed him in his office as patrician. After her departure he became so much worse that the pope was obliged to leave Rome and take refuge with Hugo, Marquis of Tuscany, through whose intervention a pressing request was sent to the emperor-elect, Otho III., now seventeen years of age, to come in person to Italy. So great was now the fear of the imperial power that Crescenzio hastened to reconcile himself to the pope, who returned and was reconducted with great manifestations of honor to the Lateran palace.

On his arrival in Rome at the head of a large army, early in 996, Otho III., who, with precocious vigor of mind and character, had assumed the reins of government, found the Roman See vacant by the death of John XV., and his first care was the election of his successor. The one whom he proposed, and who was accepted by the electors, was a young ecclesiastic but twenty-four years of age, the son of the Duke of Franconia and his own cousin-german. His name was Bruno, and his accomplished education, joined with a mature virtue, made him worthy to fill the see of Peter. He assumed the name of Gregory V., and gave great promise of adorning the Holy See during a long pontificate, as Otho did of becoming an illustrious emperor of Germany. The hopes of the church and the empire were, however, frustrated by the early death of both. Crescenzio had been condemned to banishment, but, at the request of Gregory, his sentence was remitted. The generosity of the two youthful and confiding sovereigns was requited by Crescenzio, as soon as Otho’s back was turned, by an uprising against the German pope and the imperial officers, the expulsion of Gregory, and the creation of an anti-pope, who was John Philagathos, a Greek monk, Bishop of Piacenza, and lately ambassador of the emperor at the court of Constantinople. The bold plan of these two conspirators was nothing less than the restoration of the sovereignty of the West to the Greek emperor, under whose auspices each one hoped to be confirmed in his usurped authority at Rome. In 998 Gregory and Otho re-entered Rome together, and this time showed no clemency either to Crescenzio or Philagathos, both of whom were victims of a terrible vengeance.

Pope Gregory died in 999, in the twenty-seventh year of his age and the third of his pontificate. He was succeeded by the celebrated Gerbert, a French monk, formerly abbot of the famous monastery of Bobbio, and at this present time Archbishop of Ravenna, who took the name of Sylvester II. He had been the guide, the tutor, and the friend of Otho during his boyhood. In his earlier career he had been somewhat hot-headed, and had sustained a sharp and obstinate contest with Pope John XV. in respect to the see of Rouen. Now, however, he was an old man and a wise. No pope so truly great, in the sense of the word most appropriate to a bishop and an ecclesiastical ruler, had ascended the papal throne since the time of St. Nicholas the Great, in the middle of the ninth century. Otho remained always in Rome and Italy, for which he had a special predilection. Nothing can be more beautiful than the picture of this venerable and learned old man, with his gifted and loving pupil by his side, “pulchri Cæsaris pulcherrima proles,” filling together the throne of ancient, eternal Rome with their pontifical and imperial majesty. What a subject for a painter or a poet! Otho is one of the most winning characters to be found in all history. His mother, the Greek princess, had given him an exquisite mental culture, and his grandmother, St. Adelaide, a most pious education. There was something visionary and romantic in his nature which only adds to his personal attractiveness. He dreamed of great things for Rome and the empire, such as the Florentine seer who had the vision of the unseen world dreamed of, but which were not in accordance with the plans of divine Providence, and probably not with the views of Sylvester II. He died at a castle near Civita Castellana, in the twenty-third year of his age, in the arms of Sylvester, who followed him to the tomb in a little more than a year after, on the 12th of May, 1003.

The dreaded year 1000 had been passed and the eleventh century was begun. It was really one of the most fortunate of all the centuries for Rome and the popes, yet it began under dark and menacing auspices. The Crescenzi regained the predominance in Rome and kept it for twelve years during three pontificates—viz., those of John XVII., which lasted only five months, of John XVIII. and Sergius IV., both of whom ruled the church in peace and with honor to themselves, yet were obliged to tolerate the usurpation of the patrician Giovanni Crescenzio, who seems to have governed with more mildness than his father, Nomentano, had done. In 1012, after his death, the dominion of this family came finally to an end, being supplanted by that of the Conti Tusculani, who retained it for thirty years. Count Gregory, a descendant of Alberic and Marozia, whose later years were rendered illustrious by piety and good works of a splendid munificence, left at his death three sons, Alberic, Theophylact, and Romanus. The second of these became pope under the name of Benedict VIII., and governed the church as well as the Roman principality during twelve years with consummate ability, aided in his civil administration by his two brothers, and in perfect amity with the emperor, St. Henry II., who had succeeded his cousin, Otho III., but had always been prevented by wars and other pressing employments elsewhere from interfering in Italian affairs. In 1014 St. Henry was able to come to Rome with his queen, St. Cunegunda, to receive the imperial coronation from the pope. A rival king of Italy, Arduin, the last of the Italian kings who aspired to the iron crown of Lombardy until Victor Emanuel appeared, had been conquered, and, retiring to a monastery, passed the rest of his days in penance. Henry and Benedict together made successful war upon the Greeks and Saracens, putting an end to the troubles of Italy from both these enemies. The pope and the emperor both died at about the same time in 1024, and with Henry II. was ended the Saxon line of emperors, which was succeeded by the Franconian, called also the Ghibelline from the family castle of Waiblingen, and the Salic, from the tribal name Salii—i.e., dwellers by the river Sala. Benedict’s brother Romanus succeeded him on the pontifical throne under the name of John XIX., and united more strictly in his own person the functions of ecclesiastical and civil sovereignty than had been the case during the reign of his predecessor. His pontificate of eight years was a laudable administration, without any event of note which has been recorded, except the coronation of the first Franconian emperor, Conrad II. This coronation was marked by the presence of an unusually numerous and splendid assemblage of princes and prelates from all parts of Europe, among whom were Rudolph, Duke of Burgundy, and Canute the Great, King of Denmark and England. This grand ceremony was performed in the spring of 1027, but, notwithstanding the new splendor which seemed at that time to environ the Holy See, the greatest disgrace and scandal with which it was ever afflicted was close at hand and came upon it in the next pontificate. On the death of John XIX., in 1032, there was no one of the family of the Conti upon whose head the tiara could be placed with any sort of fitness and propriety. So great and so strongly fixed was the power of that family that they succeeded in securing the election and coronation of a young boy, Theophylact, nephew of the two preceding popes, and the son of Count Alberic, their elder brother. He is said by some historians to have been twelve years old, by others to have been perhaps seventeen. Under the name of Benedict IX. he continued during the thirteen years of his reign, under the protection of the emperor and supported by the power of his family, to harass his subjects by his capricious tyranny, and to afflict and desolate the church by the unrestrained license of his moral conduct. His scandalous life and maladministration of the government brought on a schism headed by an anti-pope calling himself Sylvester III., caused frequent and violent popular tumults, and excited universal contempt and odium against his own person. At last the discontent reached such an extreme that of his own free-will Benedict abdicated his office, that he might have greater freedom to live without any restraint upon his conduct. The most distinguished and the most respected priest of the Roman Church at this time was John Gratian, arch-priest of the church of St. John at the Latin Gate, the preceptor of St. Hildebrand, who was afterwards Pope Gregory VII. Desiring to put an end to the calamities of every kind which were the consequence of a sacrilegious pontificate, Gratian took the extraordinary course of offering a large subsidy in money to Benedict IX. on condition of a complete renunciation of all his rights to the Roman See. He was then himself canonically elected Pope under the name of Gregory VI., and began with zeal the work of reformation in both church and state. Nevertheless, the circumstance that he had given a sum of money to induce Benedict to resign gave occasion to such a plausible outcry of simony and personal ambition against Gregory, and the resistance of the anti-pope Sylvester as well as that of Benedict, who reclaimed his former office, was so violent, that it was necessary to call in the aid of the new emperor Henry III., and to summon a numerous council, that the rival claims might be adjudicated and sufficient measures be adopted for restoring peace and order. The council, which met at Sutri, set aside entirely both Sylvester and Benedict. The decision of his own case was referred to Gregory with great respect, but with a manifest wish that he should resign. The pope disclaimed in the most solemn manner all mercenary and selfish motives for what he had done, yet nevertheless, on account of the scandal which had been occasioned, he judged himself to be unworthy of the papal dignity, and abdicated it with many tears and expressions of humility. The council confirmed his resignation, which St. Hildebrand and many others regretted, but which the greater number, with St. Peter Damian, highly approved, notwithstanding their esteem for Gregory, who retired into a monastery, where he lived a secluded and holy life. Even Benedict at last repented, and spent the few remaining years of his life in prayer and penance in the monastery of Grotta-Ferrata, which his grandfather, Count Gregory, had founded.

On Christmas eve, 1046, Suidger, Bishop of Bamberg, was proposed by the emperor to the Roman clergy and people, and by them elected pope, taking the name of Clement II. He was enthroned on Christmas day, and on the same day crowned the emperor and empress, and, as a safeguard against the abuse of the power of the Roman patrician by the Italian barons, it was transferred to the emperor, who was thus made the recognized head of the Roman aristocracy, with a special right of superintending the election of the sovereign pontiffs. From this moment commenced the dawn of better and brighter days for Rome. The great work of reformation was begun by Clement; and, although his reign lasted but one year, and his successor, another German prelate of high character—Poppo, Bishop of Brixen, who became Damasus II.—survived his enthronization but twenty-three days, a saint was waiting to inaugurate the glorious series of the Hildebrandine popes.

Bruno, Bishop of Toul, who was St. Leo IX., having after long resistance been persuaded by the emperor and the most eminent prelates to consent to assume the tiara, stopped at Cluny to see Hildebrand, a young monk, who became St. Gregory VII. With difficulty he induced him to accompany him to Rome, on the condition that he would make the journey in pilgrim’s garb, and submit the imperial nomination without reserve to the free election of the clergy and people of the Roman Church. He was enthroned on the 12th of February, which was the first Sunday of Lent, 1049. The eleventh century was at its zenith, and the bright sun of a new era shed its rays upon Christendom, as a new St. Leo sat upon the throne of St. Peter, St. Leo the Great, St. Gregory, and St. Nicholas, chasing away the darkness and the clouds of the tenth century, and putting an end to the period of the obnubilation of the Roman Church.

We have confined our attention almost entirely to the local history of the popes, without noticing their administration of the universal church. The general ecclesiastical history of the whole period between St. Nicholas I. and St. Gregory VII. furnishes abundant proof of the universal recognition and continuous exercise of the papal supremacy in the East as well as in the West. Adrian II. celebrated the eighth œcumenical council at Constantinople in 870. John VIII., John X., and John XV. exercised throughout Europe the same spiritual authority which was exercised by Nicholas the Great. The local difficulties of the popes, and even the scandals which disturbed the Roman Church, had no effect throughout Christendom to diminish the authority of the Roman See. During the general anarchy and chaos caused by the new irruption of barbarians the unity and common life of Christendom was oppressed and enfeebled, and the corporate, organic action of the universal church could not manifest itself so vigorously as it had done before and did afterwards. When all the evils which had attacked the church and Christendom at the very centre of life in Rome reached their crisis in the pontificate of Benedict IX., it was certainly felt by all good and honest men that the very existence of the Papacy and the Catholic Church, of the whole European society, and of all civilization, morality, and order on the earth, was in imminent danger. The spectacle of a youth who was no better in morals, and no stronger in intellectual or princely qualities, than the weakest and most dissolute of the Carlovingian monarchs, seated on the throne of St. Peter, shocked and scandalized Christendom to such an extent that the loud outcry has not yet ceased to resound in our ears. Yet we perceive in the action of the Council of Sutri, and of the emperor, Henry III., in respect to Gregory VI., one of the most signal and splendid testimonies to the undoubting and unshaken faith of that age in the supremacy of the pope. Sylvester was judged and condemned to perpetual imprisonment as an intruder and a pseudo-pope. Benedict was set aside, not because the council pretended to judge him for his conduct while pope, but because he had executed a legal and valid abdication of his office. In respect to Gregory, the council examined and judged of nothing except the validity of his election, and, this being ascertained, left the judgment of his own case to his own supreme authority, to his conscience, and to Almighty God.

Just one rapid and parting glance we must cast over Christendom, to take in by a general view its movement through this segment of the great cycle of time, and the state into which it had grown in the middle of the eleventh century. The great barbarian and heathen irruption into Christian Europe was like the casting of an immense mass of fresh coals upon a glowing but gradually-expiring fire in a great foundry furnace. The general aspect was black and dead, and the momentary effect was a suspension of the great works commenced, but the result was a rapid kindling from the burning bed beneath, a stronger and hotter fire, and a more vigorous resumption of operations. The threatened Mohammedan conquest of Europe was averted, the Hungarian invasion completely and finally repelled, the Scandinavian eruptions changed into a most beneficial colonization and infusion of a new element of strength. Many other most remarkable and salutary political and social transformations were effected. The Scandinavians, Hungarians, Russians, and other Sclavonian nations were converted and added to the church. A beginning was made with the Prussians, even, by the martyrdom of their first apostle, St. Adalbert, although the work was not completed until near the close of the thirteenth century and proved to be short-lived. Since they have resumed the persecution of bishops, there may be, perhaps, a hope of their reconversion.

The calendars of the two centuries from 850 to 1050 are crowded with the names of great saints and other illustrious men and women. Among the popes flourished St. Leo IV., founder of the Leonine City, St. Nicholas I., John X., Benedict VIII., and Sylvester II. Among the emperors and kings we may single out Berenger, Henry the Fowler, Otho the Great, St. Henry II., Hugh Capet, Robert, Alfred, Canute, Edward the Confessor; Edward and Edmund, martyrs; Brian Boroihme, Ferdinand, St. Stephen, St. Olaf, Rollo, and Wladimir. In the brilliant group of Christian empresses and queens shine with special lustre Theodora, St. Adelaide, St. Cunegunda, St. Matilda, Theophania, and Olga. As illustrious specimens of the great number of bishops and abbots of high virtue and merit, we mention St. Anscharius, St. Methodius, St. Ignatius of Constantinople, St. Dunstan, St. Odo of Cluny, and St. Romuald. These two centuries contributed but little to the treasury of literature. There is, nevertheless, a considerable list of authors, among whom are worthy of mention Nithart, Flodoard, Suidas, Pascharius Radbert, Wuthikind the German annalist, and John Scotus Erigena. One of the most gifted and clever of the Latins, Luitprand, and the most intelligent and erudite of the Greeks, Photius, were unhappily both so morally despicable that they reflect disgrace rather than honor upon their age.

The epoch we are considering was more remarkable for action than for writing. The vast and strong foundations were laid for the future superstructure. Empires and kingdoms, smaller states, cities, towns, universities, monasteries, and great churches, rose in majesty during the latter part of this epoch upon the ruins made during its earlier period, or upon heretofore waste and desert land. The glorious orders of Cluny and Camaldoli, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Cordova, several of the great minsters, and the first efforts of the new school of Christian art date from this period. It made scanty records of its own history, but it is crowded with the richest materials for the student and the literary artist. M. Ozanam projected a course of lectures at the Sorbonne covering the whole space from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries, but executed only the first and last part of his programme. The middle portion still lies open to any one worthy to complete his work. The Iron Age is worthy of more study than has been given to it, and, when it is carefully examined, there are many great discoveries to be made concerning the ages which preceded as well as those which have followed this hard era. When will intelligent Englishmen and Americans begin to read history and find out how they have been duped? When will the wretched little manuals such as Mrs. Markham’s History of England be driven out of our schools and children’s libraries and replaced by books which tell the truth? Let us lay bare history and search for the hard foundations of society and civilization, and we shall see with ocular evidence that the converging and diverging lines of all the centuries have but two centres, Jerusalem and Rome. The rocky height of Jebus, which David carried by craft and valor; the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus and Numa laid the foundations of Rome, are in the cycle of history what the two foci are in an ellipse. When the fortunes of Juda are at their lowest point, the supernatural providence of God over that royal tribe and the house of David is most signally manifested. It is impossible to read intelligently the history of the Roman See and the popes without perceiving a providence of a higher order, working on a more sublime plane, in the disasters as well as in the glories and triumphs of the New Jerusalem and its line of priestly kings, the vicegerents of David’s royal Son and Lord. The supernatural providence manifest in the destinies of Rome and its dependent Christendom makes also the supernatural end toward which God is conducting mankind equally manifest. The search after natural causes without regard to the first cause being proved absurd, the search for natural effects without respect to the final cause is equally absurd. The ideal kingdom on earth is not to be found. Not only are we unable to find it realized, we cannot even find a tendency toward a future realization. Royal power, national greatness, the achievements of art and science, the external order and splendor of the church, are all, manifestly, only means, and the end is in the spiritual order, in the souls of individual men. Everything external and temporal is built on the shifting, unstable sand of human free-will, and is therefore evanescent and changeable. The only permanent and eternal result is in the great, unknown mass of human beings who have found the gate and the way to the kingdom of heaven, and in the élite of the human race who have found the way to its highest places and wear its brightest crowns. The earth is only a palæstra, a school, an ingenious contrivance of divine art for the acquisition and exercise of virtue, for gaining merit, for nurturing the childhood of the destined citizens of the true and eternal city of God—Cœlestis Urbs, Jerusalem. The whole order of divine Providence in the church and the world, and its chief intention, must be changed, if any ideal and stable state of perfection is established on the earth; for this would require that no longer free scope should be given to the liberty of the human will. We conclude, therefore, that future ages will not differ essentially from those which are past. As the fourth and the seventh centuries differ, as the tenth and thirteenth, the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries mutually differ, so there are possible cycles of change from worse to better, or the reverse, so long as the world continues. There is a perpetual progress toward that consummation which God has in view. But there is no change in the militant state of the Catholic Church. We are informed by divine revelation that the earthly sovereignty of Jesus Christ will continue only so long as he has enemies to conquer, and that when his conquest is completed he will give up this kingdom to the Father, that God may be all in all. His eternal reign, in which all the elect will share, consists in the glory won by merit. All the rest is only scaffolding to be torn down and thrown away for fire-wood; it is scenery and stage-costume, of no use when the play is over. The lessons of history teach us to discern all the illusions which have deceived past ages; if we are wise we shall learn also not to make new illusions for the future. We shall fear nothing for the eternal cause of truth and right, and we shall have no fanciful hopes of a coming millennium. We shall learn the one needful and useful maxim that all effort is a waste of time, except the one effort to make ourselves and others better and more virtuous.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE.
CONCLUSION.

The morning they started for Monte Cassino the Signora had a Mass said for her intention, and the intention was that she might be enabled to decide speedily on her state of life, and to decide so clearly and wisely as never again to have a doubt about it. Never had she been nearer to accepting Mr. Vane, and never had she been more tremblingly afraid of doing so. The suspense and trouble were becoming intolerable. She felt that it must be settled within these three days.

But no sooner was the journey begun than all else was lost sight of. It was impossible to pass with a preoccupied mind amid all that beauty; impossible not to feel one’s individual life dwindle in view of the life of centuries there made visible. The Campagna slipped past like an old monotonous song that has been sung over one’s cradle, and heard in quiet intervals all up the years, till every note has grown to be something more than a simple sound, and is rather a long series of octaves caught along the heart-strings. Then

“The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,”

pressing near the track, and looking over each other’s heads at the train as it went, as if wondering what new Jason was ploughing with fiery-snorting monsters down through the green fields of the south. Dim, gray cities stood petrified on their heights, without a sign of life; and the torrent-beds on their sides were like silvery paths up which the souls of all the dead had climbed, and so faded off into space. What fancies went up those converging paths, and spread their wings in the shining clouds that moored themselves on crest after crest! Or, fair as any fancy, what brooks and torrents came rushing down in the rainy October and petulant April, catching the sunshine as they ran, and bringing flowers and harvests and fountains for the thirsty plains. On they went through the smiling, luxuriant paradise waving with solid green and bloom in the valleys. Dark forests hung suspended in gorges, cities lifted themselves between the mountains to look, here and there a castle sat on its rock like a king on his throne. They could no more have pointed out the rapidly-succeeding beauties to each other than they could have indicated the swift flashes of a tempest.

At length, and before they had begun to think they were tired, the cars stopped at the station of San Germano, and here a very tall old man, bent into the shape of a new moon, recognized them as the party he was on the watch for, and informed them that the donkeys were waiting for them outside, and that they were expected to dine at Monte Cassino.

They recollected that they were a little tired and a little hungry, and, very opportunely, a pretty young contadina presented herself with a basket of bread, fruit, boiled eggs, and wine. So they seated themselves in the waiting-room, a circle of admiring contadini standing about and watching every mouthful they ate, as a dog watches.

“Are we expected to take more than we want and give them what remains?” Isabel asked.

The Signora glanced over the company, and demanded to know which men had charge of the donkeys.

Five stout young fellows stood forward, and a sixth made haste to explain that four of them would attend to the party, and a fifth would carry their baggage up on another donkey.

“And have you anything to do with us?” she inquired politely of this informant.

“I belong to the hotel of San Germano,” he replied, and then went on to explain the situation still further.

“Oh! thanks; but don’t trouble yourself,” the Signora interrupted quite coolly. “You need not wait for us. Five men are quite enough to do all we want done.”

He withdrew a little, but did not go away. There was not the slightest sign of resentment or mortification. He was actuated by a simple and unadulterated desire for money, and meant to stay by till the last minute, in the hope that he might snatch at the chance of some small service which would give him a claim.

“Now, girls,” the Signora said, “don’t you give a penny to any one, unless I tell you. Here are twenty people on the watch for money. Don’t let any one do the smallest thing for you, except these five men. We will give them some bread and wine. That is all they will want. The Italian poor live on bread. What does that old man want of us?” she inquired of one of the donkey-men.

The old man, who had been constantly hovering near, came forward at once. He was the letter-carrier for the monastery.

“Oh! I did not know but you had something to do with the donkeys,” she remarked.

He came a step nearer. “I do not go up till evening,” he said with an insinuating smile.

“Go whenever you like,” she answered obligingly. “If you should bring us up any letters, however, we will give you a soldo for each one.”

He glanced longingly at the bread and wine, but she rose without taking any further notice of him.

“How much is your wine a bottle?” she asked of the pretty young vendor.

“Fifteen soldi, Signora,” was the innocent reply.

“Nonsense! I will give you five.”

Exclamations, deprecation, grieved reproach on the part of the young woman. The wine was too good for that, she protested. It was the best dry wine of the country, and sincere, as the Signora could see.

The Signora was not so new as they had supposed. She had bought better wine in larger bottles, in Genzano, close to Rome, for seven cents a bottle, and this was high at six. It was not, however, worth while to multiply words about it, and they made a compromise by paying seven soldi a bottle, with which the young woman seemed to be perfectly well satisfied.

Then they went out and mounted their donkeys, followed by the reproachful eyes and extended hands of fourteen men and children, and closely attended by the young hotel servant, who attached himself to Bianca. Marion, having visited Monte Cassino thoroughly not long before, had not accompanied them, being a little delicate, too, about joining himself to a party without an invitation from the monastery, though he would certainly have been included had his connection with the family been known.

Bianca dropped her pocket-handkerchief, and the young volunteer esquire rushed to pick it up and present it to her with a gallant touch of the cap and a smile that displayed a fine set of teeth. She accepted it with blushing thanks.

“My dear, he counts on half a lira for that,” the Signora remarked. “Don’t get any romantic ideas into your head. He would be as gallant as that to a witch, if he thought she would pay him. You must really put on a more severe expression. You have precisely the look at this moment of some young princess of fairyland who goes about giving bags of gold to everybody. If you keep on that sweet face, you will be as surrounded by beggars as a lump of sugar with flies.”

“You are a terribly forbidding and obdurate woman,” Mr. Vane said, looking into the Signora’s laughing face.

“I am sometimes,” she protested. “I pity one beggar, or two beggars, or sometimes three beggars; but when I see a score of healthy cormorants surround poor travellers, and ready for any pretence or any servility to get money out of them, I lose patience. I’ve been victimized too much in days that are gone to be very long-suffering now. Besides, I work for my money and have a feeling of indignation when I see a strong, healthy person stretch out a hand that has done me no service. Aren’t these donkeys little darlings? I do think they are the most useful, faithful creatures in the world.”

“If I could only know just where the backbone of mine is situated,” Isabel said pathetically; for her saddle had been constantly slipping either backward or forward ever since she mounted. “It really seems to me that I could ride a rail more securely. There I go! Oh!”

The hotel-servant rushed enthusiastically to catch the back of her saddle, and lift the rider from her nearly horizontal position, and help her off while they tightened the girths.

“It’s a sort of knack which you will soon learn,” the Signora said consolingly. “The poor little animals are as thin as a rail, but the saddles are like a chair. Just let yourself go, humor the motion of the donkey, and in a little while you will sit like—like Bianca there. Look at that child! All she wants is an infant in her arms!”

They had passed the narrow and stony loops of the path out of the town, and reached the mountain-side, and, as the Signora spoke, Bianca, leading the procession, went round a turn before them and came back higher up. She sat in the saddle as easily as if in a chair, upright, her hands folded in her lap, and her fair face uplifted as she gazed at the great pile of the monastery on the peak above them.

She needed, indeed, but an infant in her arms to be a ready picture of the Holy Mother and Child in the Flight into Egypt. She had taken off her hat and laid a large veil over her head. A blue mantle hung over her shoulders and came close to her white neck. The beast she rode, the saddle, the rocky path—all were perfect. She passed under a cypress-tree that pressed her eyes down with its black shadow, and, in that downward glance, caught their looks directed to her. She smiled, clasped her hands, and glanced around in mute rapture.

To and fro, to and fro they wound up the height, every turn unwinding and enlarging the scene below. The low hills of the plain disappeared, leaving only a vast level laid out in an exquisite mosaic of varied greens, with houses here and there, single or in clusters, forests that had dwindled to groves, and groves that looked like bouquets. The shining turns of a river lay amid that verdure, like a silver chain dropped and half-hidden in the grass. All round the mountains circled close and jealous, guarding this little paradise. Now they were skirted with trees; now they rose in harsh masses of stone that looked as if not even a blade of grass could find a foothold. A picturesque castle stood on a spur sent off from the mountain they were ascending.

Above them the vast square of the monastery, with its many windows and balconies, grew every moment nearer. After an hour’s ride trees shut them into an avenue, and they found themselves close under the grand walls of the building. They alighted at the lofty open archway and saw before them a long, ascending passage that looked strong enough to support even that pile on its solid arches. The first half was dim, and part way up, at the right, was a shrine in the wall, with its floating flame burning before some saintly face only half-visible behind the wire screen. The upper half was lighted by arched windows at the left, showing a double wall there, with some sort of room or passage between, arched openings in the inner wall answering to the windows. At the upper end of this avenue of stone shut the great black valves of a double iron door, studded thickly with nails, pierced with a little cluster of holes to peep through at one side, and showing the outline of a smaller door in the right valve.

The massive walls and doors, the long, sloping ascent, the light and shade, the one little golden flame, were like nothing of the nineteenth century. The action and business of such a place were not the action and business peculiar and suitable to our times. Ecclesiastical processions might go up there; the scarlet fire of a cardinal’s robe in the midst of a group of attendants would well befit that dim and echoing passage; a cavalcade of knights and ladies, with horn and hound and nodding plumes; a company of soldiers with shield and helmet—these were the figures to animate such a scene. Or, most perfect picture of all, one might imagine there that sublime company, the very thought of which brings tears to the eyes—that long procession of ecclesiastics and people, with their banners and crucifixes and candles, chanting funeral hymns as they ascended, bearing up to the mountain-top for burial the twin saint of the glorious founder and father of the monastery—Santa Scholastica. It is but yesterday, it seems, that the brother and sister parted, having their last conference together under a little roof down the mountain-side, while the tempest stormed about them. It is but this morning that St. Benedict has sent his monks down to bring the holy relics up and lay them in his own tomb under the grand altar, where soon he will join her. So the colossal saints of all time know how to recognize the grandeur of a true woman. These men are so near the most sublime and regal of creatures—the awful, immaculate Virgin—and the very type of penitents—the thrice-purified Magdalen—that the shining veil of the one and the sacred tears of the other flow about their sisters, and woman is honored in whatever work her Creator calls her to do. It was in the times, still illuminated by the twilight of the scarcely-departed presence of the Morning Star and the Son, that St. Gregory the Great ordered his mother’s portrait painted with the mitre of a doctor on her head, and one hand raised in benediction, while with the other she taught her son from the sacred Book on her knees—the queenly St. Sylvia! It was in such days that St. Chrysostom proclaimed that women may participate, as well as men, in combats for the cause of God and the church; that St. Melania, the younger, disputed so eloquently with the Nestorians that she converted many and frightened the rest, showing herself so powerful that Pelagius, who drew away priests and bishops, strove, but in vain, to convert her into an assistant; the same Melania who converted the persecutor, Volusianus, whom all the eloquence of St. Augustine could not convert. It was in such days that saintly women inspired the Fathers of the church to write, and that St. Gregory conceived his Treatise on the Soul and on Resurrection while sitting at his dying sister’s bedside and listening to her discourse on death, as she consoled him for the death of St. Basil.

And not only such thoughts and recollections, dear to women, flowed in as they went up the path that St. Scholastica had passed before them, but other recollections, dear to scholars and precious to the church and to civilization. Here was one of the citadels of learning in times when barbarous invasions overran the land and threatened to extinguish every spark of intellectual and spiritual wealth that the race of man had accumulated. Here the monks, with a zeal kindled to passion, hoarded and preserved the remains of their devastated treasures, and spent unwearied days and nights in multiplying copies of writings that must not die. Here, with the devotion of the bridegroom who brings the most precious gems he can procure to deck his bride, or of parents who shower upon their only child every gift in their power to bestow, genius the most exquisite consecrated itself to the work of adorning the page of the text of praise and prayer with such marvellous miniature beauty of form and color as only the fairy pencil of Nature can rival.

Wrapt and exalted in such recollections, the Signora moved as one in a dream, forgetting her companions entirely. It was only when the great iron doors swung open before her, and she saw a tall gentleman in a black robe hurrying forward, with his hand extended in cordial welcome to Mr. Vane, that she came back to the nineteenth century, and made an effort to salute in a sufficiently-composed manner the prior of Monte Cassino, Father Boniface.

But it was a very beautiful nineteenth century that she recalled herself to. They were within the monastery buildings, which completely surrounded them in a massive square, broken in the middle at the left by a long portico of white travertine supporting a superb terrace called the Loggia del Paradiso, and at the right, in the centre, also, by the grand stairs that go up to the higher level of the mountain peak, around which the monastery is built. This loggia and the grand stairs are at the opposite sides of a court with a picturesque well in the centre, and colossal statues of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica. The paved court is between two others, which are turned into gardens, the three separated by double colonnades and surrounded by porticos. At the head of the stairs, which are the whole width of the court, another portico opens into the upper court—that of the church—and has a door at either side leading back to the Loggia del Paradiso. The church court, also surrounded by porticos and adorned with statues, is closed on one side by the church. This is built on the very mountain-top, the confession being hewn out of the solid rock.

This plan they caught at first, though but in a glance; for, after welcoming them all, the prior conducted them through two or three dimly-lighted rooms, all of stone, unfurnished and unadorned, into a bright parlor, where a balcony window gave them a view of all the beautiful valley with its surrounding mountains. In a few minutes dinner was announced as prepared in the next chamber, and here they found a table laid out with the freshest of linen, old silver as white almost as the cloth, and a well-cooked and well-served dinner.

Weakening their wine before drinking it, they all observed the quality of the water, limpid and light as some third element half-water and half-air, and the prior explained to them that the monastery used rain-water filtered.

“We have a great cistern, ninety feet square, hollowed out in the mountain under the central court. The well you saw there is in the centre of it. The water is thoroughly filtered. Moreover, the conduits that admit it to the cistern are closed during the four hot months, so that only cold water enters.”

This prior, the “urbane librarian” of Longfellow’s recollections of Monte Cassino, was not only a kind and generous host and an intelligent cicerone, but a most agreeable and interesting man. He had a noble figure and a handsome, bright face, and combined in his character qualities which might have been thought to be inharmonious; for he was at the same time an enthusiastic monk, proud of his venerable order, and devoted heart and soul to his monastery, and a man quite up to the times in all that the times have of praise-worthy.

After dinner he led them up to see the church, pointing out the statues as they went. Here were the father and mother of St. Benedict, and with them popes, royal dukes, kings, and emperors. Before entering they paused to look at the great door of bronze, cast in Constantinople, in which is written in silver letters the list of the possessions of the abbey at the time the door was made, in 1066. At this time, more than eight hundred years later, nothing was left of these riches.

Entering the church, they stood astonished. If it had been built of simple marble, moderately varied and ornamented, there would still have been enough to praise warmly in the beautiful form and proportions of the three naves, the grand altar by Michael Angelo, the raised tribune, and the beautiful paintings of the dome, roof, and eight chapels. But these were only the frame-work of a mosaic the most splendid covering every part of the edifice to the dimmest corner or the smallest nook behind a column. And this mosaic is not that comparatively simpler kind, made of small bits, but each flower and figure is cut from a single piece of marble or precious stone, and so perfectly fitted into the groundwork that the point of a pin could not be introduced between them. It was hard at first to believe that the whole was not exquisitely painted in every possible color and shade, and it needed a touch or a near sight of that fine, inimitable gloss of marble to convince one of the incalculable riches of the whole. The very floor was superb enough for the walls of a splendid church; the very steps of the tribune were set with mosaics.

The Signora took pencil and paper, and attempted to make a memorandum of only one chapel, to enumerate its alabaster columns, its flowers of mother-of-pearl, amethyst, agate, and lapis-lazuli, its infinitely-varied marbles and precious stones and its infinitely varied designs, and, after ten minutes’ rapid work, gave up the task. A week would have been necessary for that one chapel; and there were seven more, besides the altar, the confession, and the tribune.

“You like carved wood?” the prior asked, with a smile of anticipated triumph, as they went up the tribune steps.

“Who does not?” the Signora exclaimed. “Carved wood and lace are two of my passions. I have never stolen any lace, and I hope I never shall. Wood-carving is fortunately usually in too heavy pieces to suggest the possibility of being carried away in one’s pocket.”

“We must, however, first visit St. Benedict and Santa Scholastica,” said their guide, too charitable, as well as too enthusiastic for beautiful things, to be shocked at this little escapade.

Thirteen silver lamps burned before the screen at the back of the grand altar, and under that screen reposed the bodies of the twin saints. Above them, written in golden letters, was the inscription:

“Benedictum et Scholasticam
Uno in terris partu editos,
Una in Deum pietate cœlo Redetos,
Unis Hic Excipit Tumulus,
Mortalis depositi pro Aeternitate custos.”

Rising from their knees, they turned and faced the choir—a double row of stalls forming three sides of a large square open to the altar. Looked at from a little distance, these stalls had the appearance of having been closely overgrown at some past time with the finest of vines, which had turned black and petrified there, preserving perfectly every little leaf and tendril, and still covering entirely the plain wood beneath. Looking longer, one saw little figures and faces, and birds and animals. Going nearer scarcely dispelled the illusion, so finely was every particle carved—the vines and leaves in some places quite separated from the ground, so that one slipped the finger-tip behind them. Every stall was different, every one provoked a new exclamation of admiring wonder.

Then they went into the sacristy, a long hall with the sides completely lined with presses of dark wood with gilded metal ornaments. These presses also were carved finely, each department, in front of which a priest would vest himself for Mass, having a bas-relief of a subject suggesting some particular virtue, as that of the Pharisee and the publican in the Temple, suggesting humility.

Back of the sacristy was the relic-chamber, where, in addition to the more sacred treasures, the ladies admired especially two little antique caskets, one of smalt, bright as a jewel, the other of carved ivory of the most delicious tint of creamy white—that tint so soft that it seems as if the material itself must yield like down to the touch. They gave one glance at a crosier by Benvenuto Cellini, on the inner curve of which stood a tiny group, then tore themselves away. The afternoon was waning, and there was left them but a day and a half more, with

“Such rooms to explore,

Such alcoves to importune.”

The air of this place was an ideal atmosphere; one breathed it like a fine wine that exhilarates delicately, but does not inebriate. It was soft but not warm, fresh but not chilly, and as pure as pure can be. The fresh, rosy faces of the troop of young students they met going out showed how this mountain air agreed with them.

“What a place to send boys to!” Mr. Vane exclaimed. “It is a little world in itself, where they can have every amusement and companionship, as well as instruction; and one has but to look at them to see that they are as happy as they are healthy.”

The boys were coming in from their afternoon walk down the mountain-side, and all glowing with just-subsiding fun. Each one, passing the prior, caught at his hand to kiss it; but as he would not permit himself to receive such an homage, they resorted to the amusing substitute of kissing their own hands after they had touched his.

“What beautiful recollections of their school-days those boys will carry with them through their lives!” Mr. Vane remarked, as they went out over the colonnade to the Loggia del Paradiso. “In no way, it seems to me, except by being educated here, unless one spend one’s life here, could one become perfectly familiar with the riches, visible and invisible, of the place; and such a familiarity would be of itself an education, especially for the impressible minds of the young.”

The front of the Paradiso fills the gap in the middle of one side of the monastery—that part opposite the church—and is on a level with the church, or the second story of the monastery. It is probably the same width as the church. Leaning on the parapet there, one looks off on a view which may well give the place its name—the beautiful plain and the beautiful circling mountains, with the still, blue splendor of the southern sky gazing down upon them as if enamored of their beauty. There was no need of imagination in such a place. Simple, literal eyes were enough to flood the soul with beauty.

Familiar as he was with the scene, the prior was sympathetic enough to say but little; and even Isabel, whose impressions, being more superficial, ran a good deal into words, hushed herself out of respect for the others.

“Until we reach Rome again,” the Signora remarked to her friends as they went down the stairs to the great court, “I should like to be excused from all social intercourse, except the mere being with you bodily. I don’t want to speak or be spoken to, except to learn of this place. We have no right to talk; we are ghosts. We have come here in a dream or a vision. Father Boniface talks, of course, because he is a part of the place.”

They laughed and agreed.

“But I hope,” the prior said, “that you are not too ghostly to taste the water they are just drawing up now. See how it sparkles!”

Two columns support a cross-piece over this beautiful well, and from the centre drops an iron chain with a copper bucket at each end. When one goes down the other comes up, dripping full of airy water.

They all drank silently—each, probably, to some friend, absent or present. Bianca blushed as she drank, and her pretty mouth seemed to kiss the water. Then, standing on the upper step of the well, they leaned over the stone curb and looked down to where, far below, the surface of the water shone like a huge black diamond set in a gray border.

Tired out with travel and with pleasure, the ladies were not sorry when the prior proposed that they should go down to the house where they were to sleep.

This house is the only building on the mountain except the monastery, and is under the control of the monastery. It was built merely to accommodate lady relatives of the students who might wish to see their sons, or brothers, or nephews without the fatigue of coming up and going down the mountain the same day, and without suffering the embarrassment of spending the whole day in a house inhabited and served only by men. Now and then some benefactress or a friend of the superiors of the monastery has the privilege of stopping there. The house is small and plain, and kept by a contadine and his wife. The ladies stopping there have their coffee in the house, but they dine always in a private dining-room at the monastery, from whence, also, their supper is sent down to them in the evening—supper being after Ave Maria, when the gates are closed.

Mr. Vane stayed with the prior, and the three ladies followed their guide. Their way led them a five minutes’ walk back as they had come up, then turned through an open gate in the stone wall at the right, where they found their lodgings. A contadina with dark cloth draperies pinned smoothly about her, and a huge white edifice of starched linen on her head, overshadowing a pair of bright eyes, met them at the gate and welcomed them with a pleasant voice, but in a tongue where the soft Roman consonants seemed to have each and every one turned itself into the hardest kind of a Z.

The windows looked out on a long terrace with a parapet, and outside the parapet the mountain dropped steeply to the plain.

A stair, which belonged entirely to the strangers’ house, led up to the second floor, and here they found three pleasant bed-chambers awaiting them. An hour later, as they sat at their windows looking out into the twilight, they saw their donna, Catarina, come into the terrace with a huge basket on her arm. Her head-dress and sleeves shone white in the light of the rising moon, and there was a soft richness where the scarlet stripe ran round her petticoat, and where the rainbow colors of the apron-like upper mantle bound her without a fold. Her solid step sounded on the stair the next minute, there was the spurt of a match in the outer room of the suite, and, looking through the open doors, they saw the woman, more like a picture than any picture they recollected to have seen, standing with a curious brass lamp in her hand, carefully lighting its wick, the basket she had brought sitting on the floor at her feet.

She came into the Signora’s room with that red light all over her from the lamp she carried in her hand, smiled so as to show two rows of snowy-white teeth, and, with a “Buona sera,” announced that their supper had come and would be on the table in a few minutes.

The three went out into the dining-room to witness the preparations and listen to the woman’s pleasant voice as she half-talked, half-sang an account of her life and adventures there, her manner of speech being that so common among the lower classes of Italy, especially at the south—almost a sort of chant, inexpressibly soft and touching. The peculiarity of this manner of speaking consists more, perhaps, in the ending of the sentences than in their progress; for they never come down to the definite tone that ends a period, but stop on some swinging note a little higher up, it may be only half a tone above. It is the voice of weeping, which never has a positive tone, as if the whole gamut were washed over and blurred by tears.

Talking so, the woman brought out from her basket a linen cloth for the table, next a pair of cruets with vinegar and oil, next a decanter of white-wine, next an omelette made with herbs, after that a salad that looked like sliced cucumbers, but was something else. Bread followed, then the necessary dishes.

“I’m ashamed to confess that I am hungry,” Isabel said. “It is a miserable coming down, but we won’t say anything about it.”

“My dear,” responded the Signora, “you are very ungrateful to say so. Let us be just. Our bodies have brought our souls up to this beautiful place, and carried them about from point to point of it, and kept as quiet as possible about their own affairs. Now, if they are hungry, let us feed them. Poor bodies! they have the worst of it. They are extremely useful, and we sublime creatures are always turning up our noses at them; they suffer, and we protest that we want to get rid of them, when, in nine cases out of ten, we have wantonly caused their suffering. Can a body take care of itself, or even know how it should be done? No; the soul has to do it, and ought to do it in gratitude for house-rent, or body-rent. Then, at last, the poor things have got to corrupt, and be devoured by worms, and go to dust. Fortunately, these sufferings will not be felt. It is also a satisfaction to know that this arrogant spirit, which is for ever crowing over its poor companion, will have to suffer consciously for it all and pay the uttermost farthing. You will please to recollect, Miss Isabel Vane, that if ever you should have the happiness of going to heaven, your body will go there too. Sometimes,” she said, holding her hand up before the light, which shone through and made a ruby of it,—“sometimes I think that my poor flesh has a glimmering, a presentiment of the possibility of being one day glorified.”

“Most worshipful body,” said Isabel to herself with great respect, “would you like a piece of that omelette—a large piece, a half of it, say, leaving the other half to those two? Yes? Well, you shall have it.” And she proceeded with all possible dignity to help herself to a hundred and eighty degrees of the circle of herbs and eggs before her.

The donna, who, of course, had not understood a word, looked with astonishment at this shocking piece of voracity; and when Bianca, in protection of her client, clasped her arms around the wine, and the Signora, with an air of determination, took possession of the salad, the poor creature evidently thought that she was waiting on a company of maniacs.

“Do let’s laugh,” said the Signora, and at once set the example. “We are frightening the poor soul to death.”

Their supper and their nonsense finished, the three took possession of their rooms.

A full moonlight was filling all the valley, or plain, which looked like the bottom of an emerald chalice full of golden wine. A pure and sacred silence reigned over all—the silence of peace and lofty contemplation. Had it been some such silence that suggested to Charlemagne, when, almost eleven hundred years before, he came to venerate the relics of St. Benedict, the beautiful thought of bestowing on the abbot, with all the other singular privileges he gave him, that of being the sole mediator between the emperor and the rebellious barons—the only person by whose means they could make their peace? It was doubtless by virtue of this ancient title that the prior had written “Pax” at the head of his letter to Mr. Vane.

Yes, Charlemagne came up here ages ago, and popes, and princes, and kings came, and the Saracens swarmed up with fire and sword, and the Lombards and the Normans; and the Crusaders came to pray at the shrine before going to the East. They had seen on the pilasters of the church the different crosses in precious mosaic of the orders of knights which had been formed under the Benedictine rule, among them the familiar names of Calatrava, Alcantara, St. Stephen, St. James of the Sword, and Templars. Ignatius of Loyola came up and stayed fifty days.

“But, signora mia,” said the lady who was going over all this part, as she gazed out into the night, “since you are not going to stay here fifty days, you will be so good as to shut your mind and your eyes and go to sleep.”

The next morning they went to see the monastery proper, for which they had a special permission from the Pope, and spent hours in the library, archives, printing and lithograph rooms. It would be vain to tell what old books—worth their weight in gold, printed on creamy vellum in characters that modern type has never excelled, if it has equalled—what drawers filled with scrolls, what autographs, what illuminations, they saw. It were vain to fancy with what feelings one sees for the first time the writing of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great, of Frederick II., of Countess Matilda. Then there was the long, long dormitory of the boys, with a row of snowy beds at either side, and the immense arched window at the end framing a superb outside picture, with Monte Cairo in the centre, and long, long corridors that dwindled people seen from opposite ends, with cracks made by earthquakes in their walls, and solid groined arches that only an earthquake could shake down. Then the nooks, courts, and passages, which they came upon without guessing in the least in what part of the building they were; the round window in the wall—occhio, or eye, they call it—through which they looked as through a lens, and saw the three courts and the colonnades. Finally, coming down a stair with a wall at either side and a door at the foot, they were told: “When you have crossed that threshold you cannot return. The cloister ends there.”

“What!” exclaimed Isabel, “if I should run out a minute, couldn’t I come back on to the stairs again for another minute?”

The prior shook his head. “It would be excommunication. That seems unreasonable; but listen: This is a cloister which women can enter only by special permission of the Pope. That permission is not lightly granted, and is for but once. Your running back a minute would do no harm in itself, but would do harm to the principle. If you can return in one minute, you could come back in five, or ten, or half an hour, or an hour, or a day, and so on; and so one visit might be made to cover an indefinite time. The only way, you see, is to be strictly literal in excluding from a second entrance.”

That afternoon they were presented to the Abbot—“Abbot of Abbots” he was called in the palmy days of Monte Cassino—and received, not only his benediction, but each a little souvenir of the place: a tiny photograph of the tomb of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, with a wreath of flowers pressed round it that had been on the tomb, and at the back his own name written, with the date, and under it “Ora pro me.”

They stood in the church speaking with him a few minutes, then went out to the Paradiso.

A storm was coming up from the east, and round the angle of the building they could just see that the mountains in that direction were obliterated and mists fast filling the plain. Standing up against these mists, as if to impede their progress, was the lower end of a rainbow, set straight and solid on the green like a jewelled column. The cloud advanced and pushed the column before them.

“It is like the pillar of light leading the Israelites,” Isabel said.

The cloud unrolled itself above, and down through the rainbow ran a crinkling line of white fire.

“How plainly lightning asserts its own force!” Mr. Vane remarked. “Seeing it for the first time, without knowing what it was, one would know at once that it is an irresistible power. What an experience it would be to stand just near enough to a passing flash to perhaps hear it hiss through the air, to be between it and its thunder, and yet not so near nor so in its track as to be smitten!”

Little by little the sun was vanquished, and the rainbow grew dim, faltered, blushed along the line of the advancing shadows, and disappeared. There was an odd murmur growing up, fine and pervading—the sound of rain in the plain below. All the tiny noises of each falling drop joined in a multitude, countless nothings making themselves heard in pauses of the thunder. It was to solid sound as fine carving is to plain wood, as embroidery is to a fine web—a continued succession of millions of infinitesimal watery strokes separated by millions of infinitesimal silences.

The others went into the house at the first drop that splashed on the Paradiso, but the Signora went back to the portico and seated herself under its shelter. Behind her the court of the church looked weird and strange. The pillars of the porticos appeared to move as the lightnings came and went, the statues and busts behind them seemed to lean forward and retreat, and the one window in the church front looked blue, as if there were light inside it.

She took herself out of the draught, and went to lean on the wall between the doors. In front of her the grand stairs went down to the central court, and the gardens shone green and wet through the colonnades at either side. On a level with her, across the space, stretched the Paradiso, and under the portico that supported it a large, arched door led from the court out on to a beautiful loggia. Two or three monks, who had been standing in this loggia watching the storm, were driven in by the rain, and in a minute the whole place seemed to be deserted. The rain and the lightning had it to themselves and were washing and purifying all “so as by fire.”

This one visible witness felt her soul expand as she gazed. If only she also might be purified and enlightened in that time and place! If the littlenesses of life might be washed away from her, and only the realities remain!

“Come, Holy Spirit!” she said, and blessed herself.

Then, content and confident, without saying another word, she waited with her two inarticulate but eloquent companions—Art, consecrated to God, and Nature, informed by God—and felt above and about the illuminating Presence. For faith is the rod that calls the divine Lightning down, whether it came as a dove, or a tongue of fire, or a pointing finger, or a whispering voice.

The landscape of the plain, seen through the arched door under the Paradiso, was dim and gray with rain, or glittering and red with lightning; the mountain-tops above it, and the sky, were a changing tumult of shadows veined with threads of fire, and rolled hither and thither in visible thunders. The white pavement of the court below changed every instant into jaspers, the beautiful columns and curb and steps of the well became jewels, and one of the copper buckets that stood on the brink was like a vessel of red gold brimming over with red wine.

St. Benedict with his crosier, and St. Scholastica with her dove, stood immovable but living, and their calmness in that tumult was like a song of triumph. Did he sing with Moses?—“Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thy inheritance, in thy most firm habitation which thou hast made, O Lord; thy sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.” And did she reply, like Miriam with her timbrel?—“Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified, the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea.” Such silence in a tumult seems ever a singing.

When the Signora went down, slipping from colonnade to colonnade, dry-shod, the storm was spent. From the little balcony of the parlor, where she found her companions, she saw a grand arch of rainbow trembling out over the east, as if astonished at its own glory, trembling as it grew, but as strong and bold as light.

Flocks of birds were swinging by in a great circle, screaming impudently as they passed the balcony, as if to say, “Catch us, if you can!” There was a little parallelogram of garden under the window, with a rough pole frame-work supporting a dripping vine, and, below the dropping fields, a crest of land and rock, curling over like a pointed wave, rose boldly in the foreground; then, the plain.

Mr. Vane came to stand beside her, looking at her keenly one instant, then averting his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “what has the storm been saying to you up there?”

“It has washed the drift-wood out of my path, and made it as clear and white as one of those torrent-beds up the mountain-side,” she answered. “I think I ought to work a little harder for the future. Life is short, and I have, perhaps, sometimes played with my talents. They were given me for serious use. When you shall have left me alone, instead of sitting weakly down and thinking that it is rather lonely, I shall begin to carve a new book out of the next year. Do you know that year to come looks to me as the block of marble looked to Michael Angelo when he said, 'I will make an angel of it.’ I am not a Michael Angelo,” she added, smiling; “but I am something, and, firmly and intelligently set to work, I may do what need not be despised. My mind is clear.”

He was answered.

If a shade passed over his face, it was slight. If his lips were compressed a moment, she did not look to see. He stood and watched the rainbow grow and fade, and, as its colors went out, so faded out of his life a sweet hope. But he reflected: “Denials make strong. And the light that made the rainbow is not dead.”

“Yes, life is short,” he said presently, and half-turned away. “God bless you!” he added and hastily left her.

The next morning they made their last visit to the monastery, and the prior, after showing them the tower of St. Benedict and the fine collection of pictures there, had some of the choir-books brought into the parlor for them to see. There are fifty-seven in all of these great volumes, bound in leather, with metal corners and knobs. These are all in manuscript, beautiful black scores and lettering on white parchment. Every capital letter is painted, every one different and every one beautiful, and occasionally the page has a border, and in some cases a picture in the corner, so exquisitely beautiful that one could never tire of examining it—such leaves and flowers, and birds and figures and arabesques, fine as the finest pencil and most delicate imagination could make them, and so executed that one had to touch them to be sure they are not in relief. One long, silver leaf slightly curled over to show a golden lining; Bianca stretched her finger to touch, and drew it back immediately, fearing to break.

Not a tint was faded of them all, though they had been in constant use three hundred years. They are not used every day now, however.

One page was especially rich—the first page of the Christmas service. The whole ground of this inside the border is a deep velvety crimson, the score and text being of gold. On the border imagination had exhausted itself, and in the left upper corner is a picture of the Nativity, delicate and pure, with its cool, pale mountains of Syria, and the heavenly faces of the Mother and Child.

“You should see that at the Midnight Mass of Christmas,” the prior said, “with the light of all the candles shining on it as it lies open on the desk. It is splendid then. I copied that picture in the corner of the page to send the Pope on his great anniversary,” he added, “and it took me a year.”

For the prior was an artist as well, and not only made exquisite copies from these old manuscripts, but played the organ, and had the evening before done the honors of their grand instrument for his visitors, displaying its orchestra stops.

The hours slipped away, and regretfully at length they took leave of this beautiful and sacred place, and the kind host who had made it so pleasant for them. The donkeys stood ready at the gate, and they mounted and went down into the world again. In the valley, before going to the station, they stopped a minute and gazed back with a mute farewell to Monte Cassino. The Signora thought, but did not say aloud: “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh help.”

The road they took through the plain to the station ran along the river-side. This river—the Rapido—narrowed to a swift, yellow sluice that one could toss a penny across, to be caught by the beggar at the other side, did not look very imposing to American eyes, accustomed to the grand crystalline floods of the New World; but every drop of it moved to the tune of a memory, and farther on it meets the Carnello, and the two, the ancient Vinius and Liri, join to make the Garigliano, the river made famous by Bayard.

Then back to Rome, through crowding mountains at first. But, by dark, the mountains began to draw back, the level widened, they passed the city wall by the stars, and rolled into the Città vecchia.

“Now we must begin to look respectfully at the guide-book,” Mr. Vane said the next morning. “We have been sipping the foam of the wine as it came. We must drain the cup, if we can.”

There was nothing more to be said. Their story was finished, and the remaining few weeks were but a study of what all travellers study in Rome.

“I am laying up riches for my life,” Mr. Vane said to the Signora. “I have learned of you to work, and I hope that the last of my life will be more useful than the first has been. These memories that I am preparing now will be the only recreation of my future and my only dream.”

He did not trouble her with sadness or importunities, but took his life up with manly cheerfulness, and she honored him for it and liked him better than ever. But never for an instant did she waver in her decision. Her mind, once cleared, was cleared for ever. She would not have married him, nor any other man, to have possessed the world.

One bright October day they left her. There was sadness and tears, but no heart-break for any one. Marion’s tender sympathy threw a rainbow on Bianca’s gentle sorrow, and Isabel clung to her father’s arm and dropped her head on his shoulder, soothing and soothed.

“I shall never leave you, papa,” she whispered.

Did she suspect what he had missed?

The Signora watched the train roll away, then went back to her silent house, wiping her eyes as she entered.

“What a pity it is that you will have to be alone now!” said Annunciata.

“Alone!” the Signora’s eyes flashed out through the tears. “I am not alone. I never was alone in my life!”

She smiled as she shut herself into her room. “Alone? How little they know!”

What, indeed, did they, who cannot live a day without their gossip, without trying to fill their emptiness with the husks which make up by far the greater part of the world’s talk, of the life of one whose mind was as a fountain for ever overflowing, who had eyes in her finger-tips, and who listened with every pore of her body? What knew the readers of daily newspapers of the hoarded treasures of literature, ever ready with eloquent voices? What knew the Christians of one communion in the year, and one Mass when there was obligation, of long, delicious hours in churches when there was no function to stare at, nor music to talk through? The world has no such society as the cultivated mind can fill its house with; and there are no receptions so splendid as those given by the imagination. Bores never come, tattlers and enemies never are admitted, late hours never weary, and the wine never inebriates. And, better yet, those who are invited are always present and ready to stay. How the possessors of such a society laugh at the “societies” of the outer world, and how truly they can exclaim, “Alone? I never was alone in my life!”

DOUBTS OF A CONTEMPORARY ON THE DESTINY OF MAN.

The New York Sun gave us (March 25, 1877) a short but thoughtful and substantial review of a little work lately published by Rev. Dr. Nisbet, of Rock Island, Ill., on The Resurrection of the Body. The reviewer very justly affirms that the author’s conclusions are anti-Scriptural, and that his method of interpretation lays the way open to a general disregard of dogmatic truth; for if the Bible, as the doctor contends, does not really teach what the whole world has hitherto believed it to teach concerning the resurrection of the flesh, it is plain that we can never be sure that we understand the doctrine of the Bible, even when it seems perfectly clear; and, if this be so, we can have no definite knowledge of revealed truth. The critic makes some very pertinent remarks on the baneful effects that such works as the one he criticises are apt to produce; and, although he does not point out explicitly the root of the evil, yet he gives us a clue to it by averring that any interpretation of Scripture which conflicts with the universal and traditional interpretation received in the church is calculated to shake the very foundations of faith, and exposes every dogma to the attacks and sneers of unbelievers. This is to say that the Protestant principle of freely interpreting the Bible without regard to ecclesiastical tradition leads to infidelity—a truth which is painfully confirmed by daily experience, and which accounts for the sympathy of all the anti-Christian sects with Protestantism; but which the writer in the Sun—an excellent Protestant, we presume—could not very consistently insist upon. Yet the whole tone of his article shows his sincerity. He is evidently an intelligent scholar; and though he finds himself somewhat entangled in the solution of some important questions, yet he does not imitate the folly of such flippant scribblers as blaspheme what they do not understand, but he shows forbearance and circumspection, a wholesome reverence for religion, and an ardent love of truth, and expresses an earnest desire to be taught how the resurrection of the flesh and the immortality of the soul can be successfully established and vindicated against the allegations of modern sceptics.

As we anticipate that Protestant divines will probably not take the trouble to investigate the objections of the infidel school with which they too often sympathize and of which they are the unconscious props and promoters, we will consider the honest appeal of the writer as addressed to Catholic thinkers; and we intend to do briefly what we can, from our doctrinal point of view, to solve his difficulties and to set at rest his doubts. The more so because, as he remarks, whoever can furnish a way out of such difficulties will confer, by so doing, an immense benefit upon a whole world of anxious but sincere doubters on the subject of immortality.

“It cannot be denied,” says he, “that while the Christians generally believe in some kind of continuance of human existence after death, there is a great diversity of opinions among them in regard to its nature and characteristics. The men of the primitive church were not perplexed about the matter, as they were not about many others which are actively debated among us.”

This introductory remark is exceedingly important. The primitive church “was not perplexed” about the matter. Why? Apparently because the faithful were in the habit of accepting the Gospel with humility and simplicity as it was given to them by the apostles and by their successors; because the Protestant method of interpreting Scripture according to every one’s individual bias was not thought to be consistent with the profession of Christianity; because the teachers of the faith did not contradict one another, as our modern Protestant preachers and writers are wont to do to the scandal and ruin of their bewildered flocks. When we see that our Lord’s words, “This is my body,” can be construed by Protestant divines as meaning “This is not my body,” we may form an idea of what must be the result of the Protestant system of Scriptural interpretation. No one can be surprised that such a system creates perplexity, fosters debate, and ends in discord and ultimately in unbelief. But if there is “a great diversity of opinions” among Protestants, such is not the case with us Catholics. We members of the universal church are not perplexed about such matters. We still believe with perfect unanimity as the primitive Christians believed; our teachers teach all the same Gospel—the Gospel of Jesus Christ as transmitted to us by legitimate channels, not the contradictory gospels and the doctrinal crotchets of free-thinking divines. That is what makes the difference.

The critic whose words suggested to us these passing remarks will not fail to see that it is mainly to the rebellious spirit and presumption of the Protestant reformers that the present age owes its theological perplexities and the loss of religious unity. Would it not be better, therefore, to give up at last the gospels of men, and return to the Gospel of the primitive Christians?

“They believed,” as our critic points out, “that at the last day the bodies of the dead would be raised to life, and that the faithful would once more, in flesh and blood, inhabit their former abodes. The most ancient versions of the Apostles’ Creed teach explicitly the resurrection of the flesh, and the earliest Christian apologist, Justin Martyr, writing only a hundred years after the death of Christ, defends the doctrine by asking whether it be any more difficult for God to create a body anew from its dust than for him to create it the first time in its mother’s womb. And Mr. Nisbet concedes that all the succeeding Fathers of the church maintain the same view. Tertullian declares: 'The flesh shall rise again wholly in every man, in its own identity, in its absolute integrity.’ Irenæus agrees with him, and so do Jerome and Augustine.”

It would appear that these authorities, to which many more of the same kind might be added, should leave no doubt in the mind of a Christian about the legitimate interpretation of the dogma of resurrection. For, when an article of faith is clearly expressed in the Gospel and has been uniformly understood in all ages by the doctors of the universal church, it is difficult to see how a man who makes profession of Christianity can think himself authorized to twist it according to his individual bias. Yet this is what Dr. Nisbet has had the courage to do.

“It is remarkable,” says the reviewer, “with what confidence Dr. Nisbet overrides this primitive interpretation of Scripture and declares it to be incorrect. He allows no weight whatever to the obvious fact that men living so much nearer than he does to the days when the New Testament was written, and with whom its very language was still in colloquial use, would be more likely than he to perceive its true meaning. He lays great stress upon the famous passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xv. 35-53), which, he thinks, asserts the resurrection-body not to be of flesh and blood. But he fails to perceive that all that Paul is contending for is a finer and more glorious form of flesh and blood. Paul’s language is: 'The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’ (v. 52). This he further explains in writing to the Thessalonians: 'We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord’ (1 Thess. iv. 15-17). It was the expectation of the apostolic church that the Lord would come again in their time, agreeably to his prediction in Matthew xxiv.: 'This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled’; and in John v.: 'The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.’ They know that the Lord had raised Lazarus and many others in their own flesh and blood, and had himself, after his resurrection, offered his body to the touch of Thomas; and they would have had to do violence to their own reasoning faculties had they conceived of any different fulfilment of his promises. When, therefore, Dr. Nisbet denounces, as he does, Mr. Talmage’s picture of the final resurrection, with its general scramble of souls for their old bodies, the flying of scattered limbs through the air, and their reconstruction in their pristine integrity, he discredits what has been for eighteen centuries the accepted faith of the Christian Church.”

One would scarcely expect that the writer, after so judicious a criticism, should hesitate to condemn Dr. Nisbet’s view; and yet he seems afraid of passing too severe a judgment on it, as he immediately adds: “Not that this proves him to be in the wrong, but only that, if he is in the right, no dogma, however venerable, is safe from attack.”

The conception that a man who professes Christianity may not be in the wrong while he throws discredit on the most venerable dogmas of Christianity is a monstrosity not only in a religious but also in a logical point of view. Unless the expressions of our critic can be construed as a figure of speech conveying under a mild and civil form the merited censure, every Christian reader will say that the critic himself is in the wrong. A pagan, or a man absolutely ignorant of the divine origin and glorious history of Christianity, might hesitate about the right or wrong of tampering with our revealed dogmas, for he would have to learn first how the fact of divine revelation has been ascertained; but a man who has read the New Testament, who lives in a Christian atmosphere, who knows the life, the miracles, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, and who consequently cannot conceal from himself the great fact of revelation—such a man, we say, astonishes us when he assumes that a Christian doctor may not be in the wrong, though he deal with revealed truth in such a loose manner as to expose every dogma, however venerable, to the attacks of our modern pagans. But let us proceed. To show how suicidal is Dr. Nisbet’s method of interpretation the reviewer says:

“In fact, men more daring and less respectful than Dr. Nisbet have employed his method of reasoning against the resurrection of what he calls the grave-flesh to controvert the idea of any resurrection at all. He assumes as unquestioned the proposition that human beings must in some way survive the death of the body, and is only solicitous to determine what that way is. But just as he shows the irrationality of expecting that the cast-off flesh and blood which served the soul for a tabernacle during life shall be taken up again, so do sceptics undertake to show the irrationality of expecting any kind of future existence whatever.”

The reviewer is perfectly right. If the teachers of Christianity are to be free to twist the word of God as they please, why shall their followers and other men be denied the same privilege? And what can be the ultimate result of such a reckless meddling with truth but universal unbelief? Faith must rest on unquestionable authority; when this latter is shaken, faith is replaced by doubt, opinion, perplexity, despondency, and all the vagaries of a weak, distracted reason. The present growth of unbelief is therefore nothing but the logical development of the Protestant method of free interpretation, which has engendered a thousand conflicting opinions and thwarted all honest efforts of its followers in the search after truth. The Catholic Church alone has a remedy for this plague of religious scepticism, for she alone has the power to teach with authority, as she alone has faithfully preserved in its primitive entirety the sacred deposit of revealed truths.

And now the reviewer comes to the most important part of his article, which consists of the objections urged by the modern unbelievers against both resurrection and immortality. He says:

“Let us briefly state some of the various reasons which they adduce, in the hope that Dr. Nisbet, or some other writer of ability, may be led to meet and overthrow these reasons, and to furnish the world at last with a solid and impregnable philosophical demonstration of the doctrine of immortality.”

It was after reading this passage that we resolved to write the present article. Not that we consider ourselves “a man of ability”; but we are in possession of truth, and are confident that we can vindicate it successfully, though we may lack the ability of our opponents. Let us proceed, therefore, without further observations, to the reviewer’s arguments.

“In the first place,” he says, “those who deny that there is any immortality of the individual human soul say it is contrary to all the analogies of nature to suppose that the death of the body does not end its individual being. Throughout creation, whenever any organization is destroyed, it is destroyed for ever. A new organization may arise similar to the old one, but it is not that one. A crystal crushed into powder ceases to be a crystal. Its particles may be dissolved and be crystallized anew; but they will form another and not the same crystal. Every vegetable runs its career from the seed to the mature plant, and, when resolved into its elements, perishes as a plant. If those elements be made to constitute a new plant, that plant begins its round as a new plant, and not as the old one. In like manner, when animals die and their bodies decay, they never reappear as the same animals. They may furnish materials for new forms of mineral, vegetable, and animal organisms, but these organisms are essentially new, and not the old ones under the new forms. And, in the same way, these sceptics contend, so far as our observation goes, human beings die once and finally, other men are born and succeed them, but they are other men and not the men who have died. Whether their dissolution took place yesterday or thousands of years ago, it is alike, so far as our ordinary experience goes, complete and irreparable.”

To answer this argument it suffices to point out that the resurrection of the flesh and the immortality of the soul are two distinct truths, of which the first is known to us by divine revelation only, the second by revelation and by reason. To say that “throughout creation whenever any organization is destroyed it is destroyed for ever,” is to say that we find nothing in the order of nature that authorizes us to infer the resurrection of our bodies. This, of course, is true; but what of it? No one pretends that the future resurrection will be brought about by natural causes acting in their natural manner and obeying natural laws. Resurrection will be the work of the Omnipotent. We believe it, not because it agrees with the analogies of nature, but because God himself, infallible truth, has informed us that he will raise us from death against all the analogies of nature. We concede, then, that whenever an organization is destroyed, it is, in the natural course of things, destroyed for ever; and consequently we concede that the course of nature affords no proof of our resurrection. But the course of nature is not the standard by which we have to judge of things supernatural. The analogies of nature did not prevent the resurrection of Lazarus, of the son of the widow, and of others of which we read in the Gospel and in other Scriptural books; nor did Christ respect the analogies of nature when he rose glorious from the tomb, as he had promised. Hence the argument from the analogies of nature has no strength whatever against the dogma of the resurrection.

Has it at least any weight against the immortality of the soul? On the contrary, it proves that the soul is naturally immortal. For, though nature can destroy the organic form, it has no power to destroy the substances of which the organism consists. The organic compound is destroyed, but all the components remain. If, then, no substance is ever destroyed by nature, how can we fail to see that the human soul, which is a substance, cannot naturally perish when the organism of the body is destroyed? We may be told that the sceptic does not concede that our soul is a substance; he rather believes that what we call the soul is a mere result of organic movements which must cease altogether when the organs are destroyed. But we answer that, if the sceptic honestly desires to be enlightened on this subject, he must not rely on the assertions of ignorant or perverse scientists who profess to know nothing but matter and force; he must read and meditate what has been written on the subject by competent men. If he has sufficient ability to understand their philosophical reasonings, he will come to the conclusion that the substantiality of the human soul is a demonstrated truth; if, on the contrary, he has too little stock of philosophy to be able to follow such reasonings, then he has no right to be a sceptic, and it becomes his duty humbly to recognize his incompetency, and to accept without demonstration what more cultivated minds consider a demonstrated truth. This last remark is very important. Scepticism and unbelief are the offspring of pride. Men pretend to see the why and the how of everything; but they often forget that they are born in ignorance, and that, as their knowledge of material things is the fruit of long and varied experience so, the knowledge of supersensible things is the fruit of long and methodic study. He who has not studied astronomy, may say very honestly that he does not know how to determine the mass of the sun or the distance of the moon; but he cannot honestly deny what astronomy teaches on the subject. To do this, to declare himself sceptic, would be accounted folly. How, then, can those be justified who, without having applied to philosophical studies, refuse to accept the soundest conclusions of philosophy about the nature of the soul? If they are at all anxious to know how to prove the substantiality of the soul, let them apply to philosophy; and they will learn that matter, owing to its inertia, cannot think, and that the organic movements cannot be the thinking principle.

The writer in the Sun answers the preceding objection in the following manner:

“In answer to this it is usually alleged that, though the body of a man dies and decays, his soul survives, and either, as Dr. Nisbet maintains, continues its existence in a purer or more ethereal world, or, as the Christian Church believes, retaining its potentiality of life, will clothe itself again, at some future time, with a bodily form and enter upon a new career.”

Let the writer take notice that, according to the doctrine of the Christian Church, the soul, when separated from the body, retains not a mere “potentiality of life,” but actual life and the exercise thereof. The life of the soul does not depend on the organism of the body; its spiritual operation has no need of organs; for reason and will are not organic faculties, though in the present life they are associated with the sensitive faculties which work through the organs. The potentiality of life, in the language of philosophy, means the capability of receiving life; and it is the organism, not the soul, that has such a potentiality.

The writer continues:

“This idea of the distinction between soul and body is as old as the history of the world. The ancient Greeks illustrated it by the example of the butterfly emerging from the hard chrysalis and winging its flight through the air. Like the butterfly, the soul of man, they said, when it casts off its material envelope, soars aloft in the enjoyment of a purer atmosphere. The symbol, and the argument drawn from it, have been adopted by moderns, and they represent the common opinion on the subject. The assertion is that the soul exists within the body as a separate entity, and that when the body dies the soul is merely set free.”

We wonder if any “argument” has ever been drawn from the example of the butterfly to prove that the soul survives the collapse of the body. Similitudes are simple illustrations of things, and they serve to help the imagination, not to convince the intellect. Yet the author seems to believe that the common opinion which holds the soul to be a substance distinct from the body owes its demonstration partially to an “argument” drawn from the butterfly; and he undertakes to show that such an “argument” has no weight. He says:

“But those who maintain this view fail to note that the butterfly, like the worm, is visible to the eye and subject to the laws of matter; and, moreover, that the butterfly, when it has fulfilled its function in the economy of creation, perishes and is never seen or heard of more. If the soul is enveloped in the body as the butterfly is in the worm, it should appear to sight when its covering is removed. This notoriously does not happen, and therefore the argument is unsatisfactory.”

Of course the “argument” would be unsatisfactory; and therefore it is that philosophers do not use it. But the critic should not condemn the similitude as wrong on the ground that “the butterfly is visible to the eye and subject to the laws of matter,” whilst such is not the case with the soul. Similitudes are used for illustrating something different from them; hence they cannot agree in all points with the things illustrated. When the visible is used as a symbol of the invisible, it is by no means pretended that we can see the one as we see the other, or that there is in the one every property of the other. A genius may be compared to an eagle; but the eagle has feathers, a beak, and a tail, which the genius has not. So the butterfly is visible to the eye, subject to the laws of matter, and perishable; and in all this it differs vastly from the human soul. But it is not on these points that the comparison is based. Hence it is idle to argue from these points against the use of the comparison.

The writer concludes the preceding in these words:

“The argument from analogy, therefore, does but little towards supporting a belief in the future existence of the soul either separately or in connection with a restored body.”

We admit that the analogies of nature, as alleged by the writer, do very little indeed towards proving a future resurrection; but we have seen that the same analogies afford an irresistible proof of the natural immortality of the human soul: No power in nature can deprive a substance of its being; the human soul is a substance; therefore no natural power can deprive it of its being. We have, then, in this argument, a first demonstration of the natural immortality of the soul. But let us follow the reviewer. He mentions four proofs adduced by philosophers and divines in favor of the immortality of the soul—namely, the reasonableness of immortality, the promises of Scripture, the legendary stories of apparitions, and, in our time, the phenomena of what is called spiritualism.

“Without in any way admitting the sceptic’s proposition,” he says, “we must yet recognize the striking fact that in the construction of the argument from reasonableness, or the à priori demonstration of the survival of the soul, our philosophers have not, so far, got one step beyond the point arrived at by the old Greeks two thousand years ago. No one has written more convincingly on the subject than Plato in his Phædo, nor is there any more thorough and exhaustive presentment of it extant than the one given by that diligent student of Greek literature, Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations. Plato begins by appealing to the general belief of men in their immortality, which is like appealing to the general belief in fairies and witches as a proof of their existence. He then argues, from the soul’s readiness in acquiring knowledge, that it must have learned the same things in a previous state of existence; and hence, as it existed before the body, it will exist after the body ceases to be, which nowadays is not worth refuting. Next he says that the soul, being uncompounded and invisible, is indissoluble, and therefore immortal; but this is begging the question. Finally, he argues that the soul is in itself life and the opposite of death, and therefore cannot die; which is another petitio principii. In a similar manner Cicero enumerates in favor of the soul’s immortality the wide-spread conviction that it is immortal; the thirst for fame which inspires heroic deeds, and which would be absurd if death were the end of all existence; the volatile nature of the soul, which preserves it from destruction; and its superior powers over those of the body.”

We beg to remark that this passage is full of gratuitous assertions. What the writer calls “a striking fact” is not a fact. Our philosophers, as he himself proceeds to show, have added much to the reasonings of the old Greek philosophers. How can it be true, then, that they have gone “not one step beyond the point arrived at two thousand years ago”? And if this were true, how could the writer disclaim any intention of admitting “the sceptic’s proposition,” considering that the old proofs of immortality are, in his opinion, quite unsatisfactory?

A second gratuitous and unwise assertion is that to appeal to the general belief in immortality is “like appealing to the general belief in fairies and witches as a proof of their existence.” To say nothing of witches (for we need not enter into this controversy), it is not true that belief in fairies is, or has been, general, except perhaps among nursery children. But let this pass. There is a difference between belief and belief. The belief of men in the immortality of the soul does not originate in nursery tales, but in natural reason; nor is it a belief extorted by imposition, but a conclusion of which thinking men find sufficient evidence in their own nature. It is because the nature is common that the belief in immortality is common. To question it is to ignore the sensus naturæ communis, and to forfeit all claim to a fair philosophical reputation.

A third assertion, equally gratuitous and manifestly false, is that we cannot, without begging the question, infer the soul’s immortality from its simplicity. It is not easy to understand how the writer could fall into such a tangible error. The simplicity of the soul and its spirituality are demonstrated independently of the question of immortality. This being the case, it is plain that no begging of the question is possible in arguing from the known spiritual simplicity of the soul to its immortality. The writer might probably object that to assume the simplicity and spirituality of the soul is to assume its immortality. This is to say that to assume the premises is to assume the conclusion. But, if the premises are only assumed after demonstration, the conclusion which they involve will be based on demonstration and will be demonstrated. And this is the case with the soul’s immortality. If the simplicity and spirituality of the soul were assumed without proof, the argument would be worthless; but, since both are established by independent considerations, the conclusion is unquestionably valid.

The fourth gratuitous assertion consists in denouncing as a petitio principii the argument which says that the soul cannot die, “because it is life in itself.” The words “the soul is life in itself” mean that the life of the soul is not, like that of the body, borrowed from a distinct vital principle, but constitutes the very being of the soul and is involved in its essence. Hence, if the substance of the soul cannot be blotted out of existence by natural agencies, the soul is naturally immortal; for its very existence is life. And, since it is known and admitted that natural agencies are wholly incompetent to cause any created substance to vanish out of existence, the consequence is that the soul, as Plato very justly remarks, cannot naturally lose its life.

To complete the demonstration, however, something more is needed. For, although the preceding arguments show that the soul cannot be destroyed by natural agencies, they do not prove that the Author of nature, who has created it, will keep it in existence after its separation from the body. In other terms, it is necessary to show that the soul is no less extrinsically than intrinsically immortal. This the Greek philosophers, owing to their pagan notion of Divinity, have been unable to do; but it has been done by Christian philosophers, as our writer himself recognizes. He says:

“One argument, indeed, is employed by Christians which the heathens do not seem to have thought of—namely, the necessity of a future existence to compensate men for their sufferings, and to punish them for their misdeeds, in this world, and thus vindicate God’s mercy and justice. Virtuous human beings, it is said, are more or less unhappy in this life, while the wicked are happy; and therefore we must suppose that so just and benevolent a being as God will reward the one class and punish the other in a life to come.”

To this argument nothing can be objected. God cannot be more partial to the wicked than to the good. Such a course would evidently conflict with his sanctity, which necessarily loves all that is right, and necessarily hates all that is wrong. Hence the prosperity of the wicked and the trials of the good, though permitted by God for our present probation, are not final, but must be reversed when the time of probation is over—that is, at the end of the present life. A final triumph of virtue and a final punishment of vice are therefore as certain to come after this life as it is certain that God cannot forfeit his sanctity. Nevertheless, the writer in the Sun thinks that he can get rid of the argument by remarking that, if it proved anything, it would prove top much.

“As if God’s goodness,” he says, “does not much more require him to reward the virtuous here, if it requires him to reward them at all, and as if an uncertain future punishment, in a problematical state of existence, would offset a present sin.”

But this reply is extremely futile; for how can it be proved that God’s goodness requires him to reward the virtuous here? The assertion is quite arbitrary, not to say absurd; for if God’s goodness does not actually reward the virtuous here, it is evident that God’s goodness does not require that they should have their reward here. Then the writer seems to question the very necessity of reward and punishment; but he gives no reason for his doubt, as in fact no reason could be found for assuming that the moral law can be either observed without profit or violated with impunity. If there be no retribution, right and wrong are empty names, virtue becomes vice, and vice virtue. If no happiness is to be expected after death, he is most reasonable and virtuous who strives to satisfy all his passions, and he is most vicious and unreasonable who renounces his present gratification for the sake of morality. The sceptic, therefore, who denies a future life is constrained logically to admit that all virtue is foolishness, and all wisdom consists in self-indulgence and pleasure. The evident absurdity of this conclusion shows the falsity of the opinion from which it proceeds.

The writer imagines also that the future punishment is “uncertain,” and that after death there is only a “problematical” state of existence. To this we need not make a new answer, as we have seen that a future retribution is absolutely certain and not at all problematic.

“It may still further be said,” adds our writer, “that when we turn to the Scriptures, we do not find them by any means so clear and positive in regard to the survival of the soul as people generally suppose. The five books of Moses are absolutely destitute of all allusion to the subject. The Jews were told by the great lawgiver nothing whatever concerning a life beyond the grave. They were promised rewards in this world if they behaved well, and threatened with punishments in this world if they behaved ill. Their whole subsequent history illustrates this fundamental principle. When they rebelled against Jehovah and worshipped other gods, they were smitten with war, pestilence, famine, and captivity. When they were obedient to him, they were blessed with peace and plenty, and victory was granted them over their foes. In the prophetical writings, full as they are of rebukes and warnings, there is no more explicit teaching of a future life than in the Pentateuch; and, down to the advent of Christ, the sect of Sadducees, who prided themselves of their adherence to the faith of their fathers, stoutly denied it.”

Let us make a few remarks on this argument. First, were we to concede that Moses is absolutely silent about a future life, it would make no difference as to the question of the soul’s immortality. For if we argue with Christians, Moses’ silence is abundantly compensated for by other inspired writers; and if we argue with unbelievers, we know that Moses with them is no authority whether he speaks or remains silent.

Secondly, it is not true that “the five books of Moses are absolutely destitute of all allusion to the subject.” We are not going to write a dissertation on this Biblical question; it will suffice to point out a few passages which would have no meaning apart from a belief in a future life. We read in Genesis (xv. 1) that the Lord said to Abraham: “I am thy protector, and thy reward exceedingly great.” Can these words have any other meaning than “protector in the troubles of thy present life, and reward exceedingly great after the end of the struggle”? Again we read that Jacob at the approach of his death, while blessing his children, exclaimed: “I will look for thy salvation, O Lord” (ib. xlix. 18)—that is, “though I shall soon die, yet my soul will not cease to rejoice in the earnest expectation of the Redeemer who is to come”—Salutare tuum expectabo, Domine. And the same patriarch, when mourning for his son (Joseph), “would not receive comfort, but said: I will go down to my son into hell, mourning” (ib. xxxvii. 35). He therefore believed that his soul would survive its separation from the body. It is not true, then, that the books of Moses are absolutely destitute of all allusion to a future life. Nor is it lawful to argue that, because the great lawgiver promised rewards and threatened punishments of a temporal order, the eternal rewards and the eternal punishments must have been unknown to the children of Israel; for we must reflect that Moses’ menaces and promises were made to the nation or the political body, not to individual persons, and that the political body was not destined to last for ever; whence it follows that all the promises and all the menaces addressed to the nation ought to refer exclusively to the temporal order.

Thirdly, it is not true that the prophetical writings do not teach a future life. We read in Daniel (xii. 2) that “many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some unto life everlasting, and others unto reproach.” These words are decisive. Death is but a sleep; we shall awake to a new life, and this future life will last for ever. “On the last day,” says Job, “I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God” (c. xix.) David says: “The wicked shall be turned into hell, all the nations that forget God. For the poor man shall not be forgotten to the end: the patience of the poor shall not perish for ever” (Psalm ix.) “Thy dead men,” says Isaias, “shall live, my slain shall rise again: awake, and give praise, ye that dwell in the dust” (c. xxvi.) Ezechiel (c. xviii.) intimates to the wicked that they shall die, while the just shall live; where living and dying cannot refer to the course of natural events, but must be interpreted as meaning salvation and damnation. David says again: “But God will redeem my soul from the hand of hell, when he shall receive me” (Psalm xlviii.) These passages, to which many others might be added, suffice to show that our writer is not more accurate in speaking of the prophetical writings than he is in speaking of the Pentateuch.

Fourthly, he does not seem to know that the Sadducees, notwithstanding their “priding themselves of their adherence to the faith of their fathers,” were nothing but a heretical sect; they denied the resurrection of the flesh, just as modern Protestants deny transubstantiation; and it is as absurd to appeal to the Sadducees for the right understanding of the Jewish faith as it would be to appeal to our modern heretics for the interpretation of the Catholic doctrine.

The writer adds:

“The historical books, indeed, show that in later days the doctrine gained admission into some Jewish minds, having most probably been communicated to them from their Assyrian, Persian, and Babylonian captors; but the form it took on was that of the resurrection of the flesh, which, Dr. Nisbet says, was erroneously adopted by the Christian Church. If, therefore, the Old Testament be silent on the topic, and the New Testament, as interpreted by contemporary critics, teaches a doctrine which reason cannot accept, what is there in the Bible to require a belief in any resurrection whatever?”

We have shown that the immortality of the soul was known to the Jews from the time of the patriarchs. The Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians were also acquainted with the same truth, but they seem to have been altogether ignorant of a future resurrection, and many of them thought that their souls were destined to transmigrate from one body to another. These errors may have been communicated to some Jews by their captors; as we know that the Sadducees denied the resurrection, and most of the Pharisees believed in metempsychosis, according to Josephus (Antiquit. l. xviii. c. 2). But if the captivity of the Jews may have been the source of these errors, it has certainly not been the origin of the belief in immortality and resurrection, which pre-existed among the Jews long before their captivity.

As to the argument which the author draws from Dr. Nisbet’s view of resurrection, we need hardly say that, if it may have some weight against Dr. Nisbet, it can have none against the Christian doctrine. The New Testament, “as interpreted by contemporary critics”—that is, by Dr. Nisbet—“teaches a doctrine which reason cannot accept.” What then? Then, concludes the writer, “there is nothing in the Bible to require a belief in any resurrection whatever.” We are at a loss to understand the logical connection of the consequence with the antecedent. Can we not suppose that there is something in the Bible which requires a belief in the resurrection of the flesh, and that Dr. Nisbet, whose infallibility is far from being demonstrated, has failed to understand it? When a man is bold enough to say that the Christian Church has “erroneously adopted” a doctrine which has been preached by the apostles and believed in without interruption for eighteen centuries by the Christian world, there is little doubt that such a man is himself in error, and that his assertions cannot be made the ground of any argumentation. On the other hand, if Dr. Nisbet “contends for a resurrection in a form composed of finer substances than flesh and blood,” he may indeed err theologically, but we fail to see how he thereby “teaches a doctrine which reason cannot accept.” In fact, reason is incompetent to decide what mode of resurrection should be accepted and what rejected; it being evident that in a question of this sort the province of reason is to submit to revelation, and to accept the doctrine universally received by the members of the church. If therefore the Old or the New Testament, or both, as interpreted by the Fathers of the church, teach a doctrine against which reason has nothing whatever to object, it is the duty of every wise and reasonable man to accept the doctrine without the least regard to the vagaries of “contemporary Protestant critics.” Now, this is the case with the doctrine of immortality and resurrection.

But our writer has more to say:

“Moreover, it is urged, if the survival of the soul is a fact at all, it is a fact to-day as much as it ever was, and, like other facts, susceptible of proof. There are departed souls enough now, if there ever were any, to make it easy to demonstrate their existence. If it be true, as so many multitudes believe, that when the body dies the soul of the man, the woman, or the child who inhabited it survives as a real man, woman, or child, with all that is requisite to personal identity, why, ask the doubters, does it not in some way manifest itself? From every home on this planet there go up daily and hourly passionate demands for the return of loved ones whom death has snatched away. Were they still in the flesh, no obstacle would prevent their hurrying to join the objects of their affection; and the sceptic finds it inconceivable that if, as is said, they hover about us in spirit form, they should not make their presence felt in some undeniable way.”

It is perfectly true that the survival of the soul is, like other facts, susceptible of proof. Yet not all facts are proved by the same kind of proofs. There are, even in the natural sciences, facts which must be proved by reasoning, owing to the impossibility of ascertaining them directly by the experimental method. We must not expect, therefore, that souls, which are spiritual and invisible, should, after departing from their bodies, give sensible signs of their survival in a different state. Nor do we need any such sensible proof of their survival; for we have proofs of a higher order, by which we show that the human soul cannot die. We therefore establish not only the fact of its survival, but also the necessity of the fact. On the other hand, if a soul were to appear before us, we might suspect the objective reality of the apparition; at best we might simply conclude that such a soul has been kept in existence; but we would have no ground for concluding that all other human souls are likewise kept in existence, and that they must remain in existence for ever. In fact, could not that soul be annihilated some time after its apparition? Or could we logically maintain that the survival of one soul suffices to prove the survival of all other souls? It is therefore impossible to prove the immortality of all human souls by means of individual apparitions; to establish it a general principle is indispensable, and this principle is drawn from the very essence of the soul and from the sanctity and justice of its Creator.

But “why does not the soul in some way manifest itself”? This question is very easily answered. The departed souls are either in heaven, or in hell, or in purgatory. If in hell or in purgatory, they are there like prisoners, and cannot freely roam about. If, on the contrary, they are in heaven, they have none other than spiritual relations with this world, except by special dispensation of divine Providence. And again, why should departed souls manifest themselves in a sensible manner? To convince us that the Scriptural doctrine of immortality is true? As if our faith in the word of God were based on the testimony of our senses, not on the authority and truthfulness of God himself. “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed,” said our Lord to his sceptical disciple: “blessed are they that have not seen and have believed.” Miracles, in the present order of Providence, are not the rule, but the exception: hence the sensible manifestation of departed souls, as being above the requirements of nature, is not to be made the test of their survival.

“Were they still in the flesh,” we are told, “no obstacle would prevent their hurrying to join the objects of their affection.” Certainly; for if they were still in the flesh they would belong to this world; but, since they are no more in the flesh, they now belong to the world of spirits, which is invisible to our eyes of flesh, and from which they cannot communicate with us in sensible forms without a special command or permission of God. It is not true that they “hover about us in spirit form”; this is a pagan conception. Nor is it true that the soul survives “as a real man, woman, or child.” Souls have no sex, and man cannot be without a body; hence no departed soul is either man, woman, or child: it is a soul simply, and its “personal identity” consists in its being the same soul which was in the body.

To the question, “Why do not souls manifest themselves in a sensible way?” a second answer can be given by replying that many souls have thus manifested themselves. This answer, good and legitimate as it is, is ridiculed by sceptical critics, who, while constantly appealing to facts, are invariably determined to spurn all facts contrary to their theories. Our writer says:

“Equally inconclusive is the little we have of positive testimony on the subject. It is true that in all ages there have been some who have asserted the power of actually seeing and speaking with departed souls, and the whole tribe of spirit-mediums pretend to it now. As to what has happened in bygone times it is, of course, impossible now to base any conclusion upon it. The circumstances cannot be inquired into, and, moreover, one single witness coming before us and submitting his testimony to our scrutiny is worth more than a thousand who are out of our reach. The question is: Does anybody at this day really have intercourse with the spirits of the dead? The spirit-rappers and their followers say Yes, but the great incredulous world, after hearing all they have to present in confirmation of their assertions, still says No. There is so much fraud and nonsense connected with the business that the scientific mind rejects it contemptuously. The very phenomena themselves are clouded with a suspicion of jugglery and deceit, while there is a wide divergence of opinion as to their interpretation, even granting them to be honestly produced.”

We agree with the author that spiritists have no intercourse with the spirits of the dead, and we add that no mortal has the power to call back to this world a departed soul. This, we think, is certain both by authority and philosophy. Hence, if any spirits are really made to appear and to answer questions—which we know to be a fact, though not so frequent as simpletons are apt to believe—those spirits are not the souls of the departed, but the lying spirits of hell, who volunteer to play nonsensical tricks for the amusement and the perversion of their foolish consultors. But that departed souls have now and then appeared to men in visible form is a fact established on indisputable historical evidence. Do we not read in the Bible that the ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul, rebuked his recklessness, and intimated to him the impending defeat of his army and his own death? Nor can it be objected that the ghost was a devil, for devils do not know the future actions of men; nor can it be said that the apparition was a delusion, for the ghost was seen by the witch before it was seen by Saul; and the whole narrative of the sacred writer is so worded as to exclude the possibility of explaining away the fact by such a loose interpretation. It will be said, however, that “the scientific mind” rejects all such facts with absolute contempt. To which we may reply that “the scientific mind” has no right whatever to reject historical facts. Science is based on facts; its duty is to account for them by a sufficient reason, not to deny them when they transcend our comprehension. We know that there is a class of modern scientists who contend that everything must be explained by the properties of matter, and that no exception can be admitted in favor of supernatural facts. But we do not see how this mental disposition can be called “scientific.” If physicists refuse to acknowledge all the facts which transcend the limits of their sphere, why could not the musician reject all the phenomena which transcend his musical knowledge, or the chemist ridicule all the astronomical calculations? It is evident that every science must dwell within its proper limits, and therefore no weight can be attached to the opinions of mere physicists when they presume to decide questions entirely extraneous to their profession. Thus the facts remain, and all attempts at discrediting them must be accounted idle and unscientific talk. Lazarus, dead and buried, at the voice of Christ revived. The fact was public and recognized by Christ’s enemies. “The scientific mind” will not deny it. But then, we ask, how could the soul of Lazarus retake possession of his body, if it had ceased to exist? and what else was the rising of the body from its tomb than a sensible manifestation of the soul returned to its primitive office? We read in the Gospels, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in ecclesiastical history of many dead recalled to life either by Christ or by his disciples and followers. In all such facts souls have manifested themselves. We might mention a great number of genuine apparitions well known to all readers of the lives of saints; but as we have neither time nor intention to enter into a critical discussion of the evidence by which they are supported, we shall content ourselves with citing the glorious apparitions of Lourdes, of La Salette, and of Marpingen, which, as all the world knows, are unquestionable facts, accompanied and followed by a continuous series of public miracles, to which “the scientific mind” of modern thinkers has found nothing to object, though it has been formally and repeatedly challenged to disprove them by its pretended superior knowledge. Our Catholic readers know most of the facts to which we allude; but it is probable that the writer to whom we reply is not acquainted with them, and we would suggest to him to read M. Lasserre’s book on the apparition of Lourdes, where he will find, we trust, sufficient evidence concerning the reality and nature of the facts just mentioned. But we repeat that a Christian and a philosopher has no need of sensible manifestations to believe in the immortality of the human soul. Reason and the Gospel afford such a strong evidence of this truth that all further evidence may seem superfluous. When unbelievers ask for apparitions or sensible manifestations, we may answer them as Abraham answered the rich man: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if one rise again from the dead” (Luke xvi. 31).

Our writer sums up his arguments as follows:

“The fact, then, seems to be—and we would earnestly press it upon the attention of religious thinkers of every kind, and especially upon theologians and clergymen, whose peculiar duty it is to deal with such subjects—the fact seems to be that analogy, reason, revelation, and human testimony alike fail to establish the doctrine that man can exist as a man without a material body. Books such as that of Dr. Nisbet rather add to than remove the philosophical difficulties of the subject so long as they leave the main question untouched. Moreover, in explaining away the popular interpretation of the Scriptures in regard to it, they tend to produce very much the same results as have been produced by the efforts to reconcile Genesis with geology. The conclusion that the Bible does not teach science correctly has been followed by the conclusion that it does not teach science at all; and so, if we agree with Dr. Nisbet that what it says about the resurrection is not to be taken literally, we shall be in great danger of rejecting its testimony altogether.”

This is to say that the Scriptures, in the Protestant system of free interpretation, lose all authority, inasmuch as the word of man is thereby substituted for the word of God. Thus far we agree with the writer. But that religious thinkers, theologians, and clergymen should undertake a new demonstration of the soul’s immortality and of the resurrection of the flesh, we consider unnecessary. Theologians and clergymen have done their duty on this point with such completeness as to make all sceptics inexcusable. All that is wanted is that the sceptics themselves undertake to study the works of such theologians and philosophers as have answered the objections of the materialists of the last century. Scepticism is ignorance. There is no remedy for it but study—the study of that special branch of knowledge on which the solution of any given question depends.

Our writer imagines that some “efforts” have been made “to reconcile Genesis with geology.” This, however, is not the case. The truth is that a class of scientists have made some “efforts” to turn geology against Genesis, and that those efforts have been unsuccessful. A science which denies to-day what it considered yesterday as demonstrated, and which is apt to deny to-morrow what it teaches to-day, needs none of our “efforts” to be reconciled with Genesis. When the facts of geology shall be well known, and when the theories built on those facts shall be logically correct, then we shall have no need of “reconciling” geology with Genesis; for geology will teach us nothing in opposition to the revealed origin of things.

As to the conclusion “that the Bible does not teach science correctly,” or “that it teaches no science at all,” we will only remark that the Biblical record of creation is a history of facts, not a treatise of science. Hence the proposition that the Bible does not teach science correctly has no meaning, whilst the proposition that the Bible teaches no science at all is perfectly true, although the facts themselves which it relates must be looked upon as the groundwork of geological science.

But our writer seems to take a different view of the subject. He says:

“Many believers in Christianity deny that the world was made in six days, although the Bible says it was made in six days; deny that a flood ever covered the tops of the mountains, that there ever were witches and magicians, and that Joshua made the sun and the moon stand still, although the Bible asserts all these things; why may they not likewise safely deny as unscientific the dogma of a future existence of all individual human beings? This is the dilemma into which speculations like those of Dr. Nisbet bring us; and if he and his school can furnish a way out of it, they will confer an immense benefit upon the whole world of anxious but sincere doubters upon this great subject.”

Such is the end of the article we have been examining. We would tell the writer that if there are believers in Christianity who deny anything revealed by God in the Bible, such believers are not consistent with themselves; for why should they believe in Christianity if they disbelieve the Bible? If the word of God in the Old Testament does not command their assent, why should the same word of God in the New Testament cause them to believe? It is clear that, if they believed on God’s authority, they could not reject anything based on that authority. A belief of this sort is not divine faith, but human opinion; it is not submission to God’s authority, but a denial of God’s authority in all things which man chooses to disbelieve; and consequently such a belief is not that faith “without which it is impossible to please God.” It is, however, the faith of many advanced Protestants; and thus we are not surprised that the writer considers such an irrational form of belief as consistent with the mutilated form of “Christianity” with which he is familiar. But we Catholics—we heirs of the apostolic doctrine transmitted to us in an uninterrupted manner by the universal church—we believe everything that has been revealed either in the Old or in the New Testament. We do not question the fact that there have been witches and magicians, nor do we see any reason for questioning it; we believe in like manner what the Bible says about the Flood, the six days of creation, Joshua’s great miracle, and everything else; by which we mean that those facts which we read in the Bible, whether we have a true appreciation of them or not, are all true, and that the difficulties we may find in their explanation arise from our ignorance, which the modern progress of science has done very little to dispel. Thus, while we are free to choose among the various explanations of Biblical facts, we all agree in believing the facts themselves. But, if this is true of those passages of Scripture whose meaning is obscure, and whose interpretation has not been settled by the authority of the church or by the consensus of the doctors, it is not true of those other passages whose meaning is obvious and unmistakable, or whose interpretation has been sanctioned by the unanimous decision of the universal church. Hence, while we may freely discuss the six days of creation and the astronomical result of Joshua’s dealings with the sun, we have no reasonable ground for discussing or doubting “the dogma of a future existence of all individual human souls.” To say that this dogma is “unscientific” is to assume what neither has been nor can be proved; unless, indeed, we call “unscientific” every truth which ranges above the compass of experimental science; in which case even logic itself would be utterly unscientific.

Whether Dr. Nisbet or his school can furnish a way out of the difficulties complained of by our writer we do not know. It is probable, however, that neither Dr. Nisbet nor any other doctor of the same school can successfully combat the invading spirit of infidelity so long as they do not give up their Protestant method of reasoning and their Protestant profession. Protestantism is itself one kind of infidelity; it cannot contribute in any way towards the restoration of sound philosophical or theological ideas; it can only sow doubt, discord, and inconsistency, thus paving the way for religious scepticism and its concomitant evils. The history of Protestantism is sufficient evidence of the fact. It is vain, therefore, to hope that Dr. Nisbet or his school will “confer any benefit upon the whole world of anxious but sincere doubters” by establishing either the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the flesh on impregnable proofs. Let, then, all anxious but sincere doubters turn to Catholic doctors and Catholic books; let them hear the church—the old, calumniated church, the column of truth, the heir of the apostles, of the prophets, of the patriarchs, and the spouse of Christ. She will teach them how to reconcile reason with faith and religion with science, so as to believe rationally and consistently whatever God has revealed, while preserving the fullest liberty of judgment in regard to all other things. Yet we must warn these “anxious but sincere doubters” that no benefit will accrue to them, if they approach our divines or read our books with that spirit of contention which is so common among all the Protestant sects. If they are “anxious” to know the truth, they must not rely exclusively on the strength of their reasoning powers, but must be ready to yield to authority in all things connected with Christian faith. If they are “sincere,” humility must be a part of their sincerity.

To conclude: We have met and answered the reasons alleged by the writer in the Sun against the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the flesh; and although we have scarcely developed the reflections suggested by those reasons, yet we confidently believe that our brief remarks will be found sufficient to set at rest the arguments of the sceptic. As to the doctrine of immortality in particular, of which the same writer desired “a solid and impregnable philosophical demonstration,” we have shown that the human soul neither can be destroyed by any created cause nor will be destroyed by God; accordingly, the human soul is intrinsically and extrinsically immortal. Our proofs have been few, but simple and intelligible; and we trust that the writer who gave us occasion to speak of this subject, if he chances to read these pages, will soon acquire the conviction that the doctrine of immortality was really in no need of a new philosophical demonstration.

SANNAZZARO.

One Sunday morning, while at Naples, we went to hear our Mass of obligation in the church of the Servites, erected by the poet Sannazzaro in honor of the divine Maternity of Mary, and called after his famous poem, De Partu Virginis. It stands on the Mergellina, that pezzo di cielo caduto in terra, as the Neapolitans say—“a fragment of heaven to earth vouchsafed”—and certainly the most beautiful shore on which the sun shines. It was this shore that inspired the ardent Stazio. Not far off is the tomb of Virgil, and the place where Pollio lived, and the grove where Silius Italicus conceived the idea of his Punica. Here, too, Sannazzaro had a charming villa which tempted the very Muses to descend from the mountain to dwell on the sandy shore, as Ariosto says:

“Alle Camene

Lasciar fa i monti e abitar le arene.”

Here he wrote most of his poems and gathered around him all the wit and talent of Naples on those Dies geniales, which were as famous at that time as the Noctes Ambrosianæ of Christopher North at Edinburgh in our younger days, though not quite so convivial, perhaps. This villa had about it a certain perfume of antiquity of which we know nothing in these times, and which we affect to despise. It was the natural atmosphere of this Virgilian region, and it had an inspiration of its own which must be taken into account in reading the works of Sannazzaro. He has celebrated his villa in an ode worthy of Horace. He did not, however, notwithstanding his classical tastes, dedicate his household altar to Apollo, or even to Venus—he was too genuine a Christian for that—but to the tutelar care of San Nazzaro, whom he reckoned among his ancestors. When nearly done with life, he built a church on the spot, in memory of that divine Birth which he had so sweetly sung, and attached thereto a convent of Servite monks, to whom he gave the income of eight thousand florins for the solemn celebration of Christmas and certain expiatory services for himself, his ancestors, and King Frederick III. of Naples. Here he also set up an altar to San Nazzaro, and ordered his own tomb to be built.

We had repeatedly passed the Church del Parto without being able to find it, so embedded is it among houses on the side of the cliff. And the entrance is from a side terrace, to which you ascend by a flight of steps, as to the court of a private dwelling. This terrace commands a view that surpasses all the most vivid imagination could conceive. The Castel del Ovo advances directly before you into the incomparable bay, the waters of which, generally blue as the heavens, were at this early hour all crimson and gold and amethyst, with great floods of silver coming in from the sea. Behind them were islands, such as we see in dreams, rising out of the magic waves: Capri, with its marvellous grottos, clouded with the memory of Tiberius; Procida, with its fort on the volcanic rocks; and Ischia, where the beautiful Vittoria Colonna, beloved of Michael Angelo, retired to mourn her husband’s loss, and beneath which the giant Typhœus, transfixed by a thunderbolt from Jupiter, lies imprisoned, at long intervals groaning with pain, and sending forth in his rage fearful eruptions of burning lava. On the inner curve of the bay sits Naples like a queen, with her palaces, her citadels, her white villas gleaming like jewels—her glance all flame, and her heart all fire. Beyond rises Mount Vesuvius, with its cone of perfect symmetry, full of mystery and terror, its summit now flecked with patches of snow, looking like great white flowers that bloom

“Around the crater’s burning lips,

Sweetening the very edge of doom.”

A light vapor, rather than smoke, issued from the top, no longer dark and foreboding like the evil genius whose vase was unsealed, but of soft, dove-like hues, as if some pacific herald. At its foot sleep fair villages among peaceful olive-trees, wreathed with vines, and lulled into forgetfulness by the gentle waves that caress the shore. Harmonious tints blend earth and sky and sea, but they are constantly varying with the rolling hours. There is nothing monotonous here, except the languid air which wearily plays among the odorous trees without the force to agitate their branches. Nature is here a genuine siren, half-earth, half-sea, whose magic voice wooes many a wanderer still to forget his native shore. We feel its charm as we survey the matchless landscape. An electric fire comes over the soul—admiration, wonder, emotions no words can express. Poetry is in the golden air, the bright waves, the enchanting shores, the intense hues that color everything—yes, even in the awful scars and lava streams that furnished the ancients with their ideas of Tartarus, and made Virgil place his descent thereto near the tenebrosa palus—the gloomy lake of Avernus, formed from the overflowing of the Acheron—

“Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep.”

The church bell awoke us from this delightful vision, and we entered the open door. It is a small building whose walls within are tinged a delicate sea-green, and have white mouldings, as if to harmonize with the foam-crested waves of the bay without. The windows are mere lunettes, high up in the arches, and below are five or six deep recesses with altars and paintings. The white marble basin at the entrance, for holy-water, looks like a flower on its tall, slender stem. On it is graven a shield like a chess-board—perhaps the arms of some noble of this farniente land to whom life was a mere game. We were at once struck by a singular crucifix on a kind of a tripod, under a canopy like a penthouse. Near by stood the Addolorata—the Madonna of Many Sorrows—in black like a nun, with wimple and veil, a stole embroidered with gold, and a wheel of gilt arrows piercing the silver heart on her breast. One poor dim lamp was burning before her. Opposite was a more cheerful altar with the Virgin del Parto, the titular of the church, gaily dressed after the Italian taste, and surrounded with lights and flowers. These two Madonnas seemed to personify Bethlehem and Calvary—the Alpha and Omega of the Christian mysteries—and between them we knelt to hear Mass.

The church was nearly full of people in bright holiday attire, quite absorbed in their devotions, and, though mostly of the lower classes, so-called, they all responded in Latin to the litany at the close of the service. Near by us, in the pavement, was a tomb-stone with the bas-relief of a boy with a book under his head, another in his hand, and one at his feet. This was a promising youth named Fabrizio Manlio, who so loved the Mergellina that, when ill, he wished to be brought here to die, and here be buried, as his touching epitaph relates. But that was three hundred years ago, and the father who here records the tears he shed long since rejoined his son, and now there is not a smile the less at sunny Naples. Why lay aught too much to heart?

In a recess at the right is a noted painting, generally known at Naples as the Diavolo di Mergellina. This is no new fiend, but the old outcast from heaven vanquished by St. Michael, the great captain of the heavenly host, a picture by Leonardo da Pistoja, a Tuscan painter of the Da Vinci school. The archangel, “severe in youthful beauty,” is girded with a vest of heavenly azure, and from his shoulders spring broad wings of many hues—green, yellow, and purple—with rays like long arrows of gold. His right hand seemingly disdains to use its sword—“Satan’s dire dread”—but holds it behind him, while with the left he thrusts his long spear through the demon’s neck and nails him to the ground. His face is perfectly passionless, as if not even so terrible a combat could ruffle the serenity of his angelic nature. The Diavolo is one of those strange demons that entice souls down to the gulf of perdition, common in the middle ages, with two faces, not Janus-wise, but with the second face on the bowels, of most startling character. The fiend before us has the beautiful face and bust of a woman, said to be the genuine portrait of a lady who became passionately enamored of Diomedes Carafa, Bishop of Ariano, who lies buried at the foot of the altar beneath, with the triumphant inscription: Et fecit victoriam, halleluja! which may be applied both to the bishop and the archangel. The round arms of this fair demon are drawn up under her head. Her long, golden locks

“In masses bright

Fall like floating rays of light”

around her shoulders and half-veil her bosom. Her youthful face is deadly pale, but not contracted, and her eyes are cold and vigilant. The lower face, on the contrary, is old and convulsed, as if crying with pain. The hair is grizzled and witch-like. The legs are like two scaly serpents, twisted and writhing, and the bat-like wings shade off to a lurid brown and yellow. The contrast in these two faces is very striking and has a deep moral. It is a common proverb at Naples to compare too tempting a project, or too seducing a beauty, to the Diavolo di Mergellina.

The high altar of the church is of inlaid marble. At the sides are niches containing statues of SS. Jacobo and Nazzaro, the patrons of the founder. On what is called the arch of triumph over the head of the nave is an old painting of the Annunciation, the Virgin in one spandrel with the dove on her hand, and the angel in the other with the lily stem. Along the connecting arch is the distich from Sannazzaro:

“Virginitas Partus discordes tempore longo,

Virginia in gremio fœdera pacis habent.”[82]

In a neighboring recess is an Adoration of the Magi, which contends with that of the Castello Nuovo as being the one given Sannazzaro by Frederick of Aragon, painted by Van Eyck, and said by Vasari to be the first oil-painting ever brought to Italy.

We searched a long time in vain for the tomb of Sannazzaro. Chapels, flagstones, and mural inscriptions, all underwent a severe scrutiny; and, supposing it must have been destroyed in some political convulsion, when even death itself is not respected, we were on the point of leaving the church when it occurred to us to go behind the high altar. We found there a door which we made bold to enter, remembering how often we had been repaid for exploring sacristies and odd nooks. There was the tomb directly before us, in the smallest of choirs in which ever monk lost his voice “with singing of anthems.” It is the most quiet, secluded spot in the world—dim, frescoed, and crowded with a dozen stalls, on which cherubs’ heads are carved. It is more like a little chantry than a choir, and nothing ever breaks the silence but the voice of holy psalmody. The poet’s tomb is of white marble, chiefly sculptured by Fra Giovanni da Montorsoli. It is surmounted by his bust crowned with laurel. The face is somewhat haggard, but the features are noble. He wears a cap like that we see in pictures of Dante. Beside him are two putti, one with a book and the other bearing a helmet, in allusion to the different ways in which Sannazzaro distinguished himself. The sarcophagus beneath rests on an entablature, below which, in delicate relief, are Neptune and his trident—doubtless in allusion to the Piscatoriæ—and Pan with his reeds, accompanied by fauns and satyrs, with jovial faces and shaggy sides, as if to sing the praises of the author of the Arcadia. Along the base of the monument is an inscription by Bembo, which shows he believed Virgil to have been buried at Naples:

“Da sacro cineri flores: hic ille Maroni

Syncerus musa proximus ut tumulo.”[83]

At the sides are fine statues of Apollo and Minerva by Santa-croce.

Iacopo Sannazzaro, the inspired poet of the Virgin, was born at Naples in 1458. He sprang from an illustrious family of Spanish origin that had fallen from its former grandeur, but was left not without considerable means. His mother, on becoming a widow, withdrew into the country in order to bring him up in retirement, uncontaminated by the world; but he soon displayed such uncommon abilities that she was persuaded to return to Naples and there watch over his education. It is said he showed a talent for poetry at eight years of age; but it must be remembered he belonged to a land where poesy is like the flowers that spring up spontaneously from the soil at every season. Of course his education was chiefly classical; for he belonged to an age when Greek and Latin literature was regarded as the standard of excellence, and the very mysteries of religion were sung in the measure of Homer and Virgil. When of sufficient age he chose as his master Giovanni Pontano, called “the Trojan Horse” on account of the great number of illustrious poets, orators, and warriors that sprang from his school. Pontano was then director of the celebrated Accademia Napolitana, in which he figured as grammarian, philosopher, historian, orator, and poet. He was the literary autocrat of Naples,

“Whose smile was transport, and whose frown was fate.”

He was regarded as the favorite of Apollo and the Aonides, and from his lips was said to flow a river of gold:

“Quel bel tesoro
D’Apollo e delle Aonide sorelle,
Che con la lingua sparge un fiume d’oro.”

His astronomical discoveries were announced in Latin verse. It is said he was the first in modern times to revive the idea of Democritus that the Milky Way is composed of myriads of stars.

Sannazzaro succeeded his master at the Academy of Naples, which at that time held its meetings at Pontano’s residence, near which was the Cappella Pontaniana—a gem of art, erected by Pontano in honor of the Virgin and the two St. Johns. Here were set up the wise maxims of the founder, graven on stone, which we translate from the original Latin:

“It is noble but difficult to restrain one’s self in opulence.

“He who never forgets injuries forgets that he is man.

“Whatever thy fortune, be mindful of Fortune herself.

“Integrity promotes confidence, and confidence friendship.

“He who decides too hastily on doubtful occasions repents too late, though he repent quickly.

“It is in vain the law cannot reach him whose conscience absolves him not.

“The sky is not always serene, nor does prudence always ensure safety.

“In every condition of life the chief thing is to know thyself.

“It belongs to the upright to despise the injuries of the wicked, whose praises even are a disgrace.

“Let us bear the penalty of our faults rather than the state should expiate them to its injury.

“Content not thyself with being upright, but find others who resemble thee to serve thy country.

“It is by boldness and conquest a kingdom is enlarged, and not by those counsels that seem to the timid full of wisdom and prudence.”

Such were the maxims instilled into Sannazzaro’s youthful mind. They have a flavor of antiquity. The Academy of Naples still exists, but holds its meetings in the cell of St. Thomas Aquinas at San Domenico’s, where royalty itself used to attend the lectures of the Angelic Doctor. In the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples—where Tasso found shelter—there is a striking group of figures in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, gathered in sorrowful attitudes around the dead Christ—all life-size likenesses of celebrities in the time of the artist, Modanin of Modena. Sannazzaro is represented as Joseph of Arimathea; Pontano as Nicodemus; Alfonso II. as St. John, with his son Ferdinand beside him.

Sannazzaro has celebrated a young Neapolitan girl in classical measure, under the Greek names of Amarante, Phyllis, and Charmosyne, which signify joy, love, and the immortal; but he veiled his passion, if it was one, under mythological allusions. He took as his device an urn of black pebbles, among which was a single white one with the motto, Æquabit nigras candida sola dies, as if in time he hoped to please his lady. But she died young, and he bewailed her in suitable elegies. In spite of this somewhat fantastic attachment—perhaps only a poetic fancy—it is sure Sannazzaro was all his life rather a votary of Diana than of Venus, as became one destined to sing the praises of the Purissima.

Admitted to familiarity with Frederick of Aragon, son of King Ferdinand of Naples, Sannazzaro was appointed director of the royal festivities, and in this capacity composed dramas in the language of the lazzaroni for the amusement of the court. These soon became as popular in the streets as in the palace, and were the germs of the modern Italian comedy, which finds its broadest expression in Pulcinella’s farces at San Carlino. One of these plays is spoken of with particular admiration, composed in 1492 to celebrate the conquest of Granada, and acted at the Castello Capuano in presence of Alfonso, Duke of Calabria.

Sannazzaro became so attached to his royal patron that he accompanied him in an expedition against the Turks, where he acquired the reputation of a courageous soldier. And when the prince was deprived of the throne to which he had succeeded, and retired to France, the poet, more faithful in misfortune than Pontano to Frederick I., generously sold two paternal estates to provide for his sovereign’s wants, and accompanied him into exile. It was in the following lines he bade adieu to Naples, which to leave is a kind of death:

“Parthenope, mihi culta; vale, blandissima siren,

Atque horti valeant, Hesperidesque tuæ;

Mergellina, vale, nostri momor; et mea flentis

Serta cape, heu domini numera avara tui;

Maternæ salvete umbræ, salvete paternæ.”[84]

Sannazzaro remained with Frederick III. till his death at Tours, and then returned to Naples, where he devoted himself wholly to literature. The Arcadia, which he finished in France, was published in 1504. This is a romance of mingled prose and verse after the manner of Boccaccio’s Ameto. It caused a great sensation in Italy, and is still regarded as one of the happiest inspirations of the Italian muse. His pleasant villa on the Mergellina had been respected during his exile, and here he established himself at his return. It became a rendezvous for all the literary men of the city. On Thursdays in particular, when the scholars and barristers had a holiday, all that was brilliant at Naples assembled here for a frugal repast, at which poems and epigrams were recited. Sannazzaro was very popular, and to be his friend was regarded as a brevet of immortality.

“Dipinto io sia nell’opre eterne e belle
Del mio bel Sannazzaro, vero Sincero,
Ch’allora io giugnero fino alle stelle,”[85]

wrote Cariteo. Sannazzaro, it should be remarked, had, after the fashion of the time, taken the more classical name of Actius Syncerus, to which allusion is made on his tomb.

But the greatest festival of the year on the Mergellina was the birthday of Virgil, for whom Sannazzaro had a kind of passion. He celebrated this anniversary—perhaps in imitation of Silius Italicus, who offered an annual sacrifice to the manes of the bard of Mantua—by a banquet, to which he invited his most intimate friends, such as “Alessandro, the jurisconsult, whose works, so long popular, furnish curious details respecting the public and private life of the Romans; Cariteo, who sang in his heterodox style the human soul formed by the Creator, from which nothing is concealed in heaven before it assumes its earthly veil, but which, coming below, as if fallen from some star into a human body, no longer retains any memory of the past; Andrea Acquaviva, who dismounted from his war-horse to take the lyre and drink from the fount of Hippocrene; Girolamo Carbone, who preferred the Tuscan language to the Latin, then so popular, and whose rhythm is a kind of music to the ear; and, finally, Pontano, the master of Sannazzaro, the restorer of the Neapolitan academy founded by Panormita.”[86] These repasts were served by Hiempsal, a young African slave whom Sannazzaro had freed and taught to sing the elegies of Tibullus to an air he himself had composed. It was after one of these Virgilian feasts the poet went to hear Egidio, an Augustinian monk, preach. He was as celebrated for his eloquence as his learning, and was a favorite of two popes, one of whom (Leo X.) afterwards made him cardinal. Egidio, in declaiming with his usual animation against the vices of the time, made a happy citation from Virgil, which delighted his hearer and led to a friendship between them. It was this or some other sermon of his that suggested to Sannazzaro the idea of his great poem, De Partu Virginis, to which he devoted twenty years of his life—a poem of which Mr. Hallam says “it would be difficult to find its equal for purity, elegance, and harmony of versification.” Pope Leo. X., who appreciated genius in whatever way it found expression, whether by pen, chisel, or pencil, sent the poet a brief in 1521 to encourage him in singing the mysteries of the Christian faith, and to express his satisfaction that, at a time when the voice of a monk was troubling the peace of the church, the Catholic faith should find a defender among the laity—another David, as it were, to smite the new Goliath and appease with his lyre another Saul; and he declared the poem an honor to religion and to his pontificate. Clement VII. also wrote him a brief, accepting the dedication, which alone, he said, was enough to immortalize the pontiff thus honored.

The De Partu Virginis is the most remarkable poem of the Renaissance, and its publication was an event in the literary world. It was everywhere eulogized, and the author was styled the Christian Virgil. Egidio of Viterbo, after reading it, thus wrote to the author: “When I received your divine poem, I eagerly hastened to make myself familiar with its contents. God alone, whose inspiration suggested so wonderful a creation, can reward you suitably—not by admitting you to the Elysian Fields, the fabulous abode of Linus and Orpheus, but to a blessed eternity.” This poem still merits attention, if for no other reason, at least because of its effect on religious art in the sixteenth century—an influence which has been compared to Dante’s. Mrs. Jameson says she can trace it in all the contemporary productions of Italian art of all schools from Milan to Naples. She regards this influence, however, as perverse. But let us take a brief glance at a poem which has excited so much admiration and criticism down to the present day.

The De Partu Virginis is an epic poem, in which the birth of Christ is sung with the harmonious flow, the variety of imagery, and the elevated tone of Virgil. But, strange to say, none of the sacred characters introduced are called by their real names—perhaps because unknown to the Latin muse. Even the names of Jesus and Mary are expressed by Virgilian paraphrases. The former is called Divus Puer and Numen sanctum; the latter Alma parens, Dia, and Regina. St. Joseph is the Senior Custos; St. Elizabeth the Matrona defessa ævo; and the Supreme Being is styled the Regnator, Genitor superum, etc. The author calls upon the inhabitants of heaven (cœlicolæ) to reveal to his limited vision the profound secrets of the mystery he is about to sing, and invokes the sacred Aonides as the natural protectresses of virginal purity. “Dear delight of poets,” says he, “ye sacred Muses who have never refused me your favor, allow me once more to take a long draught at your clear fount. Ye who derive your glorious origin from heaven, and have so singular a regard for what is pure, aid me in singing of heavenly themes and celebrating the glory of a Virgin. Drive away the darkness of my mind and show me the way by which to rise to the highest summit of your celestial mount. These lofty mysteries were not unknown to you. You must have beheld the sacred grotto of the Nativity. You must have heard the sweet music of the angels that surrounded it. And it is hardly credible you did not admire the splendor of the star that led from the extremity of the Orient three powerful princes to render homage to the new-born Child.

“I have not herein the less need of thy aid, thou constant Hope of men and gods, at once Maid and Mother! If I have taken delight every year in adorning the walls of thy temple with festoons and garlands of flowers; if, on this delicious cliff of the Mergellina, that seems from its proud height to disdain the waves of the sea and promise safety to the boatmen who hail it from afar, I have hewn out for thee altars of eternal duration; if, following the footsteps of my ancestors, I have taken pleasure in singing thy praises and celebrating thy honor with the immense crowds of devout people who, with lively joy, hallow the for ever memorable day of thy happy deliverance, guide my steps in these unfrequented paths, give me the courage to accomplish what I have undertaken, and abandon me not in a task at once so glorious and so difficult.”

The poet goes on to relate how the Regnator Superum, seeing the human race in danger of falling into Tartarus, a prey to the fury of Tysiphone, wishes, as all this evil has been brought about by woman, that by woman it should be repaired. He therefore despatches one of his ministering spirits to announce to the purest of virgins the sublime destiny that awaits her. The messenger finds her plunged in meditation with the prophetic page of the Sibyl open before her, and, saluting her with reverence, he makes known the advent of the Numen sanctum who would deliver mankind from the horrors of the Styx. Fame everywhere publishes the tidings of this mysterious event. Hell itself is told of it. The Eumenides tremble. Alecto, Cerberus, and all the monsters of paganism shudder with fear. The souls of the Fathers—those genuine heroes, as Sannazzaro, after St. Jerome, calls them—rejoice. David himself repeats his prophetic Psalms, and sings the life of Christ, his Passion, Death, and Descent into Limbo.

But it is the great Governor of the universe himself who reveals to the inhabitants of heaven his designs of mercy towards mankind. And when the time of the Nativity comes, he summons Joy (Lætitia) to his presence, whose privilege it is to appease the anger of the Thunderer and diffuse serenity over his face:

“Hæc magni motusque animosque Tonantis

Temperat et vultum discussâ nube serenat,”

and sends her to announce the glad tidings of the divine Birth. Putting wings to her feet, she leaves heaven, guarded by the Hours, and proceeds to earth, where she reveals the great event to the shepherds. Two of them, Lycidas and Egon, recite a part of the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, applying it to the new-born Child. The birth of Christ is related with delicacy and poetic grace. There is a sublime energy worthy of Dante in the lines that speak of the Incarnation, and the astonishment of nature in view of the prodigy. Angels in the air celebrate it by sports and combats in the style of Homer’s heroes, with the instruments of the Passion for arms. Other angels, like Demodocus, sing the creation, renovation of nature, the seasons, etc. The Jordan, leaning on its urn, is moved to its depths, and relates to the Naiads gathered about him the wonderful event on its shores. An angel comes to bathe the Child in its waters. A dove hovers above. The water-nymphs bend around in veneration. The Jordan, amazed, stays its current with respect, and recalls the prophecy of old Proteus, that the time would come for it to be visited by One who would raise the glory of the Jordan above the Ganges, the Nile, or the Tiber. After which the river, wrapped in its mantle, wonderfully wrought by the Naiads, returns majestically to its bed.

This is too brief an outline of the splendid crown Sannazzaro has woven for the Blessed Virgin, set with so many antique gems. Many have been shocked by the mingling of paganism and Christianity in this poem, but to us it is as if the waters of the Permessus had been turned into the Jordan. All these pagan deities and profane allusions that sprinkle its pages seem to sing the triumph of Christianity. They are in harmony, too, with the Virgilian region in which the poem was written, as well as with the spirit of the age. There was such a passion for antiquity and for Greek and Latin authors in the sixteenth century that even religion and art put on a classic air. Nor was Leo X., to whom it has been made a subject of reproach, the only dignitary of the church that has felt this fascination. St. Jerome himself was called by the accusing spirit, Non Christianus, sed Ciceronianus, and he used to fast before reading the works of the great orator, so much did he fear their ascendency.

Virgil was especially dear to the middle ages on account of the tenderness and melancholy of his noble nature and his strange presentiment of the future. We all remember the famous passage: “The last age of the Cumæan song now approaches; the great series of ages begins again; now returns the Virgin (Astrea), now return the Saturnian kingdoms; now a new progeny is sent from high heaven. Be propitious, chaste Lucina, to the boy at his birth, through whom the iron age will first cease, and the golden age dawn on the world.”

The learned at that time regarded Virgil as a prophet; and the people, as a magician. It was common to have recourse to his writings, as well as Homer’s and other authors, to obtain prognostics. But this was not exclusively a mediæval superstition. It was in use before the Christian era, and has not in these days wholly disappeared. The author of Margaret Fuller’s life says: “She tried the sortes biblicæ, and her hits were memorable. I think each new book which interested her she was disposed to put to this test and know if it had somewhat personal to say to her.” The church has condemned this practice, even by a similar use of the Holy Scriptures.

Dante shared in the general passion for Virgil. He makes him his guide—“My guide and master, thou”—through the lower realms; not in Paradise, whence he is excluded,

“For no sin except for lack of faith.”

Petrarch, too, loved Virgil and planted a laurel—“the meed of poets sage”—at his tomb, but it was long since done to death by the cruel hands of tourists.

A touching sequence was long sung in the church of Mantua, in which St. Paul is represented visiting the tomb of Virgil at Naples, and weeping because he had come too late for him.

In the time of Sannazzaro, Plato was also in great repute. Every one remembers the festival instituted in his honor by Lorenzo de’ Medici at his villa on the side of Fiesole, in which Ficino, Politian, and all that was brilliant in the intellectual world of Florence took part. The bust of the divine Plato, presented by Jerome Roscio of Pistoja, was set up at the end of a shady avenue and crowned with laurel, and, after a grand repast, they all gathered around it and sang cantos in his honor. Ficino even pretended to find in Plato’s writings the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist, etc. He used to address his audience as “My brethren in Plato,” and he makes Christ, in his descent into Limbo, snatch Plato from the jaws of hell to place him among the blessed in Paradise. This reminds us of the great Erasmus, who says: “There are many in the society of the saints who are not in the calendar. I am every instant tempted to exclaim: Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis, and to recommend myself to the Blessed Flaccus and Maro.”

Another of these academies that sought to revive the antique spirit was that of Pomponio Leto at Rome, which has brought so many unmerited reproaches on Pope Paul II. because it was for a time suppressed by him for carrying its passion for antiquity to a pernicious degree. One historian after another has declared him an enemy of the sciences on the principle of their tending to heresy! Hallam, Roscoe, and Henri Martin all echo the calumnies of Platina against this pope. M. de l’Epinois has proved the falseness of this accusation. As if a pope, as he says, who was all his life an amateur of ancient manuscripts, a numismatist of the first class, and an able judge of painting and sculpture, who took pleasure in doing himself the honors of his collections, and provided liberally for the education of poor children that showed an aptitude for study, was an enemy of science! Francesco Filelfo did not think so when he thus wrote to Leonardo Dati: “What do not I and all learned men owe to the great and immortal wisdom of Paul II.?”

As for the Academy of Pomponio Leto, there was a general conviction that it was pagan and licentious in its tendency, if not in actual practice. Canensius, in his life of Paul II., says explicitly: “The pope dissolved a society of young men of corrupt morals, who affirmed that our orthodox faith was not so much founded on the genuine basis of facts as on the jugglery of the saints, and maintained that it was permissible for every one to indulge in whatever pleasure he liked.” And the Chevalier de Rossi, in the Roma Sotteranea, quotes the following passage from a letter of Battista de Judicibus, Bishop of Ventimiglia, written to Platina a short time after the affair in question: “Some call you more pagan than Christian, and affirm that you follow pagan morals rather than ours. Others circulate the report that Hercules is your deity. Another says it is Mercury, a third that it is Jupiter, a fourth that it is Apollo, Venus, or Diana. They say you are in the habit of calling these gods and goddesses to witness, especially when in the company of those who give themselves up to like superstitions—people whom you associate more willingly with than others.” M. de Rossi has also found several inscriptions which prove that a secret hierarchy was established by this society, of which it is reasonable to suppose Pope Paul II. was as aware as of their other anti-Christian practices. Additional suspicion was excited by their secret meetings from the report at this very time that a conspiracy was formed against the life of the Sovereign Pontiff—the more readily credited because only nine years previously the streets of Rome had been deluged with blood by an insurrection. However, the pope, so far from being the farouche and sanguinary ruler M. Martin styles him, let off the academicians with a short confinement, and in 1475 Pomponio and his companions were once more quietly pursuing their studies, having profited by so beneficial a lesson. The academy became more flourishing than ever, and counted among its members a great number of bishops and prelates of the church.[87] Pope Leo X. himself, before his elevation to the papacy, was in the habit of attending its reunions. Archæology, poetry, and music all had a part in them, as well as other sciences, and all these Leo X. sincerely loved. “I have always loved letters,” wrote he to Henry VIII. “This love, innate in me, age has only served to increase; for I have observed that those who cultivate them are heartily attached to the dogmas of the faith, and are the ornaments of the church.” Notwithstanding this love of literature, especially ancient, Leo X. himself realized that too excessive an application to such pursuits might be prejudicial to the spiritual life. Though at Florence he participated in the general admiration for Plato, after his elevation to the Papacy he recommended to the pupils of the Roman College to give themselves up to serious studies, and renounce Platonic philosophy and pagan poetry as tending to injure the soul. So also St. Odo, Abbot of Cluny, was so fond of Virgil that it finally became injurious to his spiritual interests, and, falling asleep one day while reading one of his Eclogues, he saw in a dream a beautiful antique vase full of serpents. He understood the allusion and gave up profane reading.

Sannazzaro’s poem, therefore, is only an expression of the tastes of his age. It may also be considered in harmony with those of the primitive church, which adorned the very walls of the Catacombs with pagan symbols, and blazoned them in the mosaics of their churches. There we find Theseus vanquishing the Minotaur, beside David slaying Goliath. The Jordan is represented as a river-god leaning on an antique urn, his head crowned with aquatic plants and his beard dripping with moisture; Cupids flutter among the vines around the form of the Good Shepherd; and Orpheus is made the emblem of our Saviour.

The De Partu Virginis is like one of those beautiful Madonnas so often met with in Italy, not seated in a humble chair at Nazareth, but robed like a queen, occupying a throne covered with mythological subjects and antique devices—an emblem of the church enthroned on the ruins of paganism.

A BIRTH-DAY SONG.
TWENTY-ONE.

Bright summer sun, to-day

Mount with thy glancing spears, a cohort proud,

O’er cliff and peak, and chase each threatening cloud,

Each gathering mist, away.

Fair, fragrant summer flowers,
Lily and heliotrope and spicy fern,
Exhale your sweets from leaf and petaled urn
Through all the golden hours.

Thou deep-voiced western wind,
The stately arches of the forest fill,
Till oak and elm to thy andante thrill
As mind replies to mind.

Take up the song and sing,

O summer birds! until the joyous strains

Ring through the hills, chant in the blooming plains,

Gurgle in brook and spring.

And thou, O river deep!

Send from the shore thy message calm and plain,

As, bearing ship and shallop to the main,

Thy mighty currents sweep.

Sing, while the golden gate

Swings open, and reveals the thronging hopes,

Wingèd and crowned, that crowd the flowery slopes

Of Manhood’s first estate.

Yet soft and low! The door
Is closing, as ye sing, on Childhood’s meads;
The garrulous trump of Youth’s heroic deeds
Is hushed for evermore;

And shining shapes, that blaze
Like loadstars, with occasion wait to lure
The dazzled soul o’er crag and fell and moor
From Wisdom’s peaceful ways.

Tell him, O sunshine bright!

How clouds of lust and mists of evil thought

By Chastity’s white beams are brought to naught

Through Virtue’s silent might.

Tell him, ye blossoms sweet,
How Charity divine her perfume rare
Exhales alike in pure or noxious air,
With holy love replete.

O brook and bird and spring!

Babble your simple sermon; say, Behold

Contentment, better far than gems or gold,

Or crown of sceptred king.

Tell him, thou deep-voiced wind,
How a brave, earnest spirit may awake
Responsive thought, till distant cycles take
Their orbits from his mind;

And thou, O river wide!
Tell how a steady purpose gathers strength
From singleness of aim, until at length
On its resistless tide

It bears both great and small

With equal, silent, comprehensive love

To that great sea whose calm no storm can move,

God’s grace o’er-arching all.

So may his spirit clear,
Untroubled by the scoff, the sneer, the sting
Of clashing creeds, find heaven a real thing,
And walk with seraphs here.

Thou great Triune! thy sign
Is on his forehead. May he, manful, fight
Under thy banner, till upon his sight
Fair Paradise shall shine;

Till, crown and palm-branch won,
He shall before thee stand without a fear,
Wearing the bright and morning star, and hear
The Master say, Well done.

JANE’S VOCATION.

“O amare! O ire! O sibi perire! O ad Deum pervenire.”—St. Augustine.

She sat upon an enormous sea-washed cliff of granite, in a flood of golden light from the stooping western sun behind her. Beneath her the sea-waves rippled lightly against the cliff. Far out before her the broad expanse of sea extended till it met the sky. But on neither sea nor sky were the girl’s eyes fastened. She was looking steadily across the narrow gulf that separated the high promontory where her home was from the fishing town on the mainland. Behind her was a farm-house with its prosaic surroundings, and a few huts for drying fish were close at hand. Not far beyond these the stage-road ran, and coming over the brow of the promontory was the lumbering stage.

She did not hear the wheels as they went rumbling by, and did not know how closely she was scanned. Next the driver a youth was sitting, whose face bespoke the artistic temperament as plainly as did the portfolio and hastily-traced sketch upon his knee. Like a flash he caught the loveliness of the picture—its glorious framework of nature’s beauties, its central point of that girlish figure in its graceful pose: the upraised head, the hands clasped round the knee as she sat bending slightly forward, the sense conveyed of absorbed, pathetic yearning for something more and higher than the farm life of her home.

“Who lives there?” asked the young man of the driver; and the driver made answer, glancing for very pleasure at the boyish, handsome face, stamped, in spite of its vanity, with the impress of a singularly clean and happy heart:

“Nobody much, mister: old Jake Escott and Marm Escott and Jane. That’s Jane sitting there. She’s their niece, and the best o’ the lot.”

“Jane!” repeated the youth to himself; but to the driver he said: “Do they take boarders there?”

The man chuckled, as if the very idea was absurd.

“Much as they can do to board themselves, I guess. Shiftless set. 'Tan’t so much lack of money, though, as of go-aheadativeness. ’Twould be too much trouble.”

“Think I’d be a trouble?”

The man laughed again. “Don’t know 'bout that. You’re as clever a chap and as taking a chap to talk with as I’ve seen this many a day. You’re a real true, good-hearted gentleman, you be, sir; but you’re city-bred for all that. Reckon you’d want white napkins every meal, and all sorts of finified stuff. Marm Escott couldn’t give you such. 'Cause why? She’s no idea what they are.”

“I’ll try it,” the traveller said, shutting his portfolio decisively and speaking like one who always had his way. “Can’t you stop at the turn—there’s a good fellow—and let me and my traps down?”

“Well, well! You never meant to come here; that’s certain. Where ye bound?”

“Nowhere.” Then, seeing the driver’s puzzled look, “Anywhere,” the youth added merrily. “I’m come to do what I please, and stop where I please, and stay as long as I please. This is the loveliest place I have seen yet, and I must sketch it. Why, surely you have carried passengers before who had no settled destination, but liked to stop where it suited them.”

“Ye—es,” was the doubtful response. “Yes, mister. But never one quite like you. You’re a wide-awake chap and a merry, but you look as dainty as any city lady I ever met.”

The words were evidently taken as a compliment, in whatever way they might have been meant. The youth slung his knapsack over his shoulder, concealing the long name which had puzzled the driver for the whole journey—Van Stuyvesant Van Doorm—leaped lightly down from the coach almost before it stopped, doffed his cap courteously, and with a gay farewell was on his way along a narrow path to the house.

A woman, remarkable for nothing except her curiously total lack of anything noticeable, opened the door, but into that dull face an actual sunny gleam of pleasure came as soon as she saw the blithe young face before her. The descendant of all the Vans doffed his cap courteously again, with an answering gleam in his very brilliant eyes. He had been used all his life to know that people admired him, but it is to be acknowledged that this oft-repeated fact had never lost its charm.

“Is this Mrs. Escott?” he asked.

“I be,” was the succinct reply.

No faintest shadow of a smile betrayed her hearer’s amusement. He knew himself master already of the field. “If you please, Mrs. Escott,” he said audaciously, in his most captivating tone and with his most pleading, obstinate look, “I’m come to board with you.”

Mrs. Escott stared as one taken by storm and unable to collect her scattered forces. “But—but,” she stammered, “we never take boarders, we don’t.”

“This exception will prove the rule, then,” quoth Van. “Oh! for shame, Mrs. Escott. You never would have the heart to turn me away from such a view as this. I want to sketch it, and I will give you a sketch of it, and pay you the highest board into the bargain.”

“But we an’t got nothing fit to board ye on.”

“Ah? No eggs, then, I suppose,” suggested Van mildly, pointing at the hens cackling in the yard. “No milk, either,” he added as the lowing of a cow sounded near by. “No berries to be had for love or money, eh? And of course there are no fish to be found in the sea.”

The woman actually laughed. “I’ll speak to Jake,” she said, then disappeared, and Van seated himself on the doorstep and waited her return without fear of disappointment.

“Jane and I can pick berries,” he said to himself; and then he trilled forth gaily, in a voice that was the envy and admiration of city circles:

“In the days when we went gipsying,

Long time ago.”

The melody pleased him; it chimed in well with the birds’ blithe song in the trees and the faint dash of the waves along the shore. He began the song and went through it all as blithely and carelessly as they.

“That’s handsome, now,” an uncouth voice behind him said when he stopped at last with a sense of buoyant delight in his own power. “That’s handsome, stranger. Sing like that, and you’re welcome here, and no mistake.”

This was “Jake,” then, shuffling, untidy, uncouth as his voice. A misgiving arose in Van’s mind. Would the house, the table, his room, be like Jake and Marm Escott? But he need stay no longer than he chose—no longer than one night; and it was now nearly six o’clock in the afternoon. So, all necessary arrangements being concluded, Jake trundled a dilapidated wheel-barrow, in some vague, slipshod fashion, to the road to “fetch the stranger’s traps,” and Mrs. Escott, going to the gate, called loudly, “Jane! Jane! I want ye, child.”

Van, waiting in the parlor for her coming, looked attentively about him. There was almost nothing in the room to show that any one ever came there who cared a whit more for beauty than Jacob Escott himself did. Rag mats of discordant hues covered squares and ovals and rectangular parallelograms of the pine floor; the walls were decorated with coarse prints of General Washington and of the prize ox of twenty years ago; on the table was a big family Bible and a Farmer’s Almanac illuminating the sombre cover with its sickly yellow, and on this was a half-knitted blue yarn stocking.

There was a cheap piano in one corner, but it looked as though it was never opened. The windows were not uncurtained, but, of all other things there, they set Van’s teeth on edge with their execrable attempts at some sort of a painted landscape; he seized the tassels vindictively, and pulled the curtains out of sight, thus letting in the superb view beyond.

Some one, he discovered then, had had taste enough to put flowers in the room. A great handful of daisies and clovers and delicate grasses stood on the sill of the window that looked out to where the narrow gulf separated the promontory from the mainland.

“Jane’s work,” said Van to himself; and as he thought it, he heard a slow, calm step coming through the entry, and Jane herself stood in the doorway.

Involuntarily he bent his head with such a reverence as he had never paid to woman before. He was the cynosure at home among all ladies, but none yet had won from him the reverent greeting of an utter self-forgetful absorption in another’s presence. The girl who stood there was not beautiful, though there was nothing in her features to displease the artist’s eye; indeed, the absence of mere material beauty made more marked the impression conveyed in movement and feature and face. Of all colors in the world—and Van was passionately fond of color—he loved best the gold that is sometimes seen in the western sky near where the sun is setting: a clear, fair hue that does not dazzle but rests the eyes that gaze upon it. Van thought of that color when he saw Jane’s face with its look of unclouded peace.

She lifted her eyes and glanced at him, at first with a tranquil, unmoved expression, as though it was quite indifferent to her who it was that she was meeting; then she gave a quicker, keener glance that thrilled Van with an uneasy sense that she was reading him through and through. What was it that she read? he wondered.

He tried to talk with her as she moved about the room, engaged in the very ordinary task of setting the supper-table. Her language showed some culture and refinement. He hazarded the question, “Are there good schools about here?”

“I do not know,” she said meditatively. “There is the district school.”

“Why does she not say, 'I went there’?” thought Van. “That would tell me something about herself.”

But more and more he found, as his talk went on, that Jane ignored herself. It did not appear to enter her mind that she was anybody to be thought of or talked about. He had at first to make conversation at the supper-table—the farm, the fisheries, the crops—but presently Jacob Escott made bold to ask: “What may be your occupation, sir?”

And, nothing loath, Van launched upon one of his pet topics—art and artists. Even the plain farmer and his wife enjoyed it. How could they resist the fascination of the merry stories, the musical voice, the face that spoke as clearly as the words? But Jane hardly listened, and suddenly a thought struck Van: “This is mere surface-talk after all. Can it be that this farmer’s girl cares for anything deeper, or is it only that she has not depth enough to care?”

They rose from the table, and Van followed Jane to the door. She did not see or heed him. The tide was at the full; wave upon wave came heaving gently onward toward the land as a child, tired out with play, comes home to its mother’s arms to rest; through the twilight the dark, restless mass of water and its ceaseless murmuring alike woke a sense of mystery and awe; above, in the darkening skies, a pale half-moon was shining and a few great throbbing stars. And in the dim light Van saw Jane’s face, and it seemed to him as beautiful and as full of mystery as sea and sky. Such a look of hunger marked it! He thought of Niobe, and of Cassandra, and of Mariana in the moated grange, but she differed in some inexplicable fashion from them all, and then he heard her say below her breath: “My God! My God! My God!”

Over and over again—not what Van had ever fancied a prayer could be, and yet to his ear more full of intense personal pleading than any prayer he had ever heard. Faith, hope, love, expectation, keen desire, and suffering were all summed up in two words; and though he knew nothing of her trouble, yet when the aunt’s call for her came from the room within, Van started as if he had been struck. He could not bear to have her harried back into the dull life of her home.

“Just mend this, Janey, will you?” Mrs. Escott said, exhibiting a coarse blue shirt. “Your uncle wants it for to-morrow.”

The girl’s face was tranquil and happy again by some sudden transformation. She took the rough work—it was not clean work, either; it had evidently been worn once or twice, Van saw with mingled disgust and pity—and, sitting down contentedly in the dingy room, she began her mending. She puzzled Van greatly, she interested him intensely. As he talked to her uncle he watched with his artistically-trained eye each expression of her face. It varied now and then, though the strange, yearning look did not return to it. The peace was there, and an exquisite happiness.

“She is like a dove,” thought Van. “She is like an innocent baby. Oh! if one could take her away from this.”

But one clue to her character he was certain that he had found. He rose up before she finished her work, and he flung open the old piano and sat down before it. It was not so unfit for use as he had feared it would be, and he knew how to glide skilfully over the worst notes. And then he began to try Jane. First he sang ballads, “Robin Adair,” “John Anderson my jo, John,” “Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast.”

“That’s fine, Phœbe,” said Jacob, and Phœbe said “Yes” with an unwonted enthusiasm. But Jane worked steadily on, and if she heard or cared Van could not tell, though he fancied the sweet, dove-like look deepened upon her face.

“The brightest jewel in my crown

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.”

The last tender notes of the song lingered under Van’s fingers, as a knock was heard at the kitchen door, and Jacob went to answer it, followed soon by Phœbe, who evidently recognized the voice of the new-comer. There was a scraping of chairs on the kitchen floor—the plain indication that somebody had come to stay awhile. Van leaned his head forward against the music-rack, and once again before his eyes was the scene he had witnessed in the twilight one hour before. Could the same person who sat quietly at her rough work now be she whom he had seen and heard then in that passion of prayer? And while he mused there rang through his brain echoes that always thrilled his music-loving, art-loving nature with an especial power, and that seemed now like fit mates for the darkly-heaving sea, the star-lit sky, the girl’s yearning face; and from the old ivory keys, that grew strangely full of power and sweetness beneath his magical touch, rang out Chopin’s grand funeral march.

The work dropped from Jane’s hands. He could not watch her face, for she turned it straight toward that eastern flower-decked window that looked out to gulf and sea; but he saw her fingers lock tightly into one another and her form become rigidly still. When he ended she rose quietly and went away, and he did not see her again that night.

But long that night he studied her, while an unwonted shame of himself and a keen admiration for her grew steadily in him, and what he inferred of her then was confirmed each day more and more.

“She does not know one-half the things that I know,” he said, “but she has it in her to care for the highest art and beauty. And she is so noble by nature that she couldn’t spend her thoughts on a thousand trifling things that I waste mine upon. Such a glorious creature imprisoned here! I’ll do my best for her.”

Never used to early rising, he came down stairs the next day to find his breakfast waiting for him and the morning of the family half over.

“Yes, we be early risers,” said Mrs. Escott. “Leastways, Jake and Jane be. I’m a poor hand at it myself. Why, Jane here, she’s across the gulf and home again afore six every day.”

“Across the gulf! Before six!” exclaimed Van.

“Certain sure, Mr. Van. These Catholics are queer creatures. Jane’s a Catholic, you know.”

Habitual courtesy quelled the words of surprise and of pain that rose to Van’s lips—surprise at finding a Catholic in this notedly Protestant fishing settlement, pain at hearing Jane’s deepest feelings thus lightly exposed to view. But Jane showed not the slightest shade of annoyance.

Now he thought he understood her better. One of the many marvellous spells of Catholicism had been woven about her—some vision of beauty had thus come into her hitherto blank life; he would strive the more now to teach her of what he blandly deemed the freer, nobler lights of art and science, but never should word or look from him throw scorn or jest or trifling speech of any kind on that which was dear to her.

Love at first sight—Van had always maintained that he believed in it; he was always falling in love with any pretty face that struck his fancy, and then just as easily falling out of love with an unwounded heart. But here love and pity and real reverence all awoke together and made of him their willing slave. “I’ll go with her to Mass to-morrow,” he said, and on the morrow he stood in the early sunrise on the beach.

So early was it that Jane herself was not yet there. He watched her coming towards her boat, her eyes cast down, and that hungry, longing look stamped plainly on her.

“May I go too?” he said, the gay, trifling manner gone, and that peculiarly distinct imprint of a clean heart shining in his eyes. Lifting her own sweet eyes, once again he felt that she read him through; then, saying nothing, she bowed assent and stepped into the boat. And still without a word she let him take the oars from her, and, drawing her rosary from her pocket, she began to tell her beads. Van thought she never would stop, and she did not till they reached the town. Still silent, she led the way from the shore through some dull, shell-paved paths to a small chapel, and, entering, forgot Van altogether and went with eager footsteps up the aisle. Van stationed himself where he could see her; she sank on her knees before the altar, and crossed herself, and lifted up her face. The lips were parted in a smile of ecstasy, the eyes were shining bright as though they saw unearthly loveliness.

What Van saw was this: a square, low-studded, dingy room, poor prints of religious subjects, mean tallow dips for candles, tawdry gilding and hangings, artificial tawdry flowers, a plain, small altar, a few squalid worshippers; presently an aged priest, who said Mass in a cracked and feeble voice.

“What spell is over her?” thought Van, marvelling. “Oh! if I could once take her out of it all, home to wealth and beauty and tenderness, and to our churches. No need to tell her that Catholics have beautiful ones somewhere.”

But on their way back to the farm she did not speak, and he could not venture to break the intense calm in which she was wrapped. Every evening he read or sang and played, or talked his best, in the parlor where the household gathered, but she never again was there alone with him, and in the daytime she was always busy just when he wanted her society most. Often he was conscious that what he said or read or did failed to make any impression at all upon her; often while he tried to interest her he found her gazing toward that eastern window, and knew that she did not heed him. He longed to say: “I cannot see what you find in that dull church to give your eyes and thoughts to,” but he could not say it.

Sometimes when he read, far oftener when he played grand music—often, too, when they watched the sky and sea and listened to the waves, the noble nature woke responsive to his call. But it stung him to the quick to feel his general powerlessness to move her except when he roused his best and highest powers; it stung him to see how little she cared for the comforts and luxuries and prettinesses, for knowledge even and the art, that were part of his daily existence, and which he deemed necessary to him; it stung him to find that the meanest occupation never made her discontented, but glad and bright instead; while what he considered suited to her condition or her needs was as nothing to her, and the yearning which he could not fathom seldom came into her face when at her daily labor, but often when he told himself she ought to be content and glad with him.

She talked very little to him; she never seemed to care whether he came or went, and he—all his thoughts became engrossed in her.

One afternoon, near the close of a sultry day, as the first mutterings of thunder and the first far-off flashes of lightning shone and sounded from the dark depths of low-lying clouds above the sea—when the winds were rising, and the poplars showed their leaves’ white faces, and the white-crested waves broke in ominously upon the shore; when Jane’s sensitive nature was awake and quivering in sympathy with the gathering storm—Jacob Escott came hurrying his cattle home to shelter, bringing with him a letter which the stage-driver had flung down to him as he raced his horses by to town. “For you, Mr. Van,” he said.

Van opened it carelessly, read it carefully, then came straight to where Jane stood, watching with keen delight the seething sea and storm-tossed sky.

“Jane,” he said, “listen to me. They have sent for me to go home at once. My father is very ill. Jane, I love you. Will you be my wife?”

She turned with great displeasure in her eyes. “You jest, sir,” she said. “Such jesting pains me much. Even my uncle understands that now.”

“I am not jesting,” he cried vehemently. “I speak the truth. I love you. None but you can ever be my wife. Give me your promise, Jane. I love you so.”

At first her look of rebuke waxed sterner; then for a moment her eyes met the pleading bright eyes fastened on her with the look peculiar to them, that bespoke a singularly clean heart. She smiled as one smiles at a child.

“It is impossible,” she said.

Tumultuously he hurried on: “No, no, not impossible. If I will promise to read, to study, to be a Catholic if I can—will you think of it then? Will you try me?”

“It is impossible,” she repeated. “You pain me.” And then, with an effort, as though she spoke of things too sacred for the common ear, “By the grace of God,” she said slowly, “when he makes the way plain before me, I am to be a nun.”

“No, no!” Van cried again. “No, no! Think—listen. Think it all over again. You do not understand. Your life has been cramped here in this poor, mean place. That is why you want to be a nun. Come away with me to a life that suits a soul like yours. I have seen your craving for higher things.”

The sudden, jagged lightning cleft the skies. By its glare he saw her face distinctly, and a noble scorn was on it, and a righteous indignation.

“Come away with you—from God!” she said, and in the pause that followed Van felt himself more mean than the dust from whence he came.

“Forgive me,” she said gently. “I forget. It is you who do not understand. I do not mind that this house is poor and mean; my Lord was born in a stable, and he died upon a cross. And if I suffer here and crave for higher things, it is a suffering which even the cloister can never cure—far less, then, you—for I crave to see the face of God! To love my God, to cease from sin, to come to my God and be for ever one with him in his high heaven—I hunger for it by night and by day.”

“And if this life suits you so well, and you must suffer anyhow,” Van said curiously, “why not stay here always? or why not come with me?”

“Mr. Van,” Jane answered, “to be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will. Forgive me again, but I cannot talk any more to you about it. If you did not seem so young to me—so like a little innocent child, in spite of all your knowledge—I could not have said so much.” And the next minute she was gone, leaving Van abashed and utterly ignorant of the high meed of true praise which she had bestowed upon him.

He went home to watch for two long days and nights beside a couch of foolish delirium and lingering death; to see a mind of uncommon intellect and far-famed, exquisite taste reduced to folly; to see the eyes stare vacantly at picture and statue and familiar face alike; and then to follow the lifeless body to the grave, and hide it there, clay to its kindred clay. The young heir of enormous wealth and princely possessions paced alone in his father’s halls that night, and found no pleasure in the beauty that once had satisfied him. Even the memory of Jane’s face was a burden to him.

“She would have to die too,” Van muttered. “And, after all, one could as soon love a St. Catherine borne by angels as love her. I do not believe I ever did. And yet if I did not, I never really loved any woman.”

Wherein he spoke the truth.

Yet one look of hers haunted him—that look of settled, tranquil peace, like the undazzling gold of the western sky; and while it shone before him the steady, tranquil voice echoed through his memory, “To be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will.”

“I wonder,” queried Van wistfully—“I wonder what my vocation is. I’m sure it has never made any difference to me. I have sketched, and played, and read, just as I fancied.”

And, with that great grace vouchsafed him, of which he was so ignorant, he said like a child: “O God! what shall I do?”

The answer did not come at once. He fretted and puzzled; by and by he began to wonder whether Jane’s religion had anything to do with her choice. Besides, if it was worth a man’s while to think of changing his religion because he fancied himself in love with a creature that some time must die, had he not reason to think seriously about it anyhow? What did she mean when she said she craved to see God’s face? What caused that woman of so few words to speak with such power when she spoke of that?

Van read and thought, but it was not the books that enlightened him. He went one evening where he seldom went by day, when curious eyes could watch him—to his father’s grave. It was a warm evening late in September. As he passed the rectory adjoining the church, which his father, and his father’s father, and all the Van Doorms of the region had religiously attended, gay voices and snatches of music caught his ear, and he looked up involuntarily.

It was a pretty sight. The gas had just been lighted, the curtains were still up. Lonely, sorrowful Van, forgetful of his wonted courtesy, stood still where he was and took in the whole picture with an added heartache.

In the pleasant parlor, not luxurious, but a home-room, the mother sat with her baby on her knee. Van remembered her when she came a bride to the parish, and he was only a child of five years old. It was one of his earliest memories—that being taken to church with the promise of seeing the new young minister’s new young wife, if he would be very good. That was twenty years ago, and there were lines of gray in Mrs. Charles’ hair, but her face wore the same kindly smile that had marked it then in the freshness of her nineteen years, and at the piano a girl of nineteen might have been taken for the bride brought back again in her youthful bloom. She was playing some familiar melody; five or six brothers and sisters clustered about her, sang blithely with her; a toddling child at the mother’s knee beat time with its chubby fingers on the younger baby’s chubby hand. Presently an inner door opened, and the pastor entered. There was a cry of “Father! father!” a general rush to meet him, frantic, merry embraces from the children, while the mother smiled contented, and the father stood tender and strong in the midst of his happy flock.

The picture lasted for a brief space only; with a pretty gesture of horror the eldest daughter sprang toward the window and drew down the shades, lest somebody should see, and Van stood alone outside in the gathering night.

He plodded on dreamily to the church-yard, and sat down near the new grave among many, many older graves where the men and women of his race lay buried.

“Wife and child,” said Van, with a long, hard, envious sigh, “father and mother, and happy home. And I—”

“Wife and child—father and mother.” The words repeated themselves in that curious, echo-like fashion which words have when they come to the mind as a part of a familiar saying, whose whole cannot be at once recalled, and which for a time we vainly strive to place.

“Wife and child—father and mother.” Ah! something else comes: “Houses and lands.” What is it? What is Van striving to get?

“Houses and lands.”

He has it.

“No man who hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands for my sake and for the Gospel, who shall not receive an hundred times as much, now in this time: and in the world to come life everlasting.”

He does not see with his bodily eyes at all now, but the eyes of his soul are wide awake, and they see clear and true.

In which church—Catholic or Protestant—were the men who, not by tens or by hundreds, but by thousands upon thousands, and through centuries upon centuries, had carried out to the very letter the words of Christ, the Bible words? Which, except through some exceptions that only served to prove the rule, had by loud-voiced declamation, and an action that spoke more loudly still, set at naught the teaching of the Master—set at naught the example of Him who left all for them?

Van seemed to hear it once again—the missionary letters read from the pulpit and published in Protestant magazines; the pleadings for clothes for the missionary’s wife and children; the appeals for money, or a missionary must leave his important field because his family could not be supported there; the vaunted heroism of missionaries who endured to see their children suffer rather than desert their post. Where were the men whose heroism was such that they had no home, no family, no earthly tie, but stood ready like the angels—true messengers—to go or to stay, undeterred by any human consideration, where God and his church asked or needed them?

And so it came to pass that Van understood the mystery of Jane’s vocation; comprehended that men and women, young and old, rich and poor, ignorant and lettered, heard, as the wedded Peter and the unwedded John heard once the voice of Christ call to them, and literally, like them, left all and followed him. It came to pass also that he understood Jane’s suffering; knew that that call of God and the accompanying love of God were a hundred-fold more in this life than the earthly joys renounced, and yet that the promise of the everlasting life spoke of such ineffable bliss that the longing awakened for it could only be appeased in heaven.

Van found his vocation too. He threw himself, heart and soul, into true Christian art. His pictures were seldom seen on the walls of rich men’s houses, but churches and convents owned them free of price. That part of his work, however, was the smallest part. Money and time and strength were lavished nobly with and in aid of those who are successfully laboring in our day to show, by research in catacombs and ruined sacred buildings and among old missals and breviaries and parchments, that the Catholic Church of to-day is the church of the early Christians and martyrs.

In Italy he met and married some one very different from Jane—a very lovely and good and noble woman—and Jane to him became more and more a St. Catherine borne by angels, and more and more he wondered that he ever had presumed to think of offering her an earthly love.

“Had I been a Catholic then, I never could have done it,” he told his wife. “God had called her for himself, and set his seal upon her.”

And the happy wife said humbly: “Hers was the higher calling, dear.”

So when, one day, their only daughter came to them—a strong, high-spirited, brilliant girl, the sunshine of their home—and told them that God’s call had come to her to leave her home for Christ’s poverty, and all human love for his love alone, she found no weak resistance.

“Thank God,” they said, “for the honor he has done us! For him we gladly bid thee forget thine own people and thy father’s house.”

But of Jane they never heard, except that, when God’s time came, she left the farm beside the sea. What need to know more of her, who was where she longed to be—one of the great number who lose all to find All, and, having Him whom their soul loveth, need nothing more?

COUNT FREDERICK LEOPOLD STOLBERG[88]

Count Stolberg, a well-known statesman and writer, a minister of the Duke of Oldenburg, the friend of Goethe, Schlegel, Klopstock, Lavater, Stein, John and Adam Müller, La Motte Fouqué, Körner, and others as distinguished, the correspondent of most of the German historians, philosophers, and savants of his day, became a Catholic, after seven years’ anxious seeking for truth, on the 1st of June, 1800, at Münster, in Westphalia, in the fifty-first year of his age. He immediately retired from public life, although circumstances afterwards brought him before Germany as a representative man; and his writings spread through all classes of his countrymen as a worthy and dignified exposition of a religion at that time much reviled, misunderstood, and in some cases persecuted. His example in home-life was as powerful in a smaller circle as his writings were in a wider one; and his relations with his wife and children (he had eighteen children by his two marriages) were such as to make it true of him that he was a model for all Christian heads of families. His own tastes were simple and domestic; he was fond of the country, and was a childlike companion even to his youngest children, while to all, as they grew up, he was a wise friend and teacher. All his children, except Mariagnes, his eldest daughter by his first marriage, became Catholics with him; those born after his conversion were of course brought up in the church. His second wife, Sophie, Countess von Redern, had shared his doubts and his experiences during those seven years of eager search after religious certainty, and became a Catholic also; but while he remained in intimate and sympathetic relations with his brothers and sisters, he never influenced any of them far enough to make them follow his footsteps. His brother Christian and his wife Luise were his most constant and intimate correspondents; with the former religion seemed to make no difference, as his admiration for, and sympathy with, Stolberg was proof against anything—indeed, Stolberg often called him his “other self”; and the latter, to judge by her letters, was a woman of more than common understanding, a student of science, an observer of the times, whose mind was open to receive any new impression that had the semblance of truth or real progress in it; an investigating and impartial searcher, better versed than most women in classic learning, and eager for knowledge in any shape. To give up constant intercourse with his own family and remove to a Catholic city was the hardest sacrifice Stolberg had to make on leaving the Lutheran communion; but he considered the change imperative for the proper education of his children. In a letter to Luise announcing this resolve he says: “There is no dilemma, but, even if there were, you will agree with me that a tender conscience, in a doubtful case, must always choose against its wishes—I mean its natural wishes, which are always suspicious to upright morals, let alone to Christianity.” To his friend Princess Gallitzin, the mother of the zealous missionary in America, Demetrius Gallitzin, he says: “It is an unspeakable joy to me that my brother and sister-in-law remain bound to me in the fullest and most unreserved love, and that not even the shadow of a misunderstanding has come between them and me, however painful to them is the separation from me, from Sophie, and from the children.”

He took a house in Münster and made it his home for thirteen years, living there through the winter and spending his summers at a country-house a few miles out of the city, at Lütjenbeck. His children’s studies were his first care. Greek being his favorite study, he made each of his sons a good Greek scholar, and kept up his own studies by a repeated round of all the great authors, read successively with each of his many boys. Ernest and Andrew, the sons of his first marriage, were his first pupils, and his own teaching was supplemented in languages and history by a French emigré, the Abbé Pierrard, and in philosophy by some professors resident in Münster. Stolberg did not neglect the physical education of his boys, and would no more dispense with the daily walk, ride, or swim than he would with the studies. His sons were good shots, too, and in the summer he and they spent most of their time in the open air. Their mother writes of them that they are “truthful, generous, and good-hearted,” and “that their tender respect for their great father increases day by day.” She was herself a patient and judicious teacher, and fully recognized how much harm is done to children, and the “quiet workings of God’s influence disturbed in them, by the expectation of hurried development and individuality.” Stolberg was already beginning his literary work in the interests of religion and education, and in 1801 was translating St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione. The early Fathers were his favorite spiritual reading; also the Greek Testament and the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. He wisely resolved to lead a retired life, and not enter into what is called society; but he gathered round him a circle of real friends, in intercourse with whom he spent many hours, especially in the evenings. Among these were Princess Gallitzin, to whom we owe the suggestion that produced Stolberg’s great work, The History of the Religion of Jesus Christ; Prince Fürstenberg, an old man of very exemplary life; Kellermann, his friend and pupil, and the tutor of his younger sons for sixteen years—a priest who was the model of his order; some of the cathedral chapter, learned and enlightened men; and many young people, friends of his children, among whom the latter afterwards found wives and husbands, in all cases happily acceptable to their parents. Whoever has read the real-life idyl of A Sister’s Story will see some likeness between the home of the La Ferronays and Stolberg’s happy home. Indeed, his friends were part of his family, and admission to his intimacy became the ambition of all such in Münster as had minds beyond the common run, and aspirations beyond those of fashion, politics, and frivolity. Stolberg’s dislike to the loss of time involved in ordinary visits and the inanities of society is thus described by himself in 1810:

“I am growing more unfit from year to year for large gatherings. Intercourse with friends, like the leaves of the Sibylline books, is more precious the less time it occupies and the less often it recurs. To hear social chatter for more than an hour affects me so that I feel much like a dead donkey.... How true are Lavater’s words: 'Even the circle of good souls seldom gives me a new impulse, and a thousand trivial pleasures rob me of true enjoyment. Only solitude can shadow and cool my spirit, thirsty and weary from the company even of loved ones; only solitude can give what no friend can offer—a new consciousness and new life, and a feeling that God loves me.’”

This country life which was such a relief and yearly joy to the whole family is charmingly described in Stolberg’s letters. His garden, his hay-field, his children’s play; his walks in the beech, oak, and maple woods; the squirrels in the trees, the favorite kid of his little girls, the nightingales, the blossoming fruit-trees that suggested to him the saying that the “apple-tree did not eat of the apple”; the grottos, rocks, valleys, castles, torrents of the neighborhood of Stolberg; the old family house which he had not seen for twenty-eight years, and upon which he prided himself as a possession that had been in the family for a thousand years; the beauties of the Erzgebirg, and the Bohemian hills that lean against it; the Scotch or Norwegian-like scenery, wild and grand, of these mountains with their narrow, fruitful valleys and green meadows, fringed with dark pine woods—are all described with that heartiness and enthusiasm which real lovers of the country know, but which, as Stolberg says, so many others pretend to, while in reality they see in nature nothing but a cold show, a theatre decoration. “They look complacently as into a peep-show at the sunrise and the heavens, but their heart does not swell within them nor their eyes grow dim.” He was as fond of childish games, especially of blowing soap-bubbles, as he was of beautiful scenery, and counted it a sign of soul-health when he was in the frame of mind to enjoy such games. And now that we have before us the picture of the man in his domestic life, who in his public, political, literary, and social life was of so much importance and had so wide an influence, we will keep mostly to his own letters, which give full vent to his opinions on the important events of the time, and show him forth as emphatically of the old school, a model Christian, a thorough gentleman, but a man of his own generation; impatient of novelty, a great admirer of the English constitution, but a scornful contemner of the mushroom constitutions of the Continent; a hot Légitimiste, but a patriotic German; an uncompromising and somewhat irrational foe of Napoleon, over and above his mere national antagonism against the great and successful warrior—for instance, he believed that “Napoleon’s greatness was kneaded out of the abjectness of Europe,” forgetting that a man’s greatness may lie precisely in the art of taking advantage of a weakness inherent in an adversary, and seizing the right moment to overwhelm small minds with his stronger one; a firm believer in the necessity of his own order, but an “aristocrat” with lofty and beautiful theories of what aristocracy consists in; in a word, a great Christian and a thorough man.

Besides his Greek and Hebrew studies, he was fond of English history and literature, and knew French and Italian well; Milton and Young were his favorite English poets, though he often quotes Shakspere too, and one of his works, second only to the History of Religion, was the Life of Alfred—a man whom he looked upon as a heroic model, and whose example he wished to dwell upon as a guide to his sons through life. He also translated the whole of Ossian. His letters relating to his home-life, his losses and those of his relations, the death of his sons and son-in-law, and of many dear friends, full as they are of Christian manliness and resignation, and of moral axioms that might be taken as mottoes, we will pass by, as they have less of individuality than his letters containing opinions on religion, politics, and literature, as well as expositions of theories of his own, all strongly and conscientiously held. He firmly contradicted a current misconception in his time—and, indeed, a not unfrequent one now—of the intolerance of the Catholic Church.

“Only for those who confess Catholic truth,” he writes, “and yet consciously keep aloof from the Catholic communion, is there no hope of salvation. Of others who err in all good faith, my church teaches me to believe that they are her members, though unknowingly. God allows many honest Protestants to remain in error, and to fancy that the Catholic Church, that truly merciful mother, is intolerant against those outside her pale. It is not the true spirit of that church to persecute, curse, or burn the erring. Infallible in her doctrine, as were also the teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, she still cannot preserve all her members free from imperfections in their acts—not even the pope, nor, in the old dispensation, the high-priest.”

In another letter he says:

“Far be it from me, as it is from every Catholic who knows the spirit of his church, to doubt that among Protestants also there are and have been holy souls—holy in the sense in which all true children of God are holy; ... but my church teaches me to look upon these as unconscious members of the true, though to them unknown, church.”

“Overberg, of whose rarely beautiful catechism thirty thousand copies have been sold, especially for schools and children, expresses himself very pleasingly on this subject. No well-instructed Catholic has any objection to make to this, but even no half-taught Catholic can, on the other hand, mistake other altars for that altar of sacrifice which Malachi prophesied of, and will hold all other altars only for such as they really are.... Among unlearned Protestants (and, as I said before, among a few learned ones) there are very many whom the spirit of Protestantism as such has not touched, who have never been disturbed, because they have found in Holy Scripture a full rest and contentment, and lean with heartfelt love on Jesus Christ, doing for love of him all they do, in fullest confidence, and what flesh and blood would never teach them to do. Plants that bear such fruit as this I can only hold to come from roots watered by the Heavenly Father himself. You believe [he is addressing Sulzer, of Constance] that the number of such souls is small; and such a belief grieves me, for I think that it drives many away and discourages them. And, indeed, such hard suppositions as you make and insist upon having categorically answered lead to embittering results. I speak from experience. For seven years did I seek for truth with an upright heart, after God first put it into my heart to seek. After seven years’ search was I led, through circumstances that God overruled, to know and confess the truth. Others have sought longer and more anxiously, and have not found what I did, but they serve God in the simplicity of their hearts better than I do, and will assuredly find the truth in the kingdom of light and truth....”

“You see,” he says to his brother, “that I am not intolerant. But I hope to God that I shall never be tolerant in the newest sense of the word—that is, indifferent, lukewarm, fit to be spat out of the mouth of Jesus Christ.”... “Do not let,” he says to his son Caius at Göttingen University, “yourself be led away from the rock-founded church by the many good and worthy Protestants you meet. Among all in error are many who are individually children of God, but they have no church, no sacrifice, no priesthood, no Eucharist. The helter-skelter union of both Protestant bodies (the Lutheran and the Calvinist) must give serious scandal to the earnest souls in both, and will, I hope, lead many into our church.”

Of the difference between feeling and truth he says:

“Certain sensations may be real to one person and unreal to another. Not so with facts and doctrine. It is the peculiar character of the true religion that as it must be the same in all ages, so must every man be equally able to understand and embrace it.... I could not believe in a true religion which it would not be possible for every human being to believe in.... He leads some through rough paths, others through smooth ones; some towards truth, some through error. The way of error, as such, is not His way, although he is always ready to unfold the truth, to be beforehand with, and to meet half way, the upright soul who in all simplicity holds an erring belief.”

Indeed, in Stolberg’s experience, the difference between lukewarm and conscientious Protestants was fully shown; for the former reviled him for his change of religion, while the latter approved of his following what he looked upon as truth. Other misconceptions of Catholic doctrine he also combated, and greatly enlightened many of his friends on the Catholic belief in the justifying merits of Christ. Holy Scripture was a source from which he considered spiritual light to come, but, as he observed, “the learned have not yet been able to see that the healthy eye, like the concave mirror, gathers into one point all the scattered rays, while they split and split until the last particle of light is lost in shadow.” Elsewhere he says:

“He who is careless of Holy Writ is careless of the life of the soul, and he is happy if he becomes conscious, were it only now and then, of the fact that the world, whether with its pleasures or its wisdom, offers him nothing but what is poisonous to the immortal spirit.”

His advice to his son Ernest, who left home in 1803 to join the Austrian army, is full of the true Christian spirit. He recommends him to practise every virtue that would make a man perfect, and goes into many details which, of course, we cannot follow here, but this sentence is almost a compendium of the whole:

“A true Christian cannot find true freedom nor true unsolicitude but in the possession of a good conscience. Where the conscience is tender and watchful it watches alike over every act; and the more we pay attention to it, so much the more does it become, notwithstanding the violence it at first does to nature, a principle of our life which puts us in harmony with ourselves, and therefore makes us truly free.”

Elsewhere he says, speaking to another youth, a friend of his sons:

“Lassitude and a want of courage increase the strength of the enemy; and discontent concerning the post to which God has appointed us is unseemly in any brave man, much more in a foremost fighter. Not the wish that 'everything were otherwise,’ but the resolve always to act well and bravely—or, as Holy Writ says, 'to walk before God and be perfect’—can make men of us. That wish unnerves us; this resolve strengthens us and gives us a might which remains with the weapons of the fighter even on the other side of the grave. He who has done and suffered much does not dream of soiling his crown with tears, while he who has as yet found no opportunity of doing or suffering has still less a right to weep.”

The melancholy which the French have aptly called “la maladie du siècle”[89] was abhorrent to Stolberg—that unmanliness and cowardice of mind which became fashionable through the writings of atheists, and which in many phases has spread itself into our present literature as well as our practice. He also writes concerning the same thing:

“Every human being has his own history to work out, and that this should be thoroughly done does not depend upon the amount of talent he has, but upon the will which few bring to it unconditionally and in a cheerful spirit.”

Stolberg was of a healthier school and generation; he did not see the beauty and sentiment and romance of passion running riot, misunderstood natures, morbid hearts, vain strivings, and all the paraphernalia of a moral sick-bed. For instance, the baneful and unreal excitements of the theatre were very dangerous in his eyes, and the evil custom which even good and well-meaning people fell into of countenancing private theatricals, and letting even their young children take part in them, was a great sorrow to him. One of the evils he deprecated was the rousing of a false sympathy with imaginary woes, which ended by undermining true sympathy with our neighbor’s actual troubles; another, the vanity which play-acting fostered in young people, and the excitement which rendered them unfit for serious study and work. It also destroys the simplicity of the soul and that modesty which is the chief adornment of young souls, especially of a girl’s soul.

“Young girls,” he says, “when they have once overcome their shyness, long after the same excitement, and are always wishing to be playing a part. The truthfulness of their nature is soon lost; seeming overcomes being, every acted feeling destroys real feeling; the heart becomes cold for reality, and is only to be aroused by supposed passion.”

Public theatricals he looked upon as equally dangerous, and even wrote against them, praising Geneva for having, until it became French, refused to allow the erection of a theatre within the limits of its territory. “The special charm of the stage,” he says, “lies in its flattery of our lusts, our vanity, and our laziness.” We have often heard fine theories advanced as to the mission and morality of the drama, but as long as practice belies these theories it is impossible to look upon them otherwise than as a well-meaning Utopia. Stolberg saw the real harm done, and not the imaginary good which some high-minded and exceptional artists would fain do.

The atheistical and deist philosophy of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth were naturally repugnant to such an upright mind as Stolberg. He hated the wilful groping in the dark after a truth which the “philosophers” might have found in the Gospels, had they had the fairness to admit these on an equality, at least, with other so-called “proofs.” He called Steffen and Schleiermacher at Halle the “new Gnostics,” and compared their systems to the vain effort of the fabled Danaides to pour the ocean through a sieve.

“The name of Gnostics sounds ominous,” he says, “and brings to mind the Gnostics of the first centuries, with many of whose beliefs, indeed, the wisdom of our newest sages astonishingly coincides. Under their treatment even realities dissolve themselves in shadow, while they give to shadows the form and appearance of realities.”

Jacobi was at that time a very prominent leader of philosophy in Germany, and Stolberg mentions him many times in his correspondence with various persons, evidently as a representative man. At one time this teacher, the friend of Goethe, a sort of Medici among his disciples near Düsseldorf, where he had a beautiful house, and still more beautiful garden—now the property of the town and the appropriate scene of artists’ banquets and popular fêtes—confessed himself, in the midst of his philosophy, “a very beggar” in the true learning of the Spirit. Stolberg often alluded to this, and, when the master’s pride had long distanced the frame of mind in which this acknowledgment had been made, wrote of him: “Poor Jacobi! he was richer indeed when he called himself poor as 'a beggar.’” In 1812 he writes:

“I have just read Jacobi’s last pamphlet. The one before the last On a Wise Saying of Lichtenberg, seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. That on The Recension (Jacobi cannot help putting odd and often trivial titles to his works) has also excellent points, but the whole seems to me loose, and a windy toying with views which he borrows from Christianity, the whole system of which, however, he, as far as in him, the puny mortal, lies, seeks to weaken and annihilate. While he praises the god-like Plato, he seems to forget that this philosopher, or rather Socrates in his platonic Phædrus, evidently longs, as a hart after the fountains of waters, for a god-given revelation whose very possibility itself Jacobi, on the contrary, strives to reason away.”

Schelling’s answer to Jacobi, however, equally displeased Stolberg, and he accuses him of making Jacobi appear, “through certain wiles of speech, now an atheist, now a fanatical dreamer,” and of taking credit to himself for

“Having been the first clearly to prove the existence of God. His God has been from all eternity the greatest Force, which contained within itself, in potentia, but not in actu, that goodness and wisdom which it developed in later ages. He falls thus into Count Schmettau’s error, of a god who has raised himself from a lower state to the highest, which theory one might compare with the career of a field-marshal who has risen by degrees from the ranks.... Evidently Schelling is a man of much mind, but of overweening vanity. He speaks of Christianity with respect, and probably believes in the divine mission of Christ, whose system, however, it was reserved for him—Schelling—fully to explain. He sent this paper of his to Perthes (Stolberg’s publisher), and told him he wished me to read it, and that I should then have quite another idea of what his philosophy was, and discover that he did not hold the views I attributed to him.”

At another time he writes:

“The deplorable frivolity of these times is one of their worst signs. I find it the saddest of all. Would that one could hope,

“When the hurly-burly’s done,

When the night is past and gone,”

that things would come right again. But moral nights are not as physical ones. The latter bring us dreams which the dawn of day dispels. The moral nights are full of the feverish dreams of mankind, and they have no certain limit as to time. They go crescendo from error to folly, until the awakening at the end of a completed, comet-like course of misery.”

We have mentioned Stolberg’s warm love of his country. Prince Francis Fürstenberg said of him during the time of the humbling of Germany under the yoke of Napoleon: “I know, and have known in my long life, many of the noblest men in the nation, but I saw none surpass Stolberg in genuine love for the Fatherland. His German and imperial heart is pure as gold and shines like a diamond.” The epithet imperial sounds odd to our ears; it is an allusion to his belief that the Empire of Germany, such as it existed just before the Congress of Vienna, was the proper representative and bulwark of the nation. He blamed the Emperor Francis very strongly for laying down his time-honored dignity later on, and contenting himself with a local title which severed his interests materially from those of Germany at large. He also saw in this withdrawal of imperial authority and protection over non-Austrian countries a danger to the Catholic faith, and a possible interference of Protestant powers in the communications between Catholic German states and the Holy See. But concerning the ever-vexed question of the Rhine frontier his patriotism was quick and hot; he wished that in the new partition at the Congress Alsace and Lorraine should be given back to Germany, and lamented the injudicious behavior by which some of the German troops had spoilt the evidently favorable state of mind of the Alsatians during part of the disturbances on the frontier.

“Eighteen months ago,” he writes in 1815, “the Alsatians were very well disposed, came to meet our troops with flags and received them with ringing of joy-bells; then came the Bavarians, the Badeners, and so on, and behaved so as to make them hate us. We all talk of our wish to reunite our once torn-away brethren with Germany, but we have angered them instead and are burning their towns and villages. My hair stands on end and I could weep tears of blood at the thought.”

Early in the century, a few weeks after his conversion, Stolberg wrote thus to Princess Gallitzin:

“True patriotism embraces the highest good of the people in all things: the blessings of faith, those of law, of freedom, and of morals. It can never follow the path of forcible overthrows and of revolution, nor covenant with an outside enemy, nor lend itself to the service of injustice, even when a seeming and momentary advantage is to be gained by such service. What a disgrace for us Germans is the Franco-mania that reigns among us—the cap-in-hand alliance with the Corsican adventurer, who is spreading horror and desolation among us and knows no right but that of the sword. What undermines all our strength, and will sink us even lower and lower, is not only the jealousy and spirit of aggrandizement current among the German states against the empire and the emperor, the fawning on the French with the hope of getting their help to win new slices of territory, but far more the weakened character of the whole people, and their want of moral energy and good feeling—the result of the unbelieving philosophy and immoral literature that have unnerved the nation.”

Just as impartially he condemned in after-years, when German patriotism had spread with a sudden rush from the field into literature, the “coarse Teutonism” which rejected every refinement of foreign origin, maligned every foreign custom, and made patriotism ridiculous by enjoining upon it to be no less than rabid. He then defended all that was reasonable and applicable to German life, all the praise-worthy customs, books, and improvements that fashion had turned suddenly against. He had earned a good right to be independent; for four of his sons fought in the different German armies that overwhelmed Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow, and one, his son Christian, a brave boy of eighteen, died at the battle of Ligny. His two sons-in-law also, fathers of large families of young children, were in the national army, and the greatest enthusiasm was felt by all the members of the family, old and young, for the cause which Stolberg called “ours, God’s, Europe’s, mankind’s, and the right’s.”

In 1815 he wrote: “True German feeling it is to welcome all that is noble and good, out of all ages and nations, as our own. Every one now, with narrow minds, is Nibelungen-mad, barbaric-mad”; and concerning his Life of Alfred he says:

“Alfred belongs to us, and therefore do I wish to hold him up to the veneration and imitation, and for the teaching, of my children. But not only do Alfred and his people belong to us; we should also make our own all that is great and noble in the life of all nations, yet without losing thereby our own individuality.”

In 1805 the decree freeing the serfs in the Duchy of Holstein went into effect, and Stolberg congratulates his brother Christian on this happy event; naturally, the greater event of the abolition of negro slavery in the British West Indies was a great joy to him, and he rejoiced the more that the Illuminati, his special aversion, lost thereby their best weapon against England, and that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man could be unfavorably compared with the English constitution, on account of a contradictory law, at that time still in force, forbidding the liberation of the negroes in French colonies to be even mentioned before the legislature. The alliances, dictated by fear or by interest, of German sovereigns with Napoleon were a subject of great grief and indignation to him, and he looked upon England with almost exaggerated admiration because she withstood the conqueror. He said “Pitt would save England against Europe’s will,” and his confidence in the general policy of the English statesman was unbounded. He had, too, a kind of historical admiration, if we may so call it, for the English form of government, which alone he thought proper for freedom, but which he did not believe fit for the wants of every nation, indiscriminately, on the Continent. It strikes us, however, that the fact of the English constitution, in its then state, being nearly a hundred and fifty years old had somewhat blinded his mind to the facts—according to his theory, rather suspicious, to say the least—of the change of dynasty in 1688; for the Stuarts in England were surely as legitimate sovereigns, from his point of view, as the Bourbons in France, whose least advances, in the person of Louis XVIII., towards the modern spirit so incensed and disgusted Stolberg; and when he said that “England alone stood in the breach” against Napoleon, he forgot that she considered it her interest to withstand him, and that a deeply-rooted prejudice egged on the nation against him. If he had seen anything of the unreasoning panic which the threatened invasion caused among the English, he would have been less ready to jest at the falling through of the scheme, which he called “an expedition to gather mussels along the British shores.” It has often been so, we think, among Continental statesmen and thinkers: they look upon England with exceptionally favorable eyes and weigh her doings in special balances, forgetting the lawless and riotous disturbances that she experienced earlier than other countries, after which she settled into the solid, steady, conservative, law-abiding, slow-to-be-moved nation which she had been for over a hundred years when the French Revolution suddenly broke out. Stolberg, much as he praised England, almost refused to see any good in the chaos of new ideas that were seething pell-mell together; he saw nothing but the evident godlessness, selfishness, pride, and cruelty which marked that era; and, indeed, he, the man of another age, the lover of a lofty ideal which we shall mention presently—the man who said that “all politics hinged on the Fourth Commandment”—could hardly be expected to allow that out of such confusion God could glean anything worthy of being offered to himself.

Stolberg often called Germany the “heart of Europe,” and wrote an ode with that title; but he would not allow with the innovators that the “philosophy” of the age was the true source of the influence his country should have on the Continent. Allied to this false idea of many Germans was the affected custom, in the early part of the century, of using the French language instead of the mother-tongue, even in the nearest domestic intercourse—a fault which the Russians also fell into, but which at present they have seen the folly of and have nearly successfully remedied. Stolberg heartily hated and despised this foreign intrusion into German home-life.

“Even in my younger days,” he says with scorn, “I can remember hearing of a gifted German girl being reproached by German women with being 'affected’ enough to write 'German’ letters.... Germans now write to each other, brother to brother, husband to wife, in French.... Is that not to estrange one’s self from one’s nearest and dearest? nay, even from one’s self?”

His relations and correspondence with well-known people of his day furnish us with his opinions on many of the writers, savants, statesmen, and philosophers, the reigning and rising public men. Of the historian Johann Müller he says:

“No one ever seized the true spirit of history so early in life as he did.... His life is very interesting; it is true he showed a good deal of vanity, but also so much cheerful good-humor that one does not feel inclined to be hard upon him for the former. His plan of study, as he arranged it for himself, and the scrupulous way in which he followed it out, seem to me truly noteworthy.... What a comprehensive spirit, what feeling and sympathy for the true, the good, and the beautiful! How early, too, he broke loose from the unwisdom of the philosophy of the times, and how deep a religious spirit remained firm in him in the midst of many disturbances, since he so clearly understood the history of the world by the light of that Providence whose finger he was always tracing in it! He once said very beautifully that Christ was the key to the world s history.”

In 1807 he gives the following opinion of Alexander von Humboldt:

“I know Humboldt personally. He has much understanding, much liveliness, much industry. But is he not inclined to be too much enslaved by the German à priori tendency and by a love of the scientific form? Is he strong enough not to let himself be carried away by the method of modern criticism, which tends to violent disruption from all that has gone before, instead of tracing out the great analogies on the path of simple observation? Is he quite free from a delicate and imperceptible charlatanism? Years may have matured him, but such maturing seldom takes place when the quick strides of science make it difficult for wisdom to keep up with her.”

Of Frederick Schlegel’s poetry, and that of others in the Dichtergarten (or “Poet’s Garden,” a collection of fugitive songs by various poets), he writes:

“The rarer and the more beautiful is the noble, religious spirit that breathes through the Poet’s Garden, the more do I wish that its authors might put forth all their strength. And so it would be, if it were not for a particular theory which lies at the bottom of the poetry—a theory whose foundation I do not know, but whose evident peculiarity strikes the eye, bewilders the reader, forces the Muse, and in its purposed negligence of language goes so far as even to disfigure it. The Muse craves freedom above all things, if she is to express what comes from the innermost of our heart or our mind. Every trace of art lames poetry, and theory often misleads, because it is born of human philosophy, while poetry is something divine. Therefore poets always succeed best in rhythm where the inspiration is great and noble, and the quickly-passing images, thoughts, sensations only group themselves well and naturally when they are conjured up by an infallible, all-subduing inspiration, without the poet knowing how it happens.”

Of Niebuhr’s Roman history he writes, in 1812—not, perhaps, in the sense that most of the readers of that work will endorse:

“I marvel at the deep learning, and often at the penetration, of our friend; but who will read him? What a bulwark of tedious researches, the result of which is often nothing more than a learned outwork! It is strange that, with this fault of historical pedantry, he could not avoid the contrary one of reasoning à priori, so common to the German professors. There is much understanding in the book, and in a few places one is pleasantly surprised at its spirit; but this spirit is neither a joyful nor a certain one. He fails in simplicity. From this springs his heavy style, despite his choice use of words. He is too forward in making hypotheses and foregone conclusions; for instance, his open partisanship with the plebeians leads him to make false and hasty judgments. His pragmatical tendency makes him unjust even to Livy, and he has no appreciation of the noble amiability of Plutarch. Yet, with all these faults, he must ever remain a valuable historian—not a star of the first magnitude, but still too good to be a mere famulus,[90] to gather material for great historians. Among other things, he lacks the art of managing his style so as to appear to be led by it and yet to make it convey exactly what the writer pleases. But concerning his principles, some of which, however, I do not endorse, his conscience always appears as it is, noble and tender, while his love of truth follows him even on his hobby—hypothesis.”

It may be interesting to give the opinion of some of the same men on Stolberg himself as a historian and writer. The History of Religion, which was his great work, and which he mainly attributed to the suggestion, encouragement, and interest of Princess Gallitzin, became a topic of discussion and interest all through Germany. Many were brought by it to the Catholic Church, and of these most wrote to him first, asking advice and making confidences, before they read further or asked instructions from a priest. It was a source of deep thankfulness to him that he had thus been the means of making others share in the same blessings and peace which he had won through the grace and leading of God. But his History was no controversial work; it was very comprehensive, and embraced the whole subject of true religion from the beginning of the world, tracing the connection between Judaism and Christianity; the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ; the spirit of aloofness from the world, first symbolized in the national exclusiveness of the Hebrews, and then proved in the persecutions under the Roman emperors in the struggle between Christianity and heathendom; and, lastly, the gradual, onward sway which the truth at last won over error, and which, speaking in a certain sense, culminated in the conversion of Constantine. Here Stolberg ended his history, feeling that his life would not be spared much longer, and that he had done his work, so far as he felt called upon by God to witness to the truth that was in him. The unhappy struggles, rents, and abuses of later church history he left untouched; surely there were counterparts to them in earlier days, but no such embittering could come from a relation of the old heresies and divisions as would have sprung from even the most impartial discussion of recent and more local ones. Schlegel took the greatest interest in this work, and of the least important part he spoke thus admiringly:

“I am especially delighted at the strength and simple beauty of your style; whoso compares it with what is called nowadays the art of representing things will easily discover where is to be found the true source of even this beauty.”

Again, of the second part of the history (it was divided into fifteen parts) he says:

“I found myself much steadied and strengthened by the whole, and particularly enlightened by the exposition on the Hebrew belief in the immortality of the soul and on the Mosaic code. May you in the future of your work, as often as opportunity allows, return to and dwell upon the immortality of the soul. It seems to me the path by which mankind at present can best be led towards truth, better than by any other teaching regarding the Godhead.”

He then says that pantheism and a vague sentimentality had perverted everything distinctly Christian into an empty shadow-form, but that few were so absolutely dead to all higher feeling as not to distinguish between the “real personal immortality, and the mere metaphysical image of it, without a hereafter, and without a continuance of the memory.”

“Bring vividly before them the true personal immortality, and you will often find those whom you had thought most spiritually dead and careless to be palpably roused. To me the doctrine of the Trinity is the central point of Christianity, and therefore the foundation and source of all my convictions, views, and aspirations.... The unfolding and representation of this secret of love (the Trinity) I have found to permeate every doctrine, principle, and even custom or rubric of the Catholic Church; although even in her pale many good individuals are less impressed with the divine spirit of the whole than with some one or other literal regulation.”

Johann von Müller wrote thus of Stolberg’s work:

“It is not a lukewarm, sham impartial church history, in which one is uncertain what relation it bears to Jesus of Nazareth, but the work of a man who knows what he believes, and would fain move all men to believe as he does. Not a church history critically weighing the Messiahship of Jesus from the Old Testament against his Godhead from the New, but the work of a man who sees everywhere and at all times Him who was and is, and is to come, and to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth. Lastly, it is not a worldly representation of the deceits and time-serving devices through which Christianity crept into the world, and is still able to maintain herself, the humble handmaid of statecraft, in these our enlightened times, but the confession and outpouring of soul of a man to whom the whole world is nothing in comparison with the Saviour of the world. Of the latter he speaks so that whoever loves him must love this book, and he who knows nothing of him will learn from this book what Christians possess in him. Therefore, reader, if thou art a reed, driven before the learned wind of our modern writings, look to this rock, and see if it has not a foundation in the needs of mankind and the love of the Godhead; and thou who knowest not Christianity, come and see what it is, as thy forefathers felt it, as it is yet, mighty in every childlike heart; and thou who believest, come hear, and enjoy, and rejoice thy heart with the word of life.”

Claudius spoke of the book being read by thousands, and of its “undoubted influence in strengthening the Christian faith among the German people.” A person in comparatively private life, Major Bülow, a stanch Bible man, said that Stolberg’s History of Religion had been a “welcome surprise to him, although the style was not always clear to his understanding, and he was only fearful lest the author should not live long enough to finish it.”

Joseph de Maistre spoke thus of the work in his Recueil de Lettres, p. 23:

“New researches and discoveries, and the progress of the art of tracing all up to the first sources, may correct or supplement much in his history, may bring a new light to bear on many of his opinions—for the work, in spite of its foundation on, and buttressing by, much study of a high order, is not meant to be an exhaustive scientific work; but I doubt if any, in our century at least, will surpass the author of this history in pure love of God and mankind, love to Christ and his church, and in pure and truly creative spirit. How striking also are his observations on the circumstances of our time, his opinion on the persecution of the church by the spirit of this world, on false teachers, on the marriage tie, and the sanctity of oaths, and many like things!”

Stolberg was rejoiced by these commendations, but more encouraged than rejoiced. Mere vanity was far from him; he thanked God that he had been able to supply “what these oft-repeated praises of good and single-minded men proved to him to have been really a want.”

The ideal which we have alluded to, and which was a great characteristic of Stolberg’s mind, was that of the mission and duties of an aristocracy. He believed that, in the abstract, the existence and allowed influence of such a class was an instinct inborn in man, and that it was only when the aristocracy was false to its own principles that the people could grow antagonistic to it. His theories on the subject were beautiful, noble, poetic, but in his time there had been so much evil practice that such theories were nearly swamped under it. It was natural to his character, however, to lean more on the theory than the practice, and to consider the latter an excrescence and abuse which might be done away with, and the ideal thereby reinstated in its first dignity. At first sight his theory seems simply a feudal, mediæval, romantic one, the dream of a man proud of his own order, and nursed in prejudices such as no change in political relations de facto could uproot but if we look closer into it, it becomes a very different and far more worthy thing—namely, a belief in the essence of chivalry, a standard of conduct such as King Arthur’s, a translation into altered forms and circumstances of the Gospel rules of charity, courtesy, and patience. Here are some of his own sayings on the subject, on which he reasoned in a way so far removed from either fanaticism or vanity that we place his explanations here as something wholly special to himself, and quite different from the ordinary rhapsodies about the necessity of various grades of classes:

“The ideal of the aristocracy[91] is not weakened through the unworthiness of many who are of noble birth. On the contrary, the just scorn which follows these men redounds to the honor of their class, of which one cannot become unworthy without being despised by all. Nature gives the aristocracy neither more understanding nor more physical strength than she does to other classes; it takes its worth wholly from an ideal, but not a mistaken ideal. This, like all that is great in mankind, is founded upon the sacrifice of all that is lower for the sake of attaining the highest.

“The aristocracy must give up every mercantile and lower traffic. Three things were entrusted to its keeping—agriculture, of which kings have not been ashamed, statesmanship, and the defence of the Fatherland.

“As an ennobled countryman the aristocrat can pursue the most necessary, the oldest, and the most innocent work with better results than the peasant, because he has more means, more insight, and can better afford the danger of an occasional failure. His experience and example teach and encourage the common countryman, whom it is the beautiful and holy duty of the nobleman to enlighten and to protect, and whose well-being, morals, and temporal and eternal good it is his duty to further by every means in his power. This business is one which, if he wishes to be respected as a nobleman, he has no right to evade or neglect; except temporarily, if he is chosen as a representative of his province—a business to which he has also a special call as a citizen of the state. He must and ought, however, to take part in the government, even if he be not chosen by his province; and either as a magistrate or only as a land-owner he can take a prominent part in it. The defence of his country devolves upon no one so strongly as upon the nobleman. This is a worthy and beautiful duty of knighthood. It is well for that state where the aristocracy, as such, is called to the defence of the Fatherland as leaders of their own country people, whose patrons they are in times of peace, whose heads, judges, mediators, example, and benefactors they should be at all times. The old, fair relations have been rent by false representations, but they are not effaced.... The aristocracy has an inner worth, no matter how unworthy are many of its members. Neither royal nor priestly anointing can preserve from moral corruption! Of how much less avail are mere human, outward means to preserve the spiritual existence! Indeed, they often soil it. Let every one who is of knightly standing strive to prove by his actions that the ideal of knighthood lives in him, in noble simplicity, in courteous behavior, in quick willingness to give blood and lands for the Fatherland. His example will not remain without fruit. He will be far from looking upon certain virtues as virtues of his condition, and neglecting to practise others or superciliously leave them to other classes. If we hold fast to our knightly calling, the essence of knighthood will remain to us. The shell of the thing renews itself from time to time.... Whatever is worthy of respect in knighthood has come from self-sacrifice.... In order to keep pace with the century, the nobleman must be the equal of the citizen in knowledge, whenever the two meet in the same field. If he neglects this, he will see the burgher reigning as a cabinet minister and himself reduced to the honor of waiting in the king’s ante-chamber by virtue of his birth. And even in war, the knight’s proper field, how can the nobleman boast of his superiority to one who knows more than he does of the science of war? If the knight covets intellectual superiority, he must not seek it in emulation so much as in brave and silent self-sacrifice. The life of his fathers must teach his heart this lesson: Be worthy of thy fathers, whether the world acknowledge thy worth or no.[92] A thirst after approbation does not behove a knight, but steady reliance on his strength and his intentions.... The present hatred of the aristocracy is a fever which will soon be spent.... It remains for us, each in his own circle, to maintain a lofty ideal and to spread it abroad—that is, a true spirit of religion and that spirit of brave self-denial, of earnest courage, and discreet worth which should mark the aristocracy—and at the same time to encourage among ourselves a desire not to be behindhand in such knowledge and in such strivings as elevate the heart, adorn the mind, and make us fitter for the callings that specially beseem us.”

It will be readily understood from the foregoing quotations that Stolberg had not much sympathy with a scheme which some German noblemen had started—that of a new knight-union or society. He deprecated the publicity such a step would necessarily bring upon them, and saw in it only a hollow, childish plan of defiance, a foolish revival of old customs as powerless in practice as a return to the weapons of the ancient knights, a protest against firearms and the altered arts of warfare. His enthusiasm was always dignified and reasonable; it had no touch of sentimentality and “playing at” things. To the last his character remained the same. Forgiving and temperate as regarded any wrong done personally to him, he could not brook the distortion of truth, and was in the act of replying to a libellous pamphlet of Voss, of Heidelberg, destined to spread among the public distrust of Stolberg’s sincerity in his conversion, when his last sickness overtook him. He had just finished the Life of St. Vincent of Paul, which he had written instead of the autobiography that his friends strongly urged him to write. He had objected that he felt no call from God to do so, and that, unless one wrote with the view of God’s call, vanity and self were too apt to become the leading motive in the work. He commended St. Augustine’s Confessions because they were evidently inspired by love of God’s honor only, and a monument of thankfulness to the One who called such a sinner to repentance. In St. Vincent he saw a man of modern times whom one could hold up as a model not too exalted and extraordinary, yet thoroughly humble, perfect, and holy, to men of his and future generations.

Stolberg died December 5, 1819, at the age of seventy, at Sondermühlen, a country-house for which he had, four years before, exchanged his favorite Lütjenbeck, when French domination was in the ascendant and he had become an object of suspicion to the French spies in Münster.

What his death was to his family can be easily imagined; it was hardly less to a large circle of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who knew him only by name and by his works, but whose reliance on his advice, example, and opinion had long been their best and surest standard of duty.

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES.
A free translation.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus of Trojan Women lament their Captivity.]

STROPHE I.

Breeze of the ocean, fresh and free!

Whither, O whither wilt thou bear

The Exile, and her great despair?

Thou speed’st, and I must speed with thee!

Say, must some Dorian haven be

The home of Troy’s unhappy daughters?

O unbelovèd home!—or where

The father of most lovely waters,

Apidanus, goes winding by

The fruitful meads of Thessaly?

ANTISTROPHE I.

Or 'mid those isles of old renown,
Haply bright Delos’ sea-born glades,
Where deathless palms and laurels spread
Above their own Latona’s head
Green boughs (commemoration holy
Of that twin-birth that lit their gloom):—
There must I weep a captive’s doom?
There sing, with gladsome native maids,
Extorted song and melancholy
To Dian’s silver bow and crown?

STROPHE II.

Perchance, a slave in Athens pining,
On tap’stried walls these hands must trace
Minerva’s awful steeds and car
Still radiant from the Ten Years’ war;
Or blazon there the Titan race
Beneath the Thunderer’s wrath oppressed,
And every godlike head declining
Upon the thunder-blasted breast.

ANTISTROPHE II.

Alas my people, and alas

My fathers, and my country’s shore!

And thou, O Troy—’tis Fate’s decree—

Farewell! I see thy face no more!

Alas for thee, alas for me!

Above thy head the plough shall pass:—

Worse fate is mine, o’er ocean’s wave,

The conqueror’s plaything, and his slave.

THE TRUE IRISH REVOLUTION.

The Irish people, albeit much given to intermittent spasms of insurrection, are at present as peaceable, and apparently as contented, as the contending passions of local politicians and the intrigues of imperial statesmen will allow them to be. The constabulary, in their rifle-green and burnished accoutrements, continue to be the envy and terror of the unsophisticated peasant; the queen’s writ runs unobstructed in the remotest parts of the island; “the castle still stands, though the senate’s no more”; and, save the sharp crack of a rifle at Dolly-mount or the more death-dealing fowling-piece of the sportsman, no warlike sound disturbs the quiet slumbers of the weary sentinel or the superserviceable stipendiary magistrate.

And yet a revolution has been in progress in Ireland and in Irish affairs elsewhere for the last three-quarters of a century as beneficent in its effects and as tangible in its benefits as if blood had flowed in torrents and the pure atmosphere from shore to centre of the land had been polluted by fumes of villainous saltpetre. We mean that within the memory of men now living a radical though gradual change has taken place in the manners, habits, and tastes of the Irish people, but more particularly in their literature, which after all is the best evidence of a nation’s ability to think correctly and express accurately what their minds are capable of conceiving.

Looking back to the condition of Ireland at the beginning of the century—her domestic legislature annihilated and seven-eighths of her people unrepresented in the imperial Parliament—beyond broken relics and dim memories of a glorious past, it can be said truthfully that she had no literature whatever, or rather no literature save what was alien and hostile in tone and spirit. There were no native authors except those who had earned pelf and unenviable notoriety by decrying Ireland’s nationality, maligning her faith, and holding up to the contempt and ridicule of the world the faults and foibles of her unlettered peasantry. But, even had there been men of a different character, they could not have found either encouragement or patronage; for the mass of the population, thanks to the Penal Laws, could not read English, and one-half at least could not even speak it.

The consequence, therefore, was that every young Irishman who felt the spirit of literary ambition stir within him, as soon as he had attained manhood, hastened to pack up his scanty wardrobe and turn his face toward London—then as now the great intellectual focus of the United Kingdom. The pioneers of this movement were generally men little fitted to represent their country. They were merely adventurers, without principle or honor, facile and versatile, and in some instances even educated, but, from previous training and association, just such tools as Grubb Street publishers loved to handle and the lowest class of Britons delighted to patronize. They were the originators of the “Denis Bulgruddery” and “Paddiana” school of so-called comic literature, and were useless if they did not caricature in the grossest manner, on the stage and in the newspapers and periodicals, their Catholic fellow-countrymen. With them a priest was an ignorant and low-bred tyrant; the peasant his abject, superstitious slave. This worthless class, while it did much to destroy the moral effect produced by men of a preceding generation, like Goldsmith, Coleman, O’Keefe, Sheridan, Burke, Barry, and other distinguished Irishmen, did more to instil into the popular mind of England that utter misconception of Irish character and insensate hostility to the Catholic religion of which we find at the present day such marked traces even among fairly intelligent men.

Those mercenaries were followed by others of a higher order of intellect and of greater pretensions, of whom Crofton Croker and Sheridan Knowles may be considered to have been the representatives. The drama, poetry, and prose fiction of every description employed their attention alternately, and in each they proved true to the baser instincts of their nature and the traditions of the faction whence they had sprung. They were stanch no-popery men of the Orange stripe, and, having a Protestant, English audience to gratify, they were consistently and virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. When they wished to delineate their co-patriots, whether before the foot-lights or in the pages of cheap novels, they invariably divided them into two classes: the high-spirited, accomplished Protestant gentleman, and the low, grovelling, ignorant papist. Thus for many years did they thrive on bigotry and fatten upon treason to the land that was unfortunate enough to have given them birth. It was only natural that England should have viewed with complacency the caricatures of a faith she had so long and so strenuously proscribed, and a people whom she had robbed of the last vestige of independence; but it is humiliating to reflect that the works of such libellers were up to a recent period popular in Ireland, and that their comedies and farces “have kept the stage” even to our own day.

There were yet other candidates for fame, who, tired of the provincialism of Irish towns, or impatient of the restraints which their peculiar calling in life had placed upon them, sought an English market for their intellectual wares—spoiled children of genius, men like Maginn and Mahony, of much learning and fascinating accomplishments, fitted to have conferred lasting honor on their country, but who, lacking the true spirit of national dignity and personal respect, easily fell a prey to one or other of the contending English parties, and sank to the level of those who disgrace the noble profession of letters by making it subservient to the base purposes of political factions. This class contributed much of what is still to be found brilliant and entertaining in English literature, but little that reflects credit on their character as Irishmen.

Following or contemporaneous with them came another and a different school of Irish writers, such as Lever, Lover, Maxwell, and even Carleton; for, though the latter in many of his later works showed a just appreciation of the vast improvement taking place in public taste, his earlier and more popular productions, apart from their occasional touches of true pathos and flashes of genuine wit, were devoted mostly to caricature and exaggeration. Charles Lever, who has written so many books, and who is yet the most read of all the Irish novelists of this century, has been called the best recruiting sergeant the British government ever employed; while Lover may be styled a gifted and versatile buffoon in all save his lyrics. The first’s highest conception of an Irish gentleman was one who broke his arm over a Galway fence, was commissioned in the British army, blundered into all sorts of scrapes and out of them, hated Napoleon, worshipped “Sir Arthur,” charged wildly at Ciudad Rodrigo or Waterloo, and finally—married an heiress. His best Irish peasant does not rise above the grade of Mickey Free or Darby the Blast, while he seemed utterly unconscious of the existence of a very important social element in all agricultural countries—the farming or middle class, always remarkable for their sturdy common sense and practical views of life. It was from this portion of his countrymen and from the hardy mechanics of the towns that Scott drew his best and most enduring portraits of Scotch manliness, shrewdness, and humor.

Lover, though tender and natural in verse, was singularly unfortunate in his choice of subjects and altogether false in his attempts to develop them. He also ignored the “middle classes,” and substituted for gentlemen sentimental non-entities, and for the free-spoken, light-hearted, and withal poetical plebeian, blundering boobies full of chicane and deception. We can scarcely believe that the man who wrote Treasure Trove and Handy Andy could have conceived such pathetic songs as “The Angels’ Whisper” and “The Fairy Boy.”

Still, the works of these authors, though exhibiting many glaring defects, were a great improvement on those of their predecessors, and consequently they have not yet been consigned to the oblivion which has enshrouded the productions of the bigots of the previous era.

But the revolution in Irish literature had commenced long before their advent, and the credit of initiating it belongs to one who was not only universally admired and applauded during his life, but whose fame continues to augment as time rolls along, and the memory of his extraordinary efforts in behalf of his faith and country becomes brighter and more enduring. That man was Thomas Moore, the son of humble Catholic parents, who, on account of his religious belief, was refused a fellowship in the only university of which his native country could then boast. Naturally disgusted at such ostracism, Moore, at the age of twenty-three, went to London, and entered upon that brilliant career in poetry and prose which has indelibly stamped his name on the history of the literature of the nineteenth century. Never was the force of genius better exemplified than in the life of Moore. A plebeian, a Catholic, and an Irishman in the strongest sense of those terms; without condescending to apologize for, or attempting to palliate, the facts of his station and belief; with scarcely a friend or acquaintance in the great metropolis, and no recognition in the world of letters, the poet rose amid an aristocratic, Protestant, and anti-Irish community to a position equal to the most gifted of Scotland’s and England’s men of genius, and in his Melodies far surpassed any lyrics that have been written in our language since or before his time. In 1808 the first part of that unequalled collection of songs appeared, and each successive instalment but added to the popularity of the preceding. From the first they became fashionable, and consequently popular. They were sung in the drawing-rooms of princes and in the cottage parlors of the shop-keeper and tradesman. Persons of every rank in life who knew little of Ireland, and that little not to her credit, listened entranced to “Remember the Glories of Brian the Brave” or “Oh! blame not the Bard,” and began to think that a country that could produce such airs and so sweet a poet could not after all be considered very barbarous. It was but a poor concession, yet under the circumstances a most valuable one. It was the first blow struck against the solid wall of prejudice with which English society had surrounded itself.

Next to Moore we place John Banim, the principal author of the Tales of the O’Hara Family. Banim, like Moore, sprang from the ranks of the humbler classes and sought in London a field for his rare genius which was denied him at home. Though a dramatist of no mean order, his reputation rests principally on his novels, many of which, like the Boyne Water, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook, The Priest-Hunter, and The Fetches, are works of real power, interspersed here and there with pleasantry and humor, but always moral, dignified, and true to nature. The sale of Banim’s tales and shorter stories from their intrinsic merit, and perhaps somewhat on account of their novelty, was very extensive in England, and helped to increase the good feeling towards the Irish people which the lyre of Moore had first called into being.

In Gerald Griffin, afterward the humble Christian Brother, Banim found not only a friend but a powerful auxiliary. Griffin, of all the writers of fiction in the English language, was the purest and most actively moral. If we search all his works—and they fill nine or ten volumes—we will not find an expression or an innuendo to offend the most sensitive. The writings of the great English novelists of this century, like those of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, cannot be said to be positively immoral, though the author of the justly-celebrated Waverley Novels often exhibited marked prejudice, and sometimes downright bigotry; while his later rivals, when not satirical or trifling, can at best claim but a negative morality for their teachings and tendencies. But the genius of Griffin sprang from a pure Catholic heart filled with love for all his kind, and consequently he wrote with a sense of religious responsibility, and in a spirit of justice and rectitude rarely to be found so thoroughly developed in a writer of fiction in our days. His works have had a great influence on the popular mind of both countries. But, though he first wrote in England, his sole and absorbing object was to benefit his countrymen. When satisfied that the germ of his laurels had begun to fructify in a foreign soil, he returned to his home, where, amid domestic pleasures, and in daily communion with the characters he so admirably portrayed and the scenes of natural beauty he so loved to describe, he composed his more important and finished works.

Meanwhile, another and not less important impetus had been given to the rapid change taking place in popular sentiment regarding Irish character and literature, and this was in Ireland itself. The letters of “J. K. L.”—the learned Dr. Doyle—on Catholic Emancipation and the Tithe Question, and those of the present venerable Archbishop of Tuam on similar topics, had thrilled the Irish heart and evoked in it a feeling of national dignity and self-reliance that had long lain dormant; and even the great O’Connell, amid all his professional and political labors, found time to contribute his aid to the new movement. But it was not till after 1840 that the various rivulets combined and assumed the proportions of a mighty flood, which, bursting through the barriers of ignorance and prejudice, overspread the entire land. Then began to appear the theologians and ecclesiastical historians of Maynooth and the antiquarian writers of old Trinity; the fiery ballads of the Nation and the graceful and learned essays of the Dublin Review and University Magazine. Archæological and Celtic societies were formed, the hitherto neglected Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy were brought into public notice, and the musty tomes that were crumbling to dust and decay on the shelves of Trinity College library, after their sleep of centuries, were explored, collated, and vivified. The names of Murray, O’Reilly, Petrie, Todd, O’Donovan, O’Curry, Graves, Wilde, Meehan, McCarthy, Mangan, and a host of other lesser lights, became familiar to the intellectual world by their profound, subtle, or brilliant contributions to the literature of the age. One thing alone was wanting to complete this grand national revival: a Catholic university—and even that soon came, not as a subordinate worker in the common cause, but as the leader of the movement.

Yet, though general education and popular instruction, in their own sphere, kept pace with the mental awakening in the higher departments of learning, strange to say, the stage, generally considered the first to yield to popular impulse, was the slowest and last to acknowledge the improved spirit of the times, and even to this day clings to many of the antiquated and bigoted so-called Irish dramas and comedies with insensate tenacity. Theatrical managers still persist in presenting for the amusement of patrons, a large portion of whom are Irish, the farces and low interludes which fifty years ago were written to gratify the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings of the lowest class of London society. A partially successful effort has been made recently to redeem this gross and fatal error; better, or rather less bad, Irish dramas have of late made their appearance, and let us hope the reformation, once set on foot, will be carried out. There is no reason why we should not have Irish dramas as good as Irish poems, tales, and other works of fiction. If people will go to theatres, they ought not be compelled to become interested spectators of outrages on faith and morals, and patrons and supporters of those who commit the outrages.

Still, casting our memory back over the history of Irish intellectual life for more than half a century, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that since the Renaissance epoch no country has given such evidence, in so short a time, of mental fertility and activity as that island which was once almost as famous throughout Europe for her learning as for the piety of her children. Ireland has at last a literature which is not only rich in ideas and information, but which is both national and Catholic. Her history, once so obscure and misunderstood, can now be studied with as much ease and satisfaction as any in Christendom; her antiquities, formerly the spoil of the ignorant or the jest of the sceptic, have been collected, arranged, and scientifically explained in a hundred ways; while the lives and actions of her great and holy men, from the earliest ages, have received full, critical, and impartial justice. And as yet we have only seen the beginning! If that be so fair and full of promise, what may not be hoped for from the intellectual future of a keen yet imaginative, brilliant yet conscientious, witty yet harmless in their wit, passionate in the wider sense, yet profoundly religious, people?

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

IV.
ST. CATHERINE.

“Whom I shall wed,” said Alexandria’s princess, “rare

Of beauty must be, past imagining;

So great I shall not think I have made him king;

More rich, sweet-hearted more, than summer air!”

In dreams she came where courts such state declare

Of Mother and Son enthroned, that worshipping

She knelt, though royal: the Child placed a ring

Upon her finger, and she woke—’twas there!

So Catherine became Christ’s. Again she kneels:

With rose and lily, in white and purple clothed,

No shining host now hails the heaven-betrothed,

But God’s bolt shatters the sharp torture-wheels.

Then Night and angels her pall-bearers are—

The Bridegroom waits on Sinai lone and far.

V.
ST. MARGARET.

Of all the virgins pure that bear the palm,

There is not any one more meek and mild

Than sweet maid Margaret. Tending while a child

The flocks, she drew near, in the mountain’s calm,

To the Good Shepherd, like a trustful lamb;
She felt that God with man was reconciled;
She saw diurnal victory undefiled
Of light o’er darkness hoist the oriflamme.

Of Morning. So flashed she, in dungeon drear,

The Cross uplifted, till the Dragon foul

Crouched at her feet, in fear of that white soul.

O Pearl of Antioch, so soft and clear!

O Daisy, with the chaste dew on thy lips!

Thou touchest Christ with stainless finger-tips.

VI.
ST. BARBARA.

Dioscorus of Heliopolis
Shut his wise daughter in a lofty tower,
Jealous of lovers; therein, for her bower,
She caused three windows to be made, in this
Her father disobeying, but said: “It is

Through three clear windows that the Almighty Power,

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shower

Light on the soul—with light immortal bliss!”

Scourged, by the gold hair dragged, slain by thy sire—

A turbaned heathen!—soft as rosy May,
Yet resolute, and avenged by instant fire,
Christian Bellona! sweet-browed Barbara!
With the Red Mantle of thy fortitude,
Thy Tower and Cannon, be my soul endued!

MARSHAL MacMAHON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS.

The inconveniences resulting from the present system of transmitting political intelligence from Europe to this country for the use of our daily journals are serious. An event of importance occurs to-day in London, Paris, Constantinople, or Rome; the same afternoon we read what purports to be an account of the event in our evening journals, and the next morning we are furnished with a few more details, accompanied often by a leading article hurriedly written and based, as a rule, upon no other information than that contained in the despatches. In twenty-four hours afterwards the event is almost forgotten; and by the time that the letters of correspondents on the spot, or the journals of the locality, can reach us, the incident has become an old story and the interest excited by it in the first place has faded away. This manner of dealing with matters of great importance would be lamentable, even if the information contained in the cable despatches were always correct, full, and uncolored by prejudice; but too often the despatches are models of what they should not be—that is, they are incorrect in matters of fact; marked by omissions of the truth and by suggestions of falsehood; and disfigured, in the majority of cases when the events reported have, or are supposed to have, some relation to the interests of the Papal See, by an ingenious perversion of the real and natural meaning of the incidents which they purport to describe. A heavy responsibility rests upon the conductors of our daily journals in this matter—a responsibility to which we should be glad to see them more sensitive than they now appear to be. They know well enough how it happens that the bulk of their cable despatches from the Continent of Europe is continually affected by an evident animus against the Holy See whenever there is an opportunity to display this feeling; they know well enough why it is that, whenever possible, a coloring hostile to the church, and calculated to excite Protestant or non-Catholic prejudice against her, is given to events.

The greater part of the European despatches of the New York journals is transmitted from London, being made up there chiefly from the despatches of the Reuter Agency, supplemented by the special despatches received by the leading London journals. The Reuter News Agency, which has its ramifications throughout all Europe, and is conducted with admirable skill and good management as a business enterprise, is in the hands of Jews; its agents have peculiar relations with the governments which stand in need of their services, and a system of mutual benefit is kept up between them; in return for the monopoly of official news and other similar favors on the part of the governments, the agents of the Reuter company transmit only such intelligence as is agreeable to the governments, and with such coloring as the governments wish. The relations existing between the Italian government and the Reuter Agency are understood to be especially intimate; and certain it is that from no capital in the world has more false and distorted news been sent forth than that which all the world has received from Rome since the Italian occupation of that city. As for the Continental despatches taken from the London journals and sent to New York, it should be remembered that not one of the London daily papers is in the Catholic interest, and that those whose despatches are most frequently sent to us—namely, the Times, the Daily News, and the Pall Mall Gazette—are inspired by a very lively hatred and fear of the church. We believe that the conductors of our own daily journals are for the most part actuated by honest motives. Their heads are sometimes deplorably at fault, but their hearts are generally right; and, with rare exceptions, they are free from the guilt of wilfully misrepresenting facts and designedly deceiving their readers. But too frequently they do permit themselves to be deceived or misled, in the manner we have explained, with respect to the true meaning and co-relation of political events on the continent of Europe.

The facts mentioned are, or should be, perfectly well known in the editorial rooms of all our journals; and it is certainly to be desired that our editors should cease to take their opinions at second-hand, and should begin to exercise their own good and honest judgment upon events as they occur abroad. If they were in the habit of doing this, and if they were furnished with cable information of a correct and uncolored character, they would not, we are certain, have fallen into the error of regarding the recent change of government in France as a wicked, base, and unprovoked conspiracy to destroy the republican institutions of that country, but would have recognized in Marshal MacMahon’s action the wise, absolutely necessary, and not too rapid determination of that ruler to save the republic, if possible, while it is still worth saving, and at all events to save France and society generally throughout Europe from the convulsion, anarchy, and destruction into which the revolutionists were so rapidly and surely dragging them. It is by no means certain that Marshal MacMahon will now succeed in the task before him; he may have waited too long. Nor are we concerned to prove that the motives of the Marshal-President in his dismissal of M. Jules Simon, and in his selection of his present advisers, were unmixed; but we are anxious to show to our readers that his action was necessary, and that the good wishes of Americans who reverence law and order, who detest red-republicanism and communism, who cherish religious liberty, and who dread and abhor tyranny, whether exercised in the name of many or of one, should be on his side. “I am conscious,” said Marshal MacMahon nine days after the dismissal of M. Simon—“I am conscious of having fulfilled a great duty. I have remained, and shall remain, absolutely within the bounds of legality. It is because I am the guardian of the constitution that I acted as I have acted. To attribute to me an intention of assailing the constitution is a misconstruction of my character. The country will soon comprehend that my sole aim is the salvation of France and of the government which she has given herself.”

We believe that these are sincere and honest words; and we shall have no difficulty at least in showing that Marshal MacMahon could not have acted otherwise than he did, unless he had been prepared to surrender the virtual government of the republic into the hands of men who are leagued together to destroy the rights of property; to degrade marriage; to enslave, if not wholly to overturn, the church; to cut her off from her connection with her earthly head; to reduce her prelates, if they were permitted to exist at all, to the condition of servants of the civil power; to exile her contemplative and teaching orders; to take from her the right of educating her children; and to drag France, ere long, into an alliance with the revolutionary associations in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Russia, which dream of establishing on the ruins of religion and of society a new confederation from which God shall be banished, and over which Satan shall rule supreme. Comparatively few of the constituents of the Gambetta party in the French Assembly are aware of the designs of the leaders of this faction; but enough light has within the past few weeks been thrown upon their machinations fully to justify the President in making a firm stand against their further progress.

M. Jules Simon refused to aid the President in executing this determination; and M. Simon was removed to give place to a minister who would co-operate with his chief. So powerful had the Gambetta faction become in the Assembly that the whole of the cabinet followed M. Simon in his enforced retirement from office, and the President was for the moment left alone. The men whom he called to his aid, however, and who, indeed, had encouraged him to dismiss M. Simon, were prompt in taking up the fallen reins of office, and the government, without a day’s delay, began its work of preserving France from her worst foes. The task before them is a most arduous one, and it has been begun none too soon. Let us show how it became necessary that it should be undertaken at all.

The French Assembly was re-convened at Versailles on the 1st of May after the usual Easter recess. During the vacation events had occurred which made it probable that the long-threatened rupture between the Gambetta faction, or Extreme Left of the Chamber, and the conservative elements in the executive department of the government, could not be delayed much longer. The administration had indeed gone to the very furthest point of concession in endeavoring to satisfy the demands of the Left. The consent of Marshal MacMahon had been given to these concessions, but it was known that this assent had been extorted from him with difficulty, and that he was personally of the opinion that the more was given to the Gambettists the more would they ask, and that the true and safe course was that of steady and uncompromising resistance to their unconstitutional and revolutionary demands. The Left, by skilful management of the press in its interest; by the manipulations of the local public functionaries who had from time to time been appointed at its request, or whom it had been able to purchase; by adroit misrepresentations and exaggerations of the policy of the conservative members of the Assembly; and by the not infrequent maladroit utterances and acts of certain of the imperialist and monarchical members, had contrived to make an imposing show of their strength in the country as well as in the Assembly. It is no doubt true that, all other things being equal, a large majority of the French people would prefer a republic to any other form of government. But the republic which would satisfy them is not at all the republic which would satisfy M. Gambetta and his friends. The republic which the majority of the French people desire is a republic in which property would be safe; in which law and order would reign; in which God would be respected; and in which the church would be free. The republic of Gambetta would possess none of these characteristics; but Gambetta and his lieutenants had been allowed to assume the attitude of the especial friends and defenders of republican institutions, and many of their members in the Assembly owed their election to the votes of good Catholics and sober citizens. They now felt themselves strong enough to advance further, and to wrest from the administration a still greater share of power.

Marshal MacMahon was himself irremovable for three years longer, only four years of his Septennate having expired. But it might be possible, in the opinion of the Gambettists, to force him to accept a cabinet which should be dictated by themselves, and which would hand over to them the virtual control of the government. One of the members of the then cabinet, they believed, would be useful to them, and their plans involved his retention. What was the nature of the communications which are said to have taken place in secret between MM. Gambetta and Simon cannot at present be known. Nor can we unveil the mysteries of the correspondence which has been kept up during the last few years between the controlling members of the French Extreme Left and the revolutionary leaders in England and throughout the Continent of Europe. The operations of the secret societies are seldom brought to light until after their work has been accomplished—and not always even then. The once famous “International Society of Working-men” has ceased to exist for all practical purposes; but it, at the best, was only an engine invented and put in motion by men who still are laboring in the secrecy of Masonic lodge-rooms and in the caucus-chambers of hidden political organizations to accomplish the destruction of Christian society and Christian government. It cannot be doubted that a certain solidarity unites the socialists of France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal, and that they have the means of acting together. The Gambetta faction in France by no means stood alone in their recent attempt to gain the upper hand in the administration of the republic; they had the active sympathy and the moral support of their confrères throughout Europe.

Now, the great bulwark of the conservative republic in France is the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic faith, the Roman Catholic people. So long as the church is free and undisturbed in France—free to pursue her work of educating her children, preserving morality, and saving souls—the French people, of whom all but a small fraction belong to her, will remain tranquil and happy, and they would make short work of men who proposed to set up in France a communistic and atheistic republic. They are quite well contented with the republic as it at present exists, and are hopeful of its future; under it the church for the first time has been allowed full right of teaching; and the avidity with which Catholics availed themselves of the privileges conferred by the new university law sufficiently attests at once their intelligence and their zeal. Still, the Catholics in France, like the Catholics throughout the rest of the world, have a sorrow and a grievance; and French Catholics, like all other Catholics, claim the right to express this sorrow and to do what is in their power to redress this grievance. The earthly head of their church is a prisoner in his own city; he has been despoiled of his patrimony and plundered of his crown; his jailers threaten from time to time to deprive him of the little that is left to him; there is positive danger that the freedom of the election of his successor will be assailed, and that the church throughout the world may be subjected, through the malice of her foes at Rome, to the gravest perils. The French Catholics conceive that it is their right and their duty to protest unceasingly against this state of things, and to inspire their government to speak in their name—and, if occasion arises, to act in their name—for the purpose of protecting the Holy Father from further insults and oppression, and of seeking to bring about the peaceable restoration of his independence. In all this they are strictly within the limits of their constitutional rights as citizens of the French Republic.

Let us bring the matter home to ourselves. Suppose that a petition should be drawn up praying President Hayes to instruct our minister at Rome to represent to the government of Italy that nine millions of American Roman Catholics felt themselves deeply aggrieved and injured by certain acts of the Italian government towards the Pope, and that they considered these acts all the more unjustifiable because they were one and all in open and undisguised violation of the promises made by the Italian government to the whole Catholic world; suppose that this petition should be signed by every Catholic man and woman in the United States and sent to the President; would it be said, then, that we were exceeding our rights as citizens, and that we should be punished for our temerity? The President might do as he pleased with the petition; he might act upon it or cast it aside—that would be for him to decide; but could we, as citizens, be blamed and punished for exercising the right of petition in order to make known our feelings upon a matter which touches us so closely? Yet this is all that the French Catholics have done; and it is because of the solidarity of interests and of purpose, of hope and of fear, which exists between the revolutionists and socialists of Italy and of the other Continental nations that the Gambettists in France were spurred up to make this perfectly legitimate action of the French Catholics the pretext for a new and desperate assault upon the liberties of the church in France—an assault under cover of which, and aided by what seems to us very much like treachery on the part of M. Jules Simon, they hoped to compel Marshal MacMahon to capitulate to them.

The allocution of the Pope issued on the 12th of last March had moved to the very depths the hearts of Catholics in France, as it had moved the hearts of the Catholics of every other land. They felt that it was impossible for them to remain silent after hearing that most pathetic and powerful appeal; they wished that their reply should be as emphatic as possible, and that it should consist of acts as well as of words. They resolved to draw up addresses to the Holy Father; to organize pilgrimages to convey these addresses, with their gifts, to Rome; and to devise means whereby they could express to their own government their anxious wish that it would use its influence with the government of Italy in behalf of the restoration of the independence and freedom of the Pope. Each of these projects was entered into with commendable zeal; and early in April the Bishop of Nevers addressed a letter to Marshal MacMahon, asking him, in the name of his flock, to use the influence of France at the court of King Victor Emanuel and at other courts for the protection of the Pope and for the restoration of his rights. The marshal’s cabinet at this moment were greatly under the influence of M. Jules Simon, the President of the Council; they were imbued with the idea that it would not be safe for them to exasperate the Gambetta faction; and they persuaded the marshal to approve a letter addressed by the Minister of Public Worship to the bishop, in which entire disapproval of his appeal was expressed, with the remark that “the marshal, as a sincere friend of religion, saw with pain the clergy intervening in internal, and still more in foreign, politics.” The Gambettists were encouraged by this mark of weakness on the part of the government, and prepared to push their advantage. But the Catholics did not choose to take their views of duty from the dictates of a Council whereof M. Simon was the chief; and they continued to organize their pilgrimages and to draw up and circulate their addresses to the Pope. On the 19th of April the Bishop of Nevers, not at all disconcerted by the rebuke which he had received from the Cabinet, addressed a letter to the Mayor of the Nièvre, in which he explained to that official what, in his opinion, was the duty of all good Catholics occupying influential positions.

“The Pope being no longer free in Rome,” wrote the bishop to the mayor, “the result is that we ourselves are no longer free in our consciences, and we consequently should use all our influence to obtain a change in such an abnormal state of things, and the restoration to the sovereign of our souls of the independence which he absolutely requires in order to guide us. We must first instil these views in the minds of the population whose interests are confided to us. We must then concert together to cause similar convictions to prevail in the various councils of the country.”

On the 20th, at a cabinet council, the general petitions of the Catholics addressed to the government were taken into consideration, and it was proposed that, in order to silence the complaints of the Gambettists, who were declaiming violently that the circulation and presentation of such memorials would embroil France in a difficulty with Italy, the bishops should be ordered to forbid the further exposure of these petitions in their churches for signature. But the marshal on this occasion displayed a little more firmness and the matter was passed over without action. A few days before this an event had occurred in Italy that served to increase the distrust with which Marshal MacMahon already regarded the secret intentions of the leaders of the Left. In Benevento, near Letino, and again near Rome, the government had arrested a number of socialists who, it appears, were engaged in a conspiracy for the establishment of a Red Republic. The papers found on the persons of the arrested men were of the usual inflammatory character, and set forth, among other things, that “man ought not to be subjected to any tyranny, human or divine; that the principle of private property is the climax of infamy, because it creates inequality between men; that the union between men and women ought to be free; and that the state is the denial of the most sacred principles.” The chief leader of the band, who was arrested with about fifty of his adherents, was a young Milanese named Caffiero, a man of wealth and position; and an examination of his papers disclosed the fact that his association was only one of a large number of others spread throughout Europe, and that the names of some of the leading radical republicans of France appeared upon a list which was believed to enumerate the advisers and real leaders of the conspirators. On the 28th of April, however, the cabinet again induced the marshal to make another effort to conciliate the Gambettists, who had redoubled their agitation against the Catholic movement, which had by this time become very general throughout the whole country. On that day the Minister of the Interior issued a circular to all prefects, directing them to discourage the signature of the Catholic protests and petitions by not allowing them to be publicly circulated within their respective jurisdictions. The circular—to which Marshal MacMahon assented after much pressure—instructed the prefects to regard these petitions and protests as “an unjustifiable and illegal interference in the legislative and domestic affairs of a friendly foreign state,” and to do all in their power to suppress them. Gambetta himself could scarcely have said more; but the marshal was quite correct in his opinion that Gambetta would still ask for more. Meanwhile, the mot d’ordre to the Gambettists had gone forth to strike terror into the hearts of their opponents by public manifestations. The students of the Sorbonne were instigated into making violent assaults upon the Catholic universities; on the 1st of May five hundred students assembled in front of the Catholic university in the Rue de Vaugirard, where they insulted the Catholic students and professors by indecent harangues and by singing blasphemous parodies of a hymn to the Sacred Heart; dispersed by the police, they separated only to assemble again before the Jesuit school in the Rue de Shomond, where the same disorderly and disgraceful scenes were repeated until the police arrived and arrested the ringleaders of the mob. In all the cities where the Gambettists were sufficiently numerous manifestations against the church and her liberties were organized; and in some cases the zeal of the disciples so far outran the directions of the leaders that it was with difficulty the latter prevented the former from outrages which would have alarmed and disgusted the whole country.

Affairs were in this condition when the Chambers reassembled on the 1st of May. The Left lost no time in bringing forward their guns and forcing the fighting. M. Leblond was put up by them in the Chamber of Deputies to give notice of a question addressed to the government “as to the measures which it proposed to take to repress Ultramontane intrigues.” M. Jules Simon, hastening to comply with the demands of the men with whom, as it now appears, he was secretly in accord, at once replied that the debate on the proposed question could take place on the next day. The Catholic members of the Chamber seem to have already distrusted the sincerity of M. Simon. One of them—the eloquent and fearless Count de Mun—announced that he and those who acted with him insisted upon a clear understanding of the position of the government.

“We shall insist upon knowing,” said he, “whether the government accept the responsibility for the campaign that is being waged by means of impure calumnies against the Catholics of France. The patriotism of French Catholics cannot be called in question; it is above suspicion. In what we are doing—in what we wish to do—we are claiming but our rights. We demand, however, that the government, to which we give our support, should free itself from the responsibility for the attacks made upon us, which render our position intolerable.”

M. Simon seems to have perceived that matters were growing serious, and that he could not much longer continue to pretend to serve two masters; but he resolved to struggle still to maintain his position. On the following day, after M. Leblond had put his question and supported it by a harangue in which he urged that the government should at once proceed to repress by the most stringent means “the Ultramontane intrigues,” M. Simon addressed the Chamber in a speech highly disingenuous and full of double meanings. It was virtually an appeal to the Gambetta faction to permit him to remain in power in order that he might do their work; while at the same time it was an attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the Catholics by hypocritical professions of respect for religion and its rights. The government had been blamed, he said, for permitting Catholic newspapers to assail Italy; but the government could not prevent this; the law would punish the writers, if what they wrote was punishable under the law. On the other hand, the government would not tolerate any attack upon the Catholic religion—“which it sincerely respected”—and would protect the rights and liberties of Catholics. In fact, the church in France enjoyed to-day more freedom than at any previous time. But it was necessary to limit this freedom. For instance, the government “tolerates” the existence of Catholic societies so long as they are used only for the purposes set forth in their statutes, but it had interdicted the Catholic committees which were employed in political undertakings and which had “formidable ramifications.” Having gone thus far, M. Simon thought he might as well go a little further, and he proceeded to make a statement which was a direct insult to the intelligence of the whole Catholic world. “The Catholic petitions and the demonstration made by the Bishop of Nevers,” said he, “were based upon a fiction—namely, that the Pope is a prisoner in the Vatican”; “the law of guarantees has taken every care of the spiritual independence of the Holy Father”! And he then went on to condemn the petitions as “an interference in the internal affairs of a neighboring country,” and to remind the Chamber that the government had done all in its power to suppress these lawful manifestations of Catholic feeling. The government, he added, would continue to protect the clergy as long as they confined themselves to their spiritual duties, but would in the future punish them severely “if they encroached upon the civil power”—that is, if they continued to exercise their freedom and to discharge their duty by protesting against the acts of the Sardinian robbers, and by seeking to enlighten the public mind and conscience as to the real condition of the head of the universal church.

This speech of the President of the Council was a virtual surrender to the Extreme Left; but M. Gambetta was determined to force a more formal and complete capitulation. On the following day, May 4, he resumed the debate in a speech which he had carefully prepared, and which he delivered with great eloquence and animation. Its spirit is expressed in the sentence which was received with the loudest applause by the Extreme Left: “It is time that lay society should drive back the church to that subordinate rank which belongs to her in the state.” M. Gambetta, our readers will perceive, is very far in advance of M. Cavour. The Italian statesman dreamed of “a free church in a free state”; the French revolutionist demands an enslaved church in an atheistic and communistic state. Listen to him:

“The church has set citizens by the ears, alarmed France, and troubled Europe. It is always thus: the monarchy was often compelled to resist the encroachments of the church, but the republic must do more, for now the state is assaulted on all sides in the name of religion and her very existence is threatened. The Catholic leaders—ex-ministers, senators, and members of this Chamber—have exalted the Pope as the supreme ruler of France and of the world; when the Pope has issued an order they exclaim: 'Rome has spoken and must be obeyed.’ The Pope on the 12th of March commanded that an agitation in his favor should be everywhere set on foot; immediately we behold deputations of Catholic royalists calling upon the Minister of Foreign Affairs, convocations being held, and petitions circulated in spite of the feeble pretences of the government to suppress them. It will not do to say that the church in France must have the liberty which she enjoys elsewhere; she shall not have it, for the reason, among others, that here the church is bound to the state, and the state is responsible for the language and the acts of the bishops. No longer must it be permitted that the Pope may address himself directly to France, without having first obtained the sanction of the civil power, and without first submitting to it his bulls, briefs, and allocutions. No longer must the bishops be allowed to address themselves to mayors and prefects, conveying to the civil functionaries of the republic orders received from Rome. It is useless to say that only a few of the bishops have done these things; for these bishops represent the whole hierarchy, the church is unanimous, and its submission to Rome is complete. There is no such thing as resistance or opposition in the church; the old Gallican liberties have been swept away by the Syllabus and by the Vatican Council. The Pope must not be permitted again to usurp the rights of the state, as he has recently done in appointing one of his bishops chancellor of a French university and giving him the right of conferring degrees. I cannot understand how it happened that the papal instrument making this appointment was ever permitted to enter France! We must no longer endure these things; we must drive back the church to the place where she belongs. We need not fear that the people will not be on our side; if there is one thing more than another that is repugnant to France, it is the yoke of clericalism; and it cannot be too strongly said that clericalism is the enemy of the country.”

To this bitter harangue M. Jules Simon had no reply; he contented himself with declaring that he and the cabinet were not subject to the dictation of any power behind the throne, and that perfect harmony existed between the marshal and himself. He hastened to add that he would accept, in the name of the government, the order of the day proposed by M. Leblond, which was in these words:

“The Chamber of Deputies, considering that the recrudescence of Ultramontane manifestations constitutes a danger to the domestic and foreign peace of the country, calls upon the government to make use of the lawful means which it has at its disposal.”

This was adopted by a vote of 361 against 121; thus M. Gambetta won his victory, and, so far as M. Simon could pledge it, the government was pledged to carry out the demands of the foes of the church. This was on the 4th of May. Marshal MacMahon, it appears, hesitated as to his future course; but it appears also that he was conscious he had been betrayed into an intolerable position. He seems to have determined, from that moment, to dismiss M. Simon, and to appeal to the country to sustain him in his refusal to comply with the unconstitutional and tyrannical demands of the revolutionists; but, with what may seem to some an unwise timidity, he resolved to wait for some other act on the part of M. Simon which might be made the immediate ground for his dismissal.

He had not long to wait. During the next few days the sittings of the Chamber were characterized by great excitement and tumult. M. Simon was made the target of continual attacks; he was accused of having formerly belonged to the International Society, and of having been morally in league with the Communists who assassinated the Archbishop of Paris. He defended himself with vehemence, but his affiliation with the Gambetta faction became daily more apparent. He promised to draw up and send to the bishops a stringent circular, warning them that they would be held to a strict responsibility for all their future acts. The Committee of the Budget, on the 12th of May, reported in favor of according the sum annually paid for the support of the church, $10,626,199; but it accompanied this recommendation with the remark that it was now the duty of the government to revive and enforce a number of obsolete and almost forgotten laws which had been enacted, from time to time, by various governments which had desired to enslave the church. If these obsolete enactments should now be enforced, no French bishop could visit Rome without the consent of the government; no subscriptions for the Pope could be raised in France; no papal brief or bull could enter France, and no council or diocesan synod could assemble, without the consent of the government; and the ecclesiastical seminaries would be compelled to teach that the civil government is supreme in all things. M. Simon, it was understood, was about to enforce these unjust and virtually abrogated restrictions, and the Gambettists were in high feather. But their exultation was soon to be changed into disappointment and rage.

The Chamber of Deputies had before it a bill modifying the organization of municipalities, and another measure for the repeal of the law on the restrictions of the press which had been passed two years ago to secure social order. The cabinet had consulted upon these measures and had agreed upon the line which the ministers should take in opposing them. To this agreement M. Simon was a consenting party; it was well understood between him and the marshal that when these measures came up for decision M. Simon should explain that the government could not consent to them. But the new masters of M. Simon held him to the engagement he had made with them; and when these measures were brought forward M. Simon found it convenient to be absent from the Chamber, and the government was again betrayed. The patience of Marshal MacMahon was now exhausted; he was perhaps glad that M. Simon had so soon furnished him with a sufficient reason for his dismissal. Early on the morning of May 16 the marshal, having, it is said, passed a sleepless night, addressed the following note to M. Simon, and sent it to him without consulting with any of the other members of the government:

“I have read in the Journal Officiel the report of last night’s proceedings in the Chamber of Deputies. I observed with surprise that neither you nor the Keeper of the Seals put forward from the tribune the reasons which might have prevented the repeal of a press law, passed less than two years ago on the motion of M. Dufaure, and which you yourself quite recently wished to see applied in the courts of law. And yet it had been decided in several meetings of the cabinet, and indeed in the council held yesterday morning, that you and the Keeper of the Seals should undertake to oppose the motion for the repeal of the law.... In view of such an attitude on the part of the chief of the cabinet, the question naturally arises whether he retains sufficient influence to assert his views successfully, An explanation on this point is indispensable; for I myself, although not, like you, answerable to Parliament, have a responsibility towards France which to-day more than ever must engross my attention.”

M. Simon, upon receiving this note, saw that between his two stools he had fallen to the ground; but he made one more effort to again deceive the marshal. He repaired to the Elysée with a letter of resignation in his pocket; but before presenting it he asked the marshal if it were not possible that they should continue to act together. “No,” was the reply. “I have gone as far as I can possibly go in the wake of you and your allies; I shall go no further.” M. Simon then presented his letter of resignation, which was composed mainly of rather lame excuses for his absence from the Chamber on the two occasions complained of by the marshal. Immediately afterwards the other members of the cabinet resigned, in order to leave the marshal full liberty of action; and by the time the Gambettists had eaten their breakfasts they learned that they had overshot the mark, and that, instead of forcing Marshal MacMahon to accept their revolutionary programme, they had driven him to dismiss from his councils the man on whom they most relied, and in all probability to surround himself with men whom they could neither frighten nor purchase.

The excitement among all the members of the Assembly was great as the news spread; and a meeting of the Gambettists was called for the same evening, at which a line of action was laid down. One of the first things to be done, it was agreed, was to use the machinery at their disposal “in order properly to inspire foreign public opinion,” so that it might react upon France; and during the night “the republican leaders sent to foreign journals instructions to insert opinions upon the crisis” which would have the effect of alarming the marshal by holding up before him the threat of the displeasure of Germany and Italy. The London journals were especially inspired in this sense; and it was thus that our own journals, re-echoing this echo of the Gambetta caucus, gave their readers the idea that Marshal MacMahon had dismissed his cabinet in order to destroy the republic and to engage at once in a war against Italy for the restoration of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. The session of the Chamber of Deputies on the 17th was excited; and M. Gambetta once more demonstrated the foolishness of those who, deceived by his affected moderation and calmness during the last two years, had believed that this fou furieux had become a decent and practical statesman. He moved the resolution which had been adopted at the caucus the preceding night, and supported it in a speech full of fire and venom. The resolution, which the Chamber accepted by a vote of 355 against 154, simply declared that “the confidence of the majority can only be enjoyed by a cabinet which is free in its action and resolved to govern in accordance with republican principles, which can alone secure order and prosperity at home and abroad”—words with which no one can find fault. But M. Gambetta, giving full vent to his rage at finding himself foiled at the very moment when he was dreaming of victory, declared that the dismissal of M. Simon had been brought about by the intrigues of “a secret influence with which no ministry could cope.”

“It is not true,” he cried, “that the President of the republic bears a responsibility over and above that of the ministry. We must recall him to an exact observance of the constitution, and deliver him from perfidious counsels. The country wishes to be rid of the nightmare of those men of reaction who show their livid faces at all moments of uncertainty. If the Chambers are dissolved we have no fear of the result, but the country may see in it a prelude to war. Criminals are those who would provoke it.”

No one thinks of provoking war save M. Gambetta and his friends, and they are the only criminals. Marshal MacMahon was not at all dismayed by this loud talk; on the same evening the new cabinet was announced. The Duke Decazes and General Berthaut, Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of War in the former cabinet, retained their portfolios; the Duke de Broglie was made President of the Council and Minister of Justice; M. de Fourtou, Minister of the Interior; M. Caillaux, Minister of Finance; M. Paris, Minister of Public Works; M. de Meaux, Minister of Agriculture; and M. Brunet, Minister of Public Instruction. The cabinet is a homogeneous and a respectable one; as long as it remains in office the country may be certain, at least, that order will be maintained and that the plots of the Reds will be frustrated. During the morning of the 18th the Gambettists were very busy in preparing to give battle to the new cabinet. But they found themselves again disconcerted by the firmness of the President, who, exercising his constitutional right, sent a message to both houses, adjourning their session until the 16th of June. In this message Marshal MacMahon explains that he has scrupulously conformed to the constitution. He appointed the cabinets of M. Dufaure and of M. Simon with the object of placing himself in accord with the majority in the Chamber; but neither of these cabinets were able to unite in the Chamber a majority capable of causing constitutional and proper ideas to prevail.

“I could not,” the marshal went on to say, “take a further step on the same path without making an appeal to the republican fraction which desires a radical modification of all our institutions. My conscience and my patriotism do not permit me to associate myself even distantly with the triumph of these ideas, which can only engender disorder and the humiliation of France; and so long as I hold power I shall use it within legal limits to prevent that consummation, for it would be the ruin of the country. But I am convinced the country thinks as I do. It was not the triumph of these theories which the country desired at the last elections, when all the candidates availed themselves of my name. If it were to be again interrogated it would repudiate such a confusion of ideas. I am firmly resolved to respect and maintain the existing institutions of the country. Until 1880 I can propose no modification, and contemplate nothing of the kind. In order to allow the excitement to calm down, I invite you to suspend your sittings for one month. You will then be able to discuss the Budget. In the meantime we will watch over the maintenance of public peace. We will suffer nothing at home tending to compromise it; and it will be maintained abroad, I am confident, notwithstanding the agitations which disturb a portion of Europe, thanks to our good relations with all the powers and our policy of neutrality and abstention. On this point all parties are agreed, and the new cabinet holds the same views as the old. If any imprudence in the language of the press compromises the concord which we all desire, I shall repress it by legal means. To prevent this I appeal to that patriotism which is wanting in no class in France.”

Violent were the scenes in both Chambers when this message was read, but they were cut short by the firmness of the new ministers. M. Gambetta attempted to speak; his voice was drowned by shouts of “Down with the Dictator!” In the Senate M. Simon essayed to deliver an oration, but the Duke de Broglie announced that no one could speak, as the President had adjourned the session. The houses separated in confusion, and the Gambettists occupied themselves during the next few days in issuing inflammatory appeals to the country. The new government began without delay the task of strengthening itself by the removal of disaffected prefects, sub-prefects, and other department officials, and this work has been carried out with the same thoroughness that is displayed in our own country after a radical administrative change.

All this is the prelude to an appeal to the country in the shape of a general election for a new Assembly. The people will be summoned to decide, not whether they wish a republic or a monarchy, but whether the republic shall be entrusted to the extreme radical party or to those who can and will save France from the ruin into which Gambetta and his crew would engulf it. The decision will be waited for with anxiety, but without fear on our part. The French people, we believe, are sound at heart, and have no wish to resign themselves into the hands of men who fear not God nor regard man save as a convenient tool for their own ends. Meanwhile, however, the utmost circumspection should be exercised by the new government. Prince Bismarck is enraged when he sees France strengthening herself; he is delighted when he beholds her weakening herself by internal dissensions. Thus growls of displeasure at the check given to the Gambetta party have already been heard from Berlin, and the German press has been instructed to represent that the new French administration intends “to restore the Papacy through the humiliation of Germany.” The Italian government, troubled with a bad conscience, indulges in similar anticipations; and the first duty of the Duke Decazes has been to reassure these cabinets and to point out that the French government wishes simply to devote itself to the domestic interests and safety of France. We believe that this is the plain truth. If Marshal MacMahon and his present advisers are sustained, France will be saved from domestic ruin, and her salvation will go far towards checking the revolution in other countries.

The time will come, no doubt, when France will again assert herself in European affairs, but with a wisdom gathered from her terrible reverses and humiliation. For those reverses she had no one but herself to blame. They were the bitter fruit of an overweening pride, and of the desertion of those eternal principles of justice and right, and of the faith that embodies them, close adherence to which alone makes nations truly great. France is coming back to her faith, and with her faith will return her greatness, her nationality, her life. Before, however, she can make her voice heard in Europe she must speak in clear, calm, and not discordant tones. She must be united in herself, one nation, one people, with one heart and one soul. It is this that Germany dreads of all things, and consequently the threats and intrigues of Germany and Italy will be exerted to the utmost in aid of Gambetta and his faction, who, indeed, have much strength of their own. While we are far from thinking that the contest will be an easy one, we have little doubt as to the final issue. The republic of order in France is the Catholic republic. The French nation is Catholic. All the real glories of France are indissolubly linked with the Catholic name. Her greatest disasters are as fatally linked with the party of which Gambetta is to-day the ostensible leader. It is time for Catholic France to gather herself together and arise in a strength that she never before had the opportunity of possessing. The way is open. She stands now quite untrammelled from alliances with any dynasty or name. Her fate lies in her own hands, and the honest soldier who has guarded so well her truest interests will not betray the trust placed in him by his countrymen.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Life of the Ven. Clement Mary Hofbauer, C.SS.R. By the Author of the Life of Catharine McAuley, etc. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

Father Hofbauer was a second St. Alphonsus in the Congregation of the Redemptorist fathers, and the founder of the institute as existing outside of Italy. He will probably be canonized; and it would not be a matter of surprise if the veneration for his memory in Austria and the neighboring countries, in case this solemn recognition is accorded to his sanctity by the Holy See, should equal that for St. Vincent de Paul in France. He was a plain, simple man, of humble origin, moderate parts and learning, but truly angelic purity and miraculous sanctity. The influence he obtained and the good he accomplished are simply wonderful. The history of his life is graphically portrayed by the religious lady who has written his biography. We could wish that every priest and every ecclesiastical student in the United States might read it. The scandal and mischief wrought by perverse men of brilliant intellectual gifts, like Gioberti and Döllinger, by apostate princes, faithless prelates, and unworthy or careless priests, are best repaired by such worthy successors of the apostles as the Venerable Father Hofbauer. The study of their characters and actions is better than the most thorough course of polemics, as an antidote to every kind of pseudo-Catholic liberalism.

The Life of Christopher Columbus. By Arthur George Knight, of the Society of Jesus. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

Christopher Columbus is, and always will remain, one of the greatest figures in history and one of the grandest of Catholic heroes. He may be said to have passed through all human experience. He was born in poverty and schooled in poverty. His days were cast in one of those eventful periods in the world’s history when “the old order changeth, yielding to the new.” With ideas in his mind just beyond his time, and convinced himself of their truth and power, he had to struggle hopelessly for years under the most adverse circumstances before he could imbue other minds with the ideas that possessed him. He could only think and talk and plan. He was powerless to act, for lack of means. He had the satisfaction of being regarded as a dreamer by the enlightened men of his time. At last his ideas prevailed, and resulted in the discovery of a new world.

Then came his hour of triumph—a triumph unparalleled in history; and after it, more bitter than his early struggles upwards, ingratitude, contempt, chains, and misery. There is nothing more romantic than this story, nothing fraught with more solemn lessons. Through all, through triumph as through adversity, through poverty as through greatness, stands out the true Catholic, who cherished his faith above all things, who in all things looked first to the greater glory of God, and who from first to last lived the life of a practical Catholic. Indeed he was truly a holy man, and strong efforts are now being made for his canonization.

It seems strange that this great Catholic figure should have fallen so completely into Protestant hands. There are admirable histories of him in English, works that have won deserved fame for their authors, but they are all written by Protestants, who, however well disposed they may be, must in the nature of things make mistakes when treating of Catholic subjects. Grave mistakes have been made, not by Protestants alone, but by Catholics also, in the story of Columbus’ life. It is with a view to rectify these mistakes, and to present to the Catholic reader the true story of a most important, edifying, and interesting life that Father Knight has written the present volume. He has done his work thoroughly well, and we have no doubt that the book will become a favorite with all classes of Catholic readers.

Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Marylanders. By Esmeralda Boyle, author of Thistledown, Felice, etc. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

This little volume is replete with interest. It recalls in graceful language the memory of men who have honored by their upright lives and heroic actions the gallant State that gave them birth. It is no small boast for Maryland that no State in the Union has produced more men distinguished for their ability, patriotism, and, above all, a high-toned chivalry which could never stoop to aught having the flavor of dishonor about it. These were the men who first won for our country the recognition of European scholars and statesmen. Their lofty principles, their graceful accomplishments, their scholarly attainments, and their dauntless courage drew on them the eyes of the world, and earned for their mother State the proud reputation she now enjoys. From the time that Lord Baltimore landed on her shores to the present day no public man has disgraced the fair record or blurred a page of the history of Maryland. And, indeed, the beginning of her civilized days was an eminently fit prelude to her whole subsequent career. From out of the first colony established on the banks of the Chesapeake flowed the doctrines of religious toleration and equal religious rights to all men irrespective of clime and color, at a moment when witch-burning fires lighted up the settlements of Massachusetts. The Indians of those times for once felt that Christianity and civilization were blessings and not a cloak to avarice and tyranny. “From the records left to us,” says Miss Boyle, “it is evident that these teachers endeavored by all mild and lawful means to elevate the hearts of the Indians to a knowledge of the true God. The Indian of the present day, dwelling on the border-lands of civilization, deems the white man a traitor to his word, an enemy to the Indian race, and a breaker of compacts, whose perfidy must be retaliated upon the innocent by fire and tomahawks. This is rather a sad commentary upon the savage or the Christian of our times. Which is it?”

Miss Boyle appropriately begins her series of biographical sketches with a notice of that truly grand historic figure, Daniel Dulany, the Nestor of the Maryland bar. The unflinching advocate of probity and truth, and a strong friend of freedom, he distinguished himself fitly for the first time by counselling opposition to the famous Stamp Act. His eloquence and fearlessness greatly helped the cause of the Revolution; for although he opposed immediate separation from England, his burning words kindled the fires of opposition to British rule. The name parce detortum is the same as Delany and indicates the Irish stock whence he sprang.

The paper on Charles Carroll of Carrollton is extremely interesting. It presents a very life-like picture of that great patriot, statesman, and devout Catholic. We behold the courtly and polished gentleman, tinged with the airs and manners of an education acquired in the gay capital of France. And though fashionable Paris was at that time the hotbed of infidelity, and Voltaire ruled supreme, young Carroll never became so imbued with the madness of the hour as to abandon the strong Catholic principles and spirit pious parents and teachers had early implanted in his heart. His name will ever remain an honor to his native State, and his virtues and loftiness of character an incentive to her children to cling to the highest standard of a true gentleman’s life.

It is evident that Miss Boyle had abundant materials at hand, for she is constrained at times to sacrifice method to condensation; and this, perhaps, is the worst that can be said of her interesting volume. The sketch of the Most Reverend John Carroll, first Archbishop of Baltimore, is illustrative of this defect. The writer labored under an embarras de richesses, and passes too brusquely from one incident to another.

It is not generally known, nor does Miss Boyle make mention of the fact, which has been already announced in this magazine, that at the time when John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was supplicating George III. to send more troops to America for the purpose of suppressing the unholy rebellion against his majesty’s benign sway, Father John Carroll, the Jesuit priest, was on a mission to Canada, seeking the non-intervention of that colony in the efforts of the States to free themselves from the yoke of British tyranny. And yet it is almost a Methodist article of faith that the Jesuits have ever been the enemies of the republic, and the sons of John Wesley its warmest friends.

William Pinkney, one of Maryland’s most gifted sons, whose eloquence ranks him with Pitt, Fox, and Burke, receives a most fitting tribute from the pen of Miss Boyle. The history of this wonderful man should be known and closely studied by the young men of our time; for few lives exhibit a more perfect pattern of true manliness. His struggles against early poverty and the numerous difficulties attending the efforts to acquire knowledge in those times gave earnest of his future success in life. The late venerable Chief-Justice Taney spoke of him in these words: “I have heard almost all the great advocates of the United States, both of the past and present generation, but I have seen none equal to Pinkney.” Rufus King, having once listened to him exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm “that the speech of Pinkney had enlarged his admiration of the capacity of the human mind.” Of such men is Maryland justly proud, and Miss Boyle has performed a timely and praiseworthy task in having brought us face to face with the heroes of a past generation, whose memory their native State should ever delight to honor.

Sidonie. (Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné.) From the French of Alphonse Daudet. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1877.

We understand that this story has had an enormous circulation in France. This circulation we are inclined to attribute rather to the author’s name than to any special excellence in the book itself. Alphonse Daudet is one of the pet French novelists of the day, and it takes much to destroy a well-earned reputation. Sidonie is a repulsive story, told with great skill, and embellished throughout by those thousand and one delicate artistic touches, lights and shades, of which French writers alone seem to possess the secret. M. Daudet is actuated by the very laudable design of punishing vice, and showing in a very strong and real light the awful, the tragic misery it brings upon the vicious and the good alike. All very well. Novelists, however, who take up this kind of theme—and many are very fond of it—have an unpleasant and untrue habit of making their good people fools or simpletons. It seems to us that, as a rule, good people, particularly good women, are remarkably keen in detecting falsehood and scenting rascality. In Sidonie it is all the other way. One detestable little wretch of a woman, who has not half an ounce of good in her whole system, sets all the good people by the ears, destroys the peace of happy families, ruins a great business-house, causes the suicide of several excellent and very charming characters, and ends by retiring to that kingdom from which she should never have been called—Bohemia.

It seems to us a pity that an author of such real power and skill in delineation of character and plot as M. Daudet should waste himself on the unutterably mean. We are not of the opinion that this world is given over to the dominion of the devil and his servants. It is not heaven to any of us; yet as between the good and the bad, all things considered, we believe that the good have the best of the battle even in this life. Of course novel-readers must have their villain, male or female; and the female villain must, of course, be very, very bad. Their viciousness, however, could be shown sufficiently, and the lesson it entails inculcated, without making them the pivots on which the world turns. It is the noble, not the ignoble, who really move the world; and until the race of the noble is exhausted, novelists may as well draw their heroes and heroines from that class. At least we object to their being for ever depicted as fools.

The translation of Sidonie is admirable. It is from the graceful and cultivated pen of Mrs. Mary Neale Sherwood.

Legends of the Blessed Sacrament. Gathered from the History of the Church and the Lives of the Saints. By Emily Mary Shapcote. London: Burns & Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

This is in every sense a most beautiful and attractive volume. The author has collected a large number of legends connected with the Blessed Sacrament. These are abundantly and very handsomely illustrated, and the letter-press itself is admirable. There is much more, however, than legends in the volume. The devotion of the church to the Blessed Sacrament is traced down to the very days of the apostles, verified by ample quotations, and illustrated by pictures taken from the Catacombs and the earlier monuments of Christian art. This is indeed an excellent and most valuable feature of the work. The whole is in keeping. The devotion is brought up to our own days, and its wonderful growth and development brought out in a clear and most interesting manner. The author has done her work skilfully, gracefully, and reverently. The admirable preface shows how much she is inspired by real love for and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. The last picture in the volume is a large and admirably-executed portrait of our Holy Father Pope Pius IX.

The Discipline of Drink: An Historical Inquiry into the principles and practice of the Catholic Church regarding the use, abuse, and disuse of alcoholic liquors, especially in England, Ireland, and Scotland, from the sixth to the sixteenth century. By the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. With an introductory letter to the author by His Eminence Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. London: Burns & Oates. 1877.

The best notice we can give of this valuable work will be to make a few extracts from Cardinal Manning’s letter. His Eminence says it is “the first attempt to collect the counsels and judgments of Catholic pastors and writers on the use of wine and on the sin of drunkenness.” He believes the book will be “of signal use in clearing away a multitude of prejudices, and perhaps some more reasonable censures, which have impeded the efforts we are making to check the spread of intoxication.” These “more reasonable censures” have been called forth by the words and acts of associations not in the unity of the Catholic Church, and particularly by Catholics having joined such societies and adopted their “wild talk, worthy of the Manichees.” Father Bridgett’s book, then, “will show how broadly the Catholic Church has always taught the lawfulness of using all things that God has made, in all their manifold combinations, so long as we use them in conformity to the law of God. Drunkenness is not the sin of drink, but of the drunkard.” On the other hand, “in every utterance of the church, and in every page of Holy Scripture, wine is surrounded with warnings,” says his Eminence, and adds that our author has “done well to point out that a new and more formidable agent of intoxication even than wine has in the last three centuries confirmed its grasp, chiefly upon the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races.” So that “no exact precedents can be found in the past action of the church as to the way of dealing with an evil new in its kind, and so far more formidable both in its spread and in its intensity”; while at the same time “the principles of the church are always the same, and, in bringing forth things new and old, forms may vary, but the mind and action are immutable.” The cardinal then proceeds to give his own views of what should be done. He is in favor of “a widely-extended organization,” and advocates total abstinence as the only hope for multitudes, and a specially meritorious act of self-denial in those who do not need it themselves, but embrace it for the sake of others. But—and to this we would call particular attention—the “widely-extended organization” should comprise, in his opinion, those who are not total abstainers. He expresses satisfaction at Father Bridgett having quoted in the appendix some words of his own. We quote them, too, because we most heartily agree with them: “Now, my dear friends, listen! I will go to my grave without tasting intoxicating liquors; but I repeat distinctly that any man who should say that the use of wine or any other like thing is sinful when it does not lead to drunkenness, that man is a heretic condemned by the Catholic Church. With that man I will never work. Now, I desire to promote total abstinence in every way that I can. I will encourage all societies of total abstainers. But the moment I see men not charitable attempting to trample down those who do not belong to the total abstainers, from that moment I will not work with those men. I would have two kinds of pledge: one for the mortified who never taste drink, and the other for the temperate who never abuse it. If I can make these two classes work together, I will work in the midst of them. If I cannot get them to work together, I will work with both of them separately.”

Father Bridgett has given in his appendix “a summary of the principal Catholic organizations which have lately been set on foot in these countries” (England, Ireland, and Scotland). Some of these organizations include partial abstinence in their rules. Another society is mentioned as existing in some parts of Germany, and approved by His Holiness Pius IX. and enriched with indulgences. The members of this last promise total abstinence from distilled liquors, and sobriety in the use of fermented drinks.

We hope this labor of love from the pen of Father Bridgett will have the circulation it deserves.

Spirit Invocations; or, Prayers and Praises publicly offered at the Banner of Light circle-room free meetings by more than one hundred different spirits, of various nationalities and religions, through the vocal organs of the late Mrs. J. H. Conant. Compiled by Allen Putnam, A.M., author of Bible Marvel-Workers, Natty: a Spirit, etc. Boston: Colby & Rich. 1876.

Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat would be an appropriate motto for this hodge-podge of nonsense and lunacy. Imagine a sane man being called on to believe that he is listening to prayers offered by the spirits of Tom Paine and Cardinal Cheverus through the same set of “vocal organs”! It is evident that the “prayers” were all ground from one mill, as there is the utmost sameness pervading them. Tom Paine condescending to come down from the pedestal of his celestial greatness, and praying with unctuous fervor to the God he blasphemed on earth, is a spectacle highly refreshing; but more astonishing still is it to find him surpass Father de Smet and Cardinal Cheverus in the ecstatic intensity of a mystical devotion. “We pray not for more blessings,” exclaims the pious Thomas; “we only pray that we may appreciate those already received; and when we lift up our souls in prayer, asking that thy kingdom may come on the earth, we do but ask that thy children in mortal may know themselves and their relations to thee.”

It is evident that the author of the Age of Reason has materially changed his “spirit” since he exuviated his mortal coil, or perhaps he has deftly substituted that of Mr. Putnam, A.M., for his own. This, we rather suspect, is the case. Theodore Parker, too, has been to camp-meeting up above; for a great change has come over the “spirit” of the frigid founder of New England transcendentalism. He prays with a vim that no leader of a revival at Sea Cliff or Sing Sing could ever hope to emulate, and appears shamefully unlike the Rev. O. B. Frothingham’s ideal of a hero. Some of the prayers are quite touching, and sound as if they had been pilfered from Catholic books of devotion.

Known too Late. By the author of Tyborne, Irish Homes and Irish Hearts, etc., etc. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

This little volume bears the impress of patient and painstaking care. The author is the happy possessor of a pure and pleasant style, and yet throws off nothing carelessly, as too many with facile pens are disposed to do. The narrative is done in subdued colors, and nowhere is good taste shocked by the utterance of extravagant or whimsical sentiments.

The plot of the story unfolds itself quite naturally, and, though the dénoûment is a hard one to bring about, it is done so ingeniously as not to appear at all violent. We can conscientiously say of this little book that it is a shade in advance of Catholic stories generally and is well deserving a perusal.

The Paradise of the Christian Soul. By James Merlo Herstius, of the Church of the B. Virgin Mary in Pasculo Pastoris, at Cologne. A new and complete translation. By lawful authority. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

A most complete manual of prayer for ordinary use. One cannot tire of it. The present edition is illustrated; but the illustrations might easily have been improved.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 149.—AUGUST, 1877.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN FRANCE AND ITS BEARINGS.

I.—QUESTION STATED.

The attention of the world at large is at present fastened on two important movements—the war between Russia and Turkey and the recent political changes in France. Both of these have the same origin, but the aspect of each is different. No one will dispute that both are fraught with most momentous interests, that their development will be watched with great concern, and that it is not impossible that their final issue may change the religious features no less than the territorial limits of Europe.

Our purpose in this article is to confine the attention of our readers to the affairs of France; not with the design of narrating the successive events which brought about the present crisis,[93] but with a view to the principles involved in the struggle and their bearing on the great interests of Europe, actual and prospective.

What agitates France at this moment is not an “ultramontane” and “clerical intrigue” to restore “the temporal princedom of the Pope,” or an “anti-republican” plot of legitimists to place Henry V. on the throne of his ancestors, as our daily newspapers of all political parties and the weekly Protestant journals of every sect would have the public believe. The real political leaders in France today are representative of none of these parties, nor are they champions of their distinctive principles or advocates of their cherished measures. They have other fish to fry. Some of the newspaper writers and correspondents would persuade their readers that the change of front in France by the government is owing to the influence exerted by Madame MacMahon over the President of the Republic, her husband. Drowning men catch at straws, and men who lack common sense clutch at any flimsy pretext to bolster up a foolish project.

The day of the supremacy of such influence in great state affairs is gone by; and, even were it not, the character of the men engaged in this weighty piece of political strategy is not made of stuff that would incline them to be led by the nose by a woman, whatever may be her reputation for piety or her supposed or declared inclinations for legitimacy. We venture the opinion that the most estimable Christian wife of the Marshal-President of the Republic of France is not wasting her time in fruitless political intrigues, but employs it better in telling her beads, in taking care of her children, and in works of charity to her neighbor. All these are random shots.

The raising of such false issues, however, serves the purpose of their inventors in throwing the public attention off the true scent, and thereby prolonging the opportunity for them to invent new schemes against public order and society under the restored leadership of the octogenarian, M. Thiers. This was their manœuvre in 1871, and “Prince Bismarck regretted the fall of M. Thiers, because he would have infallibly thrown France into the arms of M. Gambetta and anarchy.”[94] They also afford them additional chances of escape from the due and certain punishment which is impending over them.

These pretexts show also the craft of those who make them and the simplicity of their dupes. For they are well aware that there is a large class of persons, especially in Protestant communities, whose prepossessions are stronger than their attachment to Christianity, and there are no absurdities too great for them to swallow, provided only you bait them with the cry of “Popery!” “Vaticanism!” “Clericalism!” As for those who are caught by the cry of “anti-republicanism,” they appear not to understand that a king without the popular instincts of a people in his favor is a mere cipher, and that the age is past and never again to return, at least in Europe, when, as an Eastern despot, the king dare say: “L’Etat, c’est moi.”

The transformation that has taken place in the nations of Europe, the expansion of their narrow lines of policy into broader political principles, has been so rapid and powerful that its force in our day has passed beyond all possible human control. These principles have become profound convictions, and for not heeding them the people of France dethroned Charles X. and Louis Philippe; and were Henry V. placed to-day upon the throne of France with the intention of attempting to restore the ancient régime, it would be as vain, even though he should have Marshal MacMahon and the army at his command to back him, as an effort to stem and throw back the mighty torrents that pour their waters over the precipice of Niagara.

The tendency of modern society to a political equality, without distinction of the privileges of birth or rank, has its root in the spirit of Christianity. The Catholic Church, in this sense, is the most democratic institution that has ever existed upon this earth. There is no barrier in the path for its humblest member to become its chief in power and dignity. It is not seldom, too, that those who have risen from the lowest walk in life have been elected to this high position. The spirit of an age, rightly interpreted, is the breath of the Almighty stirring within men’s souls, which finds its utterance in their voices, even in spite of themselves. Nowhere has the Catholic Church been given such fair play, though this is yet imperfect, as in the democratic republic of the United States. This fact has been recognized by the supreme pastor of the faithful, Pius IX., and again and again he has called the attention of the world to it.

France has the opportunity under the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, if she only knew how to profit by it, of forming a political government adapted to the genius and character of her people and in harmony with her present wants and future greatness; to govern herself, if she wishes it, independently of an emperor or a hereditary monarch; and this task will be accomplished, unless hindered by that enemy of all rational liberty—a destructive radicalism. If the young Napoleon, or the Count of Paris, or Henry V. ascends the throne of France, it will be due to the Thierses, the Simons, and the Gambettas and their abettors.

II.—TWO MOVEMENTS IN THE WORLD.

There have been from the beginning only two fundamental movements in this world, and these are becoming in Europe more and more distinct, powerful, and antagonistic. The one has its source in the Catholic Church, which is the concrete form of the direct action of God on society in view of man’s true destination. The other consists in rebellion against this divine action, and finds on earth its headquarters and expression in heresies, in despotisms, and, more particularly in recent days, in organized secret societies.

III.—FIRST MOVEMENT.

The order and stability of modern society and civilization are based upon the truths which find their root and support in the doctrines unswervingly taught and uncompromisingly upheld by the Catholic Church. Among these great truths are the divinity of Christ and the divine establishment and perpetuity of his church upon earth; the unquestionable responsibility of both kings and peoples to the law of God; the indissolubility of the marriage tie and the sacredness of the family; the reign of the law of justice between man and man, and, when violated, the strict obligation of restitution; the sacredness of oaths and the equality of all men, without distinction of rank, color, or race, before God. By the undeviating application of these and other great first truths of divine revelation and of human reason, at the cost of the lives of millions of her children; by withstanding the fierce attacks of the barbarians of the northern forests of Europe; by her contest with Mahomet and his followers; and by her resistance to the errors and vices of her inconsistent and disobedient children, the Catholic Church formed the conscience of modern society, founded the nations of Europe, united them in a universal commonwealth called Christendom, in view and as the means of establishing the reign of God in men’s souls and upon earth, as preliminary to the kingdom of heaven hereafter, issuing finally into the Christian cosmos.

Such has been the work of the first movement.

IV.—SECOND MOVEMENT.

All heresies, all despotisms, all secret societies have this postulate in common: that the overthrow of the Catholic Church is a sine qua non to their attaining ultimate success. Hence there is an instinctive and unanimous sympathy among their adherents whenever there is an attack aimed against the Catholic Church—an unmistakable sign of their common origin and an unquestionable proof of their parentage. Peoples of countries distinguished for their profession of universal toleration and championship of the right of every individual to the enjoyment of his own religious convictions will applaud to the skies the violation of these principles, provided the persecuted be only Catholics! Every right guaranteed by constitutional law, every principle of divine and human justice, may be trampled under foot—yea, with sympathy and applause—provided those who do so are animated with hatred for the Catholic Church! Witness the public sympathy, both in England and the United States, with the war of imprisonments, fines, and banishments waged against Catholics, with murderous intent against their church, by the “iron and blood” chancellor of the Hohenzollern Empire; witness the confiscations and sacrilegious spoliations by the crew of infidels of Italy, led by a Mancini, against the church; witness the banishment of all the Catholic priests without exception from its district, in violation of the federal constitution, by the canton of Berne, and the robbery of the churches built by the sacrifices of loyal Catholics, which are given over to the use of a rebellious and insignificant faction by the authorities of the Swiss so-called republic; witness, to come nearer home, the assassination, by the agents of secret societies, of the President of Equador, and, within a few weeks, the poisoning of the Archbishop of Quito at the altar! There are none to raise a voice, not to say a cry of horror or indignation, among these sticklers for liberty and justice, in condemnation of this wholesale tyranny, these cruel persecutions, and this secret and deadly violence. This is well known by the atheists, who aim at the ruin of all Christian institutions: that to delude a large class in these so-called liberty-loving countries, and gain their sympathy, material aid, and the use and support of their press, all that is required to make them run like an enraged bull at a red rag is to shout lustily, “Ultramontanism!” “Vaticanism!” “Popery!”

Herein lies also the interpretation of the assertion of the governments actuated by an anti-Christian spirit and under the influence of members of secret societies, to whom they are bound to trim, that the present attitude of France is dangerous to the peace of Europe. That is, the secret designs of radicalism are detected, and their plots are in danger of being checkmated. “Let the galled jades wince.” At the same time it gives the explanation of the motives of Marshal MacMahon, which is nothing else than to head off the efforts of these anti-Christian conspirators, and prevent France from falling into their hands and the civilized world from witnessing the repetition of the atrocities of the Commune of the petroleuse notoriety of 1871. A large portion of the people, and with them the press, of England and the United States, is duped by cunning and designing men; and probably, if all were known, a portion of Bismarck’s Reptile Fund has found its way to their shores and done some service.

The present crisis in France is fraught with her deliverance as well as that of Europe from the most desperate and wide-spread organized conspiracy that has ever existed in the world. They fail to interpret rightly public events and to discern the signs of the times who take it to mean anything less than the saving of Christianity and modern civilization in Europe.

“Let order die!

Let one spirit of the first-born Cain

Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set

On bloody courses, the rude scene may end

And darkness be the burier of the dead.”

Such is their aim, and it is also their undisguised and outspoken word; for these men “know not how to blush.”[95]

And these are the chief characteristics of the second movement.

V.—THE LINES OF BATTLE.

The explosion of the first mine laid by secret societies has been heard in the outbreak of the war between Russia and Turkey, if we are to credit Disraeli, than whom no man is in a position to be better informed of the decisions gone forth from their secret revolutionary headquarters. Unless thwarted by a counter movement, prompted by the instincts of self-preservation on the part of all the Christian and conservative elements of European society, we may expect to hear, as in 1848, the successive explosions of revolution in Paris, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, and Berlin; and being more skilfully planned, and more extensively spread, and more powerful, a revolutionary upheaving of the populations in St. Petersburg and London as well as in the lesser centres of Europe, is not improbable.

Men who read in consequences their causes will not fail to see the significance of the position taken by the President of the Republic of France; for, whatever may be his reputation as a politician, his military sagacity and strategical genius are unquestioned. President MacMahon’s change of cabinet is the first declared, earnest, and decided step taken to avert from France and all Europe this great and threatening catastrophe. For Jules Simon surreptitiously attempted to insert the edge of the radical wedge, whose butt end is made up of socialism, communism, and anarchy, into the Republic of France, which M. Gambetta, his aspiring and designated successor, would have energetically and logically driven home and riven her asunder, to the delight of her enemies and to the advantage of her foes. Let us hope that the President of France has taken time by the forelock.

The die is cast; there can no longer be any neutrality or secondary motives to divide one’s allegiance between these two distinctly-drawn camps. He is a traitor to Christ and a renegade Christian who stands aloof or hesitates which side to take when a battle is fairly drawn between Christianity and atheism. Every Christian, whatever may be his peculiar tenets, will make common cause when the primary truths of divine revelation and the first principles of morality are at stake. All political party designations will be sunk into oblivion by men who intelligently and disinterestedly love their country and their race, when both society and civilization are endangered.

The present crisis in France is a call to both religion and patriotism, in their best and widest sense, to unite in a common defence of their truest and highest interests.

There is no alternative, and he who does not see this battle imminent in Europe is like an officer on board of a ship, lulled in a dream of false peace or disputing about the rigging of his vessel when the enemy is fastening a torpedo to its bow that will in a few seconds blow them all into atoms and send their vessel to the bottom of the ocean.

The conservative elements, if not from higher motives, will be forced to unite from the instinct of self-preservation to save their property from the petroleurs and their necks from the guillotine.

VI.—THE ISSUE OF THE BATTLE.

This movement in its weak beginnings in France, regarding only impending dangers to the state, will not exhaust itself until it has restored the Catholic Church to her normal position in Europe. This final result is no more intended by the leaders of the movement than it was the design of the Allied Powers to restore the Papacy at the downfall of the first Napoleon. It is a divine law that man acts, but God directs.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.”

There is, then, this increasing purpose running through the history of God’s dealings with the human race: to bring into clearer light the divine character of his church, his spouse, rendering it less and less possible for men to recognize his existence and not be Christians, and, being Christians, not to be Catholics. This is the key of universal history.

There is not an “ultramontane,” a “clerical,” or a “papist,” in the sense in which these words are used by those hostile to the actual movement in France; and if its final outcome be favorable to the Catholic Church, it is because this is the nature of things.

VII.—ERRORS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

Europe for the past century has been in the state of transition to a new epoch—a renewal of Catholicity. This statement is in flat contradiction with the assertions of some modern thinkers who claim the title of philosophers. They would have us believe that religious motives—or, as they term it, “theological motives,” which is the same thing; for theology is nothing else than the scientific statement of religion—are exhausted. This is equivalent to saying that human nature is exhausted; for religion is what lies deepest in human nature, and consequently all other motives will be exhausted before those of religion.

Religion is the very essence of man’s nature; for it springs from the intellectual sense of his entire dependence for existence on an absolute cause. Religion is, in its last analysis, reason’s recognition of God and man’s fulfilment of his relations to God. Religion and reason are, therefore, correlative.

Men who pretend that religious motives have ceased to have a strong hold upon human nature labor under a complete hallucination. First they fancy that those faculties through which God acts on the soul, and which bring the soul in contact with God, have by some strange freak suddenly become defunct. That religious motives to an almost incredible extent have become extinct in some men’s souls we, with pain and pity, admit; that this is the case with the bulk of mankind is an egregious mistake. There has seldom been an age when religious questions occupied so large a share of intellectual attention as our own; and religious motives still influence the bulk of mankind in their conduct.

It is too true, however, that a class of men have fatally succeeded, by a false education and an erroneous philosophy, in paralyzing the action of the noblest faculties of the soul; but this disease is confined to a small class. Deluded men! they would have the rest of mankind to esteem their descent as a privilege and count their defect an honor.

The second form in which the symptoms of this malady manifest themselves is the eschewing of the first principles of sound logic. As “God is a provisionary idea,” or “man’s intuition of himself projected into space,” or “the creation of a wish”—so runs their premise; and the religious faculties of the soul having become extinct, they jump to the most absurd of all conclusions: “God is extinct,” “the soul’s immortality is a fable,” and “religion is a worn-out superstition”! The inspired Psalmist wrote in his day that none but “the fool said in his heart, There is no God.” Were he now to come upon earth, he would be surprised to see the fools of his time dressed in the garb of philosophers and proclaiming from the house-tops as the highest wisdom, “God is extinct!” These delirious minds are like the ostrich, which, when on the point of being captured, blinds its eyes by thrusting its head under the sand, and foolishly fancies, because of its incapacity to see, it has destroyed its pursuers and escaped all danger.

“Le nid n’a pas créé l’oiseau.”

“I tell thee, friend, a speculating churl
Is like a beast some evil spirit chases
Along a barren heath in one perpetual whirl,

While round about lie fair, green pasturing places.”

The eternal God is, and in him is all that lives, moves, and exists, and his providence directs all things to the end for which he called them into existence.

The world is not out of joint, nor is the responsibility of setting it right placed upon the unsteady and feeble shoulders of inventors of absurd religions, the cogitators of false philosophies, or the dreamers of sterile Utopias.

God is not ousted from his creation as easily as these ambitious philosophers, who are so ready to occupy his place in the universe, would have the world believe.

VIII.—MISTAKE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.

The mistake of a class of speculative thinkers consists in regarding the state of transition of society from one epoch to another—in interpreting a phase of religion—as the change and vanishing of the indestructible elements of all religion.

A certain class of truths suits one age, awakens the greatest enthusiasm and profoundest devotion, and in another epoch falls dead almost upon the ears of men and hardly calls forth an audible response. Epochs differ from epochs in their aspirations and instincts, like those of individuals; and this is a law of the providential education and growth of the human race. One race of men differs from another in its capacity to seize hold of, appreciate, and give the proper expression to certain truths, and in turn is brought to the front ranks in the providential march of humanity. And this is the intention of the Author of the human family. Men of the same race differ also greatly from each other; for in the wide universe there are no two things in all respects precisely alike, and in this is seen displayed God’s creative power.

These separate epochs, this variety of races, and these differences among men afford to Christianity the opportunities and means of giving expression to the great truths contained in all religions of which she is the adequate representation. For Christianity is the synthesis of all the scattered truths of every form of religion which has existed from the beginning of the world, and the Catholic Church is its complete organic, living form. Christianity is the abstract expression of the Catholic Church, which, in the successive centuries of her existence, has come in contact with every race of men, and has known how to Christianize and retain them in her fold in harmony with their natural instincts. She has met humanity in every stage of its development, from the intellectual and refined Greek to the man-eating savage, and, by working on the foundations of nature, she has captivated them to the easy yoke of Christ. The Catholic Church alone has known how to supply the defects of human nature and correct its vices while giving free play to its instincts and retaining the charm of its native originality—not by a superior human sagacity or a preternatural craft, as sophists would make the world believe, but because in her dwells that divine Spirit which breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, and made him a living, rational, immortal soul, and in whom he lives, moves, and has his being.

God is not extinct nor are religious motives effete. The mistake of these theorizers consists in supposing that the present is the finality of Christianity, whereas the hand of God is opening the way by purifying his church, by directing the movements of nations and the issues of the world, in order that she may shape the coming future beyond all past experience in her progressive approach to the perfect realization of her divine Ideal.

“An age comes on, which came three times of old,

When the enfeebled nations shall stand still

To be by Christian science shaped at will.”

IX.—NEW UNITED CHRISTENDOM.

Are the intelligent Christians of our day sufficiently aware of the serious character and the extent of the dangers which are now impending? Do they appreciate the import of the questions which engage and agitate the active intellect of their contemporaries? Are they sensible of the weight of their responsibilities, and ready to lift their minds and hearts to the grandeur of the mission of the age in which their lot is cast?

He who can see things as they are throughout the world where the Christian faith has spread, and appreciate them rightly, cannot help seeing that a fresh unfolding of the great design of Christianity in all its simplicity, vastness, and splendor, and a stricter application of its principles in the several spheres of life, alone are adequate to meet all the genuine aspirations and satisfy the honest demands of this age.

The attack is against the primary truths of reason no less than the essential truths of divine revelation, and the defence, to be adequate and victorious, must at least be equal to the attack. Thus the law of reaction is forcing upon the leading Christian minds a reaffirmation of natural and revealed truths with a completeness and a force which the world has not up to this time witnessed. There can be no compromise with the false principles of atheists in religion, revolutionists in the state, and anarchists in society. Their errors must be refuted and their movements counteracted. The positive side of truth must be brought out and clothed in all its beauty. The true picture must be presented and contrasted with the false, so as to captivate the intelligence and enlist the enthusiasm of the active minds of the youth of the age. This is the great work that, in the economy of God, is mainly left to the initiative of individual minds of the members of his church. It is the work of Catholic genius illuminated by the light and the interior inspirations of the working of the Holy Spirit. The Church, in every critical or important epoch in her history, has always given birth to providential men; these are her Gregories, Augustines, Benedicts, Bernards, Francises, Neris, Ignatiuses, Vincents of Paul.

As in the past, so in the present, a new phase of the church will be presented to the world—one that will reveal more clearly and completely her divine character. “It is the divine action of the Holy Spirit in and through the church which gives to her organization the reason for its existence. And it is the fuller explanation of the divine side of the church, and its relations with the human side, giving always to the former its due accentuation, that will contribute to the increase of the interior life of the faithful, and aid powerfully to remove the blindness of those—whose number is much larger than is commonly supposed—who only see the church on her human side.”[96]

The reintegration into general principles of the scattered truths contained in the religious, social, and political sects and parties of our day would reveal to all upright souls their own ideal more clearly and completely, and at the same time present to them the practical measures and force necessary to its realization. By this process sects and parties and antagonisms would become as far as possible extinct—not by way of antagonism, but by the power of assimilation and attraction. Just as the lesser magnet is drawn to the greater by cords of attraction identical with its own, only more intense, more powerful, and all-embracing, so the fragmentary truths contained in error, when reintegrated in their general principles, will be drawn to them and their division disappear. Christianity once more will be perfect in one, and, uniting its forces for the conversion of the world, will direct humanity as one man to its divine destination.

X.—THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.

Is not such a consummation the answer to the devout aspiration of all sincere Christian souls? Is it not also the promise of Christianity, and was it not the object of the most earnest prayer of its Founder when upon earth? The Son of God did not pray in vain.

Underneath all the errors and evils found among men of all times is the prime desire for the knowledge of the truth and the native hunger for the good. Now, the absolute truth which contains all truth, and the absolute good which contains the supreme good, is God. God is therefore the ideal of the rational soul, the term of all its seeking, and the end of all its wishes. The perfect union of the soul with God is bliss.

Again, Christianity does not confine itself to the reign of God in the soul; it seeks to establish the reign of God upon earth. “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was the petition of Christ to his heavenly Father. His life was not confined to contemplation and preaching; he “went about doing good.”

Genuine contemplation and action are inseparable. He who sees truth loves truth, and he who loves truth seeks to spread the knowledge and the practice of truth. Divine love is infinitely active, and, when it has entered the human heart and has set it on fire, it pushes man to all outward perfection and visible justice. No men have labored so zealously and so efficiently for their fellow-men, for the establishment of God’s kingdom upon earth, as the saints of God.

The love of God and the love of man are one. God promises his reward not to the ignorant, or to the indolent, or to the indifferent, but to those who visit the prisoner, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, to the doing of good works as the evidence of the true faith.

The Catholic Church teaches to men their true relations to God and to their fellow-men, and by the practical application of the principles which govern these relations are removed the errors and vices which hinder the establishment of the reign of God in men’s souls and everywhere upon earth. The history of civilization since the moment of the church’s institution on the day of Pentecost is nothing else than a record of the several steps of progress of society, under the guidance of the Catholic Church, in reaching this goal. Whatever elements the nineteenth century possesses superior to Judaism, paganism, barbarism, and Islamism are due to the uninterrupted action of Christ upon the world through the Catholic Church. Modern civilization may be defined as the result of nineteen centuries of action of the Holy Spirit dwelling in the Catholic Church in establishing the reign of God in men’s souls and the kingdom of heaven upon earth. “God is now taking the dross out of the crucible, so as to render his people free from all alloy, and once more to clothe the church for which our Lord delivered himself up with beauty resplendent with glory. And when God shall have accomplished this, he will remove the rod of his justice from the church, and, that his divine name may no longer be blasphemed, he will give her victory, a victory far more brilliant than her sufferings have been terrible. May this triumph not be delayed!”[97]

XI.—THE CATHOLIC IDEA OF HEAVEN.

The Catholic Church teaches that the road to a blessed hereafter is by striving to establish the kingdom of heaven upon earth; it is after a life spent in practical good works that the soul merits to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” But then do all the soul’s interests cease the moment it has left this world and entered upon its future life? Is it true that the only thought of a true Christian is to get well out of this world and all that belongs to it, and give it no further concern? Is this the Catholic idea?

Not at all. The Catholic idea is that as our transformation in God is perfected, so do all the faculties of the soul increase. The soul knows more, loves more, and does more infinitely in the blessed land than when upon this earth. The lives of most of us while here are only a little better than a sleep. The soul’s vision of the divine Essence, and its participation in the divine Nature, render it, like the angels, “God’s coadjutor” in the realization of his ideal in the vast universe. So far from the knowledge of this globe, and the affection towards its inhabitants or interests in its concerns, being lessened or lost by the citizens of heaven, the knowledge acquired and the affections formed during their life upon earth are essentially retained, and are enlarged and intensified; and on this truth is based the Catholic doctrine of the communion and invocation of saints. Hence to this knowledge and affection and constant interest taken by the souls in heaven in the welfare of this world, and of those from whom they are corporally but not really separated, and to their power to aid them, is owing the adoption of angels and saints as patrons by Catholic nations, cities, villages, towns, and by every individual Catholic. He who is ignorant of the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints, and who is not within the Catholic fold, can have no conception of the intimate and intense, uninterrupted spiritual intercourse between the soul of a truly devout Catholic and the angelical and saintly inhabitants of heaven. The church militant and the church triumphant are substantially one, form one communion, and their action is inseparable. The Catholic idea, then, is this: that the power of the soul, on entering into heaven, to aid man upon earth in the realization of his true destiny is redoubled; and that this power is most efficaciously employed in our favor by the souls of the eternally blessed. The retrospective action of the inhabitants of the other world on the welfare of this world greatly accelerates its progress, and, compared with their direct action while upon earth, it is immeasurably greater and free from all alloy.

XII.—FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF MODERN INFIDELS.

The Catholic Church places no gulf between God and humanity, or divorce between heaven and earth, or antagonism between revelation and reason, or religion and science; and she repudiates the doctrine which emphasizes faith at the expense of good works. Hence the accusation of modern infidels against Christianity, as confining itself exclusively to man’s happiness hereafter—“a post-mortem happiness”—while ignoring his actual, present good—“ante-mortem happiness”—may have some show of reason as against Protestant sects, especially of the Calvinistic sect; but it is altogether false, and must be set down to defective knowledge, when made against the Catholic Church.

It is through the faithful reception of the divine action of the Catholic Church by individuals and society that the highest good possible for man here and hereafter can be surely attained; and this needs only clearly to be seen to restore to her true and visible fold all the descendants of the members separated from the Catholic Church by the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, who are in good faith.

And it is the bringing out into a clearer light the divine side of the church, and to the front those truths which eliminate the errors rife in our day and their stricter application to present evils, that, by the instinct of the Holy Spirit, now preoccupies the active intelligent mind of Catholics throughout the world, especially in countries where the dangers are most imminent, such as France, Germany, and Italy.

XIII.—PROMISES, FALSE AND TRUE.

There are two controlling forces, explain their origin as we may, visible in the conflicting movements of human affairs in this world. The one places man in possession of the Supreme Good, and makes him a co-worker with his Creator in the realization of the ideal for which God called this great universe into existence. The other is instigated by the enemy of God and the human race, seeking by false promises to lead man astray.

“You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” was Satan’s promise to our first parents. This promise contained what was desirable for man; God had implanted in the human soul the aspiration for its fulfilment. But what the enemy promised he had not the power to perform, and the road that he pointed out as leading to the fulfilment of the promise led in a wrong direction.

The right answer of our first parents to Satan would have been: “We know that God has made our souls in his own image and likeness, and that we shall be made participators of his divine Nature, and thereby deified; and as our Creator has endowed us with the gift of intelligence, we shall also gain the knowledge of good and evil—for this is its proper object. And we know also with certitude that we shall gain these great rewards by following the paths which God has pointed out to us.” Had they thus spoken, they would have, in the strength of their innocence and conscious rectitude, added: “Begone, tempter! Thou art a liar; for what thou dost promise it is not thine to give; and instead of wishing our elevation, thou seekest to accomplish our fall and utter ruin!”

As in the beginning, so now, Satan seizes hold of the noblest aspirations of the soul, and, by deceiving men under the guise of a real good, leads them quite astray. For what underlies the promises of Protestantism and its innumerable sects; and rationalism, so-called, and its different phases; and the secularists, positivists, scientists, atheists, radicals, materialists, spiritists, revolutionists, evolutionists, socialists, pessimists, free-religionists, communists, internationalists, optimists, theists, nihilists, kulturkämpfer, agnostics, intuitionists, transcendentalists, and other sects and parties too numerous to mention—for their name is legion, and their confusion of tongues is as great as that of Babel—what underlies their promises is in one aspect true and in a sense desirable. The right answer to all their fine promises is this: “You affirm undoubted truths and you hold out a desirable good; but the way that you point out for realizing the one and attaining the other is subversive of all truth and the supreme good, and it will not reach even what you aim at, but end in entire disappointment and anarchy. Put together the fragmentary truths affirmed by each of your different religious sects, and you will find them all contained in Catholicity. Make a list of all the honest demands for ameliorations and reforms in man’s social, industrial, and political condition—it will not be a short one—and you will discover that they have their truth in the spirit, and are justified by the teachings and the practice, of the Catholic Church.” O sincere seeker after truth! did you but know it, the path lies open before you to a perennial fountain of truth, where you can slake to the full that thirst which has so long tormented your soul. O sincere lover of your fellow-men! there is a living body which you may see and co-operate with, whose divine action is realizing a heavenly vision for the whole human race, brighter and more beautiful than the ideal which so often haunts your lonely dreams!

The divine ideal is a God-given aspiration to your soul, but the way to realize it is not by building up a tower of Babel.

XIV.—CONCLUSION.

The evolution of Catholicity which is now coming slowly to the light will gather up all the rich treasures of the past, march in response to every honest demand of the interests of the actual present, and guide the genuine aspirations of the race in the sure way to the more perfect future of its hopes.

This sublime mission is not the self-imposed work of any man or party of men, but the divinely-imposed task of religion, of the present, visible, living body of Christ, the church of God. None other has the power to renew the world, unite together in one band the whole human race, and direct its energies to enterprises worthy of man’s great destiny. Marshal MacMahon, Duke de Broglie, or any one else, legitimists, imperialists, Orleanists, republicans, anti-republicans, these men and these parties in France may contribute more or less as instruments to the initiation of the new order of things in Europe, but that is all. They will betray the cause of God and the interests of humanity, if they should attempt to turn it to any individual account or to any partisan triumph, whether called religious or political. The enemies of the church may place hindrances in her way, but they cannot stop her in reaching her goal. God alone rules and reigns.

God has spoken his “thus far shalt thou go, and no further” to his enemies and to all the persecutors of the church of Christ. When God arises, his enemies will flee and be scattered. Their strength, compared with that of his children, is as the strength of a rope of sand. Their power is gained by secrecy, and their influence by threats and deeds of violence; for their real numbers constitute but a small fraction of the French, German, Italian, and Spanish or any other people. The present struggle will render this fact evident to all the world.

Strange destiny that of France, to be the leader of Europe both for good and for evil! France was the first nation converted to Christianity in western Europe, and the first to proclaim herself, as a nation, infidel. France will be the first to recover from her errors and give the initial blow that will end in the overthrow of the enemies of modern civilization and Christianity.

The Marshal-President of the Republic of France, the brave soldier, the man without fear or reproach, is not the man to betray his high trusts through any personal ambition, or to any party, legitimist, Orleanist, imperialist, Gambettist, or whatever may be the name which it bears on its banner.

The mission of the President of France is to keep ambitious men and partisans at bay, and afford the best elements and the truest interests of all France a fair expression and the opportunity of forming a stable and suitable political government. The Catholic Church has been made to suffer too much and too long from crowned emperors, royal dynasties, and political factions in France and elsewhere to identify her great cause with theirs.

France, under the providence of God, is slowly being taught to stand on her own feet, to assert her true manhood, and to practise self-government. The political virtues the French people have practised, and the self-control they have displayed, since the formation of the republic, have discomfited their enemies, increased the admiration of their friends, and won the applause of the civilized world. France never was so really great as she is at this moment.

The purity of the motives of the President of the Republic, the disinterested love of his country, and his undaunted valor have never been impeached, nor has his escutcheon ever borne the slightest stain. His sagacity and prudence have never been at fault. That he has a will Jules Simon has learned to his cost. Patrick MacMahon, the marshal of the armies of France and the first President of her Republic, possesses evidently all the distinguishing qualities of the first commander-in-chief of the American army and the first President of the Republic of the United States—George Washington. The French people can safely trust for one term, and not unlikely for a second, their liberties, their interests, and their honor to the keeping of such a man.

France will find in her president a providential man, and his name will go down to posterity with the title of our own great patriot, the noblest of all titles—“MacMahon, the Father of his Country.”

The turning point of a new era for Europe and of the renewal of Catholicity is entrusted by divine Providence to the hands of the eldest daughter of his church—France! In the answer of France to the present issue lies the secret of the weal or the woe of the future of Europe.

PHIL REDMOND OF BALLYMACREEDY.

“Whisht!” exclaimed the blind hostler attached to the Derralossory Arms. “There’s a car rowlin’ along the Bray Road, an’, from the sperrit that’s in the baste, it’s Luke Finnigan that’s dhrivin’ him. Ay, faix,” he added with a self-satisfied chuckle, “an’ that’s Luke Finnigan’s note. I’d know it from this t’ Arklow.”

A wild whoop and a sound of wheels in the direction indicated announced the approaching vehicle, and, ere the sightless hostler could grope his way from the snug corner in which he had been ensconced by the roaring kitchen fire—it was the middle of July—an outside car dashed up to the principal door of the hotel, stopped with a jerk as if on the edge of a precipice, and the driver, throwing the reins upon the neck of the panting horse, cried out as he gaily entered the hostelry:

“Now, thin, Misther Murphy, be nimble wud the liquor. There’s a rale gintleman goin’ for to stand, an’ I’m as dhry as a cuckoo.”

Upon the vehicle sat a young man whose exquisitely-fitting frock-coat, faultless linen, diamond studs, soft hat, and square-toed boots bespoke the American. He was fair, with soft and expressive eyes, and wore a Henri Quatre beard which admirably became his long and pensive face.

“Yer welkim to the County Wicklow, sir,” cried the hostler, who had approached the car and was engaged in giving a drink to the jaded animal. “It’s an illigant place for rocks an’ rivers an’ threes an’ scenery. Sorra a forriner that cums into it but is loath for to lave it. It takes a hoult av thim.”

“It is a very, very beautiful place,” exclaimed the new-comer enthusiastically, as he sprang to terra firma. “So green, so fresh, so—but you cannot enjoy it, my poor fellow!” suddenly perceiving the sightless orbs which were turned toward him.

“It’s many a day sence I seen it, sir,” responded the man, with a weary moan in his utterance—“many an’ many a day.”

“Thrue for him,” added the driver, emerging from the hotel and swabbing his mouth with the back of a bronzed and blistered hand, while bright beads twinkled like fallen stars in his merry eyes. “He’s dark sence he was a gossoon! An’ it’s a sight for to see him along wud the horses in the stable; he’ll go into stalls, an’ the bastes kickin’ thim to smithereens, but sorra a word they’ll say to him, though they’d be afther knockin’ sawdust out av any other tin min. He thravels the roads day an’ night. To be sure it’s all wan to him in regard to his bein’ dark, but he’ll work his way down to Lake Dan below—ay, an’ to the Sivin Churches, begor.”

“God is good to me, sir,” said the hostler; “an’ whin it plazed him for to take me eyesight, he gev me sight in me ears an’ hands.”

“Here, my poor fellow.” And the stranger placed a coin in the other’s horny palm.

“A five-shilling bit! Och, thin, may the saints light ye to glory, an’ may ye never die till they sind for ye! It’s lonely they’ll be till ye go to thim.”

By this time the car was surrounded by a motley group of tatterdemalions of all ages, sizes, and sexes, in every stage of decrepitude and every variety of raggedness.

“Throw a few coppers to an ould widdy, an’ the Lord reward ye!” exclaimed one.

“Ye’ll never miss a fourpenny bit,” added another.

“A sixpince to an orfin will take a bag o’ coals from undher ye in purgathory,” chimed in a third.

“Give us the price av an ounce av tay,” droned a fourth.

“More power to the stars an’ sthripes! Three cheers for Ameriky, boys!” roared a leathern-lunged dwarf, throwing a rabbit-skin cap into the air. This appeal was responded to with an enthusiasm that brought the fire into the stranger’s eye. Turning round upon the steps of the hotel—along, thatched, whitewashed, two-storied building—he made a sign as if desirous of addressing the assemblage.

“Be jabers! he’s going for to spake.”

“I riz him wud the stars an’ sthripes,” joyously chuckled the dwarf.

“Faix, it’s more nor a speech we want,” wheezed a little old fellow on crutches.

“The Home-Rulers has stuffed us like turkeys.”

“Ordher! Ordher in the coort!” yelled the dwarf. “Be aisy, Billy McKeon. Lave off scroogin’ me, Mary Nayle, an’ let the cripples in front.”

A few additional facetiæ, and the silence became complete.

The new-comer had removed his hat, and his massive white forehead stood out from beneath his soft brown, curly hair.

“I thank you for the cheer which you have given for the country of my birth.” (“That’s half a crown to me, anyhow,” muttered the dwarf.) “I hope that cheer was an honest one. It was not my intention to bestow ten cents among you, as I do not encourage mendicants; and once a beggar, always a beggar.”

This was received with very audible manifestations of dissatisfaction.

“Musha, but ye’ve come far enough for to tell us that,” growled the old man with the crutches.

“I have come a long way to tell it to you,” retorted the stranger, “and I’ll tell you more. It is positively sickening to travel through this beautiful country, on account of you and the like of you. From Cork to Killarney, from Killarney to Dublin, from Dublin to—”

“Boys, let’s make up a subscription for him,” interrupted a little fellow whose rags depended for support upon a straw rope—technically termed a “suggawn”—fastened around his waist.

“Th’ hostler 'll hed it wud five shillin’s,” observed a bystander with a droll, malicious grin.

“Begorra, we’ll tell the landlord for to put it in the bill.”

“Are ye goin’ for to give us anything?” demanded the dwarf. This query was backed up by a unanimous murmur of approval.

“I am.”

“Well, that’s raysonible, anyhow.”

“I’m going to give you some sound, wholesome advice,” said the stranger.

A yell of anger, disappointment, dissent, and derision followed this announcement. Crutches were brandished, sticks flourished, fists shaken, and general denunciations upon this “nagurly” conduct were indulged in, in terms as pungent as they were personal.

“You won’t hear me?” he resumed during a lull in the storm.

“Sorra a hear.”

“Well, good-afternoon.” And making them a low bow, he turned into the house, whither execrations loud, prolonged, and deep rapidly followed him.

The accommodations at the “Derralossory Arms”—for so the hostelry was named—were somewhat pretentious. Opening a door with the word “coffee-room” imprinted thereon in brazen letters, the new-comer found himself in a long, low-ceilinged apartment. A cracked mirror, the surface of which was scratched from frame to frame, like an ice rink, by amorous owners of diamond rings, stood over the mantel-piece, and above it a smoke-dried card containing the announcement of the meets of the Wicklow Harriers of the preceding season. Upon a mahogany sideboard shone a brave array of glassware interspersed with pickle-jars and some mysterious specimens of the ceramic art. Facing the sideboard was a huge antiquated sofa whose springs revealed themselves like the ribs of a half-starved horse, and opposite the sofa an ancient but uncompromisingly upright pianoforte. But not upon the mirror, sideboard, sofa, or piano did the eyes of the stranger continue to rest. The window had been lowered, and a young girl was leaning her arms upon the sash, gazing out upon the tatterdemalion crowd beneath. Her figure was petite, but of that faultless outline which no amount of drapery can conceal. A long plait of lustrous brown hair hung down her back. She was attired in black, and a huge Puritan cambric collar and cuffs adorned her wrists and neck.

“If her face is as her figure, she must be enchanting,” thought the new-comer.

“He should have given them something,” she murmured half aloud. “Poor creatures! hoping and fearing is weary, weary work.” And she slowly faced him.

He gazed at features as regular as the classic model, and whose paleness almost imparted to them the calm, impassive beauty of marble. She flushed and was about to withdraw when he blurted forth:

“I—I beg your pardon, but I overheard what you said. I am not so mean as you think.” And striding to the window and attracting the attention of the mob, who received him with a yell of derisive defiance, he flung a handful of silver among them.

A scarlet flush mantled over her face and throat. “I was but speaking to myself, thinking aloud—and—but nevertheless on the part of those poor miserable people, I beg to thank you, sir. I am sorely to blame, and your generosity only rivets the fetters that bind them to beggary.” And with a low courtesy, old-fashioned but witching grace itself, she swept from the apartment, leaving the stranger lost in admiration.

“What is that young lady’s name who was here just now?” he asked.

“Her name is Miss O’Byrne—wan av th’ ould anshint O’Byrnes that fought hard agin’ the Danes an’ Crummle—bad cess to thim, body an’ bones!” replied the waiter.

“Does she live near this place?”

“Beyant four mile, over be the side o’ Lake Dan. It’s an illigant place, wid no ind av ruins, an’ a darlin’ ghost that walks whinever sorra is comin’ to the race; an’ be me song, they’ve supped lashins av it.”

“Is Mr. O’Byrne wealthy?”

“Well, now”—here the waiter scratched a very shock head—“he’s not rowlin’ in goold, but he’s warm and”—brightening up—“as proud as a paycock. But there, I’m forgettin’ me message to ye.”

“To me? exclaimed the stranger with a start, half hoping it might be from Miss O’Byrne.

“Yes, sir. There’s two gintlemin cum here in regard o’ the fishin’, though sorra a haporth they ketch; an’ they cum regular wud rods an’ hooks an’ nets, an’ all soarts av cumbusticles. Wan av them is an attorney, a gay man, an’ th’ other houlds a situation in the Four Coorts beyant in Dublin, an’ he’s as nice a mannered man as there’s in the four walls o’ Wicklow this blessed minit.”

“But the message?” interrupted the stranger.

“That’s it. Yer to dine wud thim—no less. Misther Minchin tould me to prisint his respects an’ to hope ye’d favor him wud yer company; an’ don’t be hesitatin’, mind ye”—here the waiter winked an indescribable wink, such as an augur might have indulged in consequent upon a successful omen; “there’s lovely chickens, an’ the elegantest bacon, wud a filly av cabbage, an’ a dancing leg o’ lamb.”

“But I don’t know these gentlemen, and—”

“Permit me to introduce myself, sir,” exclaimed a small, elderly man with a merry eye, a bulbous nose, a very stiff, old-fashioned stock, and a stiffer rim of shirt-collar which kept his head as erect as though he was hung up by the chin, entering and bowing very courteously. “Minchin—Dominick Minchin. Hearing from this shock-headed retainer that you were a stranger, and having experienced on more occasions than one, especially during piscatorial excursions, the thrice-accursed loneliness of an inn, I beg, sir, that you will favor us by coming where glory waits you and—a bit of dinner.”

This was uttered with a quaint cheeriness that bore everything before it.

“Really, sir, I am quite impressed by your consideration, and accept your invitation most gratefully. My name is Philip Redmond.” And he handed the other his card.

“Redmond is not an American name, sir?”

“No, sir; my father was Irish.”

“Anything to the Redmonds of Ballymacreedy?”

“I am Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

Mr. Minchin seized him warmly by both hands and shook them repeatedly. “By Jupiter, sir! this is positively glorious—sublime, sir! I knew your father well; and when he thought fit to part with his property—”

“His property parted from him, Mr. Minchin. It is gone, and I am now here to try and repurchase it at any cost. However, we’ll talk of that by and by. I feel that dinner is not very far off, and that you are only half as anxious about it as I am.”

Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Minchin’s companion, was a tall, handsome, florid-faced man of about five-and-thirty, with a profusion of sandy hair which stood out from his head like quills upon the fretful porcupine, and a smile like sunlight. In five minutes Redmond was as much at home with the two anglers as if he had known them all his life, and had planned two excursions with them.

“I’m afraid you’ll have some trouble about getting back this property,” observed O’Hara. “It’s now in the possession of a man who doesn’t want money, and who would call you out if you proposed to purchase it.”

“Every man has his price, has he not, Mr. O’Hara?” asked Redmond.

“True; but there are exceptional circumstances connected with this case which hedge it round with an impenetrable chevaux de frise.”

“Of what nature?”

“Family pride, which will never consent to confiscate the old acres.”

“But the lands of Kilnagadd and Derralossory belonged to our family.”

“That may be, Mr. Redmond, but they were part and parcel of other territory before the Redmonds came north of Vinegar Hill. I know all about them, as I rented a fishing lodge from one of the tenants, and, being anxious to purchase it, inquired into the title.”

“I made my dying father a solemn promise that I would get back the old place. Money is no object, Mr. O’Hara. My father operated both in real estate and in gold, and died wealthy, so that a few thousands will not balk me.”

“You can try it,” was the rejoinder, accompanied by a shake of the head.

It was late when they separated, Minchin warbling “The young May moon,” and insisting upon shaking hands with the “young boss,” as he designated him, over and over again.

The summer’s morning was bright and balmy, and Redmond, after a yeoman’s breakfast—consisting of trout fried with bacon, fresh eggs, and tea in which the cream was pre-eminent—started out into the glorious sunlight which was irradiating hill and dale, mountain and valley. The forget-me-nots told their tale to the crystal pools, the graceful ferns languidly embraced the lichen-covered stones, an occasional cur basking in the heat and glow opened a lazy eye as Phil passed along the road, and compromised a bark with a prolonged yawn. The hawthorns threw their shadows across the path, and the “blossoming furze unprofitably gay” sent forth that fresh, quaint, and delicious perfume that tells us with speechless eloquence that we are out in the bright green country and away from the heat and turmoil and loathsomeness of the over-crowded human hive. Having promised to join his newly-found friends at Lough Dan, Phil took the steep and romantic road that leads to the lake direct from the village of Roundwood. Far away to the left in the summer haze lay the picturesque village of Annamoe, and farther still the sweet, sad valley of Glendalough, guarded by the giant Lug na Culliagh, while the deep-tinted groves of Castle Kevin lent a delicious contrast to the purple heights of the heather-covered Derrybawn; on his right the grim gray crags of Luggelaw, and, as he gained the crest of the hill, the blue waters of Lough Dan lay mirrored beneath him, reflecting the giant shadows of Carrig-na-Leena. The exquisite loveliness of the scene fell upon the young American like a dream or a perfume. It was refreshing, yet almost intoxicating. He thought of the color glories of the Hudson in the fall, of the blood-reds and orange-yellows and wine hues of the autumn foliage, and they seared his mental vision when he came to contemplate the soft, cloudy green, the odor-laden atmosphere, pure yet filmy as a bridal veil, and the delicious completeness of the coup d’œil, so satisfying, so soothing, and so enravishing. Somehow or other he associated all this perfection with the fair young girl whose pale face and mantling blush still haunted his imagination like a sweet strain of music. These scenes were a suitable setting for her beauty. She would comprehend them, she would commune with nature in this wild, secluded spot, so lonely and yet so lovely. As his ideas glided in this rosy channel, his revery was suddenly disturbed by the sound of wheels, and close upon him came a basket-phaeton attached to a very diminutive pony. His heart gave one violent bound—the object of his immediate and gushing thoughts was the occupant of the vehicle. Would she pass without noticing him? There had been no introduction. He could expect no recognition, and yet—

Chance fills up many a gap in life, solves many riddles, and hastens many dénoûments.

The pony, evidently a wilful, over-petted, hand-fed little brute, took it into its stubborn head that a rest at this particular spot in the road would admirably suit his inclinations; and as he feared no whip, and, save a gentle chuck upon the reins and a solemn admonishment from his fair mistress, his whim could be indulged in with comparative impunity, he proceeded forthwith to carry his idea into execution, and stopped with a jerk right opposite where Philip Redmond stood.

“Do go on, Doaty!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne, shaking the reins. “Do go on, there’s a pet. You shall have a lump of sugar when we get to stable.”

Doaty shook his head and stolidly gazed at the lake beneath him.

“Permit me to try and persuade him,” said Phil, stepping forward and lifting his hat, which, by the way, doubled up in his hand, clumsily concealing his face and utterly destroying his bow.

“Oh! thanks; I seem destined to give you trouble, sir.”

This was a delicate recognition.

“I have to thank you for making me the most popular man in Roundwood,” retorted Redmond. “I feel like the lord lieutenant. I held quite a levée this morning.”

“And your courtiers, instead of looking for place, were seeking for pence.”

“A distinction without much difference.”

“Except in the viceroy,” she laughed.

Doaty was as good as gold—at least so thought one of the party—and manifested no intention of budging an inch.

“What a tiresome pony!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne. “I shall have to beat him.”

“Let me try and get him along.” And Phil, taking hold of the shaggy mane, lugged the unwilling Doaty along in the direction of the lake.

“This is really too bad, sir,” remonstrated Miss O’Byrne. “I cannot tax you in this way.”

“It is no tax, I assure you. I have nothing on earth to do but to revel in the especial sunshine of this moment.”

This was said with ever so slight an emphasis; nevertheless it bore a scarlet blossom in the rich blush which came whispering all over the young girl’s charming pallor.

“You—you are a stranger here?”

“I am, and yet I ought not to be.”

“This savors of a riddle.”

“Very easily solved. My fore-fathers hunted these hills and fished that lake. My father was reckless, extravagant, and new men came into possession of the old acres. My father emigrated, and made a great deal of money in New York, and—”

“I have been in New York,” interposed the young lady.

Here was a bridge for thought-travel. Here was a market for the disposal of mutual mental wares.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Like it!” she exclaimed enthusiastically. “Who could dislike it? It is the most charming city, perhaps excepting Paris, that I have ever lived in. And how are Fifth Avenue and Broadway, and the ash-boxes?” she added with a ringing laugh.

Doaty made another stop, and no earthly inducement would stir him until he so willed it himself. His fair mistress relinquished the idea and the reins, and, stepping from the vehicle, clambered, with the assistance of Redmond, to a moss-grown bank, from which she pointed out some objects of special interest in the scenery.

“That is Billy Doyle’s cottage at Shinnagh, down far in the valley by the edge of the lake. See the amber thatch glowing in the sunlight, and the red flag. That flag shows that poor Mr. Fenler is on the lake fishing.”

“Who is poor Mr. Fenler?” asked Phil.

“He is a man who was a great merchant in Dublin, but who lost all his property, and his wife and all his children. He saved as much from the wreck as enabled him to purchase one-half of that cottage—the slated half—and to support himself. He came here seven years ago, having made a vow never to leave the valley again.”

“And has he kept it?”

“Religiously. He goes nowhere, and spends his whole time in fishing. Do you see that golden strand at the head of the lake?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there is a legend about that which you should hear. Any old crone in the valley will do it ample justice.”

“I should prefer to hear it from a fairy on the hill,” said Redmond gallantly.

“Pas des compliments, although yours was nearly French.”

“You beat me at my own weapons,” laughed Redmond. “But whose palatial residence is that right over in the cleft between those two hills?”

The fire lighted up in the young girl’s eye, the delicate nostril expanded, the rich, ripe lips quivered, as she proudly replied: “That is my home.”

Her home—the nest in which she had been nurtured. What a precious flower in that gloomy valley! What a world of love and joy and beauty in that lone and sequestered spot!

“I envy you,” murmured Phil. “The tranquil loveliness of your home is—” he was going to send the words from his heart to his lips, but luckily they encountered Prudence upon the road, and altered themselves to suit that cold, passionless, interfering busybody—“is—just as it ought to be. You have made no vow to leave this valley?” he added.

“No, but I have often thought it.”

“Such a determination would be a calamity, Miss O’Byrne.”

“How do you know my name?” she quickly demanded.

“I asked the waiter after you had left.”

“Now for an exchange,” she laughed. “Let us trade. What is your name?”

“Philip Redmond, son of Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

“Why, that is Ballymacreedy,” exclaimed the young girl, pointing to a fir-covered mountain, upon the side of which, as though perched on a shelf, stood a gaunt, uncompromising-looking, square-built mansion, all roof and windows.

Phil Redmond’s feelings, as he gazed on the home which he had never known save by hearsay, were of a very varied and conflicting nature. He had pictured it a feudal stronghold towering over an extensive lake such as America boasts of—a diminutive ocean—a battlemented castle, with keep and moat and drawbridge, ivy-grown in the interests of the picturesque, and plate-glassed in the interests of modern sunlight.

“Good heaven!” he exclaimed involuntarily, “how unlike what I conceived it to be. What a cruel disappointment!”

So rudely were his ideas shattered, and so bitterly the pride of baronial halls mortified, that the poor fellow’s heart felt quite crushed. Whether Miss O’Byrne saw this or whether Doaty saw it is not the question here; but certes, that admirable little brute gave a loud neigh as a trumpet-call to Redmond’s scattered senses, and evinced for the first moment during the preceding half-hour a desire to proceed upon his homeward journey.

“Papa does not visit, Mr. Redmond,” said Miss O’Byrne as she grasped the reins upon resuming her seat in the basket upon wheels, “but I shall ask him to call upon you, when I may hope for something like a formal introduction. How half an hour flies upon the wings of sans cérémonie!” And with a delicious inclination of the head, half-saucy, half-dignified, and wholly piquante, she disappeared at a turn of the road leading into the valley.

“Heigh-ho!” sighed Philip Redmond of Ballymacreedy.

While all this—shall we say nonsense?—was going on upon the hill, Mr. Minchin and his fidus Achates, O’Hara, were busily occupied upon the lake; and although not a single rise greeted their longing vision, like true sportsmen they lived in hope.

“That’s a very good style of man,” observed O’Hara.

“Redmond?”

“Yes.”

“The son of an Irish king, sir. By Jupiter! a fine fellow. A noble fellow!” exclaimed Minchin, whacking the lake with his line in emphasis.

“He’ll go back to New York without as much of his father’s property as would sod a lark.”

“You are still of opinion that the O’Byrne will not sell?”

“He’d burn the land first,” was the sententious rejoinder.

“Well, sir, the next best thing that Redmond can do is to purchase Glenasluagh. It adjoins Ballymacreedy, and he will enjoy the right of fishing the Clohogue—an enjoyment fit for the gods. Yes, by George! fit for the gods.”

“I never thought of that. Are you sure it’s for sale?”

“A scoundrelly attorney, one of those pitiful miscreants with whom it is my bane to be officially associated, knowing that I loved the gentle sport, endeavored to curry favor with me by mentioning this. I listened to the scoundrel and made inquiries elsewhere—in fact, I own I felt my way towards the Clohogue myself, but the figure was too high, sir.”

“We must put Redmond on to it at once.”

“There’s our man crossing the bridge. George! how I envy him his sensations upon beholding this cherished spot, 'where all save the spirit of man is divine.’” And Minchin glowed again in the summer light.

Redmond instinctively paused upon the quaint old lichen-covered bridge, in the worn interstices of which dainty little ferns of emerald green toyed with the pale blue loveliness of the forget-me-not, and gazed across the sheening waters of the tranquil lake. All was sleeping in sunlight, even the deep, clear shadows of the purple-covered mountains, while the melodious hum of glowing insect-life lent its peculiar charm to the peaceful surroundings.

The boat, by direction of Mr. Minchin, was turned for the bridge, and a few lazy strokes from the oar of the ragged urchin who acted as waterman brought it bump against a projecting bowlder which served as a landing-place.

“The top of the morning to you, Mr. Redmond!” cried Minchin. “You are just in the nick of time. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we were about to pass the rosy. This, sir, is a very dry country.” And the cheerful old biped laughed until the crags of Shinnagh re-echoed his jovial hilarity. At this moment a cart attached to a donkey appeared upon the bridge, and two formidable-looking hampers jostled each other for supremacy.

“Jump in, Mr. Redmond. We shall take our pick on that lovely little neck of land just under the stronghold of the O’Byrnes yonder.”

“Have you room for two friends of mine?” asked Phil.

“Any friend of yours is my friend, sir,” exclaimed Minchin with the pompous mannerism of the old school.

“Then lend a hand,” to the boat-boy, “to get these hampers on board.”

“What does all this mean?” asked Minchin as the baskets were safely stowed away.

“A liberty I have taken,” said Philip. “I want you and Mr. O’Hara to lunch with me to-day, as I dined with you yesterday.”

“O’Hara,” exclaimed Minchin, “what shall we do with this dog? Pitch him into the lake, hampers and all?”

“I should say not,” laughed the other.

“'My foot is on my native heath,’” cried Redmond; and, taking an oar, a pull of twenty minutes keel-grated them upon a silvery strand beneath the shady foliage of a gigantic horse-chestnut tree.

“A lobster-salad, George!” cried Minchin, unloading the basket. “A chicken-pie, Jupiter! A magmain of salmon! Why, hang it, man! this never was raised at the Derralossory Arms.”

“How was it done?” asked O’Hara.

“I sent a man into Dublin for it.”

“Ah!” with a long-drawn breath of admiration. “You Americans do things in the right way.”

“By the nine gods! champagne,” ejaculated Minchin as he extracted the golden-necked bottles from their wicker cradles. “Heidsieck extra dry. I am extra dry too. Per Bacco, Redmond! you are the son of an Irish king.”

Where is the mortal who does not enjoy a picnic?—that picnic where the food is laid upon the grass, and with the green leaves or the sky for a canopy; where fingers do service for forks, and the wild flowers for napkins; where the food is ambrosia and the drink nectar. Ay de mí, we have changed all that, and now we must have silver and cutlery and napery, and servants to wait upon us, and hot dishes ad nauseam. We must don our best and encase our sweltering hands in delicate-hued gloves, and icy etiquette now reigns where nature’s happy freedom heretofore presided.

They were busily engaged with the chicken-bones, and Redmond, as host, was uncorking the second bottle of champagne, when Minchin exclaimed: “Jupiter Olympus! here’s the O’Byrne and his daughter.”

Now, to be caught, under ordinary circumstances, in a stooping posture, wrestling with an infrangible wire, almost black in the face, and with the drumstick of a chicken stuck saltier-wise in your mouth, your hat anywhere, and your hair in the wildest and most elfin disorder, is embarrassing enough in all conscience; but, in the condition of feeling under which our romantic hero labored, to be thus detected was simply horrible. As Redmond beheld the tall and stately form of a man of about fifty, with a pair of fierce black eyes beneath still fiercer brows, advancing towards him, and by his side, gliding with that graceful undulation which is almost exclusively confined to the women of Spain, the young girl for whom the portals of his heart had been cast wide open, his desire to sink beneath the daisies was about the only sensation left to him.

“We have invaded the land of the O’Byrnes,” said Minchin, rising and bowing to the châtelaine.

“You seem tolerably well armed,” observed the O’Byrne, casting a comical glance at the champagne bottles.

“Permit me the honor of crossing swords,” cried Minchin.

At this moment Miss O’Byrne interposed by exclaiming: “That gentleman is Mr. Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”

The O’Byrne took a short, sharp survey of Philip from beneath his shaggy brows, and, advancing with outstretched hand:

“Mr. Redmond, I am glad to meet one of the old stock. You resemble your father very strongly.”

“You knew my father, sir?” asked Redmond eagerly.

“Yes.” The monosyllable spoke for itself. It shut down on the subject like an iron door.

“The old stock are thinning out, like my brown hairs,” laughed Minchin.

“Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto,” was the rejoinder.

“Per Bacco! you must taste the Falernian. I am Dominick—”

“Minchin,” interposed the O’Byrne, “the best angler in Wicklow. We disciples of the rod and reel scarcely need a formal introduction.”

Somehow or other, while the O’Byrne and Dominick Minchin were bandying quaint and courtly compliments, Philip managed to pull himself together and to engage in conversation with the daughter of the house.

“You perceive, Mr. Redmond, how fate is against our being introduced—so dead against as to compel me to make you and my father acquainted as if you and I were old friends.”

“I do feel as if I had known you for ever so long, and that a void—”

“Do look at the trout jumping. What perfect circles they make in the still water!”

She had interrupted with a woman’s tact. Redmond was unversed in the subtle distinctions which form the rungs of the ladder of love. Most of the girls whom he met in society were as so many agreeable nothings—exquisitely-attired statuettes, whose ideas were bounded by silk, satin, feathers, and lace. With them he had nothing in common save the weather and ice-cream; and being imbued with a feeling of aversive contempt for the whole sex, the revelation of light and love which now burst upon him revolutionized his whole being and begat an enthusiasm that forgot impossibilities. A child of nature sounds very well in poesy, but the article attired in broadcloth is very rapidly put down as a bore, if not a nuisance.

“I drink with you on one condition,” said the O’Byrne to Minchin, who presented a bottle at his head.

“Condition me no conditions, chieftain!”

“I shall; and the condition is this: that you, with Mr. Redmond and Mr. O’Hara”—to whom he had been introduced by Minchin—“will help me to punish a cooper of claret after a seven o’clock dinner.” O’Hara excused himself on the plea of being compelled to reach Dublin by the night mail from Rathdrum. Minchin called a number of the Olympian deities to witness that so superb an offer should not be lightly considered, and Redmond thought of his dress and hesitated to say yes, when his whole soul was in that solitary word.

“I want to have a gossip about New York, and surely you will not refuse me that boon?” urged Miss O’Byrne, and this decided the question.

“Are you of the true faith, Mr. Redmond?” she asked, as some hours later, in acting as cicerone through the old castle, she took him to the private chapel.

“I should be a recreant Redmond if I were not,” was his proud reply.

Coolgreny, the stronghold of the Clan O’Byrne, was as picturesque as a round tower, an ivied keep, a battlemented outer wall, a dry moat, a veritable carpet of bright flowers, solemn old yew-trees whose branches had supplied many a sturdy bow wherewithal to resist the incursions of the O’Tooles, and a rookery, could make it. As he crossed the drawbridge and gazed at the oaken door with its rusty iron rivets, at the massive archway telling an imperishable tale, at the inner quadrangle, its gray stone lighted up by blood-red geraniums and deeply, darkly, desperately blue forget-me-nots, and from thence to the high-bred-looking girl by his side, Philip Redmond felt the old blood in his veins as the old, old story began to whisper itself to his heart.

They passed into the old banqueting-hall, rich in oaken tracery and wainscoted up to the ebon-colored ceiling. Portraits of doughty warriors in the grim panoply of battle-axe and shield, suits of Milan steel, and buff jerkins of the later periods adorned the walls—formidable O’Brinns who stood in many a gap, and fought the rocky defiles of Auchavana inch by inch; who displayed their prowess on many a tented field; who followed the fortunes of the luckless house of Stuart even after the unhappy disaster at the Boyne; and who, nobly fighting, fell against the hated usurpation of the Orange William. Here, too, were soft, silken-bearded representatives of the house who attached themselves to the Irish Brigade and covered themselves with glory at Lannes and Fontenoy.

“Now for the ladies, monsieur!” exclaimed Miss O’Byrne. “I see that you are lost in admiration of my male ancestors. Prepare now to be enchanted by the beauty of their wives and daughters.”

“I need no preparation,” said Phil with a low bow. “I see all their perfections concentrated in their charming descendant.”

“Admirably done!” cried the young lady, with heightened color; “but 'bide a wee.’ Look at that little dame. There is fire for you. She was Countess of Ovoca in her own right—a Geraldine. She defended this castle against two attacks of Cromwell’s crop-eared curs, and when it was intimated to her that the defence jeopardized her husband’s life, she naïvely replied: 'I could replace my husband, but I could not replace Coolgreny.’ 'Wasn’t that complimentary to that ill-looking fellow opposite leaning upon his sword? I do believe that he steps out of that frame occasionally for the purpose of upbraiding her, poor dear!”

Redmond laughed heartily as he replied that he thought the cavalier was likely to get the worst of it.

“Here is a Lely—my great, great, great, ever-so-great grandmamma. Isn’t she lovely? Look at her cool blue pastoral drapery, her bright brown hair, her matchless eye, and her ivory complexion.”

“I am looking at her,” said Redmond, gazing earnestly at Miss O’Byrne, “and she is lovely.”

It was as if the portrait had been painted for herself.

“Mr. Redmond, you are incorrigible. I absolutely refuse to act as cicerone. Tyrconnel was madly in love with her.”

“Of course he was; and if he wasn’t he ought to have been,” laughed Philip. “Pray who is that sparkling brunette, with the color glowing beneath her swarthy skin, and with the head and hair of Cleopatra?”

“That is Mistress Lettice O’Byrne, who received King James in this very hall, as, blood-stained and travel-sore, he honored our poor house by resting here after the disaster of the Boyne. He heard Mass in our little chapel before he started at daybreak.”

They wandered from portrait to portrait, she chatting gaily, brilliantly, until they came directly opposite that of a very young man attired in a gorgeous hussar uniform.

“This is a picture of today,” said Redmond. “Who is he?”

A bright diamond-drop welled into her eyes as she replied:

“It is my only brother. He took service with our kinsman, Field-Marshal Nugent, in Austria, and fell at Magenta. God be merciful to him!”

“Amen!” And the response was a prayer, so fervently and reverentially was it uttered.

“Let us go to the chapel and say an Ave Maria for the repose of his soul.” And, leading through a long, dark passage, and thrusting aside a scarlet velvet curtain which hung over the entrance, she ushered Redmond into the church. Pure Gothic, the oaken traceries of its pulpit and chancel rails were worthy of the hand of Verbruggen, while the altar, of white marble, was decorated with constellations of the rarest hot-house flowers and plants.

As they emerged from the chapel the hideous clamor of a gong announced that dinner would be served in a quarter of an hour, and Redmond was ushered by his host to an apartment to prepare as best he might for the all-important ceremony. For after all “the dine” is a very serious piece of business, and it is only such foolish young fellows as Redmond—who spoiled his appetite at luncheon—or such delicately-nurtured young ladies as Miss Eileen O’Byrne, who can afford to turn up their noses at the mention of the word, and wish with a sigh that the noble institution yclept eating had never been invented.

When Redmond descended to the drawing-room he was formally presented to the Rev. Father O’Doherty, the parish priest “of as wild a district as lies between this and New York,” gaily added his reverence. “I am proud to meet you, sir; and let me tell you that the Redmonds of Ballymacreedy have left a name behind them respected, loved, and honored. Have you come to stop with us?”

“Not—that is, I’m—I’m so enchanted with all that I have seen of Ireland, and with all whom I have met here”—he sought the eye of his hostess (it should be mentioned that her mother had died in giving birth to Eileen)—“that if I do not return to it, it will not be my own fault.”

This was doing pretty well—much better than he could have hoped. It was very prononcé, but Phil liked to be understood. He was straight in everything, and was perfectly prepared to step into the O’Byrne’s library and explain himself right away. But he was not to get the chance. Father O’Doherty took the châtelaine into dinner and presided at the foot of the table. The dinner was not à la Russe, and, although served with extreme elegance, the guests were allowed the privilege of seeing what they were about to partake of, and to make a judicious selection according to palate. The wine was, as Minchin subsequently remarked, “of the rarest and choicest vintage.” To hear her speak, to listen to the music of her laugh, to gaze upon her when her looks were turned in another direction, was rapture to poor Philip, who drank his wine, eating nothing, being wholly and solely absorbed in the radiance of her presence. It was rack and torture to him when she arose to leave the room, and, as he opened the door to permit her egress, the words, “Do not remain too long over your wine,” rang into his senses like a peal of sweet bells.

“Push the claret, Mr. Redmond,” exclaimed his host; “you may get richer but you won’t get softer wine across the Atlantic.”

“Per Bacco! this is bottled velvet,” said Minchin, smacking his lips—“the odor of the violet, and the gentle tartness of the raspberry. By the nine gods! a bottle of this makes a man look for his wings to fly, sir—to fly like a bird.”

After some considerable time, during which Minchin and the O’Byrne had indulged in a very serious potation of the Château Lafitte, “Are you here on a pleasure trip, Mr. Redmond?” asked Father O’Doherty.

“Well, my good fortune has made it one of pleasure, but I came originally on business. I came to endeavor to rescue some of my poor father’s property,” replied downright Phil.

“What do you mean by rescue, Mr. Redmond?” asked the O’Byrne, flushing darkly red.

“I mean, to purchase it from the man who now holds it.”

“Oh!” And his host tossed off a bumper of the wine. “Do you refer to Ballymacreedy?”

“I do, and to the lands of Kilnagadd and Derralossory.”

The beetling brows of the Irish chieftain met in a black scowl.

“And suppose this man who holds these lands were unwilling to sell?”

“Oh! every man has his price,” said the unconscious Philip.

The O’Byrne rose, and, stretching himself to his full height, haughtily exclaimed:

“When I sell one rood of Ballymacreedy, Kilnagadd, and Derralossory, may I be shattered into fragments like that wine-glass,” casting, as he spoke, the crystal goblet upon the oaken floor, where it shivered into ten thousand pieces.

Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the épergne, and, splitting roof and ceiling, descended into their midst, the luckless hero of this narrative could scarcely have been less scared and astonished. The admonitory winkings of Minchin, the ankle-rubs of the good priest, had been lost upon him. He had rushed upon his fate and had impaled himself. Fool that he was, never to have conjectured that the haughty possessor of the land of his ancestors was the fiery, fierce old chieftain who now sat scowling at the ceiling and quaffing goblet after goblet of the rich red wine! Everything pointed to the fact—the conversation of the previous evening, the exclamation of Eileen upon the hill overlooking Lough Dan, the references of Father O’Doherty. He was a senseless idiot, and had planted the thorn of offence where he would have sown the bright seed of friendship. Could he apologize? How? Could he explain? He must.

“The fact is—” he commenced, when his host pulled him up:

“A word of advice to you, Mr. Redmond. When you enter a man’s house do not turn appraiser and play the amateur auctioneer.”

“But-” burst in Phil.

“Pardon me. If you consider that because you have scraped a few greenbacks together—Heaven knows how; I don’t want to inquire—that you can come over here to dictate insulting terms to a man with reference to his own goods and chattels, upon his own hearth, let me tell you, sir, that—”

“Hear me,” exclaimed Father O’Doherty. “I am certain that our young friend had no intention of giving annoyance when he made those observations.”

“On the honor of a man,” roared Redmond, who was in a white heat of mortification, “I meant no offence, and furthermore—”

“Let us drop the subject, sir, and go to the drawing-room for coffee,” said the O’Byrne, rising.

“But I will not drop the subject until I explain myself.”

“Mr. Redmond, do not press my endurance in my own house.” And the haughty host motioned to the door.

“Not a word,” whispered Father O’Doherty. “You can make it all right by and by, and if you fail I will succeed.”

Still, Philip was not satisfied. He was the outraged party. He demanded redress for a cruel wrong. Was he to remain in the pillory and be pelted with the mistrust and dislike of the man whom of all others he was most desirous of conciliating. What would she think of him when her father came to tell her his version of the affair? Would he not suffer and stand convicted, however innocent he might be? It was maddening, and Redmond, following his host, brusquely demanded a few minutes’ conversation.

“'Forbid it, Heaven, the hermit cried!’” exclaimed Minchin, playfully seizing our hero by the shoulders and twisting him teetotum-fashion, while the priest engaged the attention of the O’Byrne in another direction.

“Are you mad, Redmond?” said Minchin in a low tone. “On this subject he has a craze. Why, in the name of Jupiter Olympus, did you introduce it?”

“Am I to lie under the imputation of being a peddler, an auctioneer, a blackguard?” asked the other excitedly.

“The thing will be as dead as Queen Anne in five minutes, if you will only let it cross the Styx.”

“But I did not know that Mr. O’Byrne was the present proprietor of Ballymacreedy.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“I would not be listened to.”

“It’s easily explained.”

When Redmond entered the drawing-room the host was speaking to his daughter, and that it was about him he had little doubt from the expression of surprise, pain, and anger which flitted across her face.

Determined not to be baffled in his purpose this time, he strode across the apartment, and, confronting the O’Byrne, said:

“If you will kindly permit me a word of explanation—”

“Do take a cup of coffee, Mr. Redmond,” interrupted Miss O’Byrne; “and—and you will excuse me if I—I wish you good-night.” And courtesying very low, she turned from him and swept out of the room.

A choking sensation seized our hero. A something in his throat—anger, mortification, bitter mortification—clutched him and held him fast.

“I’ll be hanged if I’ll stop here any longer!” he said; and so earnest was his rage that, without waiting to bid his host farewell or to hint his intention to Minchin, he strode out into the quadrangle, through the arched entrance, across the drawbridge, and onwards he knew not in what direction, reckless, hopeless, and hatless.

Why had he met her? His path had been calm and peace. Why had she treated him in this way? What had he done to her? He knew how her father would vamp up his version of the story. Was ever innocent man so deeply wronged? He would leave Ireland next day, and place the broad Atlantic between him and this—ay, this lovely, bewitching girl. Why was she so captivating? Where did the charm lie?

Thoughts all-conflicting, all-contradictory surged through his brain as he marched onward. The summer dew failed to soothe his fevered mind; the soft night-wind sighing across the Shaughnamore mountain did not cool his burning brow. The gray dawn of glorious day still found him plodding onwards, and the sun was high above the horizon when he entered the picturesque little village of Enniskerry. He had left Coolgreny fifteen Irish miles behind him across the mountains.

When he had succeeded in arousing the inmates of the Powerscourt Arms, he demanded writing materials and a messenger.

“Is it pin an’ ink at this time o’ day, sir?” demanded the sleepy handmaiden.

“Yes; here’s half a crown for you. Open your eyes and hurry up.”

He wrote the following note to the O’Byrne, and despatched it by a ragged gossoon, who started on his errand, up the hill that leads by the Dargle, like a mountain deer. He also forwarded an order for his luggage to the landlord of the Derralossory Arms.

Sir: As you would permit me no explanation last night, I insist upon making it now. I did not know that you were the possessor of the lands of my forefathers until you yourself announced it. In thanking you for your hospitality I cannot refrain from saying that I wish I had never enjoyed it, as it has been a source of intense pleasure and likewise of bitter pain.

I am, sir,

Your obedient servant,

Philip Redmond.

The messenger returned in a few hours with his luggage.

“Did you deliver my letter at Coolgreny?”

“I gev it to wan av the boys, sir.”

“Did you see any of the—family?”

“None o’ them, barrin’ Miss Eileen’s pony that does be dhruv be her in a sthraw shay, yer honner.”

Happy pony! thought Redmond, as he gazed into the past and beheld Doaty coming to a standstill despite the musical remonstrances of his mistress.

“They axed me if your honner’s name was Ridmond, an’ I sed I didn’t know; an’ I was axed if ye cum wudout a hat, an’ I sed yis. 'That’s him,’ sez Luke Byrne, the boy. 'A low-sized man,’ sez he. 'No,’ sez I, 'he’s a cupple o’ yards high anyhow’; an’ Luke tould me they wor draggin’ the lake beyant at Shinnagh for ye, an’ that Miss Eileen was roarin’ an’ bawlin’ the whole mornin’.”

A thrill went through every fibre in Redmond’s body as this last announcement fell upon his ear; and although the idea was coarsely expressed, that the tender girl might be sorrowing for him caused an unutterable sensation of joy. She could not believe him capable of insulting her father beneath the same roof which shut the stars from her; and yet—pshaw! he would shake the whole thing off as a disagreeable yet delightful dream.

His immediate resolve was to proceed to Dublin, and from thence to Queenstown and back to his native shores; but second thoughts, always so sober, so full of judicious counsel, whispered that the long, lonely days and nights upon the Atlantic would but serve to increase his fever, and that his best chance lay in the distracting influence of European travel. Seven o’clock that evening found him on board the mail steamer for Holyhead; and as he gazed at the soft outlines of the Wicklow hills receding from his wistful glance, and thought of her in that secluded, peaceful valley, he would willingly have parted with a moiety of his existence to be once again in the sunlight of her presence.

While our hero was on the road to Enniskerry Father O’Doherty found an opportunity for comparing notes with Minchin, and, fully convinced of the truthfulness of the young American’s statement, proceeded at once to disabuse the diseased mind of the O’Byrne. This he ultimately succeeded in doing, but not without a deal of powerful and full-flavored argument. “I do believe, Father, I took too much wine. Where is Mr. Redmond, until I make the amende honorable?”

“Strolling about the grounds, I believe.”

“Let us go in search of him.”

“You can go, O’Byrne; I want to have a chat with my fair young child,” said the clergyman, who had witnessed Eileen’s stately courtesy and exit.

Minchin and O’Byrne strolled out into the summer night, making sure of finding Redmond on the terrace overlooking the moat.

“We have bail for his appearance,” said Minchin, “as his hat is decorating the antlers of a lordly stag in the entrance hall.”

The two gentlemen smoked their cigars as they leisurely went in quest of the missing one, and from terrace they proceeded to garden, from garden to pleasaunce, and from pleasaunce to gate-house, but no trace of him could be found. “He is in the stables,” suggested the O’Byrne; and they returned to the enormous quadrangle in which the houses were quartered, but none of the helpers had seen him, and the stables were all locked for the night.

“He is a romantic, hot-headed young dog, and is just taking a cooler. He will turn up by and by, I warrant me; or mayhap he has hied him to my lady’s bower.” And Minchin laughed at the conceit.

“Where is Redmond?” asked Father O’Doherty, as they regained the drawing-room.

“We were going to ask you,” said the O’Byrne. “Where is Eileen?”

“The poor child has a bad headache and has gone to lie down.”

“Come along, Mr. Minchin, and we’ll take our cruiskeen lawn. In the meantime I shall send some of the men to scour the wood in pursuit of this invisible guest. I needn’t ask you to join us, father?”

“No, sir; a little wine at dinner is my quantum.”

As the night rolled over considerable uneasiness was felt about Philip’s non-appearance; but Minchin’s theory, that he had, in his agitation, returned to the Derralossory Arms minus his hat, was gladly accepted, and the O’Byrne insisted upon driving with Minchin into Roundwood in order to set matters right.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the worthy proprietor of the hostelry had nothing of Redmond’s but a small nickel-mounted valise, which he described as set in solid silver.

This increased the anxiety, and as a portion of the lands of Coolgreny abutted upon the lake in sheer precipices of two and three hundred feet, fears began to be entertained that poor Philip in his ignorance of the country might have taken this unfortunate path. There was nothing for it but to await the advent of daylight, and then to scour the country, and, if necessary, to drag the lake at this particular place.

The morning brought no Redmond, and as traces of recent footsteps were very distinct in the neighborhood of the precipice, and the heather rudely torn away at the edge of the cliff, as though by a despairing clutch, the idea that he had fallen into the lake grew into a certainty. A grapnel was got ready, and the melancholy process of dragging rapidly commenced.

The relief which Redmond’s letter brought produced immediate reaction. Father O’Doherty at once started with his car to Enniskerry, with a very courteous note from the O’Byrne and a message from Eileen, but arrived about an hour after our hero had quitted the village. Later on, when the good priest had returned with this intelligence, the O’Byrne telegraphed to the Shelborne Hotel, Dublin, on chance, writing also to that address. Philip was on board the steamer when the telegram arrived, and in London when the missive reached Ireland’s capital. Had he received either, he would have flown back to Coolgreny; but it was not to be.

It was Sunday forenoon, and a great human wave surged out of the Madeleine Church, Paris. Instinctively one pauses beneath that noble portico and gazes across the Place de la Concorde, taking in the glittering Boulevard and the whole brilliancy of the coup d’œil. Philip Redmond had been amongst the worshippers, and was now on his way to the Hôtel du Louvre, so different in every respect to the white-washed, thatch-covered hostelry in the heart of the County Wicklow, and at the door of which he was introduced to the reader. He had indulged in a lazy tour, commencing with the quaint old cities of Belgium, whence he proceeded to Cologne and up the Rhine to Mayence, and after a wandering of two months found himself in the gay and fascinating capital of the world. Philip’s wound had been healed; his heart ceased to throb at the recollection of the “tender light of a day that was dead”; and if the image of Eileen O’Byrne did come back to him, he felt inclined to place himself in the pillory of his own thoughts and pelt himself with ridicule. It was a delightful thing to be heart-whole. He had played with fire and had passed through the red-hot furnace, badly burnt, no doubt, but cured at once and for ever. He used to amuse himself by imagining what the effect of his letter upon the haughty chieftain might be, and would not her vanity be ruffled by the utter absence of the mention of her name? He had done his devoir in stating that the day was one of intense enjoyment; this she could easily translate by the aid of her own dictionary. Heigh-ho! it was a pity the dream did not last a little longer, he thought, as he prepared to descend the steps of the church upon that lovely August forenoon. As he descended, his foot became entangled in the skirt of a young girl right in front of him. He turned to apologize—his heart gave one fearful bound and his brain reeled till he became dizzy. He felt himself grow pale and cold, but, lifting his hat with a cold salutation, he passed down and onwards. It was Eileen O’Byrne!

When he reached the hotel—and he felt as if treading on air—he repaired to his apartment and flung himself into a chair in a whirl of conflicting emotion. The old wound which he had imagined healed had broken out afresh beneath the sad, reproachful glance of those lovely gray Irish eyes. There was but one chance left, and that was to fly. To be in the same city, country, hemisphere with her would be torture. He felt as if some great sea should divide them, and then that the joyous serenity of the last few weeks would be restored to him. He had very little packing to do, as he had not unpacked, and he at once proceeded to the bureau to settle his bill. As he was passing along a corridor in order to reach the vestiaire, he became almost rooted to the ground. A turn in the passage brought him face to face with her whom he was doing his uttermost to avoid. She was deadly pale, and she passed him with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, cold, glacial, haughty. There was a cry of anguish in Phil Redmond’s heart, and, acting upon an unconquerable impulse, he turned after her and almost fiercely demanded: “What have I done to deserve this?”

The same bright rush of crimson which flashed across her face like a rosy sunset when first he met her covered her now as she panted forth:

“You seemed to wish it so.”

“I!” And Phil Redmond blurted out something with reference to explanation and unfair treatment in his usual brusque way.

It was chill October, and a huge log burned in the cavernous fire-place in the banquet-hall at Coolgreny. The claret was upon the ebon-colored oak table, and round it sat no less a party than that which was assembled upon the memorable night when Phil Redmond so innocently brought the wrath of his host upon his devoted head.

“To think,” said Minchin in a state of ecstatic glow, “that we should meet here under such remarkable circumstances. Ye gods!”

“Yes,” said the O’Byrne, rising, “I wanted the same party exactly, and I have been fortunate. You all heard me swear that I would never sell a rood of Ballymacreedy, Kilnagadd, or Derralossory; but”—with a smile—“that oath does not prevent my giving them away, and, please God, when you, Father O’Doherty, unite my honest young friend Philip Redmond to my only child, he shall be restored to the lands of his fathers through his wife.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE POPE’S TEMPORAL PRINCIPALITY.

The Vicar of Jesus Christ is by virtue of his office, and by divine right, of necessity in his own person a sovereign. He is exempt from all subjection to any temporal power, and perfectly free in respect to his own person and the full exercise of his spiritual supremacy, to which kings are as much subject as other baptized persons, and nations as individuals. The right of acquiring property and domain, in a manner which does not violate any other human right, is inherent in this personal sovereignty, and carries with it all the rights of eminent domain, so that whatever is acquired in this way becomes inalienable except by a voluntary cession. The possession of actual sovereign dominion over a sufficient territory is evidently the logical and natural complement of this personal sovereignty, yet is not acquired except by some legal, human act, similar to that which subjects any given domain in particular to any other given individual or corporation. The possession of spiritual sovereignty united with the temporal dignity and power of a civil monarch is, manifestly, the most dangerous and liable to abuse of all the attributions which any individual ruler or dynasty of supreme rulers can be supposed to have received as a stable and permanent right. The danger is increased in proportion to the magnitude and duration of the spiritual empire and the political monarchy united with it. We are obliged, therefore, to believe that Jesus Christ, as the Sovereign Lord of the world, when he founded such an institution, provided efficaciously for the protection of Christian society against this danger and liability to abuse. This he could not do without exercising a special and supernatural providence over his earthly vicariate, the Papacy. Yet, according to the analogy of all other departments of the divine government, this special providence ought to be reduced to a minimum and made as little miraculous as possible, by a wise ordering of natural and secondary causes in reference to the desired effect. In point of fact, we see, from the history of the Papacy, that God has permitted it to exhibit as much of the weakness and imperfection of all human things as was consistent with the fulfilment of the end of its institution. His supernatural overruling of the natural course of events has been limited to this result. And the preservation of the Holy See from perversion by human passions into a merely earthly power, an empire of this world, has been accomplished in great part by the difficulties and struggles which have always environed the possession of the greatest of human dignities and powers—the papal sovereignty.

From Nero to Constantine the Popes were obliged to struggle with the heathen emperors in order to conquer their liberty at the cost of martyrdom. From Sylvester to Gregory the Great they were obliged to struggle with civil and ecclesiastical princes for the recognition and maintenance of their spiritual supremacy. The temporal and civil domain necessary for the stable possession and exercise of the personal, sovereign independence of the Pope as Supreme Pastor of the church was not given until its necessity became manifest. It came in the natural course of events, without violence or miracle. Its tenure was precarious and constantly disputed, and has so remained until the present day. Our present purpose is to sketch the history of the struggles by which the first Popes who were kings of Rome secured the dominion of the patrimony of St. Peter as an inalienable right recognized by the international law of Christendom.

The temporal domain of the Popes began with the natural and gradual acquisition of landed property, which in those times carried with it princely authority over the tenants and inhabitants of estates. Not only the Popes but the principal bishops in Italy and other countries became in this way dukes and counts. The sovereign rights of the emperors lapsed through a long-continued neglect to fulfil the essential duties of sovereignty, and there was no other royal power in Italy which succeeded to them in a legitimate manner. The ruling power devolved naturally upon the local princes. The Roman people turned toward the Pope as their immediate bishop; just as the people of Ravenna, Milan, Treves, Cologne, and many other cities did to their own bishop, because he was the chief of their aristocracy, and also the protector of the people, and was the only one who was both willing and able to take the place vacated by their former rulers. The Western Roman Empire ceased to exist when the Heruli under Odoacer took and sacked Rome, making themselves masters of Italy. Odoacer was in turn conquered and killed by the Ostrogoth Theodoric, who was nominally the lieutenant of the Greek emperor, but in reality conquered Italy for himself. When the empire revived under the able administration of Justinian, the kingdom of the Ostrogoths was subdued and overthrown by the great general Belisarius. A new invasion of Lombards, or Long-beards, from Germany put an end once more to the imperial dominion in Italy, with the exception of a certain part called the exarchate, which had its capital at Ravenna. The authority of the Lombard kings was very limited and precarious, and under their sway the duchies and marquisates and independent municipalities of Italy assumed that character of autonomy which made Italy ever after incapable of anything except a federative unity. The Lombards were at first Arians, but the conversion of their beautiful and accomplished queen, Theodolinda, by St. Gregory the Great was the beginning of a general reconciliation of the whole people to the Catholic Church, and of the complete extinction of the Arian heresy in Italy. The Popes never acknowledged the sovereignty of the Lombard kings over the city and duchy of Rome. The Greek exarch at Ravenna, as the representative of the emperor, was recognized as having lawful jurisdiction, and a magistrate delegated by him, called a duke, resided in Rome. The actual authority of these representatives of the ancient imperial power and of their master at Constantinople became, however, continually more and more a restricted and almost nominal formality, until it was altogether extinguished by the fall of the Greek exarchate. A few passages from the Italian historian Cantù will show in a clear and brief manner how the temporal sovereignty of the Popes in Rome resulted naturally and necessarily out of the new order of things which issued from the universal disorder and confusion that prevailed:

“At the time of the descent of the Lombards upon Italy the country lacked a head possessing general authority, and the Roman people, as well that portion of them who had been subjugated as those who were still free, had no other eminent personage to whom they could look except the Pope. He possessed immense domains in Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, the Campagna, the Sabine territory, Dalmatia, Illyria, Sardinia, in the Cottian Alps, and even in the Gauls. These domains being cultivated by farmers, he exercised over them a legal jurisdiction, appointed officers and gave orders; and, besides, his revenue enabled him to distribute succors in times of dearth, to furnish asylum to refugees, and to pay troops. After the conquest had interrupted the communications between Rome and the exarch of Ravenna, the Pope remained the de facto head of the city where he resided; he corresponded directly with the Byzantine court; made war and peace with the Lombard kings; and, moreover, by putting himself in an attitude of resistance to their conquests, he became the representative of the national party. The chair of St. Peter awaited only a pontiff who should feel all the importance and display all the dignity of his high position. Such a man was Gregory the Great” (580-603).

“Italy, at this time, had no more stability in its civil institutions than France. The Lombards had occupied a large part of it in the first burst of invasion; but the partition which they made among several dukes, though it served to consolidate their possession, prevented them from completing their conquest. As the king was elected from among these different nobles, without any hereditary right, there was a revolution at every vacancy; moreover, the dukes obtained continually more considerable privileges by favoring one or another among the competitors—so much so that those of Benevento and Spoleto acquired complete independence. The only thing they all desired was to remain in tranquil enjoyment of absolute authority in their particular domains, or to make war for their own personal aggrandizement in power and wealth, and not in obedience to the king’s command; so that the king could with difficulty induce them to follow him in any military enterprise against the Greeks for the purpose of expelling these from Italy, or against the Franks, who molested them unremittingly, either for the sake of pillage or at the instigation of the Eastern emperors.... The Greek exarch’s administration extended over the Romagna, the marshy valleys of Ferrara and Comacchio, over five maritime towns from Rimini to Ancona, and five other towns between the shore of the Adriatic and the Apennine slope, over Rome, Venice, and almost all the cities on the sea-coast. Some cities, for instance Venice, made themselves independent, while others were constantly menaced and often invaded by the Lombards. When these latter were involved in foreign or civil wars, the exarchs would avail themselves of the chance to repossess the places they had lost, but were always speedily driven back into narrow limits, without ever enjoying peace, and subject to the necessity of making every year short truces, for which they frequently had to pay a tribute of three hundred livres in gold. When the means failed for paying tribute and the wages of the soldiers, they ran down to Rome and plundered the treasury of the church, or pillaged the sanctuary of St. Michael at Monte Gargano, which was an object of great veneration to the Lombards....

“Another power remained in Italy, as yet imperceptibly growing up, but destined to be developed during the course of the century and to cast lasting roots amid the ruins of the others. The Popes had always shown themselves hostile to the Lombard domination and desirous of preserving the invaded provinces to the empire. Gregory the Great had employed for this effect his authority, his eloquence, his treasure, and his skill in the arts of diplomacy; his successors followed his example, and whenever they were menaced by the Lombards they implored without delay the aid of Constantinople. Preserving toward the emperor the submission which they had constantly exhibited while Rome was the capital of the world, they asked his confirmation of their election, paid him a fixed tribute, and kept at his court an apocrisiarius, who treated with him respecting their affairs; but their dependence on distant sovereigns and feeble exarchs, upon whom the people looked with an evil eye, kept on continually diminishing. Thus the authority of the Popes, who were at the head of the municipal institutions which had been preserved in the city, rendered that of the Duke of Rome almost a nullity, and approached to a species of sovereignty.”[98]

Alboin, the first Lombard king, was murdered soon after his conquest by his own wife, in revenge for the death of her father, Cunimond, chief of the Gepidæ. He was succeeded by Clefis, who was assassinated after reigning eighteen months. The Lombard dukes were disposed to do without a king, and elected no successor to Clefis, until the necessity of uniting in war against their enemies compelled them to elect Autharis, the son of Clefis, the prince whose wife was the celebrated Queen Theodolinda. Autharis died one year after his marriage, and Theodolinda was requested by the dukes to choose a new spouse and king from among their number. The choice fell upon Agilulph, Duke of Turin. His son and successor, Adoloald, was deposed and Ariovald, Duke of Turin, elected in his place, to whom succeeded Rotharis, Duke of Turin, the second husband of Gundeberga, widow of Ariovald, and who was followed by his son Rodoald, the last of the descendants of Theodolinda. The nobles and people were so much attached to the memory of this pious queen that they sought for a new king in her family, although it was not Lombard, and elected her nephew, Aribert of Asti, of the Agilolphingian tribe settled in Bavaria. At his death the kingdom was divided between his two sons, from whom it was wrested by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento. His son Garibald was dispossessed by Perthurit, one of the sons of Aribert. Cunibert, Luitpert, Ragimpert, and Aribert II. completed the list of the Agilolphingian kings. Ansprand, a partisan of Luitpert, who had been dethroned by his rival Ragimpert and imprisoned by Aribert, conquered Aribert, and after a short reign of three months was succeeded by his son Luitprand, who reigned thirty-two years (712 to 744) and was the greatest of the Lombard kings.

With the reign of Luitprand begins the epoch of the decisive events which resulted in the final severance of all the bonds of political dependence which united Rome with the Greek Empire, in the establishment of the formal and legal monarchy of the Popes, and the overthrow of the Lombard dominion in Italy by Charlemagne.

Luitprand was a sovereign in the strict sense of the word, through his ability and energy of character even more than by the recognized title to the royal dignity which was vested in his person. He undertook and carried out a thorough reformation in the political administration of his kingdom, re-established order, extirpated the germs of disunion and civil war, secured the obedience of his subordinate dukes, and preserved a good intelligence with the Popes and the church. His ultimate aim was the union of all Italy in one kingdom under his own laws, including all the remaining Greek possessions and the city and principality of Rome. The first great step toward the fulfilment of this design must obviously be the conquest of the Greek exarchate. In this undertaking he had the sympathy of the Roman aristocracy and people, though not that of the Popes. The remnant of the old Roman nation existed at this time almost entirely in the ancient capital and its adjacent territory. The Roman Empire really perished from no other cause than the general extinction of the Roman race. As the barbarians swarmed into Italy the best part of the old Italians took refuge in Rome, where the old spirit, the old manners and institutions—so to speak, the Roman essence—was concentrated and preserved to effect a new and peaceful conquest of the world. This Roman nation desired to have its own autonomy and to be subject neither to the Roumanians of the east nor the barbarians of the west. They had no thought of accepting Lombard sovereignty over themselves, yet they were eager to see the Greek domination in Italy terminated, and therefore desired Luitprand’s success in the enterprise of overthrowing the exarchate. For Rome they desired independence. The Popes, however, would not take any measures for making Rome a sovereign state, until divine Providence directed the course of events to this end as a natural and necessary result, without any positive act on their part renouncing civil allegiance to the empire.

The course of events actually favored most opportunely and remarkably the designs of Luitprand and the wishes of the Roman people. The unutterable folly of the Emperor Leo the Isaurian drove him to an attack on the religion of the Romans and the sacred person of the pontiff. He ordered the exarch Paul to enforce submission to the heresy of the Iconoclasts by military power. Pope Gregory II. excommunicated Leo and exhorted all the Catholic princes and people of Italy to stand firm in defence of the faith and discipline of the church. They obeyed his voice so readily and with so much zeal that the absolute and final extinction of the Greek dominion in Italy was only averted by the mediation of the Pope himself. As Luitprand and the Lombards, profiting by the general uprising against the imperial authority, became stronger and advanced toward a more entire subjugation of Italy, they became more dangerous to the independence of the Holy See than were the feeble dukes and exarchs who represented the distant emperor. The king even allied himself with the exarch for the subjugation of the proud republic which disdained to be subject to either Greek or Lombard, and besieged the city of Rome. Pope Gregory II. went to Luitprand’s camp, and the majesty of his presence, together with the force of the arguments which he addressed to the noble and Catholic mind of the king, produced such an effect upon him that he cast himself at the feet of the pontiff, imploring his benediction and promising peace. In company with the Pope, Luitprand went to St. Peter’s Church, where he laid upon the tomb of the apostle his royal mantle, bracelets, coat of mail, dagger, gilded sword, golden crown, and silver cross as a gift to St. Peter and the church. Nevertheless, he renewed his attempt to make himself master of Rome ten years later during the pontificate of Gregory III., and continued during the pontificate of Zacharias his occasional irruptions into the exarchate of Ravenna and the duchy of Rome, although in every instance he yielded to the voice of his conscience and of the Vicar of Christ, desisting from his purpose as often as he renewed it, and making restitution of the towns which he had conquered. His successor, Rachis, undertook anew the enterprise of subjugating the exarchate, but was so much affected by the remonstrances of the Pope that he abdicated his dignity and withdrew with his wife and children into a monastery. His brother and successor, Astolpho, actually achieved the conquest of the exarchate,[99] and put an end to the Greek dominion in that part of Italy. Henceforth the Byzantine emperors had no authority in Italy except in Calabria and Sicily. Astolpho next turned his attention toward Rome and made a formal demand of allegiance on the senate and people, supported by a large army. The city was strongly fortified, and all its people were determined to make a stubborn defence of their independence. Astolpho would not lend his ear to any negotiation, help was demanded in vain from the Greek emperor, and in these sore straits Pope Stephen III. betook himself for aid and succor to Pepin, the King of the Franks.

Gregory III. had once before invoked the help of Charles Martel without any result. Since that time the Frankish nobles had referred to Pope Zacharias the question of their right to set aside the effete dynasty of the Merovingians and to substitute in its place the family of Charles Martel. The Pope had answered that the royal title ought to be given to the one who actually possessed and exercised the royal authority and functions. The new Carlovingian dynasty was thus formally established in France with the sanction and benediction of the Pope. And the time was now come for these powerful kings, Pepin and Charlemagne, to step forward as the eldest sons of the church, to secure the temporal sovereignty of the Pope, and to inaugurate that close relationship which has ever since existed between the kingdom of France and the Holy See.

Pope Stephen, although old and in extremely feeble health, went to France, where he was received with a spontaneous and splendid ovation by all ranks of the people, from the highest to the lowest. The Pope performed the solemn ceremony of the anointing of the king, the queen, and the royal princes, and conferred upon Pepin the dignity of patrician of Rome. A solemn assembly of the magnates of the kingdom was held at Quiercey, at which the king and nobles bound themselves to place the Pope in possession of the sovereign dominion of Rome and the exarchate. Pepin first attempted peaceful negotiations with Astolpho, and, these being absolutely refused, crossed the Alps with an army, and compelled him to make a treaty of peace with the Pope, by which he renounced all claim upon the Roman principality and the exarchate. Astolpho, however, disavowed and violated his engagements as soon as Pepin had withdrawn his army. Again (755) Pepin crossed the Alps and suddenly appeared with an overwhelming force before Pavia. Severer conditions of peace were this time imposed upon Astolpho—a mulct of one-third of his treasure, a yearly tribute of 12,000 gold solidi, and hostages for the fulfilment of his promises. French and Lombard commissaries were appointed to visit the whole territory assigned to the Pope and receive the keys of all the cities. Pepin made a solemn and festal entry into Rome amidst universal jubilation, and laid a formal document of investiture of the pontifical domain, together with the keys of the towns, upon the tomb of St. Peter.

Astolpho died suddenly from an injury received by a fall from his horse, very soon after these events (756). Rachis came out of his cloister with the design of regaining the crown which he had resigned. The majority of the princes favored the election of Didier, Duke of Brescia, who secured the influence of the Pope and of the envoys of Pepin in his favor by a solemn promise under oath to execute the treaty made by Astolpho and to cede some additional territory to the Holy See. He was accordingly elected King of Lombardy, but failed to fulfil his engagements and passed the seventeen years of his reign in perpetual efforts to secure an undivided sovereignty over all Italy. At last, taking advantage of the death of Pepin and of Pope Stephen III., and of cabals and factions among the Romans in reference to a new election, he made an open and violent effort to seize the dominion of Rome and the entire principality. He was deterred from actually consummating his intention by an armed entry into the city, where there was no force which could have prevented it, simply by the threat of excommunication, and withdrew to Pavia. The end of the Lombard kingdom was now near at hand. Pope Adrian, the Italian people, Charlemagne, and all except a few adherents of Didier were in accord on this subject. Charles crossed the Alps with a large army, evading the troops which guarded the passes by means of a secret defile, and easily took possession of the whole territory, Pavia only excepted, which held out for a year under Didier and his gallant son, Adelchis. Pavia at length surrendered, the Lombard kingdom was abolished, Didier was confined in a French monastery, where he became a monk in earnest for the rest of his life, the donation of Pepin to the Holy See was confirmed, and Charles returned home to prosecute that brilliant career which made him before the end of the century the monarch of almost the whole of Europe.

The temporal kingdom of the Pope was now established in a definite and stable manner, with the universal recognition of Catholic Christendom. Nevertheless, as a civil institution it was still exposed to the inward and outward vicissitudes and dangers to which all states are liable from the very nature of things. It was necessary that some great political power, distinct from the papal sovereignty, should hold over the See of St. Peter the ægis of protection. The providence of God, therefore, soon raised up that power which was consecrated by the name of

“THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.”

During the last year of the eighth century Adrian’s successor, Pope Leo III., was obliged to implore the aid of Charlemagne to repress the turbulence of Roman factions. Leo was received by Charlemagne at Paderborn, in the midst of a brilliant assemblage of nobles and a vast army, with all possible veneration and honor, and returned to Rome escorted by princes and prelates and a guard of honor, to await the promised visit of the king. In December, 799, Charlemagne came to Rome, a great council was assembled, and all the measures which were necessary for restoring and confirming order in the pontifical state were adopted. The Christmas festivities were celebrated with the greatest possible pomp and splendor, and while Charlemagne was kneeling before the tomb of the apostles Leo suddenly and unexpectedly approached him and placed on his head a golden diadem. The people burst forth into the acclamation: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Roman emperor!” In the bull which Leo published on the same day he says: Quem Carolum auctore Deo, in defensionem et provectum sanctæ universalis ecclesiæ Augustum hodie sacravimus.

In a former article[100] we have sketched an outline of the destinies and vicissitudes of Rome during the period of the decline of the Carlovingian dynasty and the rise of the German Empire. We have, therefore, now presented in a general view the history of the rise and consolidation of the temporal sovereignty of the Popes between the two great eras of St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory VII. From that time forward the political history of the Papacy relates chiefly to the rise and subsequent decline of the temporal power of the Pope over all Christendom, until at last, in the disruption of political unity among European states, the Holy See is once more subject to the same struggle for independence in its immediate patrimony which preceded the period of its mediæval power. The confederate union of the European nations under the moral presidency of the pope and the political primacy of the emperor was gradually transformed, by the waning of the imperial power which became restricted to Germany and at last subsided into a mere royal dominion over Austria, and the diminution of the spiritual power of the Holy See by the schism in Christendom, into a weaker sort of alliance, held together by common interests and mutual treaties. So long as this continued the Pope retained his place among the other sovereigns as one of the Italian princes, with a personal pre-eminence and a moral influence derived from his spiritual supremacy over the Catholic nations, and over the Catholic population in those nations which were not Catholic. Sound policy and the necessity of preserving an equilibrium in Europe caused the powerful monarchs of the great states to protect the independence of the Pope against one another, and to restore it when it was invaded. The disruption of the last bonds of European alliance in our own day has left the Holy See and the church once more a prey to secular tyranny exercised by a new German emperor, and a new Lombard king, without protection or defence from any political power. As Rome and Christendom went up together, so they have gone down together. And if a regeneration or restoration in the actual present or the future is destined for Europe and the rest of the world, it must be accomplished in both together; for they are inseparable parts of one whole. The history of the past is therefore a guide for judging the present and forecasting the future. The question of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the Roman state is essential and pre-eminent in the discussion of the principles of a reconstitution of the family of civilized and Christian nations. The complete independence and liberty of the Pope as supreme head of the church, and of the church itself, are intrinsically the most important of all rights and interests; and with these the temporal sovereignty of the Pope is necessarily connected so intimately that it becomes indirectly and extrinsically of equal importance, being, in fact, practically identified with them. We have, therefore, in our preceding historical sketches prepared the way for showing how this sovereignty of the Pope over Rome and the whole territory which he claims as subject to his crown is an indubitable and inalienable right, which must be restored and secured to him as the indispensable condition of religious and political order and well-being.

We shall not attempt to reconcile this proposition with the doctrine of a divine or natural right of sovereignty inhering in the multitude of every nation or a majority of them. At the present time this doctrine is not maintained by sensible and moderate advocates of a constitutional form of government and of popular franchises. The sovereignty may lawfully reside in the multitude politically organized, as it does in our republic, but it is not by virtue of divine or natural right coalescing from the separate, individual rights of the units who make up the mass. The right of Mr. Tilden to the Presidential chair was not asserted on the ground that he received a majority of the popular vote, which he did receive without question, but on the ground that he received a majority of the votes of the electors who were really competent to vote for the appointment of a President, according to the Constitution. We might make a plausible argument to show that the Roman people have always consented to the papal sovereignty, except during intervals of political madness, and actually at the present time would re-establish it, if they were free to do so. But the right of the Pope cannot be maintained on a theory, which would reduce it to a popular concession revocable at any time by the will of his subjects. Some good Catholics may hold the doctrine of popular sovereignty as above defined, but they do so inconsistently; for, although it is not directly contrary to the Catholic faith, it is incompatible with the principles and practice of the Holy See and the church, and the doctrine of every authority respected by sound and loyal Catholics who are instructed in the science of political ethics. In certain circumstances the will of the people suffices, alone or in concurrence with other causes, to convey or transfer lawful dominion. We have shown how, in the case of the papal sovereignty, the Roman people did, voluntarily, withdraw or refuse allegiance to all other princes and eagerly give it to the Pope. We have shown, also, how other causes concurred in establishing his right as a fact, and placing him in actual possession of the sovereignty, without prejudice to any other really existing legitimate right. The Pope possessed all the rights belonging to his position as the chief land-owner and prince among the Roman princes. He possessed the right, as head of the church, to have no temporal prince placed over him who could control or hinder the exercise of his spiritual supremacy. Moreover, he possessed a great many imperfect rights or claims upon the allegiance of the Roman people arising from the services he had rendered to the state in preserving, defending, and succoring it in circumstances when it was near extinction, from his superior ability to govern the state, and the fitness of things making it expedient, and even necessary, for the public good that sovereignty should be vested in his person. The action of Pepin was that of one who defended the Roman people in the right of their independence against tyrants and aggressors, and defended the general right of his own and other nations to the independence and tranquillity of the Roman Church as the centre of Christendom. The action of Charlemagne was similar, and his overthrow of the Lombard kingdom was justifiable by the right of conquest, the consent of the greater part of the people of Italy, and the necessity of providing for the welfare not only of Italy but of all Europe. His final act of settlement in the beginning of the year 800 had still greater force and legitimacy as the act of the king of Europe, in which all the great estates of his realm concurred, the whole people of Western Christendom applauding, and the Eastern empire tacitly consenting. The possession of a temporal principality by the Pope became thus a fact, which was so connected with natural and divine rights of various kinds that it became a perpetual and inviolable right. This is the only way in which sovereign rights can become vested in any kind of lawful possessor or political person. There is no such thing as a right to civil sovereignty immediately delegated by God or springing out of the constitution of nature directly. Scarcely any one can be found, even among legitimists, who maintains any such origin for sovereign rights. There is a natural and divine right to good government inherent in the social and political order. There is a divine right, having a natural basis, in the Catholic Church to good government, which is specifically secured by the divine appointment of the form of government, as a hierarchy subordinated to a supreme head. This right takes precedence of all others. As those rights which are more particular cede to the more general, all rights whatever must give way to the universal right of all Christians and all mankind, that the Vicar of Christ shall be left free and independent in the possession and exercise of his spiritual supremacy, and that all men shall have liberty of obeying him as the vicegerent of God on earth. The Roman people have a right to good government, the Italian people have a right to national well-being, all Europe has a right to the advantage of a due political equilibrium and alliance among nations. All these advantages were secured by the establishment of the sovereignty of the Pope in Rome. It grew up and became strengthened, and sustained itself for ages, as an essential part of the political constitution of Europe. Whatever pretence to right, legitimacy, stability, or sanction of any kind can be made by any European institution, the same is applicable to the temporal principality of the Pope. But, beyond all this, it is necessary to the spiritual independence of the Holy See, and therefore protected by the sanction of a higher right and a higher law. It has been given to God and accepted by his vicegerent, and has thus become sacred, inviolable, irrevocable. It is like a cathedral, an altar, the sepulchre of a saint. It is the property of the universal church, of Christendom, and of God. As such it is under the protection of ecclesiastical, international, and divine law; it is within the domain of right and of morality, and therefore appertains to the Catholic religion; is included in the order which is subject to the spiritual supremacy of the Pope. In this order he is the supreme judge and lawgiver, infallible in defining and declaring the law, sovereign in the judgments and decrees by which he applies it to particular questions and concrete matters. The Pope is therefore the supreme judge, the Catholic episcopate being associated with him in the same tribunal, by whom alone the right and the necessity of the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See can be determined. The consent of the Catholic people adds moral weight to this determination, and the political action of states gives it the necessary physical force for its execution. But there is no appeal from the judgment of the Pope himself on his own rights as sovereign in the Roman principality, either to bishops, sovereigns, or people. His own judgment has settled the right of the Roman question, and it is the duty of all Catholics to adhere to that judgment. The Pope will not cede his sovereignty, and the Catholic people will not consent to its cession or to its violent occupation by any usurper.

The history of the destinies of Rome in the past shows that the recent calamities of the Holy See do not warrant the expectation that its temporal sovereignty has passed away to return no more. It has proved itself to be indestructible amid all the vicissitudes of Europe. When Rome is shaken and disturbed, the civilized world is thrown into commotion. As we are writing, the Russian army is crossing the Pruth, and it cannot be doubted that we have reached one of the most momentous epochs of history. When our readers are perusing what has been written, another fold of the scroll of time will have been unrolled, perhaps thickly written over with records of great events. We have read this morning the significant utterance of Von Moltke on the necessity of arming more German troops for the defence of the empire. Some may take Châteaubriand’s gloomy view of things and think that Europe is hastening on a funeral march to the tomb. If this be so, then there is no refuge for the Pope but the catacombs. If atheism, despotism, revolution, and anarchy are going to hold a wild revel amid the ruins and monuments of a Christendom which was but is no more, then Rome will be involved in the common ruin. But “when Rome falls, the world.” However, we do not feel obliged, as yet, to despair of Europe, Christianity, or civilization. If there is a resurging movement after a temporary convulsion, Rome will be the centre of it, and the successor of Pius IX. will reap the advantage of his long watch by the tomb of St. Peter. We believe in the triumph of the Catholic Church over infidelity, heresy, schism, revolution, and despotism; over Judaism, Mohammedanism, and heathenism. The restoration of the Pope’s temporal kingdom is necessary to this triumph, and therefore we believe it will be restored. We hope for a pacification of Europe after the war which has now begun is terminated. Civilized mankind is tired of war, and the almost bankruptcy which is universally produced by the enormous military establishments of the nations of Europe, it would seem, must enforce at length disarmament and bring about a period of amicable alliance and devotion to the arts of peace, the study of the welfare of the people as the end of government, the moral sway of principles which are not only patriotic but Christian and Catholic. In such a state of things the moral influence of the Holy See would naturally rise to a higher point than it attained even under the mediæval system.

As for Rome and Italy, their temporal prosperity, so far from being sacrificed, would be promoted, by the re-establishment of the pontifical state and the overthrow of the visionary fabric of Cavour and Mazzini. We certainly desire to see all just national aspirations of the Italians satisfied. We are glad that Austrian domination in Italy has ceased. But all history seems to show that a confederate unity of distinct states is the only order suited to Italy, and that a monarchical unification is foreign and hostile to the genius and conditions of the Italian people. But, whatever may be done by the Italians and the European princes who will be left masters of the situation and arbiters of national interests after the conflict now impending, in respect to the rest of Italy, the domain of the Pope must be restored to him in its integrity and placed under the protection of the law of nations. This is the indispensable condition of the restoration of Europe from the condition of decadence into which it has fallen, and no doubt the providence of God will force upon the rulers of the world the recognition of this truth in due time and by the course of events wholly beyond their foresight or control.

ALBA’S DREAM.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC.
PART II.

When it was known in the country that M. le Marquis had joined the army as a common soldier, the consternation was great; but when it was known why he had done so, surprise gave way to bitter indignation and regret. The Marquis de Gondriac gone to risk his life for the son of a low plebeian, generally supposed to have been a pirate! The marvel was how the world stood still while such a scandal was enacted in its face. As to the widow, nobody thought of congratulating her. If Marcel had gone out and been shot, they would have pitied her, within reasonable bounds; but now every man’s hand was against her and her son—even the women felt the sweet font of pity dried up within them when they thought of what might come of this. But the people, despite their wrath, were loath to take so gloomy a view of the future.

“The bullets have a sense of their own,” said Peltran; “they know who to hit first and who last, and who never to hit. Look at M. le Comte, how they respect him! He has seen more fighting than ever the Caboffs did, and yet the bullets have never touched a hair of his head. It’s my belief the things are alive and know what they are about.”

No one contradicted this sapient remark; for Peltran was not a pleasant person to contradict.

Marcel Caboff had never been popular, but from this time forth he was branded as a sort of potential malefactor; if M. le Marquis died, Marcel would be his murderer, and Marcel’s life would not be worth an old song in Gondriac. The only people who did the young man justice and had the courage to take his part were Virginie and Alba. Since the night of the storm a friendship had sprung up between Marcel and Alba which had grown to more than friendship on his side. Alba was a lovely maiden now; impulsive, untutored as the waves that her nature seemed attuned to, wild as the sea-birds whose lot she sometimes envied when they beat their wings, rose up from the rocks, and took flight across the sea.

“I wonder you can stay here and live this idle, humdrum life when you might be away seeing the great world,” Alba said to him one day, as they met upon the cliff and walked on together.

“You wish I were away, do you?”

“Oh! no; only I wonder you don’t go. I should, if I were a man.”

“It is harder on me than you think,” said Marcel bitterly. “I did my best to get away; but mother went on her knees and said I would kill her if I went. It was hard to resist that; but it makes me feel angry with her when I think of what has come of it. I know the people hate me and call me a coward. Alba,” he said, turning suddenly round, “you don’t think me a coward, do you?”

“No, Marcel; if you had not been braver than any man in Gondriac, except your father, you would not have come out in the boat that night. How dare they call you a coward when they remember it!”

“They don’t remember it. Everybody has forgotten it but you.”

“M. le Marquis has not forgotten it.”

“I wish he had. That is what has brought all this misery about. If he had not remembered, I should be away with the grande armée now, and should either die a glorious death like my brothers, or come home by and by with the cross, and perhaps a wound or two. Then everybody would know I was a brave man, and mother would have had something to be proud of.”

“Yes,” said Alba dreamily; she was watching a ship that flecked the horizon far away like a great swan, its white sails flapping against the sky, the sea-gulls following in its wake, as it cleaved the wave.

“Would you have been proud of me?” asked Marcel.

“Yes,... perhaps.”

“You would not have cared a straw, I believe,” he said, angry and hurt at her indifferent tone.

“If you had been killed? Indeed I should, Marcel. I should have been very sorry; but what is the good of being sorry now, when it is never going to happen? Look at that ship out there! With what a dip she shears the water! How fast she goes! Her sails are like wings. I wish I had wings!”

“You are always wishing for impossible things,” said Marcel, huffed at this summary dismissal; “you were wishing you were a man a little while ago, and now you want to be a bird. Why don’t you wish for something I could give you?”

“You give me! You could not give me any one of the things I wish for!” Alba flung back the waves of swart hair from her low, broad brow and laughed derisively.

“How do you know that? I have plenty of money, and money can buy everything—everything reasonable, that is. Suppose a fairy were to come and say she would give you whatever you wished; what would you ask for?”

“I would ask her first to make me perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy,” began Alba.

“Why, you are all that already, you foolish girl!”

“You think so; but you know nothing about it. I would ask her to make me as rich and powerful as a queen, and to make everybody pay me homage—not because I was rich and powerful, but because they loved me! Oh! I should like to be loved more than anybody ever was in this world before. And I should like to live in a beautiful castle, like the castle yonder, and I should fill it with beautiful things, and make it a real fairy palace to live in.”

“And who would you like to live in it with you? You would not care to live in it all alone?” inquired Marcel, bewildered by these ambitious aspirations that left himself and his money-bags altogether out of the reckoning.

“Well, first, I should like to have petite mère, of course; then ... then I should ask the fairy for a brave and handsome prince, who would come and woo me as they do in the story-books; he should be handsome and clever and good, or I should not care for him; but if he was all that, I should love him with all my heart and soul, and we should be as happy as the days are long!”

Marcel heard her to the end, and then began to consider if there was not some one item in the capacious list that came within his possibilities.

“If another castle would do instead of this one—you know you never could have this one—I would go and buy it for you, Alba, and you might have as many pretty gauds to fill it as you liked. We have lots of gold and silver things and pictures up there”—nodding towards the Fortress—“and if I asked mother she would give them to us—to you, I mean.” Alba’s laugh rang like a silver echo all along the cliff.

“And the prince—where would you get him?”

“Must he be a prince? Would not a brave man who loved you and was ready to do your bidding in everything, who would spend his whole life in trying to make you happy—would not that do instead? Must he be a prince, Alba?”

He took her hand and held it, and she did not struggle to release it. They were standing at the foot of a rock that cast a long, black shadow far out upon the sea; the west wind blew into their faces; Alba’s scarlet hood had fallen back, and her hair drifted in a heavy stream behind her, as Marcel bent over her, waiting to hear his fate. He might have read it in her blank, scared looks, in her startled, reluctant attitude. If there had been hope for him, would she have shrunk away and drawn closer to the rock, as if asking it to protect her?

“I have been too hasty,” said the young man penitently; “I should have spoken to Mère Virginie first. Forgive me, Alba, and say only if I may go to her now and ask you for my wife?” He still held her hand, and, mistaking her silence, made an effort to slip his arm around her. The movement acted on Alba like the sting of a snake; she escaped from him with a cry, and sped along the cliff like a deer flying from the hunters.

“My child, you have been foolish, and so has Marcel; but there is no need to cry or be unhappy about it,” said Mère Virginie when Alba had sobbed out the terrible story on her breast. But Alba was not to be comforted. She had been living in dreamland, and now awoke to find the hard ground under her feet instead of golden clouds. Of course she had dreamt of love and lovers, and her heart, or that vague yearning which as yet took its place, had become enamored of the dreams, visions that lay safe beyond the disenchanting present, wrapped in the golden haze of distance; and now this rude awakening had dispelled them, and brought home to the dreamer that she had reached that border-land that lies between the mystery of morning and the revelation of noon; the pearly mists had rolled away in an instant, and the blaze of the mid-day sun was upon her, chasing the fairy phantoms and making sober realities pitilessly clear. She had been dreaming of a lover in some remote time and place, and, lo! he was at her side; he had been close to her all along—an ugly, common man, who seemed made on purpose to mock the visions of her fancy. And yet this incident, which threw Alba into such despair, had been for many a day the fond anticipation of her mother’s heart.

“Why need it frighten you to find that Marcel loves you and wants to have you for his little wife, my child?” said Virginie. “Don’t shudder and cling to me as if he were going to drag you away this very moment! You shall never leave me, unless you do it of your own free will. But remember, darling, that I may have to leave you; and then what will become of you?”

“You leave me, petite mère?” And Alba looked up at her in dismay.

“It must come to that some day. I am old and you are young. I have a trouble here that reminds me of this often, and then I lie awake of nights, thinking of my little one, and praying God to give her a friend, the best and truest friend a woman can have in this world, to take care of her before I am called away.”

“Mother, if you go I will go too. I could never live without you! What should I do here if you were gone? Nobody wants me, nobody loves me in the whole world but you.”

“Marcel loves you, my child, and he will be that good friend, if you will let him.”

“Marcel! Marcel! As if he could replace you! I don’t love him; I don’t care if he went to the wars and never came back again.”

“If you married him you would soon learn to love him; his goodness would soon win your love. And then remember, Alba, how happy he could make you. You often long to have beautiful things—pearls and jewels and splendid dresses—and you sigh to go away in the ships that we see setting sail for distant lands, and to see fair cities, and the great mountains, and the countries where it is always summer and the flowers never die. Marcel would give you all these wishes; and then he would let you be so good and generous to the poor!”

“I should not care for pearls and pretty things, if I had to marry Marcel,” said Alba. “I should not like to go to distant cities with him; and if he loved me like a real lover, he would let me be good to the poor without making me his wife.”

How was the anxious woman to argue with this sweet, foolish innocence? If she could but teach the child to believe in the happiness that was at her feet, and persuade her to become Marcel’s wife, how easy it would be to die! How terrible it was to have to leave her unprotected and alone! Virginie’s heart overflowed in tears as she thought of it, and the hot drops trickled down her face and fell on Alba’s.

Alba looked up quickly. “Petite mère!” she said.

Throwing her arms round Virginie and kissing the wet cheeks again and again, “I will marry him! I will do anything, only don’t be unhappy, don’t cry! O mother, mother! what is it?” she cried, starting up in terror; for Virginie had fallen back and was gasping for breath. She pressed the child’s arm, and with her eyes bade her be still. The spasm of pain passed away after a while; but when she tried to speak the words came faintly in broken sentences.

“Petite mère! what is it?” entreated Alba, scarcely reassured. “May I call Jeanne? Shall we send for the doctor?”

“No, my darling, it is nothing; I am well now,” said Virginie, with a sickly smile that belied her words. The sharp pang had, it is true, subsided, but she was still ashy pale and could only speak under her breath. Alba watched her intently for some minutes, and then, twining her arms round Virginie’s neck, she laid her head upon her breast, nestling to her like a bird.

“Mother,” she whispered, “would it really make you happy if I were to marry Marcel?”

“My darling, it would make me happier than anything else in this world.”

“Then I will marry him, petite mère.”

“My child!” Virginie’s face lighted up with a beaming joy.

“I will marry him to please you. There, now, promise me not to be unhappy, not to lie awake at night fretting, and never to have any more pains at your heart!”

“But, my darling, I would not have you do it to make me happy. It is your happiness I am thinking of, not my own. Don’t you think you could learn to love Marcel after a while?”

“Petite mère! how can you ask me? Foolish, ugly Marcel, whom everybody laughs at and calls a coward! But never mind. I will marry him, since he wants me and you wish it; I promise you I will.”

“You are a foolish child to speak of Marcel so,” said Virginie; “those who laugh at him are the fools, and you know he is not a coward. As to his ugliness, what does that matter, if he is faithful, and fond, and good?”

Alba pondered this philosophy for some minutes; then she said: “When will he want to marry me, petite mère?”

“Not for a long while yet, my darling. You are both very young; there’s time to wait.”

“How old am I?”

“You were sixteen in September.”

“And how long will you let me wait?”

“Till your seventeenth birthday is passed, at least.”

“Nearly a whole year! Then I have all that time to be free and happy!”

“And if at the end of that time you have not learned to care for Marcel, I shall not ask you to marry him at all,” said Virginie. The ecstasy which the reprieve had called forth sent a pang through her heart, and made her ask herself whether, after all, she was doing wisely and well in forcing upon the child a lot from which her sympathies recoiled so violently.

“Not marry him at all!” repeated Alba in amazement; but she added quickly, with one of those sudden changes of manner that were familiar to her sensitive and mobile nature: “I think, petite mère, I had better not wait for the year. Instead of growing easier, it might grow harder by thinking over it all that time. You know you always tell me that when one has a disagreeable thing to do, it is better to do it at once and be done with it; one only makes it worse by looking at it. I think it would be better if I were to marry Marcel at once and get it over.”

Virginie was aghast at the combination of strength and utter childish ignorance of the true nature and bearings of the sacrifice in contemplation which Alba’s reasoning revealed. In the bottom of her heart the mother believed this repugnance would pass away, and there was no cruelty in coercing the child’s will at the outset, in order to bend it to her real happiness; but unless it could be so bent, Virginie would rather die trusting her treasure to God’s guardianship than force it into any man’s keeping.

“We will say no more about it for the present, my child,” she said; “we will leave it in the hands of God for another year.”

“And you will be happy now, petite mère?”

“Yes. I feel more tranquil about my darling’s future.”

“And Marcel—must I tell him?”

“No, you must not mention to him or to any one what we have been saying. I will speak to him myself.”

So there was no engagement, no promise exchanged; not a word of thanks or of rejoicing passed between him and Alba; but Marcel knew how docile she was to the power of love, and she loved her mother with a strength and depth of feeling that knew no limits and measured no sacrifices. He did not mean to be accepted as a sacrifice. He had faith enough in his love to believe that before the year was out it would have conquered the coy heart of his lady-love and brought her a willing captive to his side. Meantime, he would leave none of the stratagems and tactics of honorable warfare untried.

Alba was fond of books; he sent for all those he could hear of that were likely to interest her, and she and Virginie read them together in the long evenings, and talked over them, until their days were brightened by the scenes of travel and story which the books described. He knew she loved jewels and shining silks, and he went to Paris himself and selected pretty trinkets of every kind—a necklace of pearls, and rings of emeralds and rubies, and silks of soft and brilliant colors—and he would carry them to the cottage, and shyly lay them down without saying a word. Alba seldom noticed them till he was gone, when she would open the parcel and examine its contents; but Mère Virginie seemed to take more pleasure in the gauds than she did. This went on for three months. Then, one morning, Alba, who had been out since sunrise, sitting on the rocks and watching the tide come in and the creamy surf break upon the shore, entered the cottage and said abruptly:

“Mother, I won’t take any more presents from Marcel, and I want to give him back all those we have. I can’t keep them; I can’t indeed.”

“You have made up your mind never to marry him?”

“I will marry him whenever you wish it. It is not that, only I can’t take his gifts; they make me miserable. I hate them!”

“My darling, I will send them back to him, if you wish; but it will hurt him very much, poor fellow!—he took so much trouble to get them for you, and you used to love pretty things. How often have I not heard you long for the rings and flowers and shining silks we have seen in the fine shops at X——? Many a time you have wished a fairy or a lover would come and give them to you! Do you forget?”

“Ah! that is just it,” said Alba, with a light laugh that was full of pain; “if a lover gave them to me, I dare say I should like them well enough.”

“But Marcel is your lover?”

“Poor Marcel! It is so funny trying to think of him like that. He is so awkward and stupid and ugly; a real lover would be quite different. But I don’t want one now; I don’t indeed, petite mère. Only please send Marcel back his gifts. They make me feel as if he were bribing me to be fond of him, and I should not care a bit more for him if he gave me the loveliest jewels in France. I don’t care any more for jewels. I used to long to be happy myself, but now I only care to make you happy. You promised me to be very happy when I married Marcel?”

This was dreadful. This was not what the mother meant when she prayed for the marriage that Alba contemplated with such pathetic resignation, as if it were a sacrifice or a torture that every day brought nearer to her. There were still eight months between her and the dreaded fate, and Virginie was strongly moved to tell her at once that she was released. It seemed cruel to poison the child’s life all that time on the chance, which apparently grew less as the months went on, of her getting to love Marcel at the end of the year. But, again, this marriage was the one prospect of security and happiness which the future opened out—quiet, substantial happiness such as the mother longed to see her in possession of. If Alba flung it away, there was nothing before her but a lonely, loveless life of unprotected poverty. It was best to be patient, to keep silence a little longer. Virginie, meantime, had faith in the power of her own love, and she would never cease imploring heaven to take the destiny of her darling into its safe-keeping.

Hermann de Gondriac had now been five years absent, and those years had been an uninterrupted series of triumphs for him; he had borne a charmed life on every battle-field, and come off unharmed where all around him were stricken. But the chances of war prevailed at last, and the news came to Gondriac that M. le Comte had been seriously wounded and was coming home. His left arm had been shattered, and, though the skill of the emperor’s surgeon had saved him from amputation, he was in great suffering and condemned to the severest precautions. A few bonfires were lighted on the cliffs to bid the home-comer welcome, but this was all the people ventured on. M. le Marquis, it was said, had been in the same engagement with his son, but had come out of it unhurt.

That winter was a fierce one all through France, and Gondriac suffered terribly; the bleak gray sea in a perpetual roar, and the winds beating on its wild, open coast. Food and fuel were scanty, and but for the presence of the young lord at the castle many amongst the fishermen’s families must have perished and starved. No one had yet seen him; the great physician, who came from Paris at intervals, forbade his going beyond the southern side of the park until spring came with sunshine and blossoms. But Hermann could not have been more actively present amongst his people had he been walking daily in the midst of them. He seemed to know by inspiration what they wanted, and food and clothing were dealt out from the castle in unlimited supplies. There were toys for the children, and medicine and strengthening wine for the sick, and books for those who could enjoy them, until the people came to think that the bird of the fairy-tale must be true, and that their young master had the tell-tale messenger at his orders.

Alba busied her poetic fancy in making pictures of what Hermann was like. She had not seen him since she was a child and he a tall, slim lad. Now that he was a man and a hero, she longed to behold him again. Even to look at a hero from a distance would be something—life was so tame, and all the people she knew were so commonplace. Was he proud and stern and abrupt in speech, as they said the emperor was? Or was he gentle and honey-tongued like the knights of old?

One morning a man rode in from X—— to the castle bearing important news to M. le Comte. Important news indeed: the emperor was coming the next day to inspect the fortifications of a neighboring seaport. It was settled at once in Gondriac that M. le Comte would go to meet his majesty. No physician could hinder him in that, come what might of it.

Alba had heard nothing of this great event which was stirring the country for fifty miles round. She and Virginie lived a life apart up in their sea-nest, and old Jeanne was not given to gossip, but did her marketing without waste of words, and brought home little news in her basket.

It was a lovely morning; the sun shone brightly on the sea; the breakers were scampering in, not loud and angry, but tossing over one another in masses of creamy foam. Alba loved these laughing seas, and would sit for hours on the rocks, watching the tide ride in on the silver horses. To-day the salt breath of the ocean and the mellow west wind excited her like wine, and carried her off to the old dreamland where she seldom ventured now. She was away on the dancing billows, sailing to the land of the sun with a noble knight by her side. Virginie sat there with maidens serving her; there was music on shore, and crowds waving glad farewells. Alba began to sing as she walked briskly along the cliff, building her castle in fairy-land. But the Fortress standing out like a spectral prison, with the ivy blown inside out on its grimy walls, sent a sudden chill through her and put out the sunlight. There was a figure at the window watching her. She turned hastily back, walking quickly until she got down the slope, when she almost flew across the moor, on and on till she was safe in the shelter of the park. O that figure, how it pursued her! How the Fortress threatened her! If she could but fly from them for ever, and never hear of Marcel Caboff any more! She had fancied latterly that the prospect of being his wife and living with old Mme. Caboff in the gloomy, rat-haunted place was less odious to her than it used to be; but to-day the thought nearly drove her mad. She had sped along as if some evil fate were behind her, and she was tired; there was a moss-grown oak close by, and she sat down on the trunk to rest. The wind rustled the dead leaves at her feet and swept the topmost branches of the pines; then the anthem died softly away and all was silent. The place was very still; nothing stirred but the insects in the grass, and the zephyr high up above her head, as it rose and fell in swift, Æolian breathings. In the distance, with a forest of trees between, lay the castle, its battlements and towers and flying buttresses rising majestically against the sky—a high romance of chivalry and war chronicled in stone; to Alba the door of an enchanted realm whose portals she might never pass. No wonder men were heroes who lived in homes like this; how easy it must be to lead grand lives where the very walls are heralds and witnesses urging to noble and knightly deeds! The present owner of this splendid house was worthy in all this of his proud ancestors. What a royal act of heroism it was of the old Marquis to enlist as a common soldier out of gratitude to a dead man and pity for his widow! Then Alba thought of Marcel, of the poor, tame creature he showed beside this race of knightly nobles, and she despised him, and fell to wondering how it would be when she was his wife. Gradually the castle melted away, and in its place rose the Fortress, dark and frowning, and it lowered on her like a doom, and Marcel and his grim old mother stood at the window beckoning her to advance. Alba flung herself down upon the trunk and buried her face in the moss, and began to cry passionately. She cried a long time, being full of pity for herself, and there was no one within reach that she need check her sobs.

“What has happened? What is the matter with you, child?” said a voice close to her.

She started up in terror. Yet the speaker was not at all terrible to look at—a gentleman in the brilliant uniform of the Imperial Guard, young and handsome, with a most commanding air, and carrying his left arm in a sling. When Alba rose it was his turn to start. Lying there in an attitude of child-like abandon, shaken with sobs, her scarlet hood thrown back and her masses of black hair falling in loose coils over her neck and face, he had taken her for a little girl; he had called her child, and, lo! she was a full-grown maiden, and lovely beyond words, despite her tears and her dishevelled mien. He bowed to her as he might have done to a queen.

“You are M. le Comte!” said Alba, pretty much as she might have said to a celestial apparition, “You are the Archangel Gabriel!”

“Hermann de Gondriac, your humble servant, mademoiselle.”

She stared at him through the big tears that hung like dew-drops from her lashes, her soft, large glance modest, yet unabashed as if it were gazing on a picture. The knighthood in Hermann recognized the maidenhood of that fearless gaze and did it reverence, but he could not quench the glowing admiration of his own. How liquid and pure they were, those black stars with which she stared at him, those soul-lit eyes that met his without dismay, too innocent to quail beneath their burning light! Why should they quail? Were they not looking at a vision, a dream transmuted into substance? This was the young chief whom she had pictured to herself so often, whose lineage and prowess were the pride of all the people. Only how much grander the reality was than anything she had fancied! What a martial air he wore in his gold-embroidered uniform, with his spurs and clanging sword and plumed helmet, the stars upon his breast—every inch a warrior and a knight!

“You have hurt yourself, mademoiselle; you are in pain,” said Hermann. “Can I send to the castle for assistance for you?”

“Thank you, monseigneur; I have not hurt myself.”

“Yet you were crying?”

“It was not with pain.” This time Alba dropped her lids and blushed.

“Forgive me; I did not mean to intrude upon you.” Alba stood looking down like a guilty child, her cheeks aflame, her lips quivering with the sudden conflict between fear and shame, and a strange emotion that thrilled her like sweet music. “Who is she?” thought Hermann. He remembered, years ago, a child whom his father raved about, wondering how a plebeian stem could have put forth so fair a flower. Could this be she? The curé had told him of the girl’s rare beauty as a sad and anxious burden on his mind, and of the mother’s being ill and in need of generous wine, and he had ordered the best in his cellar to be sent to her. Half unconsciously, as when we try to catch some forgotten air by humming it under our breath, he murmured, “Alba....”

She looked up with a start, and then they both smiled.

“How did you guess I was Alba?” she said, her shyness gone in an instant.

“I did not guess, I remembered.”

“How wonderful! I should never have remembered you, monseigneur.”

“That is not surprising. I am changed since you saw me.”

“And so am I, am I not?”

“Yes, more changed than I could have believed.”

“Ah?” Did he mean for the better or the worse? The man read the question in her eyes and answered it:

“You are far more beautiful than I expected.”

“Beautiful!” she repeated, and her face lighted up.

“I was frightened when I saw you; I took you for a fairy princess,” said Hermann, yielding to the irresistible temptation of pleasing her.

Alba’s face clouded over. “Now I know you are laughing at me, monseigneur; you don’t believe in fairies, and you know very well I’m not a bit like a princess.”

“I have seen many a one who would have given a great deal to be like you,” said Hermann.

“Like me! I thought princesses were all so happy!”

Hermann smiled. “Sometimes they have hearts,” he said.

“Sometimes! And does that make them unhappy?”

He turned to walk under the trees, tacitly inviting her to do the same.

“It endows them with the power of loving,” he answered absently.

“But I thought....” She hesitated; it was difficult to put the thought into the right words.

“You thought that love always led to happiness?” said Hermann, finishing the sentence for her, while he looked at her with a curious glance. Why had she come to cry in this lonely place?

“I don’t know what it leads to. I shall never know,” said Alba very gravely.

M. le Comte smiled. “Tell me, Alba, why were you crying so bitterly just now?”

She turned away her head and made no answer.

“Tell me, sweet Alba,” persisted the young man; “perhaps I can help you if you are in trouble. Trust me with your secret. As I am a soldier and a gentleman, I will defend you if I can. Tell me, is there some one you care for who does not know it?”

She shook her head. “It is not I who care.... I wish I could, but I have tried my best and I cannot love him!” The tears welled up again and were flowing freely.

“Who is forcing you to love him? Tell me his name and I will protect you from him. I swear to you I will!” And Hermann, with a soldier’s instinctive gesture, put his hand to his sword, while his eye kindled with chivalrous anger. Alba thought him the ideal of a noble knight, as she looked at him, terrified and enchanted.

“He is not forcing me, monseigneur,” she said, “and you can do nothing to help me. I have promised to marry, and I must keep my word.”

“You shall not, by heaven, if it makes you wretched! He is a cowardly dog who would hold you to your word against your will,” protested the count hotly.

“He is not forcing me; but I have promised,” repeated Alba.

“And you cannot love him?”

“No! and I have tried so hard.... But mother says that when I am his wife it will be different....”

“Yes, it will be worse, a thousand times worse! Alba, tell me this man’s name; trust me with your secret,” said Hermann, changing his angry tone to one of soft persuasion.

“I dare not,” said Alba in a frightened whisper; “you would go and kill him.” The great, swart eyes were looking up at him, full of trust and admiration.

“Kill him, child! Do you think me so terribly wicked? Do I look like a murderer?”

“It would not be murder in you. You are a warrior; you don’t think it wrong to kill men. That is what warriors are for; but I should not like you to kill poor Marcel.”

“Marcel!... Marcel! I seem to know that name,” said the count, musing. “Has he no other?”

“Yes, Marcel Caboff,” replied Alba in a confidential tone; “but you must not hurt him, monseigneur. Oh! I wish I had not told you.”

Hermann started and muttered something between his teeth which she did not hear, but his look frightened her.

“Marcel Caboff! the fellow whom my father ransomed at the risk of his own life!” said the count. “And he would force you into marrying him! By heaven! he shan’t. I will foil him there.”

“O monseigneur, monseigneur! you will not kill him,” pleaded Alba, clasping her hands and appealing to the murderer with a scared face. “It is not his fault—it is not indeed, monseigneur!”

“I don’t mean to kill him; I would not touch a hair of his head,” said Hermann. “But why do you say it is not his fault? Does he not love you? Does he not want you to marry him?”

“He does, oh! so dreadfully. But I should not mind that. It is mother whom I have promised. It is to please her that I must marry him,” said Alba, and her breast heaved with big sobs, and all the floods were let loose again.

Hermann longed to draw her to his breast and kiss away the tears—she was such a child in spite of her sixteen summers and their full-blossomed beauty! But he checked the impulse. There is no majesty so imposing as the majesty of childhood. “Alba,” he said, “I will save you from Marcel Caboff without hurting him or any one. You shall not marry him, unless you come to wish it yourself. Are you sure that if he gave you up you would not change your mind and wish him back again?” This was Hermann’s estimate of woman’s nature; true, his experience had been gathered among types as different from the one before him as the flowers of a hot-house are from the primrose of the woods.

“I should never wish him to come back; I could never love him,” said Alba—“never, never, never.”

“Then I swear to you on my sword you shall not marry him!” said the count impetuously. “Now tell me, Alba,” he resumed, seeing that she did not speak, “is there not some one you would like to marry better than this fellow Caboff? Tell me the truth. If you had a brother, you would not mind telling him. Try and fancy I am your brother.”

Fancy him her brother! Alba’s fancy had taken many an aerial flight, but never such a one as this.

“Who is he? What is his name?” said Hermann in a whisper, bending closer to her.

But she shook her head. “There is no one, monseigneur.”

“Oh! I don’t believe that; you are afraid to trust me. There is surely some one else who wants to marry you?”

“No one, monseigneur, but Marcel.”

“Alba, look at me!” She turned and looked at him like a docile child. “Have you never seen any one whom you could love or whose heart you would care to win?” He was gazing deep down into the two dark pools of light, as if he thought to see into her soul through them. She did not shrink from the searching glance, but dwelt in it for one long moment; then, as if the flame in Hermann’s eyes leaped out and flashed upon her with too intense a radiance, revealing the spring of some sweet mystery in her heart and his, the white lids quivered and dropped, and a deep blush rose to Alba’s face. They were alone. The voices of the wood were hushed; the dead leaves ceased to rustle at their feet; the zephyrs paused in the branches overhead; the silence grew and deepened, filling the solitude with an overpowering presence, till each seemed to hear the beating of the other’s heart. Suddenly the sound of a horn, followed by a noise of wheels crushing the gravel in the distance, broke the spell and admonished Hermann that he must be gone. He lifted Alba’s hand to his lips, and without a word of farewell turned from her and struck across the park towards the castle.

Alba watched him out of sight, and then turned and wended homewards. Her heart beat with wild throbs of joy; the spirit that had been dead within her all these miserable months woke up, quickened to a new birth, and overflowed in song. The flute-like voice trilled out over the lonesome moor like the carol of a bird let loose; but as she drew near the confines of the heath the Fortress came in sight and checked her song. Was it so certain that Hermann could set her free? and how? What would her mother think of it? how of this wonderful meeting and monseigneur’s promise? Alba slackened her steps and took to pondering. A moment ago she was impatient to pour into Virginie’s ear the story of the interview, to repeat every word Hermann had said, to convey, as far as it was possible, the impression he had made upon her, to describe his manly beauty, his warlike aspect, his gentle courtesy, the incomparable sweetness of his voice, the chivalrous kindness of his manner, never doubting but that Virginie would sympathize in this new delight, as she had done in every little joy that had gladdened her child’s young life. But suddenly a change came over Alba—something vague, and undefined; a sense of doubt, of warning, of intangible fear. She had done nothing wrong, and yet the still, small voice was whispering inaudible reproach as if she had. Could Virginie be angry with her for speaking to monseigneur? How could she have avoided it, how refuse to answer his persistent questions, so kindly and so courteously put? He had entreated her to trust him! Alba stood amidst the breezy waves of heather, and recalled him as he bent near her and lowered his voice and bade her look at him. How he had seemed to read her through and through! “Have you never seen any one whose heart you would care to win?” She murmured the words softly to herself, and the sound of them was like the echo of his voice, and called up the hot blush to her cheeks again. There was nothing wrong in monseigneur’s asking her the question. Why, then, did she feel afraid to tell her mother of it? Musing for a moment on this mystery, Alba remembered how he had said: “Try and fancy I am your brother.” Virginie could not be angry at that, surely. “I will tell her that, and say nothing about the other,” muttered Alba to herself; and, satisfied that this was a safe way out of the difficulty, she walked on briskly till she was close upon the confines of the moor. Then the sound of a carriage coming down the road made her stop till it should pass. It was an open calêche preceded by outriders. Alba recognized the occupant at once, even before his hand was raised in courtly salutation as he flashed by. Her heart beat fast, and sent the blood to her cheeks and brow, dying them crimson.

“Perhaps I had better say nothing at all to petite mère,” was her reflection as she crossed the road and began to climb the cliff. “He told me to trust him; perhaps he would be angry if I spoke until he bade me.” And so it was decreed. The tyrant had stepped in, and at his first whispered prompting the discipline of a life gave way.

It was not many days after this wonderful morning when an event occurred which threw all the sweet romance of life into the shade, and made Alba forget her own cares and hopes in concern for the great sorrow of another. M. le Marquis was dead. He had died, not actually on the field, but of a wound received in battle. The young lord’s grief was like a madness, they said. Those about him said that in the first frenzy of despair he had called on Marcel Caboff and cursed him as the murderer of his father. Whether this was true or not, Gondriac believed it, and bitter words were spoken against the widow’s son in all the country round. Bitter words are like the wind; they fly, and have a faculty for reaching those whose aching nerves most dread their sting. The widow heard what was said of her son and felt it keenly; it was cruel, yet it was just; it was a hard price to pay for Marcel’s safety, but she could not reckon it too high. If only she might pay it alone! They are all alike, these mothers. Mme. Caboff was a vain, hard woman, but the mother in her was all soft and generous and beautiful. She came to Virginie for sympathy—not for herself, but for Marcel. It was her doing, M. le Marquis’ death, not his. Why would not people visit her sin upon herself, and not upon her boy? But Virginie and Alba would be kind; they had always said that Marcel was no coward. Virginie gave the poor woman what comfort she could; but Alba was not there. She could not bear the sight of Marcel’s mother; for the thought of Marcel was now unendurable to her. It might be unjust, and yet it was true to say that he was the murderer of M. le Marquis, of Hermann’s father. The news had thrown her into such a paroxysm of distress that Virginie was terrified, not holding the key to it. It was right that she should be sorry, and natural that she should be shocked, but this agony of grief was unaccountable. Virginie took her in her arms, and soothed her with caresses and endearing words, and then bade her go and rest awhile. But Alba, as if instinct warned her of the coming visit, hastened out of the house, and fled across the moor until she was safe in the shelter of the park, and then she flung herself down on the moss-grown trunk that had a memory of its own, and buried her face in the primroses and cried her heart out in pity for Hermann.

After this it was impossible to mention Marcel Caboff’s name in her presence. “I loathe the very thought of him, mother! I would rather die than marry him!” she said; and Virginie felt that Providence was against her, and surrendered. Marcel took back his gifts, and quarrelled with his mother, and went away from Gondriac. People said it was shame and remorse that drove him forth; but Alba knew this was not true, and, now that he had set her free, she pitied him.

M. le Marquis was borne to the grave amidst such honors as the proudest Crusader of his name might have envied. It was with the jubilant pomp of a coronation rather than the mournful pageant of a burial that they laid him to rest. For his people would have it that he was a martyr; he had gone out to die of his own free will, sacrificing himself out of gratitude to the dead and charity to the living. The population flocked in from thirty miles round to attend the funeral. Five hundred men followed the crimson-draped car with palms and laurel branches; children clad in white bore crimson banners that fluttered in the breeze, while their voices rose in hymns of victory, giving glory to God and the Christian soldier; the voices of the multitude made response in chorus, and the waves, breaking in low thunder against the rocks, sounded their everlasting amens as the procession wound its way by the sea-shore to the cemetery.

And now Hermann de Gondriac was alone, the head of an ancient house, wealthy and young, but as poor in that which makes life rich as the poorest of his peasantry. If he could but have girded on his sword, and, escaping from solitude, have drowned his grief in the excitement of the camp! Spring came, and the fields were carpeted with wild flowers, and the woods were full of music. But Hermann was seldom seen abroad; he lived indoors, amidst his books, the people said; but, in truth, the young lord’s chief companions were his thoughts, angry, rebellious thoughts, that made him chafe most bitterly against his forced inaction. The park was vast as a forest, and he never went beyond it. Often, in his moody walks, he strayed to that spot close upon the moor where he had first seen Alba lying upon the mossy trunk. The charm of her beauty and her daisy-like simplicity had wrought upon his heart more deeply than he was aware. For days after that meeting she had been ever in his thoughts. He said that he was thinking only of how he might rescue her from a cruel fate; no doubt it was to help him to this issue that he returned to the spot where she had stood, and conjured up her image, till the nymph-like figure with the dark eyes and witching smile seemed to float visibly before him, and listened for her voice until he thought he heard it in the sighing of the wind.

Then came the thunderbolt of his father’s death, and Alba and all the world were forgotten. But grief cannot hold its sway in human souls beyond a given time. As the days go by they bear away its sting upon their wings, that touch the bleeding places with a balm. Hermann was young, and as the weeks passed youth vindicated itself, and rebelled against the stagnant, lonely life, and longed for action and for the sweet companionship of kindred youth. If he could not fight, he could at least love; but who was there at Gondriac to love? The merry comrades of the bivouac were out of call, and when he returned to the midst of them he would find his place filled up; others would have come and gone again, and risen in command and won place and distinction, while he was out of sight, a prisoner to a stiff arm, as good as a dead man. He hated himself with bitter vexation. One morning he betook himself in one of these savage moods to wander in the park, and, not heeding which way he went, strayed to that lonely walk under the shadow of the old trees near the moor. Some one, meanwhile, was watching him, crouched timidly behind a furze-bush, admiring his quick, military stride, thinking how grand and lion-like was that angry toss of the head which every now and then relieved his bitter thoughts.

The air was fresh, and yet warm with that delicious warmth of some spring days that come like heralds of the summer, gathering up all the sweets of earth into one fragrant breath, wooing us with soft, furry zephyrs, and the scent of opening blossoms, and the melody of young birds learning to sing. Alba had been tempted across the heath to the park, where the trees had put out their bright green foliage that looked so lovely sparkling in the sunlight. Perhaps, too, though she did not own it, there was a lurking hope in her heart that she might catch a glimpse of Hermann in the distance. If so, she was not disappointed. There he was, walking under the pine-trees, but, happily, with his back to the heath, so that he did not see her! She dipped quickly behind a furze-bush, and disappeared from view just as he turned, and, coming through the trees at an angle, stepped out on the pathway. A nightingale began to sing in the distant copse; but Alba, as she cowered behind her bush, thought the crystal trills and the loud call-note less musical than the sound of Hermann’s foot-fall crushing the gravel close to her hiding-place—so close she almost feared he would note the shadow of her pink skirt upon the grass, or mayhap overhear the palpitation of her heart. But presently the foot-falls died away, and the nightingale and the zephyrs had it all to themselves again. She waited some minutes—an hour it seemed to her—before she ventured to look up; but at last she did, and there, within a few paces, straight before her, stood Hermann. He had left the pathway and taken to the noiseless grass under the trees.

“Alba!”

There was a ring of joy in the greeting, as the young lord came forward, holding out his hand.

“Why have you never come? I have been here again and again in hopes of seeing you!”

He was a true knight and meant no harm; but in his joy at seeing the sunbeam on his path he forgot that he had no right to be so glad or to let Alba see it.

“I did not forget my promise,” he said, leading her into the park and turning to walk by her side; “but I learned soon after that there was no need for me to interfere. Caboff left the place, they told me.”

“Yes, monseigneur, people said” ... she hesitated. “They were all so sorry for you, and Marcel could not bear it, because they hated him—poor Marcel! It was not his fault; he never was a coward.”

“You are sorry now that he is gone! Perhaps he will come back? No doubt he will, if you ask him.”

“I will never ask him; but I am sorry for him,” she replied, and then, looking up at Hermann with those soul-lit eyes that had a language of their own like music, she added timidly: “But I was more sorry for you, monseigneur.”

“Alba!” He took her hand and kissed it. It was very sweet to be so near him, Alba thought. They walked on together, hand in hand, without speaking for a while. The grass was soft beneath their feet, and the trembling sunbeams stole through the trees and touched their faces with golden shadows, thrilling and pure and full of gladness, as the touch of nature is when it stirs the chords of young vibrating hearts. “If I could but comfort him!” she was thinking, till the thought grew so loud within her she feared he would overhear it. But we are deaf to those voices that lie “upon the other side of silence.” Hermann, as he held the warm, soft hand within his own, was wondering how it came to pass that yonder on the barren cliffs a flower so rare and delicate had grown, and been trained to so much grace and ease by a woman who was called Mère Virginie. Then he remembered his father’s words about the royal flower on the plebeian stem, and, thinking of him, he sighed. Alba looked up quickly, offering all her soul’s wealth of sympathy through her eyes, and Hermann bethought to himself how delightful it would be to have this sympathetic creature always at his side. But he thought also of the emperor and the world, and wondered what these potentates would say were he to pick up the jewel from the dust and set it in his coronet. Bonaparte had a way of choosing mates for his officers as he chose sites for his battles, and ordering them to marry as he ordered them to charge; but Hermann felt he was not one to be cowed by the imperial match-maker, and there was something rather inspiriting in the idea of defying the despot if he attempted to meddle with his life outside the camp. Why should he not gather this wild flower, if he chose? Had his father lived, it would have been different; but now he was free, there was no one to whom he need sacrifice the promptings of his heart, be they wise or foolish. The world and the court might laugh; it was not from amongst them he cared to take a wife; he wanted to be loved, to be wed for his own sake, and not for the good things he had to offer. But did Alba love him?

“Alba,” he said, “now that Marcel is gone, who is to be the favored suitor?”

“No one, monseigneur; I told you so before.”

“But I did not believe you. I don’t believe you now.”

“Why should I tell you a lie? I never told one in my life.”

She spoke without anger or offended pride; but Hermann saw that he had pained her, and there was a purity of truth about her that rebuked his denial, though it was spoken in jest.

“Forgive me, dearest! I wanted to hear you say it again. I wanted to be certain there was no one else you cared for.”

He bent toward her caressingly, and, looking under her hood, saw two big tears slowly trickling down her cheeks.

“Alba....”

What an idle boast seems this about the freedom of the human will! Our most pregnant words, our weightiest actions, spring far oftener from impulse than from deliberate resolve; a touch, light as the feather floating on the summer breeze, will stir the fountain and make its waters overflow; a word spoken when we had meant to be silent will change the current of our life, and push us to a step that can never be retraced. An hour ago Hermann de Gondriac no more dreamed of offering his hand to Alba than he did of burying himself in the Grande Chartreuse; but those two tears were the drops that made the fountain overflow, and, in the sudden flood of tenderness, pride, prudence, everything but love was swept away.

“Alba,” he whispered, clasping her in his arms and gathering her to his breast—“Alba, I love you. Will you come to me and be my wife?”

Was she awake, with the solid earth under her feet, or were those whispered words the music that our fancy makes in dreams? But the music did not die away, nor did the clasping arm melt from her, as do the embraces of those loved ones who visit us in sleep.

“You love me!” she said, looking up into his face with her large, warm glance, pure and trusting as a child’s—“you love me!” And the sunbeams went on singing it in shadow music on the grass, and the cuckoo called it through the woods, and the trees in their murmurous song repeated it, and the clouds, as they sailed over the zenith, traced it in silver lines upon the sky—“You love me!”

TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.

MAGDALEN AT THE TOMB.

Deep sombre clouds roll up to shroud the night,

For in the silence of a guarded tomb

Rests the rich promise of a Virgin’s womb;

And hearts that hoped are shrunk as buds by blight,

Till, like a soul which gains from Heaven delight,

The radiant morn dispels the woeful gloom,

And casts o’er hungry Earth a new perfume.

A white-robed Angel, pinion-fring’d with light,

Beside the empty grave bade one rejoice,
Who, coming from the cross, outran the morn,
In loving haste the body to adorn;
But found it gone—and wept. Oh! hasty choice
Of tears, for one who was the first to turn
Her eyes upon her Lord, and hear his voice.

FROM THE MEDEA OF EURIPIDES.
'A free translation.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus dissuades Medea from slaying her children.]

STROPHE I.

O race renowned in ancient story,
Race from the blest Immortals sprung,
Athenians, ye who all day long,
Feeding on wisdom and on glory,
Walk lightly through that climate fine,
Where, as the fabling poets say,
The yellow-tressed Harmonia
Brought forth the Muses nine;
That sage and virgin choir whose shell
You hear so often, love so well:—

ANTISTROPHE I.

To you white Aphrodite sends
Her Loves, to make you wise and kind;
For they are Wisdom’s choicest friends;
And here they say the goddess wreathed
Her fragrant locks with rosy twine;
And here they sing that, passion-fraught
And o’er Cephisus’ stream reclined,
Along the flowery vale she breathed
Sweet airs from that cold current caught
Upon her balmy lips divine.

STROPHE II.

Medea, dream not that the city

Of sacred founts and streams can e’er

Give harbor to a wretch like thee:

Pity them, ruthless mother, pity!

See but thy guilt as others see;

By all things great and good, forbear!

We clasp thy knees, and bid thee spare

The babes that laughed upon thy knee!

ANTISTROPHE II.

They are thy children! They will call

Aloud, aloud upon their mother!

How can’st thou hear that pleading cry?

In vain thou striv’st:—thou can’st not smother

A mother’s love. Thy hand will shake;
Thy heart will bend; thy heart will break,
Thy frenzy melt away and die,
When twining round thy feet they fall
In that despairing agony.

THE STORY OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL.

When, centuries hence, historians endeavor to delineate the characteristics of the present century, it is more than probable that the features that will most strike them will be those of innovation and change. Progress in every science, rapid advance in material prosperity, sweeping reforms in laws and governments, political and social changes not a few, will appear to have pretty well filled up the records of the busy century that is fast drawing to its close. To those, however, who look more closely into the minor though oftentimes important details that contribute in a great measure to influence the character of an age, it will be evident that, if change and revolution have to a large extent reigned paramount in this century, neither has it been altogether wanting in a just recognition of the past, and in a serious revival of some of the best features of that past.

These thoughts have been suggested by the perusal of Sir Charles Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival in England—a work in which is displayed a thorough knowledge of the subject combined with an agreeable style and a high artistic taste, which cannot fail to interest even those whose predilections are for other styles of architecture.

The revival which it describes has not been confined to England; in both France and Germany progress in Gothic art has made rapid strides during the last thirty years. In the production, indeed, on the history and theory of the pointed style France is perhaps in advance of England; but nowhere else has the revival been so universal and so practical as in the latter country, nowhere else has it reached a point which could justify an author in attempting its history. So many Catholic associations are linked with Gothic architecture, so many fond recollections of a glorious past are called up by the mere name, that it is only natural that Catholics should take a special interest in its revival, should feel justly proud of the large part that some of their co-religionists have had in that revival, and should refer with feelings of pleasure to the influence brought to bear upon it by the adoption of many Catholic doctrines and practices by their Protestant brethren.

American readers cannot be indifferent to the history and fortunes of edifices where their ancestors prayed in those happy days when unity of faith prevailed; nor can they fail to take an interest in the history, which we propose to sketch, of those years during which a handful of earnest men struggled, and struggled successfully, to revive the glories of a style that had been rendered for ever illustrious by such names as Cologne and Chartres, Amiens and Salisbury, Notre Dame and York Minster.

Many were the fair buildings that graced the broad lands of merry England at the commencement of the reign of Henry VIII.; stately churches and splendid monasteries adorned her towns and nestled among her wooded hills and valleys; the one same principle of art had presided over their structure—happy symbol of the one faith to whose service they ministered. Before the end of that reign what a transformation had come over the face of the land! One of the first acts of the Reformation had been the suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property. Cromwell and his band of impious followers but too faithfully carried out the orders of their royal master; the venerable and beauteous piles on which the pious munificence of ages had lavished their skill and their treasures were soon reduced to bare and crumbling ruins. Nor did the spoliation end here; the zealous reformers of God’s church were not slow in condemning as idolatrous the rich and brilliant decorations and ornaments that filled the cathedrals and churches, and thus these sacred edifices were shorn of all the costly treasures that devotion had accumulated to honor the abiding presence of a heavenly King, in order to fill the coffers of a licentious monarch.

It was not, however, the material ruin and desecration of its finest buildings that struck the severest blow at Gothic art; it was rather the loss of that faith which had witnessed its earliest efforts and had inspired its grandest works. When the cold blast of Protestantism swept away one after another each Catholic dogma and each Christian belief, the sources of Gothic inspiration were dried up, its very raison d’être ceased to exist. Not that the Catholic Church has in any way adopted one style of architecture as the only fitting one for her use; she has equally sanctified by her solemn ritual and her sacred ceremonies the colonnades of the Greek temple, the dome of the Italian basilica, and the pointed arch of the Gothic cathedral. But this last, if we may use a comparison, seems somehow more especially her own child; the others are but children of adoption—wayward children that she has rescued from pagan parents. She has not watched over them from their birth, nor seen them grow up under her fostering care to the vigor and strength of manhood.

It naturally took some time before the spirit of a form of art which was then the only form could completely disappear from the country; for we must recollect that in England at the time of the Reformation not only ecclesiastical but civil and domestic architecture was entirely Gothic. As there were for several centuries no new churches built—for the usurped edifices of Catholic days more than sufficed for the needs of Protestant piety—it was in domestic structures that the spirit of the style lingered longest in a practical form.

“Even down to the reign of James I. the domestic architecture of England, as exemplified in the country-houses of the nobility, was Gothic in spirit, and frequently contained more real elements of a mediæval character than many which have been built in modern times by the light of archæological orthodoxy. Inigo Jones himself required a second visit to Italy before he could thoroughly abandon the use of the pointed arch. But its days were numbered when in 1633 the first stone was laid for a Roman portico to one of the finest cathedrals of the middle ages, and Gothic architecture as a practical art received what was then no doubt supposed to be its death-blow.”[101]

From this period the practice of Gothic art gradually died out. Classic and Italian architecture, which had received a fresh impulse from the French Renaissance, rapidly came into fashion. Architects studied no other style, for the very good reason that the public admired no other. It was henceforth considered the criterion of good taste to abuse as barbarous all the productions of mediæval art, and the test of good Protestantism to look upon them as superstitious and popish. It is indeed surprising that so many of the wonderful productions of a period no longer understood or appreciated should have been allowed to come down to us unaltered by “classical” remodelling. What saved them and at the same time preserved the spirit of the old art from total extinction is thus told by Sir C. Eastlake:

“By a strange and fortunate coincidence of events, however, it happened at this very time, when architects of the period had learned to despise the buildings of their ancestors, a spirit of veneration for the past was springing up among a class of men who may be said to have founded our modern school of antiquaries. Sometimes, indeed, their researches were not those of a character from which much advantage can be expected.... But, luckily for posterity, the attention of others was drawn in a more serviceable direction. Up to this time no work of any importance had been published on the architectural antiquities of England. A period had arrived when it was thought necessary, if only on historical grounds, that some record of ecclesiastical establishments should be compiled. The promoters of the scheme were probably little influenced by the love of Gothic as a style. But an old building was necessarily a Gothic building, and thus it happened that, in spite of the prejudices of the age, and probably their own æsthetic predilections, the antiquaries of the day became the means of keeping alive some interest in a school of architecture which had ceased to be practically employed.”[102]

Amongst the earliest names that attained to a certain celebrity by their researches and writings may be mentioned those of Mr. R. Dodsworth and Mr. W. Dugdale, joint authors of the Monasticon Anglicanum, a work first published in 1655, and which still retains much interest for the modern student, as it includes many records and views of buildings which have long since perished. Another writer whose name deserves mention was Antony à Wood, born 1611, whose History of the Antiquities of Oxford was a book of considerable importance, connected as it was with a university where Gothic architecture was so nobly illustrated and where the traditions of the style lingered long after its true principles were forgotten.

During the next two hundred years the annals of Gothic art are indeed meagre; from time to time we have the record of some antiquarian research, and at rare intervals we hear of some uncouth attempts at Gothic building remarkable only for the egregious mistakes they display.

Early in the eighteenth century we find the name of a remarkable man connected with one of these crude attempts at mediæval art—that of the celebrated Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford, the author of the first work of modern fiction whose scene is laid in the middle ages. His labors in the fields of literature and art were not profound. Eccentricity seemed the most marked feature of his taste; and, as may be well imagined, his famous Gothic house, Strawberry Hill, which has remained almost unaltered to the present day, is a strange monument of what debased art can achieve. The fact, however, that a man of his position, and enjoying the reputation he did, could patronize a form of architecture which had fallen into almost universal contempt could not have been without a powerful effect on the public mind—an effect which may be traced in the erection during the next fifty years of a certain number of mansions throughout the country in that style which Pugin loved so much to call “Brummagem Gothic.”

Towards the end of the century some useful books on architectural archæology appeared, such as Carter’s Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting, Hearne’s Antiquities of Great Britain, Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments, Halfpenny’s Gothic Ornaments of the Cathedral of York, B. Willis’ History of Gothic Architecture in England.

“It was something at least to draw attention to the noble works of our ancestors, which had long been neglected and despised; to record with the pencil or with the pen some testimony, however inadequate, of their goodly form and worthy purpose; to invest with artistic and historical interest the perishing monuments of an age when art was pure and genuine.”[103]

When the nineteenth century opens, we find these works already producing practical fruits; for we see several architects of note, such as Wyat, Nash, and Smirke, attempting, and not without some success, the erection of edifices of Gothic design. Nearly always, however, their efforts were confined to domestic structures for private individuals—a proof how completely the taste was confined to the upper classes and was still unappreciated by the general public. If they did not often attempt to build new churches, unfortunately they did not hesitate to restore and improve the venerable cathedrals and churches of the past. Wyat in particular has a heavy burden of responsibility to bear on this score; for many were the noble buildings that long bore the traces of acts of vandalism and ignorance associated with his name.

How, indeed, could we expect better things in ecclesiastical architecture at a time when religion was at so low an ebb in England? As each generation had passed away the lingering memories of the old faith and the old ritual had vanished one by one; the last remnants of Catholic feelings and practices had disappeared under the influence of the cold formalism of the Puritans and the colder indifferentism of those who succeeded them. When we read the following description, given by Sir C. Eastlake, of a Protestant church and Protestant worship as he recollected them during the early years of the present century, we cannot feel surprised that there was a lack of inspiration among church architects:

“Who does not remember the air of grim respectability which pervaded, and in some cases even still pervades, the modern town church of a certain type, with its big bleak portico and muffin-capped charity-boys? Enter and notice the tall, neatly-grained witness-boxes in which the faithful are empanelled; the 'three-decker’ pulpit placed in the centre of the building; the lumbering gallery which is carried round the three sides of the interior on iron columns; the wizen-faced pew-opener eager for stray shillings; the earnest penitent who is inspecting the inside of his hat; the hassock which no one kneels on; the poor-box which is always empty. Hear how the clerk drones out the responses for a congregation too genteel to respond for themselves. Listen to the complicated discord in which the words of the Psalmist strike the ear after copious revision by Tate and Brady. Mark the prompt, if misdirected, zeal with which old ladies insist on testing the accuracy of the preacher’s memory by turning out the text. Observe the length and unimpeachable propriety, the overwhelming dulness, of his sermon.”

Alas! as far as exterior worship was concerned, the Catholic chapels of this period were in an equally sad condition; but from how different a cause! Centuries of persecution had not been able to stamp out the Catholic faith, but penal laws still in force, though not rigorously carried out, forced it to hide away in back streets and lanes, always avoiding whatever might attract public notice, lest it might awaken again the dormant flames of bigotry. Add to this the state of poverty to which, in many places, the Catholic body was reduced, and we need not wonder at the desolate aspect of the chapels, if the miserable structures that oftentimes were used for divine service deserved the name. They possessed, however, the presence of that God who had not disdained the poverty of a stable nor the humble offerings of poor shepherds; in like manner he looked with indulgence on the mean and scanty ornaments that in these sad times decorated his altars, and on the cold and desolate walls within which persecution had forced him to make his dwelling. He was pleased to await the time when happier days and gentler laws should once again permit his worship to be freely celebrated with all the glory and pomp of by-gone years. Such days were rapidly advancing, and Catholics were not slow in availing themselves of each relaxation of penal statutes, each favorable turn of Protestant bigotry, to improve their churches and to carry out more fully their sacred ceremonies—a task of no small difficulty on the part of a community so ill supplied with the riches of this world, and so long, from cruel necessity, forced to content themselves with a simplicity almost akin to that of the early Christians.

The dawn of the revival, which was now at hand, was marked by some writers of eminence whose theoretical works contributed much to prepare the way for it. Their writings were distinguished from those of the earlier antiquarians by a more practical knowledge of building and a more exact delineation of the details of the edifices they describe. Mr. J. Britton may be looked upon as a link between the two schools, as he had some of the characteristics of both. He was the author of numerous works on the English cathedral and other Gothic edifices, all illustrated with really artistic drawings. They were, however, more designed to create a taste for ancient art among the reading public than to assist the professional architect.

“While Britton was thus enlisting the sympathy of the amateur world two architects were engaged in preparing a practical and valuable work for the use of professional students.

“The examples of Gothic architecture which had hitherto been selected for publication were chiefly those which either served to illustrate a principle in the history of the style, or possessed some picturesque attraction in the way of general effect. But neither of these were of real service to the practical architect, who required geometrical and carefully-measured drawings of ancient roofs, doors, and windows to guide him in his designs and to help him in reviving a style the details of which had been as yet most imperfectly studied. Pugin’s (father to the celebrated Welby Pugin) and Wilson’s specimens of Gothic architecture supplied this want. It was a happy accident which brought these men together, the one eminently qualified as a draughtsman for the task, the other equally fitted to undertake its literary labor.”[104]

The writer whose name next appears on the roll of champions of Gothic art is one whose memory is enshrined in the hearts of all English Catholics—Dr. Milner, Vicar-Apostolic of the Midland district, better known to most people for his holy life, his ardent zeal, and his controversial power than as a writer on architecture. In this latter capacity, however, he deserves a foremost place among those who prepared the way for the great revival which unfortunately he did not live to see accomplished.

His Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester revealed much erudition and a thorough appreciation of ancient art; but by far the most important part of it was the short but now famous essay it contained, “On the Rise and Progress of the Pointed Arch.” In it the author uses for the first time the appellation now become so general as applied to the architecture of the middle ages—viz., the pointed style. His next work was an important Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of England during the Middle Ages. In this work the author not only proves himself an antiquary but a man of taste. A work more important still, and one productive of the most serious results, was a short pamphlet entitled A Dissertation on the Modern Style of Altering Ancient Cathedrals, as Exemplified in the Cathedral of Salisbury. In it he protests in vigorous language against the miserable degradation of the old churches accomplished under the name of restoration; nor does he spare Wyat, the leading spirit in these unfortunate improvements. No one before the days of Welby Pugin had so enthusiastically entered into the spirit of the old art, so thoroughly appreciated its beauties, and so ably defended its principles, not only against its avowed enemies, but against the ignorance of many of its would-be admirers. So outspoken, indeed, was Dr. Milner’s language in this pamphlet that it shocked the staid members of the Society of Antiquaries, before whom it was to have been read, and was in consequence withdrawn—not, however, to lie mouldering in its author’s desk, but soon to appear in print, and to work even more important effects on the future than its author ever contemplated.

Dr. Milner died in 1826, the very year that W. Pugin, then a youth of fourteen, was displaying one of the earliest proofs of his taste for mediæval art in devoting long hours to the studying and sketching of the old castle of Rochester.

How little did the gray-haired bishop dream of the wonderful revolution this youth, as yet unknown to fame, was to accomplish within a few years. Little did he think, when he saw arising the humble walls of his Gothic chapel at Winchester, that the day was not far distant when a Catholic architect would revive throughout the land the glories of that style which Dr. Milner had so well defended in days when it was neglected and abused.

One more name of importance must be mentioned before we attempt to trace the outline of Pugin’s career; we again quote from Sir C. Eastlake:

“Midway in point of time between Milner and Pugin, and possessing, though in a minor degree, the talents of both, Thomas Rickman, as an architect and author, plays no unimportant part in the history of the revival. His churches are perhaps the first of that period in which the details of old work were reproduced with accuracy of form. Up to this time antiquaries had studied the principles of mediæval architecture, and to some extent classified the phases through which it had passed, while architects had indirectly profited by their labors when endeavoring to imitate in practice the work of the middle ages. Rickman united both functions in one man.... In the science of his art he will not, of course, bear comparison with Willis. In the analyzing of its general principles he must yield to Whewell. In capability of invention he ranks, even for his time, far below Pugin; but it may be fairly questioned whether, if we consider him in the twofold capacity of a theorist and a practitioner, he did not do greater service than either his learned contemporaries or his enthusiastic disciple.”[105]

Had Rickman done no more than write his Attempt to discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, he would have been worthy of a high place among those who contributed to revive Gothic art. He supplied by this book a want long felt by architects and by those interested in architecture. Of learned, or rather unlearned, dissertations on the origin of the pointed style there were plenty, but of those short and useful volumes to which have been aptly given the name of hand-books there was a complete absence. Rickman’s book gave in a small compass a very complete history of the various phases of Gothic architecture in England; the main divisions into periods which he adopted being so good that they have remained unaltered to the present day. The work was illustrated with very fair engravings, and no architect who had perused it could any longer plead ignorance as an excuse for the monstrosities that were so often produced in those days under the name of Gothic.

His work on French Gothic, the fruits of a journey through the North of France with his friend Whewell, afterwards the famous Master of Trinity, is full of interest and contains an elaborate and carefully-drawn comparison between the mediæval remains in France and England.

With Rickman ends that gloomy night which had so long, with faint flashes of light now and again, enveloped the science and art of Gothic architecture; a dawn as sudden as it is bright foretells a day of more than ordinary brilliancy.

Ignorance and prejudice, which had so long reigned supreme in England in all matters concerning true religion and true art, were fast giving way before the researches of conscientious science, and as a result we see two great movements marking the first quarter of the present century—the Tractarian movement and the Gothic revival; the one religious, the other artistic. Of the first it does not enter into our plan to speak here, though it would no doubt afford a highly interesting study to trace out the mutual influence these two movements have exercised on one another; for it is impossible not to perceive that, on the one hand, the inquiry into the principles and form of ancient art led naturally on to an inquiry into the ancient formularies and practices of the faith which had inspired that art; and that, on the other hand, the revival of the long-forgotten ritual of the old faith led directly to the restoration and refurnishing of those temples that were so intimately connected with it. Before entering on the life of Pugin, which constitutes the culminating point in the great artistic revival we are attempting to sketch, we cannot do better than quote the opening words of the chapter in which Sir C. Eastlake traces his career, as it clearly proves the importance he attaches to the labors of this great man:

“However much we may be indebted to those ancient supporters of pointed architecture who, faithfully adhering to its traditions at a period when the style fell into general disuse, strove earnestly, in some instances ably, to preserve its character; whatever value in the cause we may attach to the crude and isolated examples of Gothic work which belong to the eighteenth century, or to the efforts of such men as Nash and Wyat, there can be but little doubt that the revival of mediæval design received its chief impulse from the energy and talents of one architect whose name marks an epoch in the history of British art, which while art exists at all can never be forgotten.”[106]

Augustus Welby Pugin, the architect to whom these words apply, was born in London on March 1, 1812. We have already spoken of his father, and of the important place his illustrated works occupy in the history we are tracing; he was a French refugee and a Protestant, and his son was brought up a Protestant. Although the elder Pugin had little professional practice, he seems to have attained to a position of ease by the sale of his works and the instruction of pupils. His son was educated at Christ’s Hospital, on leaving which he entered his father’s office, having from his earliest years shown a great taste for drawing. He soon mastered the first elements of his profession and became of much use to his father, already showing that earnestness in all he undertook that was so characteristic of him in later years. His taste for mediæval art received a fresh impulse from a professional tour he made in 1827 with his father through Normandy, which gave him the opportunity of studying the beauty of Gothic ornament in some of its most splendid productions.

While still a mere youth his cleverness in designing attracted attention, and he received a commission from the royal upholsterers to prepare designs for the new furniture for Windsor Castle, which it was determined should partake of the character of the building. The drawings he gave were probably better than what most architects of the day could have produced, yet in the writings of his after-years he always frankly pointed out their faults.

A love of variety and a strong taste for roving interrupted for a short period his architectural studies. He devoted for a time his energies to scene-painting, and with much success when the subjects were of a mediæval character. Next we find him carried away by an extraordinary passion for the sea, and he actually for a certain period commanded a merchant schooner trading between England and Holland. Having been wrecked, however, on the Scotch coast, his seafaring ardor was somewhat cooled, and he returned to the labors of his original profession.

His talents were soon rewarded by increasing practice, many architects being glad to avail themselves of his wonderful, one might almost say innate, knowledge of Gothic ornament.

A most serious and important event in Pugin’s life, and one having much influence on his future career, occurred about this time—his conversion to the Catholic religion. There can be no doubt that his intense love of the past and his enthusiastic admiration of the glorious monuments of the ages of faith strongly biassed his mind towards this determination, though of course it was not these considerations alone that led him to take so important a step. His after-life proved how thorough was his faith and how sincere his piety.

This change of religion affected, in more ways than one, the professional career of Welby Pugin. From a pecuniary point of view it probably made little difference to him—as his talents were such as to insure for him constant work, and he already possessed independent means. But by this step he sacrificed what was far dearer to him, his future fame as an architect.

Never was there a more splendid opening for architectural talent than that very time when Pugin, in the first dawn of his genius, embraced the Catholic faith. Everything had combined to prepare a revival of Gothic art. The materials were already collected and awaited but the hand of a man of genius to make a practical use of them. The ritualistic movement had awakened the desire to restore the old and to build new churches. Rich men were ready to give unbounded wealth to further the enterprise. Had Pugin remained a Protestant, had he preferred fame to conscience, he might have found an easy road to it by availing himself of an opportunity so worthy the gifts of one eminently fitted to be a leader in a movement that combined religion and art. He preferred to return to the faith that had inspired those mediæval times he so fondly loved, and to risk his future reputation by offending that feeling which is so strong in Protestant England against converts. The Catholic who for centuries has kept his faith they can tolerate, nay, admire; but one who was their own and deserts them they find it hard to forgive.

Not only did Pugin, in thus affronting public opinion, bias the judgment of his contemporaries and of future critics, but he actually, by attaching himself to the poorest religious body in England, deprived himself of the means of adequately displaying his power.

During the next years that composed the short career of Pugin we find him working with an activity and enthusiasm that showed how all labor connected with his art was to him a labor of love. His pen and his pencil were alike devoted to its service. In 1836 he published his celebrated Contrasts—a work in which he compares with keen irony and scathing satire the buildings and institutions of the past with those of the present; in the sketches which illustrate it he delineates with wonderful humor all the weak points of modern architecture. His style of writing was flowing and easy, always highly picturesque and enthusiastic, but sometimes slightly inclined to exaggeration and eccentricity. It was this that made it so difficult for him to write without giving offence sometimes even to his own friends and co-religionists.

His next work was his True Principles of Pointed Architecture. It is but a short volume, consisting of two lectures delivered at St. Mary’s College, Oscott, but it forms a most complete elementary treatise on Gothic art, founded on the two great principles enunciated in its first page: “1. That there should be no features about a building that are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2. That all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.”

It is clearly shown that in these principles lies the true secret of all correct pointed construction and ornament, and that any analysis of Gothic work undertaken without taking them into consideration must inevitably lead to erroneous conclusions.

The truth of these principles is now universally admitted in works that treat of pointed architecture, but to Pugin belongs the honor of having first laid them down and having shown how important they were to the right understanding of the lessons handed down to us in the wondrous structures of the past.

His next work was An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. It is a brilliant defence of Gothic art, intended specially to prove that it is still “the only correct expression of the faith, the wants, and climate of our country.”

As a specimen of Pugin’s amusing style when describing the incongruous productions of modern architecture, we cannot do better than quote the description of a nineteenth-century cemetery contained in this book; we only wish we could reproduce the delightful picture that accompanies the text:

“There are a superabundance of inverted torches, cinerary urns, and pagan emblems, tastefully disposed by the side of neat gravel walks, among cypress-trees and weeping willows.

“The central chapel is generally built on such a comprehensive plan as to be adapted (in the modern sense) for each sect and denomination in turn as they may require its temporary use; but the entrance gate-way is usually selected for the grand display of the company’s enterprise and taste, as being well calculated from its position to induce persons to patronize the undertaking by the purchase of shares or graves. This is generally Egyptian, probably from some associations between the word catacombs, which occurs in the prospectus of the company, and the discoveries of Belzoni on the banks of the Nile; and nearly opposite the Green Man and Dog public-house, in the centre of a dead-wall (which serves as a cheap medium of advertisement for blacking and shaving-strop manufacturers), a cement caricature of the entrance to an Egyptian temple, two and a half inches to the foot, is erected, with convenient lodges for the policeman and his wife, and a neat pair of cast-iron hieroglyphical gates which would puzzle the most learned to decipher; while, to prevent any mistake, some such words as 'New Economical Compressed Grave Company’s Cemetery’ are inscribed in Grecian capitals along the frieze, interspersed with hawk-headed divinities, and surmounted by a huge representation of the winged Osiris bearing a gas-lamp.”[107]

In 1844 he published his next important work, The Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume. It is a thoroughly practical book, designed to supply correct descriptions and patterns for the use of those who manufacture the various ornaments employed in the ritual of the church, which were at that time of the most incorrect forms and in the worst taste.

His other literary productions were numerous but of less importance, being for the most part of a controversial character, and we pass on to examine, as far as our limited space permits, Pugin’s career and influence as a practical architect. Catholic emancipation, in freeing the church from the galling restraints to which she had been so long subjected in England and Ireland, opened for her a new era of liberty and prosperity in those countries. True, she did not regain that wealth which had been sacrilegiously torn from her at the Reformation; still, she was enabled, through the generosity of her children, to expend large sums in the construction of churches somewhat more worthy of the august mysteries she celebrates than those poor edifices she had been so long forced to use.

As a Catholic of undoubted talents, Pugin soon found that his architectural capacity was appreciated by his co-religionists, who entrusted to him the construction of all their principal churches. Few among them, indeed, were, by their size or importance, calculated to give full scope to Pugin’s genius; nevertheless, to the smallest building he always devoted long study and attention and a scrupulous fidelity to the principles he had laid down in his writings, although in many cases it was extremely difficult to do so, owing to the small amount of money that could be expended on the work. Among the many churches he designed we may mention, as the best specimens of his skill, the cathedrals of Birmingham, Southwark, Nottingham, Killarney, and Enniscorthy; the churches of St. Wilfrid’s, Manchester; St. Marie’s, Liverpool; St. Giles’, Cheadle; St. Bernard’s Abbey, Leicestershire; St. Augustine’s, Ramsgate.

In all these churches the exterior beauty has been more or less sacrificed to interior ornament and decoration, Pugin preferring to devote all the money possible to beautifying those parts which were most closely connected with the presence of his God, when the funds did not permit him to adorn fully both exterior and interior. This has often led his critics to misjudge his capacity as an architect; even Sir C. Eastlake falls into this error, and, though a sincere admirer of Pugin, does not hesitate to assert that “of constructive science he probably knew but little.” That his greatest power lay in ornament and detail may no doubt be true; still, we are fully convinced that had he found the same opportunities of displaying his knowledge as a scientific architect, and had he not been trammelled by the constant necessity to keep down expense, he would have amply proved to the world how unfounded were these accusations.

In comparing Pugin with the architects who have succeeded him people often forget the difficulties he had to contend against. He had to revive and educate the whole series of artisans whose combined labors are required to construct the smallest Gothic edifice—sculptors, carvers, iron-workers, painters, and decorators. When he began his career as a practical architect he had to design every smallest item required for his buildings, and, what is more, often personally to superintend their manufacture; a lock, a screw, a nail of correct pointed design were then things that had no existence.

If we take up now a book of that period, we can scarcely believe that ignorance and absurdity could go so far as to call Gothic the designs we see there depicted under that appellation. It is solely to Pugin’s untiring energy, to his conscientious love of his art, and to his wonderful fertility of invention—gifts which even his adversaries cannot deny him—that we owe the change that has been wrought in a few years.

The important progress in metal work, which now places at the disposal of the architect and builder material and designs almost equalling the best products of the middle ages, is completely due to him; in this, as in another long-lost branch of art—glass-staining—he found in Mr. J. Hardman, of Birmingham, one thoroughly competent by his practical knowledge and refined taste to assist him in carrying out his reforms.

How many other branches of industry, connected directly or indirectly with mediæval art, could be mentioned in which the influence of Pugin’s labors can be traced!—the production of encaustic tiles, silk embroidery, wood-carving, the manufacture of church plate and furniture of all kinds, even household articles and jewelry. Sir C. Eastlake truly remarks: “Those establishments which are known in London as ecclesiastical warehouses owe their existence and their source of profit to Pugin’s exertions in the cause of rubrical propriety.”[108] He might have added with equal truth that the many beautiful objects we admire in them owe their existence to the principles he established by his writings and to the endless models which his unrivalled facility of invention placed at the disposal of the public.

If a proof were wanting of the hold that the revival of which Pugin was the leading spirit was taking on public opinion, it is the fact that a Parliamentary committee, in drawing up the terms of the competition for the plans of the new Houses of Parliament, stipulated that the designs should be Gothic or Elizabethan. It has often been regretted that Pugin did not take part in this competition, and his reasons for not doing so have never been quite satisfactorily explained.

Barry, the architect selected for the new buildings, showed his appreciation of Pugin’s capabilities and his esteem for his talents by applying to him for designs for all the important interior decorations and furniture. The beauty of these parts shows how well suited he was for the task; many consider them the most perfect parts of the edifice, the exterior, notwithstanding its real merits, having numerous faults—some of them, it is true, inherent to the style adopted—Tudor or perpendicular.

Besides the many churches and other religious edifices which Pugin designed, he devoted considerable attention to domestic architecture; and among the best specimens he left may be mentioned Bilton Grange, Adare Manor, and Scarisbrick Hall, Chirk Castle and Alton Towers; the last two he only restored and altered. But perhaps his happiest effort in this style was his own house at Ramsgate, which is, in every detail, a perfect specimen of a mediæval residence, strongly illustrating how deeply imbued Pugin was with the spirit and traditions of the past. So thoroughly Gothic were all his feelings and tastes that we firmly believe it would have been impossible for him to design a building in any other style.

With Pugin’s death, which occurred in 1854, we shall terminate this short sketch of one of the most wonderful revivals of the present age. We have told how Gothic architecture became extinct as a practical art, how its theory was forgotten and misunderstood for centuries, its very name kept in remembrance only by a few rare lovers of antiquity. We have traced the first dawn of a change in public taste, originated by the serious works of men versed in the history of ancient art, and inspired by a love of its grand productions.

In what a different position we leave it now! The master spirit that had breathed a new life into its almost inanimate form has passed away; his mortal remains are sleeping in the hallowed transept of that beautiful church at Ramsgate, the designing and decorating of which had been to him such a labor of love; but, unlike many reformers, he had lived to see his cherished dreams realized; he had lived to see the mystic steeple and the high pitched roof once more ascend to heaven from the crowded cities and the wooded fields of his country; he had lived to see a long array of distinguished names consecrate their gifts to that one style he had loved and for which he had labored.

ALONG THE FOOT OF THE PYRENEES.

We followed the old Roman way along the foot of the Pyrenees—a delightful route, picturesque on one side and fair on the other, and everywhere abounding in historic and legendary memories. Every age has left its impress here, as every geological period has left its strata in the mountains. Many of the cultivated hills are crowned with the ruins of feudal times. The plains are blooming with a thousand traditions and marvellous events that have sprung up from the contests with the Moors in the eighth century. Numerous remains of ancient art are constantly coming to light from the soil to prove that, during the Roman occupancy of the land, many wealthy patricians established themselves in this region, at once attractive to the eye and favorable to health. The Visigoths also, who once held possession of the country, have left behind them memorials of their barbarity in the martyrs who are still honored; and the Huguenots and Revolutionists ruined churches and cloisters that are still deplored.

At length we came to Martres-Tolosanes—the ancient Callagorris—an industrious place on the left bank of the Garonne containing about two thousand inhabitants. Clouds of smoke hover over it by day, and flames and sparks stream up at night, from the numerous potteries which supply all the neighboring region with dishes and tiles, and pave all the by-roads with broken crockery. The streets are narrow, and the begrimed houses seem inclined to stray off on the road to Spain, as if to breathe the pure mountain air. There is an interesting old church here that was consecrated in the year 1309. The baptismal font is an ancient sarcophagus, set up on four pillars, its sides divided by colonnettes, between which are holy emblems and other carvings. In one chapel there is a sculptured retable over the altar, with the shrine of St. Vidian supported by chained Moors—not covered with precious stones, or a work of art, like so many of the shrines of Italy, but a mere urn of gilded wood. On great festivals this is taken down and placed before the grating of the sanctuary, surrounded by lights and flowers. The bust of the saint is placed above it, the head shaded by nodding white plumes to give it a martial character, in view of St. Vidian’s achievements, the face painted more or less after nature, the shoulders covered with a gilded mantle of imperial fashion, and the neck adorned with a collar, or necklace, of blue and white crystal—probably the offering of some devout peasant. In another chapel, on such days likewise full of flowers and tapers, is St. Vidian’s ivory comb exposed in a kind of monstrance, as if the object of particular veneration. It is rudely carved, and the teeth which used to disentangle the long blond locks of the warrior after battle are of portentous size and length, and jagged from the conflict. But those were not days of gentle measures. This comb is of considerable celebrity in the country, not merely on account of its original use, but also because of the curious tale that hangs around it.

In the golden ages, when kind Heaven directly intervened in human affairs more frequently than is thought to be the case now, and did not suffer sacrilegious deeds to go unpunished, a peasant woman of the neighboring canton of Cazères, who had come to Martres to attend St. Vidian’s fair, went into the church to pay her devotions at the shrine, and, finding it empty, was induced by some diabolical inspiration to steal the wondrous comb, which was not then kept under glass as now. She hid it under her scarlet capulet, and, rejoining her husband at the market-place, set out for home. The afternoon was drawing to a close. Some rays of the declining sun still brightened the gray tower of Mauran among the mountain oaks, but the evening shadows had begun to gather in the valley below. Accordingly, they hurried along the road that bordered the river, the irons on their shoes clattering over the stones and giving out an occasional spark. The woman’s feet, however, often faltered, and, contrary to custom, her tongue was mute. But this was no affliction to her husband, and he pretended not to observe it. At length, on crossing the boundary that separates Martres from Cazères, he suddenly found himself alone, and, hearing a cry, looked around. His wife remained fastened on the line, as if by some invisible influence, with one foot in the parish of Martres and the other in that of Cazères, without the power of moving. He hurried back to her assistance, but, in spite of herculean efforts, he could not move her an inch, more than if she had been Lot’s wife. Night was now coming on fast. Not a ray of the sun was left on St. Michael’s tower, and they were only half way home. A cart from the mountains came by, drawn by three cows, and he begged the driver’s assistance. The woman seized hold of the cart. The driver goaded the cows. They were usually gentle and tractable, as becomes the female nature, but they now set off as if suddenly gone mad, leaving the poor woman behind, her arms nearly dislocated with her efforts, but her feet still glued to the ground. Then came along some Spaniards with their mules covered with gay tassels and bells. New efforts were made to remove her. She clung desperately to bridle and harness, but the mules so reared and kicked that she was obliged to give up the attempt. “Certainly the devil must have a hand in this,” said the husband. The woman rent the mountains with her cries, and at length was forced to confess the deed she had done. It was evidently a case in which the spiritual powers alone could be of any avail, and, as she could no more go back than forward, her husband sent to Martres to make known the case and ask the benefit of the clergy. As St. Vidian would have it, they were all keeping solemn vigil at his shrine, and, taking the torches that stood around it, they came hastening out with cross and banner, and as soon as they took possession of the relic the woman had stolen, her feet recovered their liberty. After this the comb was kept under lock and key, and, at a later day, was placed in the reliquary where it now is. Of course so stupendous an event caused a great sensation in the valley, which had not been so stirred up since the Norman invasion, and made the comb not only an object of universal curiosity but of increased veneration. The legend is related to this day. It is pretended that the women of Cazères are a little spiteful about it, and dress their shining black hair with much more care than their neighbors at Martres, probably to show they have no need of the comb of St. Vidian.

St. Vidian figures everywhere in this region. Charming legends, handed down from father to son for ages, have thrown quite a veil of poetry over numberless places. They are not very clear as to the precise place of the saint’s birth, but they are quite positive that he was one of the preux who served under Charlemagne, and had even a dash of imperial blood in his veins. In his youth he became a hostage for his father, who had been taken prisoner by the Basques of Luceria, then idolaters. They sold the young Frank as a slave. An Englishman bought and adopted him, and as soon as Vidian was sufficiently inured to the use of arms he organized a crusade against Luceria, which he pillaged and completely destroyed. Of course such a feat recommended him to his imperial kinsman. Charlemagne invited him to his court and created him duke. About this time the Saracens crossed the Pyrenees and began to ravage the plain of Toulouse. Vidian joined the imperial hosts who came to the rescue of the land, and entrenched himself with his followers at Martres, then called Angonia. He defended the place so bravely against the enemy that for a while it was supposed saved, but, surprised by an ambuscade near a fountain where he had gone to stanch his wounds, he was slain after a stout resistance, and the town taken and devastated. When it rose from its ruins it took the name of Martres in memory of those who were martyred in trying to defend it.

It is certain that all this part of France was once overrun by the Moors. They, and the Normans after them, probably destroyed not only most of the ancient Christian churches, but the monuments left by the Romans. History has not recorded all the efforts made to repel them, but a confused memory of the struggle has been left in the minds of the people, and, colored by time and the warm southern imagination, these memories have become a genuine cycle of poetic traditions, not the less founded on fact because only written with the sword and blood of their ancestors.

The country around Martres is full of character and beauty. The Garonne, fresh from its mountain sources, winds through the verdant plain. To the south are broad terraces and wooded hills, and behind is the grand barrier of mountains, their summits all crystal in the morning light, and at evening all rose and amethyst. No wonder the Romans thought it rivalled Italy, and established themselves here. On one of the neighboring plateaus have been found the remains of a magnificent Roman villa that must have belonged to some wealthy person of luxurious and cultivated tastes, to judge by the objects brought to light from time to time. In 1826 a vault was found by a laborer, and excavations were systematically made which led to the discovery of sumptuous apartments paved with mosaics and marble, with remains of columns, statues, and bas-reliefs, and fine bathing-rooms with furnaces and earthen pipes, and all the accessories of Roman luxury. Among the works of art that have been found here are about forty busts and medallions of Roman emperors and empresses from Augustus down; a white marble statue of a reclining naiad; the beautiful head of another statue called the Venus de Martres; medallions of Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Cybele, and Atys; large bas-reliefs of Serapis, the labors of Hercules, etc., and several bronzes. These form quite a gallery of ancient art in the museum at Toulouse, where we saw them in the old cloister of Augustinian friars.

Beneath one of the plateaus is a pretty fountain with a cross near it, in the midst of gentle undulations of verdure, shaded by a grove. Here St. Vidian had his encounter with the Moors and was slain. The pebbles in the spring are said to be still stained with his blood. Every year his exploits are celebrated here by a mimic battle between the Moors and Christians, in which nearly all the male population take part. It is said the brilliant costume of the Saracens is so attractive to the younger portion that they show a lamentable disposition to enter the service of the infidel. However, by dint of cautious measures, both armies are kept about equal. They consist of nearly one hundred and twenty-five men each, of whom fifty are horsemen. The Moorish cavaliers wear red and white turbans with silver trimmings; green stomachers adorned with a yellow crescent; orange coats turned out with red facings; girdles of scarlet silk; and blue pantaloons of Oriental amplitude. It will at once be perceived that nothing could be more gorgeous. The infantry are less pretentious. They content themselves with the white pantaloons of the French hussar, but make up for this with bright orange vests a Mameluke might envy. The Christian knights wear a black pasteboard helmet with a silver cross on the front, a blue tunic, and a tin cuirass that is quite dazzling in the sun. The foot-soldiers are dressed in gray, with blue caps, and a silver cross on their breasts. Both armies are furnished with tall lances, and each has its standard. That of the Moors is green and orange. On it gleams the ominous silver crescent. The Christians’ is blue and bears the redoubtable figure of St. Vidian.

The battle takes place on St. Vidian’s day. The relics of the saint are exposed in the church. High Mass is celebrated with the utmost pomp. Even the followers of Islam are so unfaithful to their traditional intolerance as to attend and present arms at the Elevation of the Host, in utter disregard of the Prophet. Mass over, the clergy and people go in procession to the miraculous fount, bearing the shrine and chanting the hymn of St. Vidian. There they bathe the bust of the saint in memory of his wounds. These traditional services concluded, the military ardor of the soldiers begins to assert itself. The two armies draw up on the neighboring field. Prodigious acoustic performances are made on the drum of the commune. Military evolutions begin. The banners fly. Red, yellow, and blue uniforms flash across the green field. The cavaliers show themselves true paladins. Such curveting and prancing have not been seen since the days of Charlemagne and Haroun al Raschid; at least, on such steeds—mostly farm horses the worse for wear. Sometimes the contest becomes too warm and real. However, their ardor never lasts longer than is warranted by tradition. The Moorish flag is invariably captured by the Christians, and the battle-field deserted till the next anniversary of St. Vidian’s martyrdom.

Vigilantius, the first heresiarch that troubled the peace of Christian Gaul, was a native of Callagorris. He was of a roving turn and a lover of novelty. In early life he crossed over into Spain and there became an inn-keeper. Then we hear of him as a priest at Barcelona. He made the acquaintance of St. Paulinus (afterwards of Nola) in Spain, who was induced to give him a letter of recommendation to St. Jerome. Furnished with this, he went to the Holy Land, but there he took sides with the enemies of St. Jerome and attacked the monastic life, celibacy of the clergy, the veneration of relics, the use of candles in the daytime, etc. St. Jerome, sarcastically referring to his original calling, told him the faculty of testing wine and that of expounding the Scriptures were not quite the same, and advised him to acquire the elements of grammar and the other sciences, and then learn to be silent. His countrymen do not seem to have been influenced by his example, however, but have always been remarkable for their confidence in the saints and veneration for relics.

Five or six miles beyond Martres we came to St. Martory, so named from a holy monk of the East whose beautiful legend is related by St. Gregory. One evening this saint, on his way to a neighboring monastery, overtook a poor leper forced by fatigue and disease to rest by the wayside. Filled with intense compassion, St. Martyri, as he is otherwise called, spread his cloak on the ground, placed the leper thereon, and, carefully wrapping him up, took him on his shoulder and proceeded on his way. The abbot of the monastery, seeing him coming, cried: “Hasten, my brethren, to open the gates. Behold Brother Martyri coming, bearing the Lord.” While they were gone to execute his command the leper descended from the good monk’s shoulders, and, taking the form under which the Redeemer is usually represented, he addressed him in these words: “Martyri, thou hast had pity on me on earth; I will glorify thee in heaven.” And, while the monk was gazing at him in speechless amazement, he ascended to heaven. When St. Martyri entered, the abbot asked what he had done with the person he was carrying. The saint replied: “Oh! had I known who he was, I would have held him by the feet!” And he related how light he had seemed on the way. The body of St. Martory is still revered in the church.

Not long after leaving St. Martory we came in sight of the towers of St. Gaudens at one end of a broad plateau, once the place of a Roman encampment. Behind it are the mountains that enclose the beautiful valleys of Aure and Campan, the Pic du Midi, and the whole of the mighty chain that binds sea to sea. Below is a vast plain, fertile and smiling, supposed to be the bed of a lake in which the waters of the Neste once mingled with those of the Garonne. On the other side are to be seen the ancient thermal place of Labarthe, overlooked by a feudal tower and a village that dates from the fourth century, called Valentine, in honor, it is said, of Valentinian II., who was assassinated in Gaul Narbonnaise in 392. Here and there in the fields are found remains that attest the importance of the place under the Romans—fragments of tombs, bas-reliefs, and antique vases. At one corner of the church of Valentine is the head of a Roman soldier with his helmet on, and near it a white marble urn. Inserted in the wall of the church is a marble slab with a Latin inscription, thought to be of the fourth century, which may be thus rudely rendered:

“Nymphius, whose limbs are cold and stiff in eternal sleep, reposes here. His soul is in heaven. It contemplates the stars, while his body is left to the repose of the tomb. His faith dispelled the darkness that seemed to envelop it. O Nymphius! the renown of thy virtues raised thee to the very stars and placed thee in the zenith. Thou art immortal, and thy glory will be perpetuated in ages to come. The province honors thee as its father. The entire population made vows for the preservation of thy life. At the celebration of the games due to thy munificence the spectators on the gradations of the arena testified their joy by acclamations. Once thy beloved country, at thy command, assembled its magistrates and spoke worthily by thy lips. Now our cities, deprived of thee, are plunged in mourning, and the senators, in consternation, are incapable of action. They are like the human body that, deprived of its head, falls lifeless and inert, or a flock without its shepherd that knows not which way to direct its steps. Serena, thy spouse, abandoned to grief, erects this monument to thee, and finds in this pious duty a slight solace for her pain. Thy companion for eight lustres, she only thought and acted by thee. At thy side life seemed sweet. Now, abandoned to her sorrow, she sighs for the eternal life, hoping that which she now possesses may be brief.”

What a tale might be woven out of the epitaph of this old Roman, who died fourteen hundred years ago in this remote valley—made up of domestic bliss, political honors, the happiness that virtue alone can bestow, and an untimely death mourned by the public and, above all, by the gentle-hearted Serena!

The Romans knew how to choose their sites. Nothing can exceed the charm of this region, especially in the month of May, when we visited it for the first time. The fresh valleys, the clear streams, the unexpected views at every turn, the harmonious outlines of the landscape, are a perpetual delight to the eye. The fertile plain of Valentine especially is so lovely that all the mountain-tops seem crowding together to gaze at and admire it, and they send down their purest streams to preserve its freshness and beauty.

On the sides of the plateau that overlooks Valentine a young shepherd, named Gaudentius, led his flocks to pasture in the latter part of the fifth century. His mother, a holy woman of the name of Quitterie, had brought him up in the practice of the most fervent piety. The country at that time was in possession of the Visigoths. Euric had succeeded to the throne by slaying his brother, Theodoric II. He was a man of great military genius, who extended his conquests in Gaul from the Loire beyond the Rhone, and carried war beyond the Pyrenees with so much success that he conquered most of the Peninsula. Toulouse was thus made the capital of an immense empire that extended from Provence to Andalusia. Euric was a fanatical Arian, and, attributing his success to his fidelity to his principles, he began a violent persecution of the Catholics, though they constituted a large part of his subjects. Executioners were frequently his missionaries, and one of these summarily opened heaven to the young shepherd Gaudentius, who, refusing to apostatize, gave a last look at his mother, who encouraged him, and submitted to martyrdom. His remains were carefully transported to the place of his residence, and, after the downfall of the Visigoths, an oratory was erected over his grave.

Such miracles were now wrought through the instrumentality of St. Gaudens that his fame extended all through the country, people came to live around his tomb, and a village soon sprang up that took his name. More than a thousand years passed away without diminishing the affluence at St. Gaudens’ tomb, but in the sixteenth century the town was taken by Montgomery the Huguenot, the church stripped of its ornaments and greatly injured, the statues broken, the tombs desecrated, and most of St. Gaudens’ relics thrown into the flames. But that was a way of reforming the Huguenots had.

“N’est ce pas réformer, quand on trouve une église

Trop riche, lui ravir ses trésors anciens?”

says the old Plainte de la Guienne of 1577 with a bitterness that is quite natural. The bullet-holes made in the church are still pointed out. This is a noteworthy building of the Romanesque style, with round arches, clustered columns, and carved capitals. Each aisle ends in a chapel, and a choir is at the apsis. Over the altar is a statue of the Virgin that, before the Revolution, belonged to the neighboring abbey of Bonnefont, now completely destroyed. This statue is the production of Pierre Lucas, the founder of the academy of art at Toulouse. A priory was formerly attached to the church of St. Gaudens, dependent on the abbey of St. Sernin at Toulouse, but it has been totally destroyed. The old cloister of Pyrenean marble, built by Bernard I., Bishop of Comminges, and of the race of its counts, has also been destroyed. Of the tombs that once lined the arcades, only one here and there is left, with its touching mediæval inscription, and perchance some consoling emblem of religion, such as a cluster of grapes on a vine branch, recalling the Saviour’s words, “I am the vine and ye are the branches”; the monogram of Christ; the Alpha and Omega, etc.—symbols of hope graven on the cold marble tomb. And there is an ancient portal over which used to hang the horseshoes of Abderahman’s steed, which, according to tradition, plunged and reared when his master attempted to pillage the shrine of St. Gaudens, and thus lost its shoes. The horse of Montgomery seems to have been of a coarser nature, and as insensible as his ferocious owner to the spiritual influences around the tombs of the saints.

There is a kind of mournful pleasure in sitting down among the ruins of such old cloisters, listening to the echoes of past times, and trying to decipher the pious inscriptions on the tombstones among the rank grass, and to divine the history of those who lie beneath—once centres of fond affection, but now forgotten and unknown. Through the rifts in the wall is seen the peaceful rural valley, with the Pyrenees in the distance, resplendent in the light; and the contrast between all that is graceful and sublime in nature, and the desolation of this spot once beautified by art and hallowed by religion, is exceedingly touching. How peaceful, how religious, this cloister must have been, where paced the silent, prayerful monk among the tombs! And there is a sacredness in its present desolation that appeals to the heart; if the solemnity of the ancient arches is wanting, there is no lack of beauty in the lovely vistas among the picturesque mountains and delicious valleys.

St. Gaudens is a place of four or five thousand inhabitants, with old blackened houses full of industry. The country around is densely populated, and at certain seasons many go into the neighboring districts to add to their slender earnings. The young men have a commercial taste, and all through the Pyrenees you meet peddlers and colporteurs from St. Gaudens, hawking their small wares with amusing pertinacity. The girls, too, in harvest-time descend to the neighboring valleys to offer their services, and there are many popular rondeaux that allude to them.

“Las fillos de Sen Gaoudens nou n’an d’argent,

Las qui nou n’an qu’en bouléren:

Faridoundaino, qu’en bouléren.”

—The girls of St. Gaudens are penniless, and those without money desire it. Tum-te-tum, yes, desire it.

“Aou pays bach, anem! anem!

Coillé d’argent!

En sega blat et dailla hen,

Faridoundaino, n’en gagnaren.”

—Down to the valleys let us go, go! Money to seek, by reaping grain and raking hay. Tum-te-tum, we shall gain some.

On the outskirts of St. Gaudens is shown the house where St. Raymond was born—the celebrated founder of the order of Calatrava, which rendered such glorious services to Spain, and thereby to all Christendom, in the struggle with the Moors. It is a humble birthplace for one who gathered under his banner the haughtiest grandees of Spain. His companion, Durand, was also a native of St. Gaudens. They both became monks at the noted abbey of Escale-Dieu, where they inured themselves by austerities for the mission Providence had in reserve for them. There would seem to be but little in common with the peaceful pursuits of the Cistercians and the valiant exploits of the knights of Calatrava, to those who know nothing of the bracing discipline of monastic life.

Not far from St. Gaudens is the chapel of Notre Dame du Bout-du-Puy—a place of pilgrimage, enriched with indulgences by Pope Innocent XI. It is under the continual guardianship of a hermit. This Madonna is particularly invoked by people in danger of death. Among the ex votos on the wall is the picture of a child carried away by a neighboring torrent, the mother kneeling on the bank with eyes and arms raised towards heaven, where Mary appears, commanding the waves to bring back her child.

We have mentioned the tower of Labarthe. The viscounts of this name were the lords of the Four Valleys for several centuries, and played an important rôle in the history of Bigorre. The fifth Vicomte de Labarthe married the grand-daughter of Eudoxia, the daughter of Emmanuel Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, who died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, and was buried at the church of the Vatican. Geraud de Labarthe, Archbishop of Auch, put on the cross and accompanied Richard the Lion-hearted to the Holy Land as the prefect of his army. One of the glories of this race is Marshal Paul de Labarthe, Lord of Thermes, who lived in the sixteenth century and saw six kings succeed each other on the throne of France. He took part in the siege of Naples, and, made prisoner by the corsairs, endured a severe captivity for two years. He afterwards distinguished himself in the Piedmont war and fighting in Scotland against the English, and was finally created Marshal of France. He was so noted for his humanity that the Huguenots said he could not hold his place as governor of Paris because he was “too little inclined to slaughter.” Some of his descendants still live in Bigorre.

On our way to Bagnères de Bigorre we stopped to visit the abbey of Escale-Dieu, at the bottom of a deep valley enclosed among the hills. The name is derived from Scala Dei—the ladder of God—a ladder to aid man in his ascent to heaven! No name could be more appropriate for a monastery where, as Wordsworth says, paraphrasing the words of St. Bernard:

“Man more purely lives; less oft doth fall;
More promptly rises; walks with nicer tread;
More safely rests; dies happier; is freed

Earlier from cleansing fires; and gains withal

A brighter crown.”

This abbey is on the banks of the Arros, a river noted for its impetuous character and sudden overflows. It has its source in the valley of Oueil, the ancient Vallis Oculi—so called from its shape, where it is said three barons once could breakfast together without leaving their own domains. Near by is a little hamlet called Mayleu, on the edge of a torrent, where on stormy nights pale lights are said to wave to and fro on the current, which the mountaineers say are caused by the soul of an old miser that agitates the waters—emblem of his restless life, spent in grasping the goods of others with insatiable avidity. His influence surely extends all along the Arros.

The valley of Escale-Dieu was given to a community of Cistercian monks in the twelfth century by Beatrix, Countess of Bigorre, in order, as she says in her charter, that she “might be accounted as a sister in Christ by the brethren of Escale-Dieu in their watchings, and fastings, and prayers, and obtain the redemption of her soul, her husband’s, her father, Centulle’s, her mother, Amable’s, and other relatives’.” The Cistercians were famous as agriculturists, and in bestowing on them large tracts of land the old lords of the middle ages ensured the best means of bringing the country under cultivation and humanizing the inhabitants. The monks built a church here under the invocation of SS. Peter and Paul, which was consecrated October 23, 1142, by the Archbishop of Auch, in the presence of the Countess Beatrix and her husband, many abbots and neighboring lords, and an immense crowd of people. This church became the St. Denis of the counts of Bigorre, who doubtless thought to rest here in peace till the end of the world; for the abbey was at that time so remote from the highways of travel that its solitude was almost unbroken. The Countess Beatrix was one of the first to be buried here, but her tomb was broken open at the Revolution, and the remains, spared by centuries, fell into dust at contact with the air.

The first abbot of Escale-Dieu was a son of the Vicomte de Labarthe, and his successors, over forty in number, were mostly from the great families of the country. The house was immediately dependent on the Holy See, and the Sovereign Pontiff forbade any one to rob, burn, make any arrest, commit murder, or do any violence on its domains.

One peculiarity about its history is that, contrary to most great monasteries, no town or village ever sprang up around it. It remained solitary in its valley, studying “the secret lore of rural things” and pruning the wings of Contemplation, unconscious that Providence was to give it a mission in the world seemingly incompatible with the spirit of the order. The monks became so numerous, however, that two colonies were sent across the Pyrenees under the charge of St. Raymond and Durand, to found the abbeys of Yergo and Fitero. In 1147 the town of Calatrava, the bulwark of Andalusia, was taken by Alfonso, King of Castile, and entrusted to the care of the Knights Templars, who held it for ten years. Then the success of the Moors made them fear they would not be able to defend it any longer, and they resigned the place to the king. The latter, embarrassed at having it thrown on his hands, offered it to any one who would undertake its defence. St. Raymond, indignant to see knights, vowed to the defence of religion, thus abandon the post of danger, asked the honor of taking their place. The king willingly consented. St. Raymond went through the provinces preaching a kind of crusade, and twenty thousand soldiers ranged themselves under the Cistercian banner. Their success made him conceive the idea of cementing the union of the knights with his order. The abbot of Escale-Dieu did not at first approve of the design. “What an idea,” said he, “for solitaries by profession to convert a monastery into a school of war, and flatter themselves tumultuous exercises can be combined with the silence of prayer and the chanting of Psalms!” A chapter of the Cistercian order was held, but the Kings of France and Castile, and the Duke of Burgundy, overcame the scruples of the abbot, and the pope issued a bull authorizing the affiliation of the Knights of Calatrava with the Cistercian Order as lay brothers. All the houses in Spain were subjected to the rule of the abbot of Escale-Dieu, who had the right of visiting and inspecting them till the secularization of the knights.

The most brilliant era in the history of Escale-Dieu is the thirteenth century. Two saints had sprung from the house (for we must not forget St. Bertrand of Comminges, one of the most popular saints of the Pyrenees, whose tomb is still honored in the town called by his name); it held rule over ten monasteries in Spain; and it was greatly enriched by the neighboring lords, particularly by the counts of Bigorre, who made it their burial-place. The Countess Petronilla, so famous for her five husbands, was a great benefactress of the house. Besides endowing it during her life, she bequeathed it, at her death, all her gold and silver vessels and reliquaries, her jewels, rings, and precious stones, her dresses (probably for vestments), sheets, and blankets. Her first husband was Gaston, Viscount of Bearn, who took sides with Count Raymond of Toulouse, but was reconciled to the church before his death. The second was Nuñez Sancho of Aragon, whom she repudiated under pretext of consanguinity. The third was Guy de Montfort, son of the great opponent of the Albigenses, who was killed at the siege of Castelnaudary. The fourth, Aymar de Rançon, who died about the same time as her second husband. And finally, Boson de Matas, Lord of Cognac. After these five chapters she died at the Abbey of Escale-Dieu in great need, it is thought, of expiatory prayers and good works. Henry III. of England was captivated by the beauty of her daughter Amate, and three other princes sought to obtain her hand in marriage; but she married Gaston VII. of Bearn, and two of her daughters, by the intermediation of Abbot Bernard of the house of Castelbajac, married princes of Aragon.

One of the viscounts of Lavedan also became a benefactor to the abbey, and in his deed of conveyance declares he gives it the soil, the rocks, the vegetation, the fruit, leaves, all that rises from the land towards heaven, and all it contains in its depths.

Rising over the valley of Escale-Dieu are the ruins of the old feudal castle of Mauvezin, like a vulture’s nest on the cliff, overlooking the whole country. It was once considered impregnable, and was, after that of Lourdes, the most important fortress in Bigorre. From this castle went many a valiant knight to the Crusades. One of them, in making his preparations to go beyond the seas with St. Louis, gave to “God and Madame St. Mary of Escale-Dieu” fifty sols of Morlaas money[109] from the rents of the thermal springs of Capvern.

In early times the abbey found a kind protector in the castle; but when, at a later period, it became the stronghold of freebooters, who only issued forth to pillage the lowlands and fat abbeys, the good monks of Escale-Dieu had reason to call it a Mauvais Voisin—a bad neighbor—a name that has ever since clung to it.

When the English took possession of the country after the treaty of Brétigny, the Black Prince established a garrison of soldiers here, who rendered themselves as famous for their brigandage as for their heroic exploits. When the Duke of Anjou and Duguesclin went to the Pyrenees in 1374 to root the English out of the land, the castles of Lourdes and Mauvezin long resisted their stoutest efforts. The latter was besieged by eight thousand men, but the castle was so strong that it would have held out a long time, had not the supply of water been cut off by the capture of the outer cistern. The garrison now suffered all the horrors of thirst under a burning sun. Froissart says the weather was excessively warm, and not a drop of rain had fallen for six weeks. There was no choice but to surrender. Captain Raimounet de l’Epée, the commander of the fortress, like the true Gascon he was, made the best of his fate, and offered to yield up the castle on conditions that were the most advantageous to himself and his soldiers. Unwilling to lose any of his plunder, he stipulated that they should be allowed to depart in freedom, taking with them all they and their sumpter-horses could carry. The duke consented, saying: “Go about your business, every man to his own country, without entering any fort that holds out against us; for, if you do, and I get hold of you, I will deliver you up to Josselin [the executioner], who will shave you without a razor.”

Raimounet had fought well for the English, but he had an eye to the main chance, and he now showed the nature of his bravery by entering the service of the Duke of Anjou and continuing, under the fleurs-de-lis of France, the pillaging he had so long practised under the leopards of England. What he had not seized in the name of St. George he now took in honor of St. Denis, and thus filled both pockets at once. He died fighting by the side of the Duke of Anjou under the walls of Naples.

The sixteenth century, so fatal to innumerable churches and monasteries in France, did not spare the abbey of Escale-Dieu. The Huguenots now invaded the peaceful valley and proved far worse than the old troopers of Raimounet de l’Epée. The first band came in 1518 and burned the stables and the abbot’s residence. In 1567 a more formidable company appeared that put the monks to flight and took possession of the abbey, which they made the centre of their operations, issuing suddenly forth from time to time, like birds of prey, to plunder some church, or monastery, or well-garnished priest’s house. Blasphemies now resounded beneath the arches only accustomed to the voice of prayer and psalmody. All religious emblems were destroyed. The sanctuary angels feared to tread witnessed their orgies. At length, by the combined efforts of some of the lords of Bigorre, they were routed from the abbey, but before leaving they set fire to it and nearly destroyed it. In this destruction was included the fine old Romanesque church of the twelfth century, where St. Raymond and St. Bertrand had so often prayed, and the cloister they had so often paced in silent meditation. It is a poor comfort to know that the leaders of this sacrilegious deed were taken and executed at Toulouse. The monks returned to Escale-Dieu, but only to find it in ruins. In the course of time, however, it was rebuilt, but in an inferior style, as suited their diminished means, and the house led a precarious existence till the French Revolution, when it was once more ravaged, the very tombs violated, and the monks for ever dispersed.

The abbey is now owned by a layman who is more interested in agriculture than archæology. It contains, however, but little that is ancient. At the end of a long file of poplars you see the dome and white walls of the church, a building of the seventeenth century, now a grange. There is a flower-garden on the site of the ancient cloister, and in the walls are encrusted a few of the old columns with palm-leaves sculptured on the capitals, emblem of spiritual victory. And the hallowed name of Escale-Dieu, which once gave laws to Spanish knights, is now degraded to a mere post station.

Mauvezin itself became the hold of the Huguenots under Captain de Sus in 1584, and they made the castle more than ever worthy of its name. They extended their ravages as far as St. Bertrand of Comminges, and the name of their leader became a terror in the land. Now the castle is in ruins, which are as melancholy as its history. The square, massive tower that withstood so many attacks is roofless, windowless, and dismantled. Beneath is the vaulted dungeon where the prisoner once groaned in vain—dark and hopeless as the tomb. Over one of the doors of the tower is an escutcheon on which the arms of Foix are quartered with those of Bearn, with the inscription Fébus mé fé—Phœbus made me; for here lived for a time the famous Gaston Phœbus of Bearn. The kite and the osprey inhabit it now. The hoarse notes of birds of prey well suit the place where once resounded the war-cries of Raimounet de l’Epée and Captain de Sus.

Two leagues from Mauvezin is Bagnères de Bigorre, one of the most popular watering-places in the Pyrenees. Here “Esculapius est sans barbe et sans rides” says the poet Lemierre. Long before you arrive you see the tower of the Jacobins rising into the air light and slender as a column. It is a clean, attractive town in a circular valley surrounded by hills cultivated to the very top, or covered with woods whose shady paths are full of mystery. The valley is watered by several streams, and cooled by mountain breezes that are delicious in summer. Numerous canals convey the waters of the Adour through most of the streets of the town, giving a certain freshness to the air, and a supply of water for domestic purposes. An old author attributes the foundation of the place to Venus and Hebe, and says it was here the god Mars came to be healed when wounded at the siege of Troy. It was, at least, frequented by the Romans, who gave it the name of Vicus Aquensis. Their homages to the nymphs who guard the springs are still to be seen graven on marble, such as: Nymphis pro salute sud, Sever. Seranus V. S. L. M.

Like most of the towns of this region, Bagnères was formerly held by the Visigoths, Saracens, Normans, and English one after the other, but seems to have been spared by the Huguenots, who perhaps were more afraid of offending the water-nymphs than the saints. The people, it is said, propitiated their leaders by sending them occasionally a tribute of butter and maize. The town, notwithstanding its antiquity, has but few ancient remains. There is a feudal tower or two that formed part of the old fortifications, necessary when, as Froissart says, it was so often worried and beset by the garrison at Mauvezin. The old church of the Templars is standing, but used for profane purposes.

There are many agreeable promenades around Bagnères. One of these is to a green hollow among abrupt cliffs, called the Elysée-Cottin, from Madame Cottin, who was very fond of this quiet nook. It was here she is said to have conceived the noble character of Malek Adhel, which so delighted us in our youth, and wrote not only Mathilde but some of her other works. It is a charming retreat with a fountain in the bottom of the valley, in her time shaded by fine beeches and ash-trees, which have since been cut down.

The Allée Maintenon is so called in honor of Mme. de Maintenon, who accompanied the Duc du Maine here for his health. This Allée begins at the end of the town, and, climbing a steep hill, proceeds along the plateau of Pouey till it comes to a spot where you can see the whole plain of Bigorre, and the waters of the Adour dashing down the steep sides of the mountains. Here, taking the road to Campan, you soon come to the place where once stood the Capuchin convent of Médoux, founded in the sixteenth century by Susanne de Grammont, Marchioness of Monpezat. It was particularly renowned for a miraculous statue of the Virgin, honored under the name of Sancta Maria in Melle dulci, corrupted into Notre Dame de Médoux. The convent was destroyed during the Revolutionary period, but the Madonna, so dear to popular piety, was saved and now adorns the high altar of the church of Asté. The people say it was miraculously transported through the air and thus saved. It is of white marble, and a genuine work of art, by an Italian sculptor. It was the gift of one of the viscounts of Asté, who were generous patrons of the monastery. The expression and pure outline of the face, the dignity of the attitude, and the graceful flow of the drapery excite the admiration of every visitor.

A modern villa now occupies the place of the convent. It is in the midst of a fine park watered by a stream that comes pouring out of a cool grotto. Nothing could be more delightfully rural. Not far off is an old feudal tower, and beyond is Baudeau, the birthplace of Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Napoleon. The Vicomte de Castelbajac has sung the beauties of this spot where once stood

“Une chapelle hospitalière
Toujours ouverte au pélerin,
Jamais il n’y frappait en vain;
Et le malheur et la misère,
La pauvre veuve et l’orphelin,
Y trouvaient toujours la prière
Et l’aumône du Capucin.”

“CATHEDRAL WOODS,”
MANCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

Hushed grow our voices as our footsteps fall

These darksome woods’ high fretted roof beneath,

Whose living arches, sprung from living sheath,

Are organ-pipes for winds to play withal.
We leave, without, the meadow’s autumn glare—
Its Tyrian wealth of asters prodigal,
Its pomp of scarlet-robed cardinal,
Its gentian that doth heaven’s livery wear.
So leave we, too, the sparkle of the sea,

And land-locked beach where waves break lazily.

Herein we seem among the hills at rest;

Their balm by breath of salt wind undefiled;

Freshness of streams, and strength of great rocks piled,

Seem by our souls in this calm shade possessed,

Where hemlocks stretch their dusky branches o’er

The scattered rocks, whereto the green moss clings,

Catching the prisoned sunbeam as it flings
A miser’s portion of its golden store,
As if it feared to break the shadow deep,
To mar some vigil these grave giants keep.

Here only mountain incense seeming fills

The lofty arches, by sea-wind unbent,

That rise as if with height still nobler blent:

Some peak, cloud-piercing, 'mid the sunlit hills

Whose glamour holds us fast, whose blossoms lie

The darkness of the broken rocks amid,

Whose written speech in these lithe ferns is hid,

Whose forests whisper in the winds’ low sigh.

Should any bird this inland silence break,

Sure in his song the mountains’ soul would wake.

Hearken! breaks through the silence soft a sound

Faint as the thought of half-forgotten dream.

Not speech so sad is that of mountain stream

That from all loftiest heights doth reckless bound,

Scattering its broken life in shining drift

Of constant dew that mocketh at the sun.

Nor breathes the wind in such low, measured tone

When doth it lightly leafy branches lift—

This wakes and dies in mournful monotone:

The sea’s vast life dashed out against a stone!

Some law this chant seems ever to obey—

Advancing, swells, now sinketh in retreat,

Sad-voiced like life that knoweth but defeat,

Yet still with patient purpose keeps its way.

Joy-burdened silence of the hills, farewell!

And salt sea-wind, thy carven choir reclaim!

Brave sun, set all these dusky trunks aflame!

Lost are our mountains in yon ceaseless swell

That, shoreward rolling, lapsing quietly,

Holds all the strength of the untiring sea.

The land grows little, and we crave the blue
No earthly shade e’er shutteth from the sun,
The barren sands whereon the light waves run
But rest not, bidding evermore adieu,
And evermore returning, bringing gifts

They give and take, and still give o’er again.

We crave the vastness of the salty plain!

As sea-bird on unbreaking billow drifts

Our hearts with that soft plashing throb in time—

Longing, we list our dim cathedral chime.

One well might paint the hemlock solitude,
The quiet shadow that the sunshine breaks;
Even in color give the song that wakes
At windy touch amid the peaceful wood.
Limned all might be, indeed, so cunningly

That one should hear the babble of glad stream,

E’en catch the climbing mountains’ happy gleam;

But—who could paint the murmur of the sea?

Who dream, amid these dark boughs closing o’er,

The song eternal of the broken shore?

JULIETTE: A NORMAN STORY.

I.

Marriage is in one respect not unlike greatness: some are born to it, some achieve it, some have it thrust upon them. And the last-named some are apt to find it as unprofitable an acquisition as to Napoleon the Little it proved to be the nephew of his uncle.

Now, M. de Boisrobert was a born bachelor, and, left to himself, a bachelor he would have died. But who shall gainsay fate? Upon him gayly baccalaureating Fate fixed her eagle eye and made up her mind that he should marry. Not without reason has Fate been made a female. When a person of that charming but inflexible sex makes up her mind that any bachelor of her acquaintance shall marry, we know what happens. Married M. de Boisrobert accordingly was, with what direful consequences to the poor gentleman the reader shall see.

Up to his forty-fifth year Messire Guillaume Georges de Boisrobert, Sieur de Boisrobert and Saintange, had lived the happy life of a country gentleman upon his estates in Normandy, near Evreux, satisfied with himself and with the world. Indeed, he had every reason to be satisfied, possessing as he did a fine château, a princely income, an honorable name, an easy conscience, and the respect of all who knew him. From the summit of his towers, look which way he would (and his sight was keen, as so good a sportsman’s should be), he could scarce fix the boundary of his domains. Farms, meadow-land, and woodland, his broad acres stretched for many a mile along the blue waters of the Eure; upon his pastures fed sheep and cattle by the hundred; in his stables neighed scores of gallant steeds. Yet, strange to say, with all his wealth, envy had no word for him, nor was he even decried more than it was fitting a rich and handsome bachelor should be. Certain maiden ladies of uncertain age, to whose charms he had, perhaps, been ungallantly cold, sometimes, indeed, made light among themselves of his pretensions to noble birth. That, truly, was the simple gentleman’s weakness, and he loved to style himself after the stately fashion written above.

“He De Boisrobert, forsooth!” Mlle. Reiné might say over her tatting (or is it tattling the ladies call it?). “He was never aught but plain” (“plain indeed!” Mlle. Gudule would giggle, pointing the mot with her crochet-needle. Ah! thou thoughtest otherwise, fair Gudule, of his beauty when the embroidered slippers, and watch-pockets, and what-nots worked by thy own fair fingers—or thy maid’s—deluged the château and made largesse for its kitchen!)—“plain Guillaume Robert till his father, the notary, got an army contract and left him money enough to buy the wood in which his dismal old château is buried—the stingy old hunks!”

Now, this was not entirely true; and these fair Ariadnes were, to say the least, uncharitable. But it must be remembered, for the credit of the sex, that these events took place very long ago—so long ago, indeed, as the time of that great and glorious monarch, Louis XIV.—“le doyen des Rois,” as he called himself—whose majesty was like the sun (which orb, indeed, depicted in the act of illuminating the world, he modestly took for his device), and whose grandeur was indisputably shown in the fact that he could eat more for dinner than any man in his kingdom.[110] In point of fact, no small number of his loving subjects, owing to their sovereign’s majestic and princely appetite, had rarely anything to eat at all. But to return to our sheep.

M. de Boisrobert was not stingy. On the contrary, his open-handed, and even profuse, hospitality endeared him to all the men about him, who had, no doubt, their own private reasons for liking him, as some of the women had theirs for looking upon him with a different feeling. The manner of his living was almost lordly; and when he was at home, it was nothing but junketing and merriment from month’s end to month’s end. An enthusiastic sportsman himself, his stables and his kennels contained the best that money could buy; while his huntsmen, his gamekeepers, and his beaters were a small army in themselves. Being so rich and so generous, he was naturally looked upon with great respect, and even liking, through all the country round; and many a man who had little reverence for aught besides would doff his hat most humbly to the well-furnished larder of that excellent M. de Boisrobert.

It must be said, however, that in his case—what is unhappily not always true—this respect was rightly his, for better reasons. Amiable, simple, and sincere, a scrupulous observer of his word, his charity was greater than his hospitality, and his piety was as unbounded as his wealth. Every morning he was first at Mass in the little village church of Boisrobert, whose excellent curé was his favorite and, it may be said, his only intimate associate. His best friends, indeed, he counted among that admirable class, whose sterling and unobtrusive virtues he thoroughly appreciated. It was strange that so worthy a penchant was destined to lead him into the great danger of his life. Of the great folks our friend was a little shy; and as for the small farmers and hobereaux, or “squireens” (to borrow from the familiar speech of Ireland a word which alone fitly translates it), who made the bulk of the neighboring landed proprietors, their tastes and habits were little congenial to his own. So good Father Bernard and he were much together; and a pleasant sight it was to see the two friends placidly angling, side by side, for the fish which somehow a French angler seems quite as well satisfied never to catch; or, in the bright summer evenings, playing bowls with all the zest of school-boys on the village green. No more welcome guest than Father Bernard entered the gates of the Château de Boisrobert; and when the November nights grew chilly, and the logs were piled high and glowing in the wide Norman hearth (its owner always quoted Horace at such times, and old Mère Chicon, the housekeeper, knew as well as any one that dissolve frigus was the Latin for “stir up the fire and fetch a bottle of Burgundy,” and had had, indeed, many bouts thereanent with the village schoolmaster, in which that worthy was not always triumphant), our hero liked nothing better than to engage his friend in a contest at chess, or trictrac, or piquet, or, over a jug of Norman cider or the aforesaid Burgundy, to discuss the movements of the court, with which he professed to be in constant communication.

That was, as we have said, the honest gentleman’s foible—almost his sole one; he secretly worshipped rank, and often sighed to think that he, who might—and, he sometimes added to himself, should—have been a De Rohan was only a De Boisrobert, barely a gentleman, by virtue of the lands his money had bought. Yet, if not the rose, he had at least lived near the rose. The son of a notary himself, he was yet distantly connected with one of the noblest names in France, as he was by no means slow in making folks aware.

“My good cousin, De Beaumanoir,” he would say in an off-hand way, pronouncing the name tout sec, like the provincial ladies in the Roman Comique, though to his face he never ventured to address him otherwise than as M. le Comte—“my good cousin De Beaumanoir writes me that he is to visit Saint-Aignan at his country-seat, and will have me to be of the party.”

Or, mysteriously: “The army—but this, you conceive, my friend, is between ourselves—a secret, mind you, of state—the army moves on Flanders this week. I have it direct from Beaumanoir.”

It was then, as you may read in Scarron’s sprightly pages, a common ambition of provincial gentlemen to be thought on familiar terms with the great folks of the court. Truly, an extraordinary time!

At these naïve confidences the curé, who knew his friend’s failing, but respected his virtues, smiled, if at all, to himself.

But M. de Boisrobert’s reverence for his noble kinsman went further than talking of him in season and out of season. He gave a more substantial proof of his regard in making him his sole heir. “The money should go with the title,” he said; “the family must be kept up.” It seemed to him a little price to pay for the privilege of being admitted for a month or two in the year to the rather frigid hospitality of the Hôtel Beaumanoir, of being nightly snubbed by the bluest blood in France, and of having down a great man or two for a day in the shooting season, to convert the Château Boisrobert to his enamored fancy into a new Versailles. His noble cousin he would gladly have had stay longer; but the count, after yawning through forty-eight hours of ennui, invariably left. The lands of Boisrobert he wanted; its simple and placid life he could not stomach. His palate was seasoned to higher flavors.

Not to put too fine a point on it, M. the Count de Beaumanoir was as insolent, imperious, and ungrateful a scoundrel as was to be found in a court where gentry of his pattern were rather a drug. Had it not been that he enjoyed the confidence and familiarity of a still greater rogue than himself—no less a one, to wit, than Monsieur, the brother of the Most Christian King—he would long since have come to grief. He was more than suspected of a share in the mysterious poisoning of the hapless Henrietta of Orleans, and it was only the credit of his patron and his own well-known courage and skill as a swordsman that kept these doubts from taking form.

Such was the heir whom our worthy M. de Boisrobert had selected for the reversion of his vast estates; and his promise once given, the count determined that it should be kept.

II.

Daybreak of a pleasant morning in October, 1681. In the court-yard and stables of the Château de Boisrobert, and in the great farm-yard near by, all is bustle and confusion. Grooms and footmen, herdsmen and farm-servants, are scurrying to and fro, with lanterns and lighted torches, through the gray dawn, tumbling over one another in their haste, shrieking out contradictory orders at the top of their lungs, clamoring and making all the noise possible, as though they had taken a contract for the purpose and felt they had but a limited time to fulfil it. In the farm-yard the heavy Norman horses are being harnessed, with collars that would be in themselves a load for a horse of our degenerate days, to the unwieldy Norman carts, already loaded with huge sacks of wheat and barley; further on, in the barns, a prodigious lowing and bleating and bellowing tell where Pierrot and Hugues are marshalling their herds; in the court-yard, saddled and bridled, are stamping and snorting the steeds which shall bear M. de Boisrobert and his bodyguard of two armed domestics to the great fair of Moulin-la-Forêt. Himself booted and spurred for the journey, that gentleman stands upon the terrace of the château, overlooking these preparations; chiding here, encouraging there, animating all by word and gesture. M. de Boisrobert has not been a nobleman long enough to forget that he is a farmer, and prefers to be his own steward. He finds it saves time and temper as well as money.

By dint of much exhortation and shrill volubility of expletives in the curious Norman patois all is at last in readiness, and they are off, with many tender partings and tearful embraces between Blaise and Madelon, and much scolding from Mère Chicon the housekeeper, and fervent adjurations to the Bon Dieu to bring them a good market and a safe return. The latter prayer may seem superfluous, as the distance is but thirty miles and they are a stout party. But it is the day of the famous Mandrin, most redoubtable of robbers, and of the terrible chauffeurs who extort the farmer’s hidden hoard by roasting his feet at his own fire; so there is some room for trepidation in the bosoms of the simple peasant-girls whom this animated company soon leave behind.

We have not space to follow the great cavalcade as it goes bellowing and baaing and shrieking and sacrréing over the white roads between the hedges and the apple-orchards to the great fair. We cannot even stop with M. de Boisrobert at the tidy little auberge of the Pomme d’Or for the welcome déjeuner of soupe aux croûtes, to be followed by ham, and perhaps a poulet with the freshest of eggs and salad, and the most delicious of cheeses, and a most refreshing draught of cool cider from the great stone jug. Nor can we do more than glance at the humors of the fair—much like other fairs, for the matter of that—with its inevitable jugglers and tumblers and charlatans, swallowing flames as if they were sausages, and pulling endless yards of ribbon from their mouths, to the delight of gaping rustics; its gipsies and gingerbread hawkers; its shrill-voiced peasant women, in high Norman caps, selling eggs and poultry; its shriller-voiced ballad-singers piping out:

“Si le roi m’avait donné

Paris sa grand’ ville,”

or some other favorite chanson of the time. These joys we must pass lightly by, to say that, before the afternoon was well over, M. de Boisrobert had already sold his entire venture at an excellent profit, and it was rumored about the fair that he would go home richer by 20,000 francs (equal to 80,000 now) than when he came. The interest in the lucky capitalist increased; it extended even to his horses, and one or two simple rustics went so far as to push their way, during the temporary absence of the grooms, into the stables, there to gaze in open-mouthed admiration upon the steeds that had the honor of bearing—so history renews itself—M. Cæsar de Boisrobert and his fortune.

The hour for departure drew nigh. As the days were getting short and the homeward ride was long and lonely, and, as already hinted, far from safe—few roads in France were safe in those days after nightfall—M. de Boisrobert commanded an early start. He himself was to ride on ahead, attended only by his two mounted valets, leaving the wagoners and herdsmen to follow more leisurely with the carts. The horses were accordingly brought forth and saddled, and the worthy squire was just setting foot in stirrup when he was accosted by a curé, who, calling him by name, politely craved leave to ride with him, as their road lay in the same direction. M. de Boisrobert assented more than gladly, for not only was company desirable, but a curé the company he most desired, and which could be accepted, as would not have been the case with every comer, without suspicion. So they set forth together.

The curé turned out a most agreeable travelling companion, and M. de Boisrobert secretly felicitated himself on the chance which had thrown them together. So charmed was he with his new-found friend that, when the latter pressed upon him the offer of a supper and a bed at the vicarage, he wavered, until reminded by the sum he had about him of the wisdom of pushing on. But even while he doubted came a most distressing mishap. The horse ridden by one of the servants stumbled, fell, and, before his rider had fairly scrambled to his feet, rolled over stone dead. There was nothing for it but to mount Blaise behind Constant, and so get on as best they might. But, lo and behold! scarcely had Constant drawn rein for the purpose than, with what seemed to the startled hearers almost a shriek, the beast he bestrode set off at a furious gallop, which soon left his luckless rider on the ground with a broken leg. And, strange to say, the poor animal had run but a few yards further when he too stopped, staggered, and—pouf! before one could say Jack Robinson, or its equivalent in Norman French, he is as dead as the very deadest of door-nails or herrings.

Whatever M. de Boisrobert may have thought of this odd coincidence, he had little leisure to dwell upon it; for the next instant his own steed was in convulsions, and, barely giving him time to spring from the saddle, like the others rolled over dead. How account for so singular a fatality? Had some poisonous weed got into their fodder? had some venomous reptile stung them in their stalls? or—uneasy doubts crept into the good gentleman’s mind—had they been foully dealt with by reptiles in human form who meant to waylay and rob, if not murder, the travellers? If the latter, it would be indeed most prudent to accept the good curé’s hospitality. His house was luckily not far off, and the disabled servant being first made comfortable in a wayside cabin, and the sound one despatched to the nearest town for a surgeon, M. de Boisrobert and the curé took their way to the home of the latter.

Night had fallen when they reached it, but enough light still remained to show that it was a partly-ruined château, dating probably from the time of the Crusades. One wing had been so far reconstructed as to be habitable, and the ancient chapel, the curé explained, had also been put in order to serve as the village church. “My parish,” he added with a sigh, “is too poor to build a better.” A moat, still filled with green and stagnant water, surrounded the walls; a few planks served for a pathway across it, where once had hung the feudal drawbridge; a dark and snake-like ivy crawled up the crumbling walls; dense woods cast about it a funereal gloom. Altogether its outward aspect was sombre and forbidding in the extreme, and M. de Boisrobert could not repress a shudder or stifle a sinister presentiment as he looked upon his quarters for the night. Had his host been anybody but a curé, he would have felt like drawing back even then.

A little old man, who filled in the modest household by turns the comprehensive functions of butler, valet, groom, gardener, waiter, cook, and general factotum, took their horses in silence, but with a curious glance at the visitor the latter could not help remarking, and the curé led the way to the drawing-room. This was a lofty, vaulted apartment almost bare of furniture, on the walls of which flapped dismally a few tattered pieces of tapestry, the relics of old-time grandeur. A faggot or two crackled and sputtered feebly on the gloomy hearth. Near it, busied apparently over woman’s work of some kind, were seated an old woman of repulsive aspect and a young girl, the latter of whom the curé introduced as Juliette, his niece, and, briefly requesting her to entertain their guest, excused himself to see to the latter’s entertainment for the night.

And now, as the heroine of this exciting history has at last arrived—a little tardiness, as you know, messieurs, must be forgiven to her sex—it seems only becoming that she should have a chapter to herself.

III.

Lovely? Of course she is lovely. What a ridiculous question! Who ever heard of a heroine who wasn’t lovely, still less a heroine who was also the niece of a rob—Peste! The cat was almost out of the bag that time—so nearly out, in fact, that we may as well slip the noose and let her go at once. Scat! And now, the author’s mind being freed of an enormous load, he breathes more freely and announces that our luckless M. de Boisrobert has literally fallen into a den of thieves. For what purpose otherwise that artful hint about the rustics prying into the stables, the horses falling dead upon the way, the elaborate setting forth of the gloom and desolation hanging like a pall over the ruined château—to what end, do you suppose, was all this expenditure of literary artifice, except to prepare the reader’s mind for some blood-curdling and harrowing event? But the curé? the curé? Why, simply no curé at all: a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as there were then but too many in France.[111]

Of this, however, as yet M. de Boisrobert knew nothing. Filled with vague forebodings of evil he could neither define nor reason down, he felt but little in the humor for talk, and still less—being, as you remember, in his tenth lustrum—for flirtation. So, after one or two wise remarks upon the weather, or the state of the crops, or the latest opera, or whatever other topics gentlemen-farmers then chose to break the ice of conversation with a pretty girl, had been answered more virgineo with shy blushes, or faltering monosyllables, or embarrassed and embarrassing silence, M. de Boisrobert betook himself to the window to look out upon the surrounding country. A full moon threw upon every object a lustre like that of day, and—ha! what is this he sees in the court-yard? Can that be his host, the curé, talking so confidentially to those exceedingly sinister-looking chaps (one of whom he now remembers to have had pointed out to him at the fair as a coiner of base money, the other as a more than suspected thief), and handling those three exceedingly long and ugly-looking poniards!—ugh! how their keen edges glitter in the moonlight as the rascals run their dirty thumbs along to try their temper.

M. de Boisrobert turned from the window with a gesture of affright and despair, and beheld Juliette standing before him, no longer a timid child but a lovely and courageous woman, one finger upon her lip, the other pointing to the ill-featured duenna, who had had the good manners to go to sleep. In a few rapid whispers, and still more eloquent gestures, she explained the danger and her unalterable resolve to save him or perish in the attempt. Whether it was her words or her beauty, M. de Boisrobert felt instantly reassured. Indeed, had he known anything of the course of such adventures, he must have felt so from the moment he laid eyes on her. For what other purpose except to save him could he suppose so lovely a creature was to be found in so vile a den? And let it here be said for the benefit of scoffers that the present writer is well aware how often this incident has been used for purposes of fiction—at least ten thousand times in the English language alone. Yes; but does not the very frequency of its use prove it to be founded on fact, that some time or other it was true? Very well; this is the time it was true. Besides, who has said that Juliette is to succeed in her noble but rash endeavor? Suppose—now just suppose—she were to fail; in which of your fictions do you find a stroke of originality like that? If the historian were revengeful; if he had a mind to distort facts, as historians in very remote ages are said sometimes to have done—well, well, we shall see.

In her hurried warning Juliette had made shift to tell M. de Boisrobert that it was meant to put a sleeping potion in his wine, and afterwards to enter his chamber and kill him while still under the influence of the drug.

“Do not for your life refuse to drink,” she added, “but be careful to eat the apple I shall offer you after it, and which will contain the antidote to the drug.”

Scarcely had she ended when the pretended curé came in with his precious comrades, whom he introduced as parishioners. (“A fit flock for such a shepherd!” thought poor M. de Boisrobert.) Supper was served at once, and all went as the young girl had foretold. The wine was drunk and the apple duly presented and eaten with a confidence that must seem truly sublime under the circumstances, remembering, too, that one of M. de Boisrobert’s remote ancestors had lost his entire patrimony through accepting a similar gift from a near female relation. Feigning weariness and sleep, the traveller begged to be excused and was shown to his room.

No sooner was he alone than he began to examine his means of defence and offence. The flints, of course, were taken from his pistols and the bolts removed from the door—they would be poor robbers, totally unworthy the attention of an enlightened reader, who would neglect such obvious precautions as these. Somewhat disconsolately M. de Boisrobert looked under the bed and into the wardrobe, but found no comfort there. Then he piled all the furniture against the door, drew his sword, said his prayers, set his teeth, thought of Juliette (O middle-aged and most forlorn of Romeos!), and awaited the conspirators.

He had not long to wait. Scarcely had he taken position when a stealthy tread outside, a fumbling at the latch, and probably a strong odor of garlic penetrating through the keyhole, announced their arrival. The door was first softly, then strongly, pushed, and then, as the unlooked-for resistance showed their plot was discovered, a furious volley of oaths was followed by an onset that made the barricade tremble. Now should we dearly love to entertain the reader with the description of a terrific combat à l’outrance—also à la Dumas—wherein M. de Boisrobert, calmly awaiting his foes’ approach, falls upon them with such ferocity that in a twinkling he has one spitted like a lark, another cloven to the chine, and the third in headlong flight and bawling lustily for mercy, but pricked sorely in tender places by the relentless sword. But, alas!—such is the fatal limitation of your true story—nothing of the sort took place. On the contrary, our hero was in all probability horribly frightened and thoroughly glad to see a secret panel suddenly slide back, and a white hand thrust through the opening, while the sweetest voice he had ever heard begged him to make haste. To seize that hand—and who shall blame him if he pressed it to his lips?—to dart through the opening—quick! quick! good Jean!—to close the panel, is the work of an instant. Scarcely is it shut when cr-rack! crash! bang! go door and barricade, and the foiled assassins are heard stamping and swearing furiously about the deserted room. If you could but have seen their faces and heard—no, it would not have been edifying to hear their language. But the fugitives are safe. Need it be said that the foresight of the faithful Jean (who, of course, follows his young mistress, having, indeed, waited this long time in the robber’s den only for a chance to be on hand in this emergency) had provided horses, on which they soon reached Evreux, where they lodged an information, which, there being no police there to speak of, led to the prompt arrest of the ruffians.

Placing the lovely Juliette in a convent, M. de Boisrobert returned home. But it was observed that he hunted less than formerly, that he was often closeted with Father Bernard and his notary, and that he spent much time in settling his affairs. Need the result be told? What in the world is a middle-aged bachelor to do whose life is saved by a lovely maiden of spotless virtue? For, be it known, the fair Juliette, left an orphan only a week before, had, by her dying father, a rich farmer of Brézolles, been consigned to the guardianship of this wicked brother, whose evil courses he was far from suspecting. All that is as plain as a pikestaff; as it is that in less than six months after, just long enough to get the trousseau ready (from the Worth of the day, of course) and to see the wicked uncle comfortably hanged, the bells of Friar Lawrence’s—we should say of Father Bernard’s—little church at Boisrobert rang out a merry answer to the problem last propounded.

When the distant echoes of these wedding chimes reached the ears of M. le Comte de Beaumanoir at Paris, he was not at all angry, as people thought he would be. Oh! dear, no. On the contrary, he only smiled, showing a remarkably fine set of teeth. So that people said he was a brave man, this poor M. le Comte, and not by any means as black as he was painted. And, indeed, a great many folks began to commiserate him and to abuse M. de Boisrobert.

IV.

Well?

Well what?

Why, what came of M. de Beaumanoir showing his teeth?

Oh! that? Nothing—just nothing at all. That’s the trouble, you see, of telling a true story: one’s imagination is hampered at every step. It would have been most delightful and exciting to have invented a frightful tale of the count’s vengeance; how he slew his recalcitrant kinsman, immured his weeping bride in a dungeon for life, and laid waste the lands of Boisrobert with fire and sword, etc., etc. But the truth is, he did nothing of the kind. Indeed, his teeth were speedily drawn, and he was glad to get away with his worthless life. The false curé confessed before his death that the count had suborned him to kill his kinsman as he returned from the fair, promising him a sum equal to that which he would be sure to find on M. de Boisrobert’s person, and even suggesting the disguise. He little thought that the very scheme he fondly imagined was to secure him his coveted inheritance was destined really to lose it to him for ever. So ever come to grief the machinations of the wicked! This last escapade was a little too much even for courtly morals, and Monsieur was quietly advised to hint to his murderous favorite that his health would probably be the better for a change of air.

And the fatal consequences resulting from this marriage?

Yes, yes, of course; how stupid to forget it! Well, a cynic might say that for a bachelor to marry at all, especially at forty-five—but never mind the cynic. Their married life was surely not unhappy? Let us hope not. Do Romeo and Juliet ever throw teacups at each other over the breakfast-table because that duck of a spring bonnet is not forthcoming? In romances certainly not; but in true stories—hem! Let us trust, however, that peace reigned eternal over the domestic hearthstone at the Château de Boisrobert. But his marriage had cost its owner an illusion—a life-long illusion; and that is a painful thing at forty-five. Disenchantment seems to come harder as one gets older and has anything left to be disenchanted of. He ceased to believe that rank and birth are the same as goodness, or even greatness, and it cost him many a pang, and no doubt a great deal of real though whimsical unhappiness, to be forced thus suddenly and radically to readjust his scheme of life. But, in spite of the adventure which gave him a wife, perhaps because of it, he never lost his faith in curés or in Juliette; and the games of bowls and of trictrac were all the pleasanter for the sweet face that thenceforth lit them up, and the romping curly-pates that disturbed them and in time effaced from their fond father’s memory his lingering regret for the loss of a noble heir.

TO AUBREY DE VERE.
AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

I stood in ancient church, ruined and vast,
Whose crumbling altar of its Lord was bare,
Whose shattered windows let in all the glare

Of noonday heat, and noise of crowds that passed

With careless jest, of malice not assoiled.
Within, fast-fading angels still lent grace
Of art, believing, to the holy place
That cruel hands of its best gift despoiled.
With weary feet I trod the broken floor,

With tearless eyes the maimèd aisles gazed down,

When, lo! afar a waxen taper shone,

Burning a hidden altar clear before:

Here hastened I, here knelt—O poet true!

Thine was the light that shone my sorrow through.

COLONIZATION AND FUTURE EMIGRATION.

God has apparently chosen the United States as the theatre for the demonstration of the truth that the Catholic Church is the church of the people. She has always been the church of the people; many of her most severe persecutions have been caused by the stand she has taken in behalf of popular rights and individual freedom against the tyranny of kings and the exactions of nobles. But never before has she been furnished with so large a field for the manifestation and development of her popular and democratic character as has been prepared for her here. It is her destiny, we believe, to save the republic from the ruin to which the sects and their offspring, the atheists, would lead her. Even those of our Catholic readers who may not fully share this belief will admit that, to all seeming, the Catholic Church is destined to play an important part in the future history of our country—at least that she has grown in numbers, material wealth, and social influence during the last thirty years to an almost marvellous degree.

A better or more certain method of accomplishing the work of the church in the United States could scarcely have been devised than the congregation of a large share of the Catholic emigration in our great cities. The Catholic Church in the United States is not “a foreign church” in any other sense than the Bible, or Shakspere’s plays, or Homer’s poems are “foreign” books; she is, as they are, and far more than they are, the common inheritance of all, and she is as much at home here, and as rightfully at home, as she is or ever was in any other land. Indeed, the church of God is not and cannot be foreign to any of God’s creatures. But a large proportion of her children in the United States at present are either of foreign birth or are the descendants of foreign-born persons in the first or second generation. These people did not bring the Catholic Church with them to America: they found her here; she had always had an existence here since Christopher Columbus planted the cross upon San Salvador, and since the Jesuit priests sailed up the St. Lawrence and down the Mississippi rivers. If, however, the emigration which has poured into this country since 1840 had not arrived, or had it come from non-Catholic countries, and had the growth of the church here been dependent wholly, or even chiefly, upon the natural increase of American Catholic families and upon converts from Protestantism or heathenism, the church in America to-day would have been numerically insignificant; which is only the same as to say that, if emigration had ceased after the first European exodus, the population of the United States to-day would be equally insignificant.

We may form some idea of what the progress of the church under these conditions would have been here by remembering what it has been in England since the cessation of the active persecutions which followed the Reformation. There are about 1,800,000 Catholics in England to-day. Of these not less than 800,000 are Irish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian emigrants or their children; the remaining 1,000,000 represent all the converts of English birth, as well as the descendants of the old Catholic families who always retained the faith. Half a century has elapsed since the English Catholics were emancipated from the last remnant of the persecuting and restrictive legislation which had oppressed them since the days of Elizabeth. During this half-century the church in England has been free—free in its own government, free in its work of propagating the faith and of bringing back the English people to the religion which their fathers had cherished for a thousand years.

Yet, with some advantages that Catholics in the United States did not and do not yet possess, the growth of the church in England during the last fifty years has been vastly less than the progress she has made in this country during the same period. In 1830 there were more Catholics in England than in the United States; since then the church in both countries has been equally free, with the advantages at the start on the side of England. But now the Catholics in the United States outnumber those in England more than fourfold.

In 1830, according to the most trustworthy estimates, there were 600,000 Catholics in England and 475,000 in the United States; now they number two millions there and from six to seven millions here. In England to-day the church has a cardinal, twelve suffragan bishops, and 2,064 priests; in the United States she has a cardinal, 66 archbishops and bishops, and 5,297 priests. In England, according to the English Catholic Directory for last year, there were 997 Catholic churches, 7 theological seminaries, 312 ecclesiastical students, 15 colleges, 38 asylums, and 5 hospitals. In the United States, according to the American Catholic Directory for the same year, there were 5,292 Catholic churches, 34 theological seminaries, 1,217 ecclesiastical students, 62 colleges, 219 asylums, and 95 hospitals.[112]

We have drawn out this comparison for the purpose of accentuating our former remark that the marvellous growth of the church in the United States during the last half-century has been mainly due to emigration from Catholic countries. Had it not been for these accessions, it is doubtful, in our opinion, whether the church in the United States would to-day equal in numbers the church in England. But would its growth have been so great, so pronounced, so commanding to the attention of all beholders, had this emigration been directed away from the cities and dispersed throughout the rural and agricultural sections of the country? A little reflection will, we think, show that this question must be answered in the negative. It would have availed the church nothing had these emigrants been placed in their new homes under conditions where the preservation of their faith in any practical form would have been almost impossible; where they would have been deprived of the care and counsel of their spiritual guides and of the sacraments necessary for salvation; where their children would have remained unbaptized, their marriages have been degraded to civil contracts, and their souls starved and enfeebled by the absence of the Bread of Life. Yet that this would have been the fate of the great majority of them, had they not congregated in the cities, cannot be doubted, unless, indeed, God had chosen to work another miracle in their behalf and to create for them a miraculous supply of priests—a supply so large that every little hamlet in the far-off wilds of the West and North should have been furnished with a spiritual director.

Some boast of having even nine millions of Catholics in the republic; but it can be shown that there are perhaps half as many more Americans now living who are the children of Catholic parents in the first or second generation, but who have lost their faith and grown up as Protestants or without any religion at all, chiefly because their parents had gone into districts where there were no priests, and where the exercise of their religion, save as a spiritual meditation, was impossible.[113] It was only when the Catholic emigrants began to arrive here in large numbers, and to dwell together by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands in the great cities, that it became possible, humanly, to provide for their religious wants and for their Catholic education. How nobly they have themselves furnished the material means for this work the statistics given above show. They have mainly done it for themselves. In England the Irish Catholics, in their works of charity and in the erection of their churches, have often been aided by the contributions of their wealthy English fellow-Catholics; but in America the foreign-born and the descendants of the foreign-born Catholics have for the most part built their own churches, their own convents, seminaries, and schools, and have received but little aid from their co-religionists of native ancestry. Indeed, in some instances within our own knowledge it is the latter who have been the beneficiaries of the former; and many an American Catholic to-day is indebted to the charity and self-denial of German, French, and Irish Catholics for the services of the priest who was the means of his conversion, and for the erection of the church in which he hears Mass. We repeat that all this was made possible by the congregation of our Catholic emigrants in the cities, and that the most deplorable consequences would have followed had not this congregation taken place.

It is not, moreover, in spiritual matters only that our emigrants have been wise in congregating in the cities. One must remember the condition in which the great majority of them landed here during the years when emigration was at the flood-tide, and then compare with that their present state and the future which is before them and their children. They were desperately, or apostolically, poor, because they came from lands where it was impossible for them to acquire anything beyond the means of bare subsistence. They were uneducated, because they had been the subjects of governments whose studied policy it was to keep them in ignorance. They had neither the capital nor the knowledge necessary to render them successful as independent agriculturists. Labor was most abundant in the cities, and in the cities they remained. What have they done there? If you seek their monument, look around you! Behold not only the 57 Catholic churches (12 of them built almost or quite exclusively by Germans, 1 by Poles, 1 by Italians, 1 by Bohemians, 1 by Frenchmen, and 30 by Irishmen), the 17 monasteries, the 22 convents, the magnificent Protectory, the theological seminary, the 3 colleges, the 22 select schools, the 19 asylums, the 4 homes for aged men and women, the 4 hospitals, and the 85 parochial schools of which the city and diocese of New York alone boast; but the great business houses, the large manufactories, the numberless smaller though important factories, stores, and shops belonging to the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of this metropolis; make a similar examination of what this class of our citizens have done in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Boston, Hartford, Portland, Springfield, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Albany, Buffalo, Newark, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and twoscore more of our large cities; and then compare these truly magnificent religious, moral, charitable, commercial, and industrial results with all that the same people could have accomplished had they been scattered as sheep without shepherds throughout our Western and Northern wilds, destined to lose their faith, deprived of the support and strength which common association and common interest afford, and doomed, most probably, to lives of hopeless poverty and unremunerative struggle. God has been too good to them, and to the country in which they have become so important a factor, to permit this, and what the arrogance of man has so often stigmatized as folly has proved to be the highest and best wisdom both for eternal and for temporal ends. The whole number of foreign emigrants who have landed in the United States during the first 75 years of this century was 9,526,966. We showed in a former article[114] what proportion of these has remained in the cities; and we have now pointed out some of the results of this congregation.

We must not be understood, however, to convey the idea that a very considerable proportion of our foreign-born Catholic citizens have not made homes for themselves in the rural districts of the country, under conditions which rendered it possible for them to continue the active exercise of their religion, and that the happiest results have not followed. In the New England States, in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota, the number of Irish and German Catholic farmers—well-to-do, prosperous, and faithful—is very large. In the New England States the increase of this class has of late been marked. The farms throughout this section are generally small; their native owners, especially when they are young men, find it difficult to extract from them incomes large enough to supply their desire for the luxuries of life; they are often anxious to try their fortunes in the cities or in the West; whenever one of them offers his little estate for sale the purchaser is most likely a German or Irishman, whose wants are more modest, and who finds it quite possible to derive from a farm of twenty or thirty acres a comfortable subsistence for his family. This change in the proprietorship of the soil in New England has gone on to an extent much larger than is generally known; and one would labor under a serious mistake who supposed that the foreign-born and foreign-descended population of New England was altogether, or even unduly, congregated in the cities. There are in New England, according to the last Catholic Directory, 539 Catholic priests, 508 churches, 167 chapels and stations, with a Catholic population of about 890,000 souls; and it is evident from an examination of the list of the churches that a large proportion of them are in the small towns and rural districts of these States. It may be unwelcome news to our Protestant readers, but it is true, that nearly 25 per cent. of the present population of New England is composed of Roman Catholics. It may be still more unpleasant for them to learn that nearly 70 per cent. of the births in that region are those in Roman Catholic families. New England, indeed, promises to be the first portion of the country which is likely to become distinctively Roman Catholic. The immigration into New England is small, but it is mostly composed of Catholics; the increase of population is very largely Catholic; the emigration is almost entirely non-Catholic. From this digression from our main subject we return with the remark that the rural Catholic population in the Middle and Western States—a population largely composed of foreign-born citizens and their descendants—constitutes a most important factor in the material strength of the Catholic body, and that, as we shall show, the future course of foreign emigration should, and most probably will, tend mainly to increase this class.

The late decline in emigration to the United States, and the present lull, amounting almost to stagnation, which has taken place in it, together with the fact that there is abundant reason to suppose that this lull is but temporary and that emigration will again ere very long pour in upon us, suggest some reflections respecting the changed character which that emigration will probably assume, the changed conditions under which it will be carried on, and the changed duty of the Catholic body in the United States towards it. What was so essentially necessary in the past will be necessary, under these new conditions, no longer; what was so often impossible in the past will now become generally easy of accomplishment. The Catholic Church in the United States has passed through the stage of its infancy and feebleness, and has entered upon the period of its manhood and strength. Firmly planted throughout the land, it fears nothing and can watch over and abundantly protect the faith and the education of its children. In every State and Territory, save Alaska, at least one bishop; in seven States two bishops; in five States three bishops; in one State six, in another State eight bishops, and with more than 5,000 priests—surely with this army of shepherds the sheep and the lambs of the flock can be fed and guarded from the wolves of infidelity, sectarianism, and bigotry. God has built up his church in the republic in the manner, and chiefly through the agencies, which we have pointed out, and has thus fitted her, armed her, and made her strong for the great work which still lies before her. That work is the conversion of the non-Catholic portion of our fellow-citizens; the nurture of Catholic children; and the care, the protection, and, if need be, the conversion of the emigrants who, in the future, are to come to us from the Old World. It is only with this latter branch of her duty that we now deal. Emigrants to the United States have hitherto arrived here chiefly as isolated individuals, or at best as isolated families. There have been some attempts at colonization—that is, in bringing in one company a large number of individuals and of families, destined to migrate together to a spot already selected for them, and which they are to occupy as a community. Most frequently these attempts at colonization have been successful. Where they have failed the failure has been due to some incapacity or dishonesty on the part of the agents who had the matter in charge, and not to any vice in the system itself. There is evidence to show that emigration in future will be to a great extent, and may be almost wholly, conducted on the colonization principle. We have already said that emigration from Ireland in the future would most probably be confined within small limits; but if anything could stimulate it, it would be the development in Ireland of wise plans for colonization, carried out by men of probity, experience, and practical wisdom. Our chief sources of emigration, however, for some years to come, are likely to be England, Scotland, Germany, France, Austria, Bohemia, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Russia. There are causes at work which even now are stimulating emigration from each of these countries, and these causes may attain great strength. As an instance of the curious manner in which apparently insignificant causes, originating at a distance, produce large effects, we may mention the fact that the shipping of fresh meat from this country to Great Britain—an enterprise only in its infancy—has already so seriously unsettled the relations existing between landlords and farmers in England and Scotland that the latter are declaring their inability to make both ends meet, and are turning their thoughts towards emigration. So general and so serious is this feeling that the leading journal of Scotland has sent to this country a trusted member of its permanent staff (the editor of its agricultural department for many years), with instructions “to make the fullest possible inquiry into everything connected with the stock-raising department of agriculture” in the United States, extending his researches to Texas, “where he proposes to examine thoroughly the system of cattle and sheep breeding and raising carried on in that State on so immense a scale, and to obtain all the information that is to be had with respect to the breeds of cattle, the methods taken to improve the quality of the stock, and Texan agricultural methods and circumstances generally.” He is then to visit other States for the same purpose, and “all along his route he will take note of all the phases and conditions of agriculture, and of the suitability of the States for advanced farming.” The results of his investigations, published in Scotland and England, will enable the farmers there “to determine the full significance of the competition of American cattle-growers in the British dead-meat market,” and in all probability determine many of them to emigrate to this country, with their capital and their skill, to engage in this competition on the American side.

Farming in England and Scotland—especially in Scotland—has long been a precarious and hazardous business; and now the reduction of four or six cents a pound in the price of beef which has been caused by the importation of about 1,000 tons of American beef and mutton every week at Glasgow and Liverpool, threatens to be the last straw to break the back of at least the Scotch farmer. Irish agriculturists likewise depend to a great extent for their profits upon the money received for their cattle, and they, too, will feel as severely as their Scottish friends the ruinous consequences, to them, of a reduction of twenty-five per cent. in the market value of their principal commodity. Thus the emigration of the well-to-do farmers of the United Kingdom is likely to be stimulated, and these agriculturists, most probably, would need but little persuasion to induce them to emigrate, if they emigrated at all, in colonies, and not as isolated families or individuals. So, also, as respects the future emigration from the Continent of Europe. Different causes are at work in each of the countries above named, but they all tend to the same result.

We have already hinted that the emigration of the future will be of a different class from the emigration of the past. At the present moment, and probably for some time to come, it would be dishonest, cruel, and unwise to encourage the emigration to this country of people without capital—those who must earn daily wages in order to live. Hitherto the great majority of our emigrants have been people of this class, and most fortunate is it that they came in such vast numbers. The time will again arrive, no doubt, when this class will be once more necessary and welcome among us, and when they will come, as they have come before, in thousands and tens of thousands. But at present they are not needed here; to bring them hither would be cruel to us as well as to themselves. The emigrants whom we need, and who are for some time most likely to come, are those who possess considerable worldly wealth at home, but who, like the English, Scotch, and Irish farmers of whom we have spoken, find it difficult to provide sufficiently for their increasing families, or wish to secure for them, in the New World, better fortunes than they can hope for in the Old. On the European Continent, and especially in Germany, other causes are at work which are morally certain to promote emigration. The war in the East may be localized—although all the probabilities point to a different conclusion—but even now it has increased the burdens which oppress the German people, and rendered the “blood-tax” that they are compelled to pay heavier and harder to bear. There is probably no intelligent man in Germany who does not look forward to a not distant day when that country will be again engaged in a desperate conflict; and meanwhile the military service exacted from every German citizen, and the cost of maintaining the army, press with a crushing weight upon the country. A thoughtful and experienced writer in one of our daily journals—a writer who, if we mistake not, has himself had extensive experience in the organization of emigration enterprises—thus treats of this subject:

“But it is in Germany that the fears awakened throughout Continental Europe will contribute most powerfully to a renewal of interest in the subject of emigration among classes to whom this country even now presents all requisite advantages. The stern methods employed by Bismarck to repress emigration movements—his interference with the freedom of American citizens who dared to speak of the attractions held out by the fertile West, and his suppression of whatever seemed likely to facilitate emigration to the United States—were all called forth by the anxious desire of people to escape the liability to military service. The military glories of the empire had charms for the cities, which acquired delusive appearances of prosperity. Among the population of rural districts the situation was different. The burdens and penalties of war, and of a system which exacts incessant preparation for war as a condition of national safety, have among these people stimulated the feeling in favor of emigration to a degree which the action of the Imperial Government has imperfectly controlled. The dread, vague before, will now be a reality. What, as a mere contingency, has sufficed to foster the wish to leave the Fatherland is now so near a certainty that the movement in favor of emigration needs but a guiding hand to assume large proportions. And the emigration available is of the description which, discreetly operated upon, should be attracted rather than repelled by the considerations which have driven wage-earners back to Europe. Those who would gladly get out of Germany to save their sons from service in the army look to the land for a livelihood, and would form valuable accessions to the Western States. As far as Germany is concerned, the difficulty is in reaching this class. Agencies that might be freely used in England or Holland are in Germany unavailable. All that seems possible there is to provide authentic information through channels which would not conflict with local law or incur the suspicion which, in view of recent experience, interested representations are likely to excite. Might not our consular agencies be utilized, not as emigration bureaux, but as means of supplying to those who seek it information in reference to lands and farms in the West and South, and to other matters connected with the opening or purchase of farms, and stocking and working them? The laborious head of the Statistical Bureau some years ago compiled a volume of statistics which to the working-men of the Old World was invaluable. The manual at present needed would deal with the phases of the emigration question, and would be much more than an accumulation of figures. It would be more legitimate than half the matter which emanates from the department and is printed at the public cost; and it would contribute to a revival and increase of the only immigration which can be honestly encouraged in the face of hard times.”

The French have never shown much anxiety for emigration; but the arrivals of emigrants from that country have increased during late years, and were slightly larger last year than in 1875. In France the burdens which are felt in Germany are also a cause of suffering, if not of complaint; and emigration from France, if the proper means for stimulating and directing it were employed, might reach large proportions. In Holland causes like those to which we have alluded as potent in Great Britain exist. The emigration from Russia has hitherto been of a peculiar character; it has consisted mainly of the Mennonites, whose anti-war principles impelled them to escape from the military service exacted from all Russian subjects, and from which only the temporary and partial concessions of the czar exempted some of them. The mission now undertaken by Russia is of a character which will compel her ruler, ere he has finished his task, to press every one of his subjects into the military service, directly or indirectly. The desire for emigration from Russia may be expected to increase, although some time will probably elapse before large results can be hoped for from it. The emigration from Austria has thus far been small. The total arrivals of emigrants from that country at the port of New York during the last 30 years have been only 21,677, of whom 1,210 came last year and 1,088 in 1875. But Austria is a country especially fit to emigrate from, and the incentives which are powerful in Germany will ere long be felt in Austria also. From Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland emigration of the better class may with reason be anticipated; and even from Italy, which has sent us 42,769 emigrants since 1847, considerable accessions may be expected.[115]

We have before us a collection of documents relating to colonization in the West and Northwest. One of them describes the admirable plan of the Coadjutor-Bishop of St. Paul for Catholic colonization in Minnesota. In a powerful letter addressed, on the 16th of September last, to the President of the Board of Colonization of the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, the bishop dwells upon the evils which have followed the settlement of our Irish emigrants in the large cities—evils which we have no wish to belittle; but he also confesses that the misfortunes of those who went into the rural districts were equally deplorable. He remarks:

“Those who—exceptions to the rule—did move forward into the country, in search of homes on the land, suffered in many instances from the absence of proper and systematic direction no less than their companions in cities. They lost their faith. They strayed away from church and priest, from Catholic associations, and in certain States to-day there are whole districts where you hear the purest of Celtic names, and where, nevertheless, not one man proclaims himself a Catholic or smiles at the mention of the old land.”

And then, after a charming picture of a certain little Irish Catholic colony in the West, of which he says that, beginning in poverty and hardship twenty years ago,

“To-day those families are prosperous—rich; their children are as innocent and as true as if they had always breathed the atmosphere of the most Catholic of lands; the number of families has doubled, through mere natural increase; their district of country is for ever secured to the church,”

Bishop Ireland goes on to say that the results of his own colonization labors in Minnesota may be thus described:

“We began last February. Our first step was to secure the control of 117,000 acres of land, situated in Swift County, belonging to the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. There was at the time in the county about as much more vacant government land open for settlement under the pre-emption and homestead acts. The price of the railroad land was fixed, so that during the time it was to remain under our control the company could not advance its figures. We at once placed a priest in the colony, whose duty it was to direct and advise the immigrant as well as to minister to his spiritual wants. An office was opened in St. Paul, where the immigrant would be received on his arrival from the East, and where all letters of inquiry would be answered. Two weeks after publication of our plans had been made in the Catholic press, immigrants commenced to arrive, and up to the date at which I am writing over eight hundred entries have been made by our people on government land, and about 60,000 acres of railroad land have been occupied. We permit no speculation, so that each quarter section generally represents a family, persons, as a rule, being allowed to take more land only when they have grown sons, who soon will themselves need a home.”

He then gives a letter from the register of the Land Office, showing that the number of land entries made in Swift County from January 1 to June 1, 1876, was 1,317, and saying that over 800 of these were made by “your people.” The register adds:

“In this connection allow me to bear testimony to the intelligence, integrity, and good order always manifested by your colonists in all their business relations with this office. I can now call to mind no instance in which one under the influence of liquor has been in this office. Cases of profanity are extremely rare; in no instance have we had trouble or contention with any one. They are model colonists. I know this opinion to be shared by all who come in contact with them.”

The bishop adds:

“We have already in the colony two churches; one more will be built in spring. Two promising towns have sprung up—De Graff and Randall. In De Graff there are some forty houses, stores or residences, a large brick-yard, a grist-mill; a grain elevator and a convent school are to be put up during the winter. The settlers, whom I had the pleasure of visiting a month ago, are full of hope and delighted with their prospects. Last spring Swift County was a wild, untenanted prairie; to-day on every side new houses and freshly-broken ground meet the eye. Our expenses in organizing and directing the colony were large; still, we were able to meet them by direct revenue from the colony itself. Each settler paid a small entrance fee, and we sold town lots. We have also reserved from sale some choice sections of land, which can at any time, if there is need, be disposed of at a high advance over the original price; so that we are safe against all losses in our enterprise. As soon as a settlement is formed the land advances at once in value; one farm bought in Swift County last spring at two dollars per acre has been sold since at nine dollars per acre, and a settlement that embraces three or four hundred families always affords room for a valuable town-site. The two excellences which I deem our Minnesota plan possesses are the following: We had control of the land; this is necessary to ward off speculation and preserve the land for our own colonists. No sooner would twenty families be settled in a district than the surrounding land would be bought up by speculators or strangers, if you had not complete control over it in some manner. Next, we began the colony with a priest on the spot; the presence of a priest does more than any other agency to attract immigrants and to encourage them in their difficulties. We have been so well satisfied with our work in Swift County that our programme for next year includes the opening of two new colonies.”

Our space does not permit us to summarize even the accounts of the other Catholic colonization movements which have come under our notice. These movements are serious and important, and those engaged in them should take every possible precaution to prevent them from falling into the hands of careless, incompetent, or dishonest persons. The work, it appears, will have two chief departments—the home and foreign agencies. The former will undertake and supervise the task of selecting and securing proper localities for colonies, and of procuring as settlers families and individuals already resident here, but whose interests would be promoted by their translation to these new homes; the foreign agencies would be employed in diffusing the necessary information among the classes in Europe who would be most likely to emigrate, and who would be the most desirable emigrants, and in inducing them to join new colonies already established or to form others of their own. The Catholic Advocate, of Louisville, Ky., in some well-considered remarks on the subject, says:

“Now, it is our opinion that a great impetus could be given to this good work if the directors of the colonization project could so manage as to awaken the Irish people at home to the value of the movement; if they could have their plans placed in all their development before that class in Ireland from which emigration recruits its numbers. This could be best and most efficiently done by inducing the formation of corresponding organizations in the old country. There are very many thousands of people in Ireland, with farming-stock worth two and three and four hundred pounds sterling, holding their lands by an insecure tenure and at a rack-rent, who would come out to this country to-morrow, with all their valuables converted into gold, if they knew or understood the advantages of the colonization scheme. As it is now, they only hear about it. It comes to them by newspapers, as a kind of far-off echo. It is not brought forcibly to their notice. Its benefits are not urged upon them personally. There is no persuasion about it, and it is as a dead interest to the great majority of the people, who, if they only knew and understood it thoroughly, would grasp at it. The British government was very earnest in its efforts to colonize Australia and New Zealand some years ago, and the advantages it had to offer were far and far away from those offered by the Catholic colonization movement amongst us. But how did the British government act? It sent agents amongst the Irish and English and Scotch, prepared with maps and pamphlets and lectures, to impress the value of their project upon the people at home and put it immediately before their eyes. What was the consequence? Numbers of emigrants came forward, and of a class which had the means to colonize, and they settled in Brisbane, Queensland, and New Zealand, where they are to-day prosperous and promising. We do not say that paid agents should be sent to Ireland for the purpose we indicate, but it would be very easy to communicate with influential persons there to put before them the value of forming organizations in connection with Bishop Ireland’s scheme, with the St. Louis scheme, and any others that may be started. What is required is emigrants with some capital, and this is the way to get them.”

Bishop Ireland, in the letter from which we have already quoted, sets forth at some length what such a body as the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union could do in this work. It could constantly agitate the subject of colonization, and it could establish a national bureau of information, which would collect information, publish pamphlets, secure the co-operation of bishops and priests, and open colonies of their own. But the “crowning stone in the work of colonization,” in the bishop’s opinion, would be “the formation of joint-stock colonization societies.” He says:

“By no other means can the poor among our people—those most in need of homes—be colonized. However successful our Minnesota plan may seem to have been, it does not reach the poor. We have received hundreds of letters from most deserving persons, to whom we were obliged to answer that we had no place for them in our colony. How many there are who have simply means to bring them West, but who can neither pay for land nor maintain themselves while waiting for the first crop! A joint-stock company would give them land on long time, at reasonable rates of interest, and would also advance them small sums to assist them in opening their farms. The plan might be somewhat as follows: The executive power of the company should be in the hands of most reliable business men. Stockholders would be promised that their money would be paid back in five years, with interest at six per cent. per annum, and, in order that men of all classes might take part in the work, shares would be put at low figures. The inducement to take shares is that good is done to our fellow-countrymen without any loss to ourselves. The company purchases a tract of land; cash in hand, the land would cost but little. Immigrants, in purchasing it from the company, would give back a mortgage, promising to pay the full price in four or five years, with interest at eight per cent. per annum. An industrious settler could not fail to meet such obligations. If he failed to do so, the land reverts to the company, worth much more than it was when first purchased. The company derives its expenses from the two per cent., which it charges the settlers over what it pays its shareholders; but to protect itself the better it could sell the land at a slightly increased figure, especially a few choice pieces; it could also lay out for its profit a town-site, and sell the lots.

“There should be colonies in every State where cheap lands are to be found. The movement should be made general, our entire Irish Catholic people entering into it: one class coming forward with advice and money, the other profiting, for their own good and that of their religion, of the assistance offered to them. What is to be done must be done quickly. The time is fast passing when cheap lands can be had in America. Already the tide of immigration—bearing, alas! but a small number of our people—has crossed the Missouri, leaving in its wake but inconsiderable portions of unoccupied land, and reaching even now the limits of the arable lands of the continent. Patriotism and religious zeal are two great incentives to action for Irish Catholics. Colonization is a work upon which both can be most easily brought to bear.”

Already one such joint-stock company has been formed—on the 10th of April last—in St. Paul, in which the bishop and the coadjutor-bishop of that see have taken shares.

It will henceforth be the duty of the church in America to see that no Catholic family landing on our shores and seeking a new home in our Western States and Territories shall be permitted to stray beyond her control, but shall be conducted to localities where her priests are already prepared to receive them, and where their fellow-citizens will be bound to them by the ties of faith. Catholics in this land are already about as one in six. We receive accessions every day from the ranks of the Protestant sects; few, if any, of our own number fall away from us; the emigration of the future, to a great extent, will be in our hands. Thus will the church in America—where to-day, to use his own words, our Holy Father “is more truly Pope than in any other land”—grow in strength and beauty, and thus will she be prepared, when the hour comes, to save the republic for which her sons, from the hour of her birth until now, have shed their blood, and given their toil and their prayers, in unstinted measure.

A THRUSH’S SONG.

Underneath a leafy cover,
Green with morning-wealth of June,
Wanting still, like gift of lover
Craving even greater boon,

Deeper chords of light to perfect summer’s fulness, love’s high noon;

Just apart from all the glitter
Of a busy crystal world
Where, amid quick human twitter,
Pond’rous engine huge arms hurled,

Leaping shuttle wrought bright fancies, girded wheels obedient whirled;

Just a little from the glimmer,
From the footfalls’ tuneless tread—
With the distance ever dimmer—
Rose, so calm o’ershadowèd,

Sound of lusty drum and hautboy, with clear flute voice interlaid,

Notes exultant loud outpouring
Chant of nations, lightly bound
With frail melody, up soaring
O’er the people gathered round,

Resting from the glare a little, from the wearing sight and sound.

Ears of loyal Briton tingling
Hark’ning there, “God save the Queen”;
Erin’s children’s tears commingling
At “The Wearing of the Green,”

Thinking of a loveless bondage, truer trust that might have been.

Sounds of wrathful people seeming
Storming through the “Marseillaise,”
Stirred a land, nigh dead in dreaming,
Through Hortense’s song of praise,

Through its wailing sadness tolling bells of old chivalric days.

Through sad France’s slumber breaking
Germany’s triumphant hymn,
Armed peoples, eager waking,
Watching Rhine-lights growing dim,

Hearing clear a weary nation struggling sore with spectres grim.

In the nations’ anthems swelling
Ever twanged some chord of wrong:
Broken notes in anguish welling
Even in our starlit song—

Shadowy notes from swamp and prairie mingling with the suffering throng.

Stilled at last the music’s clamor,
Drum and hautboy laid to rest,
Softly through the silence’ glamour
Stole the light wind of the west,

Gently parted the green branches, tenderly each leaf caressed.

And a sudden thrill of sweetness,
Mellow, careless, glad, and clear,
Love’s noon-song in its completeness,
Poured in peaceful nature’s ear

From a thrush’s throat of silver—happy song without one tear—

Fell like precious, heav’n-dropped token
'Mid the elements of strife,
'Mid the melodies, grief-broken,
Blare of trumpet, shriek of fife—

Only with undarkened blessing was the thrush’s singing rife.

Where the ways were broad and ordered
England’s Indian blossoms flamed;
Here, where guarding thickets bordered,
Bloom of May June’s sunshine claimed,

Lifting, 'mid the throngs of people, glance, half-fearing, half-ashamed;

Trembling at the cymbals’ crashing
Through the ancient solitude,
Till the thrush’s sweetness flashing,
With its wild-wood joy imbued,

Seemed a covenant from heaven, arc of promise, rainbow-hued.

In the upper silence singing,
Hidden minstrel, unafraid,
In the sunlit branches, swinging,
By the west wind, whispering, swayed,

All the lower tumult silenced in the clear, blue depths o’erhead;

Whence the peace of heav’n, descending,
Filled the bird’s song, true and clear,
Lightsome duty sweetness lending,
Joy o’erbrimming in its cheer,

Freedom on his pinions resting, sunshine soft, and heaven near.

Careless strength and free heart blending
In each note’s melodious mirth,
Calm within a pure soul bending
Praising for its heavenly birth,

For its gift of soaring pinions, lightening so the bonds of earth.

With that clear and sudden sweetness
Sober fancies swept along,
And its wild-wood, perfect meetness
Seemed our country’s truer song—

Sunshine soft, and heaven near it, and no undertone of wrong.

So, methought, her clear voice, ringing,
Should in strength of freedom rise,
With the sweetness of its singing
Every evil exorcise;

Blessing for her children winning through her nearness to the skies.

Philadelphia, June, 1876.

THE CONGREGATION OF CLUNY.
TRANSLATED FROM SCHOEPPNER’S “CHARACTER-BILDER DER GESCHICHTE DES MITTELALTERS.”

At the close of the ninth century the great wealth of the Benedictine Order in France had produced a relaxation of discipline and a departure from regular observance in many of its monasteries which brought it into a state of decadence. One principal source of this degeneracy lay in the want of all organic union binding together the distinct monasteries, each one of which was exclusively subject to its own abbot. It is true that in earlier times the bishops exercised a certain jurisdiction over them; but this was seriously impeded by the fact that the abbot was frequently equal to the bishop in power and in external consideration. The pope was too distant; disorder could strike deep root before any information would reach him, and even then he was ordinarily able to employ only indirect methods of remedying the evil. This seems to have been felt by all those who, from the tenth century onwards, endeavored, by various additional statutes, explanations, and stricter applications of the Rule of St. Benedict, to bring back those who were subject to it to a more conscientious fulfilment of the obligations of their religious profession. At the time when the Carlovingian dynasty, represented in the person of Charles the Simple, was verging toward extinction, William the Pious, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Auvergne, in concert with his duchess, Ingeburga, formed the plan of founding a new monastery. He took counsel respecting the carrying out of his design with Hugh, Abbot of St. Martin’s at Autun.

In company with the duke and duchess Hugh made an exploration of their domains in search of a suitable location, and selected a meadow on the banks of the little river Grosne, near an agreeable cascade, where a chapel in honor of the Blessed Virgin and St. Peter had been already erected. The duke objected that this was his favorite hunting-ground, and that the noise and tumult of deer-chasing would frequently disturb the quiet of the monastery. “Well, then,” replied the abbot, “drive away the hounds and bring in the monks; you well know which of the two will bring you the most favor with God.” The duke cheerfully assented to this proposition, and took measures for the erection of a monastery in honor of the apostles SS. Peter and Paul upon this territory, of which he had but recently acquired the possession.

At the recommendation of Hugh, Berno was invited from a neighboring monastery to become the first abbot. He was succeeded by Odo, the son of a Frankish knight, who had been brought up at the court of Duke William, had afterwards devoted himself to the religious state, and was at the time of his election in the maturity of his manhood. Odo saw that in many monasteries the end of the religious vocation had been entirely forgotten, and, in order that he might restore the primitive discipline of St. Benedict, he determined to reform the monastic state in accordance with its original spirit and intention, and to induce the monasteries in his own vicinity to adopt his reformation. He was a man well fitted to undertake such a task, by his personal austerity, his self-devotion to the good of others, and his extraordinary charity, which was so great that he was ready at any time to bestow all he had upon the poor, without any thought of reserving on one day what might be necessary for the next. The influence of his personal character, and the effect of his active efforts during a prolonged life, were so great that a number of monasteries became affiliated to the one over which he immediately presided. He is, therefore, properly speaking, the founder of the Cluniac Order.

His meek and humble successor, Aymard, won for himself by his amiable virtues the confidence of all the brethren of the order, and the favor of the great and powerful, who were profuse in conferring upon it liberal gifts, charters of protection and privilege. His successors in office, Majolus, Odilo, and Hugh I., were all equally eminent by their able administration, their great influence in all the most important ecclesiastical and political movements of their time, and their high favor with emperors, kings, and princes. Emperors, kings, popes, and bishops maintained intimate relations with the abbots of Cluny, and all the great and powerful nobles of the country sought their advice in matters of importance. Three Sovereign Pontiffs were taken from Cluny to fill the chair of St. Peter. When the son of a king was obliged to become a fugitive, he sought for a refuge at Cluny, and princes who were weary of life and disturbed by remorse of conscience came there to do penance among the brethren. The rulers of foreign countries were lavish of their donations to the order, the popes were equally munificent in conferring marks of their high favor, and bishops were eager for the affiliation of the most important monasteries in their dioceses with Cluny. The immense revenues which flowed into its coffers from all countries in the world became at last proverbial.

The internal discipline and external splendor of Cluny were maintained in an undisturbed permanence and stability for a period of two centuries. At the end of that time both were grievously shattered by the disastrous administration of the unworthy Abbot Pons, a man of worldly levity in character and manners, haughty and ambitious in his disposition, whose whole course of official conduct was such as to threaten the complete downfall of the order. After a length of time he was formally impeached and tried at the tribunal of Rome, by which he was deposed from his office as abbot. Disregarding this sentence, he seized anew on the possession of the monastery of Cluny by force of arms, but was soon after overpowered and cast into a prison, where he was carried off by a sudden attack of fever.

After a short period of only three months, during which the abbatial chair was occupied by Hugh II., Peter the Venerable was placed over the Cluniac Order, which he ruled for thirty-nine years, precisely during the period of St. Bernard, who was his intimate friend, and whom he survived about three years. His activity, prudence, and universal reputation, the intellectual power, deep learning, and exalted virtue which merited for him the appellation of Venerable by which he is designated in history, sufficed not only to heal Cluny from the wounds inflicted on it by the Abbot Pons, but to raise the whole order to its highest summit of importance, and to make the monastery which was its centre flourish in a state of unexampled spiritual and temporal prosperity. If we consider the many journeys which this great abbot undertook on affairs of the utmost importance connected with the public interests of the day, it would seem that he was exclusively a statesman; his vast correspondence seems sufficient to have employed the time of one whose whole attention was given to counselling all sorts of persons seeking his advice by letters; his theological works are like the productions of one actively occupied in study; the strictness with which he observed and enforced upon his subjects in the cloister the monastic rule indicates a contemplative ascetic; his administration of the temporalities of his monastery presents him in the light of an able financier and man of business. The world was filled with his fame, and his order attained the highest zenith of its glory during his administration, which ended at his death, during the Christmas-tide of the year 1156.

All the special rules of the Cluniac Order were based upon the Rule of St. Benedict. The ecclesiastical chant and the service of the choir employed much more time and attention, according to the customs of Cluny, than in other Benedictine monasteries. As far as possible, uniformity was enforced in the different houses after the model of the mother-house. Besides the special prayers which each one said according to his own devotion, one hundred and thirty-eight psalms were prescribed to be recited daily, which was usually done while engaged in performing the various tasks; and even in the great heats of summer, on the days when talking was permitted, there was only time for a recreation of half an hour. Every negligence or mistake in the choir-service received instantly a reproof. This was regarded as a spiritual military service, in which no individual caprice or negligence could be tolerated. Special care was exacted on the greater festivals of the church, and their high importance was recognized by the greater length of the choral song, the reading of longer lessons, and a more fervent devotion. During High Mass no Low Masses were allowed to be said, so that no one could in that way consult his own convenience and escape from the public and solemn celebration. The moment of the departure of one of the brethren from this world was treated as a specially solemn occasion. As soon as he had received Extreme Unction a wooden cross was put under his head in place of a pillow. All who could possibly attend were obliged to assist at the last agony of the dying man, and, although at other times running through the corridors was strictly forbidden, it was specially ordered whenever the passing-bell announced that one of the brethren was about to depart this life. Special revenues were devoted to all charitable purposes, and their conscientious expenditure strictly enjoined. There was a particular endowment for eighteen poor men who were perpetually supported by the mother-house. Six brothers were appointed for the service of the poor, one of whom waited on them, another acted as porter of their hospital, two others furnished the wood out of the forest for their fires, and two had charge of ovens for baking bread, to be given away in alms to the poor. Everything remaining on the tables of the refectory after the meals was taken by the almoner for distribution among the poor. A cover was laid for each one of the most distinguished benefactors at every meal, even though they were living at a great distance or had been long dead, and all their portions were taken for the poor. Twelve loaves, each weighing three pounds, were prepared each day for widows, orphans, feeble and aged persons. On Holy Thursday the ceremony of foot-washing was performed for as many poor men as there were brothers in the community, all of whom were afterwards served at dinner. On certain special occasions, and on all the festivals when the table of the brethren was better served than usual, more abundant alms were distributed. The almoner was bound to make a weekly visitation of the houses in the village near the monastery, that he might find out every poor person who was sick, and furnish him with food, wine, and medicines. The number of poor persons who regularly received aid was estimated at seventeen thousand. The Abbot Odilo sold the ornaments of the church and a crown presented by the German emperor Henry II. in order to relieve the wants of the people during a famine. The subordinate monasteries were required to imitate in this generous alms-giving the example of Cluny, and a similar observance of hospitality was also exacted. Precise rules were laid down for the reception of visitors of different ranks and conditions, who were continually arriving at the monastery on foot or on horseback. If they were ecclesiastics, they were not only invited to partake of the hospitality of the monastery, but also to participate in its religious exercises. Every one who travelled on foot received a certain amount of bread and wine on his arrival and at his departure. If the poverty of the house did not permit anything more than a temporary shelter and a friendly reception, this, at least, was to be cheerfully given to every one. The prior was not to consider what was within his means, but to go beyond them in providing for the wants of strangers. Frequently, when they had consumed all the provisions of the larder, the monks had to endure hunger until new supplies, which often came unexpectedly, were furnished by royal and noble benefactors.

The life of the monastic brethren was austere. Besides the regular and very long choir-service, which no one was dispensed from attending, the fasts were frequent. The flesh of quadrupeds was never allowed, and on the ferial days and the entire period from Septuagesima to Easter, not even fat could be used in preparing the food. The principal article of their daily diet was beans, with an occasional allowance of eggs and cheese, and more rarely of fish. After night prayers no one could taste food or drink anything without special necessity and permission. The violation of these rules and of the law of strict poverty was considered as a grievous transgression, exposing the offender to excommunication and privation of Christian burial.

Obedience, the pivot of all the virtues of an ecclesiastic, was regarded as having a higher and more extended obligation for religious. Its disregard was esteemed worthy of the severest punishment, and the incorrigible were subject to expulsion. Priors and other officials were twice admonished, and afterwards deposed without any hope of restitution. The observance of a strict rule of silence was regarded as a specially efficacious help to the acquisition of perfect spiritual virtues, and, in the opinion of the Abbot Odo, monastic life was utterly worthless without it. Absolute silence was invariably observed during meal-times, and during all times of the day throughout Lent and several other penitential seasons. The Cluniac monks became so expert in the use of the sign-language through their disuse of speech that they might have dispensed with talking altogether without the least inconvenience. The most perfect silence and stillness, undisturbed even by hasty and noisy walking through the cloisters, reigned throughout the monastery.

Every fault must be expiated by penance, or at least an acknowledgment before the abbot. Those who were late must remain standing or prostrate until a sign was given to them to repair to their places. The tardy at table received also a penance. Public offences received public penances, in order that every one might have sensible evidence that the community was vigilant in observing the behavior of each individual member. Smaller offences were punished by solitary confinement, making a station at the church-door, or exclusion from the common exercises. Those which were more serious were punished by flagellation, and, if the offence had been public, the penance was administered at the door of the church while the people were assembling for Mass, and the cause of it announced to them by an official of the monastery. For the gravest faults the culprit was put in irons or imprisoned in a dark, underground dungeon. St. Hugh’s maxim was that a monastery is not dishonored by the faults of its members, but by their impunity. Several brothers were appointed to make the rounds of the monastery at intervals, and to declare in chapter every disorder which they observed, whereupon due penance was inflicted on the delinquents. This duty devolved on the prior for the first hour of the night, and at intervals during its progress, with a special charge of watching that all the doors were properly closed and fastened.

Such a special care was observed in regard to cleanliness that the most particular housekeeper could not be more thorough or exact in a well-regulated private family than were these monks of Cluny in their domestic arrangements. This care for cleanliness showed a deep psychological insight into the close connection between this exterior virtue and interior purity, which is often endangered and damaged by a slovenly disregard of outward propriety. Articles of clothing and all the bed and table furniture were regularly changed according to an invariable rule. Careful supervision was observed towards the novices in respect to their personal neatness in such minute particulars as washing, combing their hair, etc., and conveniences for these purposes were provided in abundance for all, that they might easily make use of them when they came in from work to go to the choir or the refectory.

The clothing was very plain, in contrast to the worldly elegance and vanity in dress which prevailed in many other religious communities, but all the different articles of dress were provided in abundance, with two complete outfits for each one. The winter clothing was made to suit the season and the climate, warm and comfortable; for the men who made the regulations of Cluny were not so narrow-minded as to adhere scrupulously to purely exterior customs which were suitable to Italy but utterly unfit for the ruder climate of the North.

The sick were cared for with the most tender solicitude, six brothers were deputed to the service of the infirmary, and the best ass in the stables was set apart to haul wood for the fire. The infirmarian was always provided with spices and wholesome herbs to make the food of the sick more appetizing and wholesome. Meat was provided for them every day, and even on fasting-days. A certain part of the presents made to the monastery was assigned to the purchase of comforts and delicacies for the sick and weakly. They were dispensed from the rule of silence, and only required to refrain from abusing the privilege of talking. The abbot and grand-prior were required to make frequent visits to the sick, and the cellarer was bound to see each one, in company with the infirmarian, every day, and inquire what kind of food he wished for and in what way it should be prepared. As soon as one was released from the infirmary he came to the chapter, and, standing up, said to the prior: “I have been in the infirmary and have not kept the rules of the order according to our obligation.” The prior answered: “May God pardon you!” whereupon the convalescent brother went to the place of the penitents and recited the seven penitential psalms or seven Pater Nosters.

As for the interior legislation and administration of the order, a general chapter was held at Cluny once a year, where all the abbots, priors, and deans of the entire congregation were bound to appear under pain of deposition, those only who lived in distant countries being exempted from attendance oftener than once every two years. Every question which related to the rules was submitted to this chapter, and to the votes of all the brethren of the monastery of Cluny. Each one was obliged to make known in the chapter, without any regard to personal considerations, whatever he had noticed in any of the houses or in any individual member of the order which was worthy of censure, and was protected from any unpleasant consequences which might possibly ensue afterwards to himself from his disclosures. All priors whose administration or personal conduct was censurable were deposed by the chapter; and, finally, they made an examination of all the novices of the congregation.

As soon as the chapter was dissolved the supreme power reverted to the abbot of Cluny. He appointed all the priors and confirmed all the abbots-elect, being strictly forbidden to receive any presents or perquisites in connection with any such official act. He could make such regulations as he saw fit in all the houses; all his sentences upon individual delinquents which were in conformity with the canons were binding; and in the interval between the capitular assemblies he could depose from all offices without appeal. He was bound to share as much as possible in the common life of the other monks, to be with them in the common dormitory and at the common table, and to use the same food, the only mark of distinction being that he was served with wine of a better quality and with two loaves at dinner.

Next in rank and authority came the grand-prior, appointed by the abbot with the counsel of the elders of the monastery and the assent of the chapter. Under the abbot’s supreme direction he presided over all the spiritual and temporal offices of the monastery, with a special oversight of those brothers who were charged with out-door employments on the cloistral domains. Every year, after the vintage, he made an inspection of all the farm-lands, examined the stores laid up in the barns and cellars, and directed the division of the fruits of the harvest for the use of those who resided in the outlying farm-houses, and for the general use within the monastery.

The interior order of the house was under the oversight of the prior of the community, who had several assistants, and in case of absence a deputy. The rule prescribed that no account should be taken of birth or other personal considerations of human respect in the choice of prelates and officers, but only of moral virtue, experience, and prudence. No abbot or prior, not even the abbot-general of the congregation, was allowed to travel without some of the brethren in his company, as witnesses of his conduct and associates in fulfilling the devotions prescribed by the rule.

We can form some estimate of the extent of the monastic buildings of Cluny from the circumstance related in history, that in the year 1245 Pope Innocent IV., with twelve cardinals and his entire suite; also two patriarchs, three archbishops, eleven bishops, with their respective suites; farther, the king of France, with his mother, wife, brother, and sister, and the whole of their retinue; the emperor of Constantinople, the crown-princes of Aragon and Castile, several dukes and counts, and a crowd of knights, ecclesiastics, and monks, were accommodated within the precincts of the monastery without encroaching on any part of it which was ordinarily occupied by the community or incommoding any of the brethren.

The fine arts were made to contribute to that which is their highest end—the service of religion—in the Cluniac Order more than in any other contemporary institute. They were all employed in harmony and unity with each other to enhance the splendor of the divine service. The candles and lamps by which the church was lighted were placed in costly hoops beset with precious stones. Instead of candelabra, trees artistically wrought in bronze stood near the altar, having the lighted candles prescribed for the solemn ceremonies blazing among their branches. Paintings covered the walls; the windows were richly ornamental and filled with colored glass. Costly tapestry and hangings, beautifully-carved stalls, a decorated pavement, chimes of bells of unusual size, reliquaries of gold whose beauty of workmanship even surpassed their costliness, chalices, ciboriums, and monstrances of gold, sparkling with jewels, vestments heavy and stiff with cloth of gold, and all else that was magnificent in sacred art and decoration, made the church of Cluny a theme of praise and admiration throughout all France. It was probably at the date of its erection the largest in the world, and rested upon sixty-eight columns, each eight and one half feet in diameter. Thirty-two of these pillars supported the vast dome, and the whole edifice, which was built in the peculiar form of an archiepiscopal cross, was regarded as one of the most splendid monuments of the Roman style of architecture in France. Sculpture, carving, and painting rivalled each other in the decoration of this magnificent church, and there still remained at the beginning of the present century a representation of the Eternal Father on a gold ground in the vaulting of the apse, ten feet in height, which retained all its original brilliancy of color. The choir-stalls, which were of a comparatively late period, were two hundred and twenty-five in number at the time of the suppression—showing how numerous the community had become—and the towers were filled with a great many bells, the largest of which were melted down to cast cannon during the religious wars. At present but little remains of this grand structure in a state of ruin. During the French Revolution the whole was sold for building material for the sum of twenty thousand dollars, and thus rude force destroyed this grand work of the spirit of Christianity.

The cultivation of science was fostered in the Cluniac Order with much greater care and zeal than in some of the other monastic bodies. Its founders were more solicitous for the promotion of intellectual labor than for material industry. The Abbot Peter wrote: “In virtue of a special privilege, the abbots of Cluny from ancient times promoted literary occupations with zeal and energy. It is not the desire of winning a high reputation which stimulates them to write books, but the feeling that it would be shameful to neglect the imitation of their predecessors, the holy Fathers of the church, and thus to prove themselves degenerate sons.” Under such superiors the brethren were not deterred by any ill-grounded scruple from applying themselves to the study of the heathen classics, and in fact considered this study as a valuable auxiliary to the investigation of the Sacred Scriptures. The works of the great ecclesiastical writers were fully appreciated and diligently perused, and the valuable manuscripts collected in the library of Cluny were not considered as a mere assortment of curiosities for the sake of show, but as useful implements for the cultivation of science, and in a generous spirit of liberality were freely lent to other monasteries for the sake of making copies or recensions. The books used for the church service were written out in a beautiful, ornamental text, richly adorned with initial letters executed in the most elaborate style of art; and those who were engaged in this kind of work, if it would not admit of interruption, were excused from choir for the time being. The ability and industry of the Cluniac monks in collecting manuscripts and preserving precious monuments of ancient history have been recognized even in later times, and abundant documents of that zeal for the promotion of science which was not damped by the earnestness with which religious discipline was enforced have come down to our own day.

The confraternity of Cluny, which had speedily risen to a high consideration throughout France, attained to a higher and more solidly-established reputation during the period extending through nearly forty years of the administration of Peter the Venerable. The renovation of the Benedictine Order in its original spirit which had been effected by the Cluniac reform became renowned in other countries as well as in France, and awoke the desire of attempting to accomplish the same happy results elsewhere by the use of similar methods. Every founder of a new monastery in France desired to introduce the rule and submit to the supremacy of Cluny. Kings, princes, and bishops urged upon the already existing monastic communities, especially when they had fallen into disorder, incorporation with the Cluniac congregation. During the rule of Peter the Venerable it was increased by the addition of three hundred and fourteen monasteries, collegiate foundations, and churches, and at its most flourishing period it embraced within its limits more than two thousand distinct houses. At the time of the Crusades it extended itself even beyond the sea. Cluniac houses were founded in the valley of Josaphat and on Mt. Tabor, and in the time of Abbot Peter a monastery in a suburb of Constantinople was united to the mother-house, over which he presided.

Men of all conditions who desired to do penance for their sins, to seek a refuge from the dangers of the world, or to find spiritual direction and come under a holy influence for their own sanctification, sought to make reparation and deserve the grace of God by rich gifts to Cluny, to consecrate themselves to God in some house of the order by the religious vows, or to secure for themselves by becoming affiliated to it a share in the sacrifices and prayers perpetually offered within its sacred enclosures. It is related that Count Guy of Macon, who had been a bitter persecutor of the order, one day presented himself at the gates of Cluny in company with his son, several grandsons, thirty knights, and the wives of each one of the noble group respectively, all of whom demanded permission to take the vows of religion. Under the sixth abbot, Hugh I., three thousand monks were present at one general chapter. The crowd of applicants for admission became so great that Hugh VI. was once compelled to issue an edict forbidding the reception of any new candidates during a term of three years. Under Peter the Venerable the number of monks resident at Cluny increased from two hundred to four hundred and sixty, some of whom, however, led a solitary life as hermits in the neighboring forests.

The popes were lavish in their grants of privileges to Cluny and the monasteries connected with it. Alexander II. decreed that no bishop or prelate should have the right of excommunication in respect to the Cluniac congregation. Urban II. allowed the use of episcopal insignia to the abbot, and Calixtus II. conceded to him the special privileges of a cardinal. The brethren of the order were even permitted to have the celebration of Mass continued for their own benefit during an interdict.

There is nothing which shows more clearly the high esteem in which Cluny was held than the decree of Pope Innocent IV. in the third session of the Council of Lyons: that accredited copies of all the official documents relating to the diplomatic intercourse of emperors, kings, and other princes with the Roman Church should be deposited in its archives. This important and precious collection was still in existence at the outbreak of the Revolution.

The history of Cluny has a very great importance in connection with the general history of the mediæval period, but especially with the great ecclesiastical reformation of Gregory VII., which was prepared by the interior working of the order within the church. For many prudential reasons the fact that the great ecclesiastical movement of the eleventh century had its source in the monastery of Cluny was kept out of sight as much as possible; but it is proved by abundant evidence, and Gregory VII. himself, who was its prior when St. Leo IX. persuaded him to return with him to Rome in 1049, speaks of the peculiar and intimate relations between Cluny and the Holy See.

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

VII.
ST. AGATHA.

“She hath no breasts—is cruelly maimed withal:

What shall we do for her, when spoken for,
Our little sister? Sheathe her, if a door,
In boards of cedar; if she be a wall,
Build up a house of silver,[116] and instal
Her worship”—so the monks. O bleeding core
Of maidenhood, thy Spouse and King shall pour

Balm in thy wounds, the lilies’ growth recall!

When Etna belched forth Phlegethon, and rolled

Its molten flanks upon Catania,
The saint’s veil they did reverently unfold
And wave it in the face of fire—Behold!

Piled black against the convent’s wall to-day,

That Red Sea curdled by Saint Agatha!

VIII.
ST. LUCIA.

“What’s this? Two human eyes upon a dish?

Wretch! what dost mean?” “Lucia sends thee these;

She greets thee: 'Be no longer ill at ease;

They are thine! When mine, a spirit devilish,

With them, with pink bloom and pale limbs, did fish

For men’s souls.’” Quick! to her—ere horror freeze.

Her wan lips smiled beneath the bandages:

“Thou hast languished for mine eyes—have, then, thy wish!”

She raised the fillet—the youth dropped as dead.

“Look up!” a sweet voice spake, “and praise the Lord!”

He obeyed trembling—O illumined head!

Low with an altered spirit he adored.

Thenceforth an angel’s eyes, her own instead,

Lighted her to her martyrdom’s reward.

IX.
ST. URSULA.

A bower of woven palms! In white arrayed,
Marshalled beneath that verdant canopy
By fair-haired Ursula of Brittany,
Eleven thousand martyrs, each a maid!
For England’s heir, Etherius, had obeyed
His bride’s will, honoring her virginity.
To Rome on pilgrimage, by river and sea,

They sailed, and prettily the bold mariner played.

Saint, dear to tender years! thou and thy doves

Fell pierced with many arrows, and the Rhine

With blood of innocents ran red as wine—

Still teach that to the pure Death’s kiss is Love’s!

Still teach it, though thy mortuary shrine

May moulder, while the stream to ocean moves!

THE UNKNOWN EROS.[117]

There seems a growing and lamentable tendency among English poets in these days to divide themselves up into schools. We have the Tennysonian, the Swinburnian, the Rossettian, as a little earlier we had the Lake school, the Byronic, and so on. In these schools of poetry, as in schools of painting, there are certain marked features peculiar to each and forming, as it were, the common property of that one. Certain tones and colors belong to this: subdued grays, royal purples, dim and far-away lights on meadow and mere. Another is a lustier flesh-and-blood school: its men and women are decidedly, though musically, improper. The choice expressions and tender care that the other lavishes on the beauties of nature this one devotes to a maiden’s hair, or her cheek, or her nose, the droop of her lashes, or the arch of her brow. A third affects the mystic in matter and form; the more incomprehensible it is, the finer the poetry. It is like the “vague school” in painting. One is sometimes puzzled to know whether the picture be a battle-piece, a landscape, a portrait, or a nightmare on canvas. And so they go on.

This follow-my-leader tendency is unquestionably a mark of feebleness. It would be so in any art; it is obviously so in an art that springs from inspiration, and is thus necessarily original. A poet is comprehensible; a school of poets is absurd. Imagine a school of Homers, of Virgils, of Dantes, of Shaksperes, of Miltons, of Byrons! Why, the world could not hold them.

Weak as our days may be in original poets, they are strong at least in numbers. Probably, unless in the days of good Queen Anne, never before did such a constant and voluminous stream of English verse roll through the press. Most of it falls still-born on the market; yet nothing seems to discourage the poets. From Tupper to Tennyson they publish and publish and publish all the time. Yet there is not a living English poet to-day—unless Aubrey de Vere, whose best work has been his latest—who did not establish whatever fame he has almost a quarter of a century ago, and whose poems since that period have not shown a marked and steady decline.

In the author of The Unknown Eros we find a man who has certainly something new to say; who follows no leader; who has thoughts, and a mode of expressing them, all his own; who cares less for how than for what; whose work compels attention, and who depends in nowise on the jingle of words, the tricks of adjective and rhyme—the ballet-dancing, so to say, of the English language—for his attraction. Indeed, in respect of form he is far behind the other poets of the time. He almost disregards it. Yet, as will be seen, the strange dress that he has chosen for his creation fits it admirably, and moulds itself at will to the strenuous freedom of the combative athlete, the scorn of a man of fine feelings and bright intelligence, the meditative mood of the student, or the softer movements of a lover. His instrument is now a clarion call to battle, now a lover’s lute, now a dirge. It has the strength and simplicity of the Gregorian chant, which in a few notes and changes expresses the heights of inspiration and exultation, the depths of dread, the saddest sorrow of the human heart.

The volume is a collection of odes, written at various and long intervals apparently, and in a style of metre resembling somewhat that of the minor poems of Milton. It has often the regular irregularity of the Greek chorus, with much of the latter’s elasticity, brightness, flexibility, and crystalline texture. In all this it is novel—markedly and successfully so. It is more novel, however, in subject-matter. It is refreshing to come across a man, a poet especially, who can drop out of the commonplace, and do it without affectation. So accustomed have we grown, however, to the commonplace that we follow him at first with difficulty. His “Eros” is indeed an unknown god to the run of readers. He is no Cupid rosy-red, with flowery bow and fire-tipped dart to smite and melt the hearts of sweet young lovers. He does not slumber in summer meads, or rove listlessly by laughing streamlets, or roguishly haunt the bosky dells, or float adown the slanting sunbeam to flame on the unwary and capture their hearts and kindle them into passion while they languish in the soft arms of Mother Nature. His God is not this pagan deity. He is remote, obscure, harsh-seeming. The poet’s song is no pleasing love-tune. It is martial, high, far away, up on crags remote and to be reached only by thorny paths with bleeding feet and straining eyes, and hearts that faint many times on the way. True love is banished from the earth, the poet seems to think; and in place of him, high, pure, serene, with his head lifted up and bathed in the clear light and refulgence of heaven, and his feet only touching the earth, men have set a toy, a plaything, a fair bestiality.

“What rumored heavens are these,” he asks,

“Which not a poet sings,
O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze
Of sudden wings

Speeding at far returns of time from interstellar space

To fan my very face,

And gone as fleet,

Through delicatest ether feathering soft their solitary beat,

With ne’er a light plume dropp’d, nor any trace

To speak of whence they came, or whither they depart?

O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,
What portent and what Delphic word,
Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird,
Is this?
In me life’s even flood
What eddies thus?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood
Like a perturbed moon of Uranus

Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;

And whence
This rapture of the sense
Which, by thy whisper bid,

Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign

A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine;
This subject loyalty which longs
For chains and thongs
Woven of gossamer and adamant,
To bind me to my unguess’d want,
And so to lie,

Between those quivering plumes that thro’ fine ether pant,

For hopeless, sweet eternity?”

The hard questions here put the poet answers, to some degree at least, in other odes. In the “Legem Tuam Dilexi” (p. 43) he sings:

“The 'Infinite.’ Word horrible! at feud
With life, and the braced mood
Of power and joy and love;
Forbidden, by wise heathen ev’n, to be
Spoken of Deity,

Whose Name, on popular altars, was 'The Unknown,’

Because, or ere It was reveal’d as One
Confined in Three,
The people fear’d that it might prove
Infinity,
The blazon which the devils desired to gain;

And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent;

Yet did so far relent,

That they might seek relief, and not in vain,

In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain.”

Was there ever a truer picture painted by man of the curse of lost souls and the hopeless relief they find “in dashing of themselves against the shores of pain”—that relief that the demented seek in beating their weary brains out or letting out the stream of the tired and useless life into the dark ocean of infinity, severing with maddened and sacrilegious hand the little knot that separates Time from Eternity? And what stronger picture of the prevalence of evil and the inherent tendency in the fallen world to rebel than this:

“Nor bides alone in hell
The bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel.
But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode,
And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space.
The furious power,

To soft growth twice constrain’d in leaf and flower,

Protests, and longs to flash its faint self far

Beyond the dimmest star.
The same
Seditious flame,
Beat backward with reduplicated might,
Struggles alive within its stricter term,
And is the worm.”

And here follows the response to the search after the “Unknown Eros”:

And the just Man does on himself affirm
God’s limits, and is conscious of delight,
Freedom and right,
And so His Semblance is, Who, every hour,
By day and night,
Buildeth new bulwarks ’gainst the Infinite.
For, ah, who can express
How full of bonds and simpleness
Is God,
How narrow is He,
And how the wide waste field of possibility
Is only trod
Straight to His homestead in the human heart,
And all His art

Is as the babe’s, that wins his mother to repeat

Her little song so sweet!

Man,

Darling of God. Whose thoughts but live and move

Round him; Who woos his will
To wedlock with His own, and does distil
To that drop’s span
The attar of all rose-fields of all love!
Therefore the soul select assumes the stress
Of bonds unbid, which God’s own style express
Better than well,
And aye hath borne,
To the Clown’s scorn,

The fetters of the three-fold golden chain....”

What “the three-fold golden chain” is that binds “the soul select” to God no Catholic needs to be told. Free and loyal self-sacrifice, in a world where self-sacrifice, whether we like it or not, is necessary and must be endured, brings us nearest and makes us likest to Him, the true Eros who “emptied himself for us.” These lines will help us to read the riddle of the “Unknown Eros,” “some note” of whose “renown and high behest” the poet thinks might thus “in enigma be express’d”:

“There lies the crown

Which all thy longing cures.

Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!

It is a spirit though it seems red gold;

And such may no man, but by shunning, hold.

Refuse it, though refusing be despair;

And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair.”

This thought again is more fully wrought out in the conclusion of the same ode, “Legem Tuam Dilexi”:

“... For to have naught

Is to have all things without care or thought!

And lastly bartering life’s dear bliss for pain;

But evermore in vain;
For joy (rejoice ye Few that tasted have!)
Is Love’s obedience
Against the genial laws of natural sense,
Whose wide self-dissipating wave,
Prison’d in artful dikes,
Trembling returns and strikes
Thence to its source again,
In backward billows fleet,
Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet;
Thrilling each vein,
Exploring every chasm and cove

Of the full heart with floods of honeyed love,

And every principal street
And obscure alley and lane
Of the intricate brain

With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet

Of the primordial heat;
Till, unto view of me and thee,
Lost the intense life be,
Or ludicrously display’d, by force
Of distance, as a soaring eagle, or a horse
On far-off hillside shown,
May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.”

To those who read these lines carefully it will not be necessary to say that the author is a Catholic. His name, though modestly withheld from the present volume, is not unknown. It is many years ago since Coventry Patmore sang his sweet love-songs, The Betrothal and The Espousals.

They were received favorably enough by the critics—far more favorably, indeed, than have been many higher and greater poems on their first appearance: Keats’ Endymion, for instance. Then a strange silence struck the poet, and he was dumb.

If the present volume is the growth of all these silent years, Mr. Patmore has not suffered by his solitude. Between his earlier work and the present there is no comparison. Indeed, it takes a very careful reading of the first to detect therein the germ of the strong growth and most beautiful flower that compel admiration to-day. Those were nothing more than the story, told with all the fond minuteness of a gentle, ardent, intelligent, and chivalrous young lover, of his first true love; of the flowery paths and pleasant ways that led up to it; of the gracious nothings that make that time so sweet and ever memorable to the lovers; the lone communings, the tremulous doubts, the bitter-sweet emotions, the sun and shade, the laughing April showers that weave Love’s many-colored web and make a brief paradise for the new Adam and Eve, with no serpent lurking in the grass—all this is told delightfully and with delight. The verse is sweet and pleasant and flowing as the subject; but it is a song to while away a drowsy hour, not to cause us to halt and listen in the busy march and fierce strife of life. We glance over them with lazy pleasure as we watch the gambols of children in the sun.

These later poems are of a far different and more solemn nature. The poet has lived much, felt much, suffered much, joyed much, thought and meditated much in this long interval. He has been lifted to the heights of heaven; he has been dashed back to the gates of hell. He has been tossed on the waves of Doubt and felt the brotherhood of Despair. He has lost her who first taught him to sing; whose gentle glances thrilled the tender chords of his nature and moved them to utter sweet music. Here is her picture:

“But there danced she, who from the leaven
Of ill preserved my heart and wit
All unawares, for she was heaven,
Others at best but fit for it.
I mark’d her step, with peace elate,
Her brow more beautiful than morn,
Her sometime air of girlish state
Which sweetly waived its right to scorn;
The giddy crowd, she grave the while,
Although, as ’twere beyond her will,
About her mouth the baby smile
That she was born with linger’d still.
Her ball-dress seemed a breathing mist,
From the fair form exhaled and shed,
Raised in the dance with arm and wrist
All warmth and light, unbraceleted.
Her motion, feeling ’twas beloved,
The pensive soul of tune express’d,
And, oh, what perfume, as she moved,
Came from the flowers in her breast!”[118]

Here is she ten years later:

“Her sons pursue the butterflies,
Her baby daughter mocks the doves
With throbbing coo: in his fond eyes
She’s Venus with her little Loves;
Her step’s an honor to the earth,
Her form’s the native-land of grace,
And, lo, his coming lights with mirth
Beauty’s metropolis, her face!
Of such a lady proud’s the lord,
And that her happy bosom knows;
She takes his arm without a word,
In lanes of laurel and of rose.”[119]

And here at last is her “Departure,” as told in the latest volume:

“It was not like your great and gracious ways!

Do you, that have naught other to lament,
Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
Upon your journey of so many days,
Without a single kiss or a good-by?
I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;
And so we sate, within the sun’s low rays,

You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,

Your harrowing praise.
Well, it was well, my Wife,
To hear you such things speak,
And see your love

Make of your eyes a growing gloom of life,
As a warm south wind sombres a March grove.
And it was like your great and gracious ways
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash
To let the laughter flash,
Whilst I drew near,

Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.

But all at once to leave me at the last,
More at the wonder than the loss aghast,
With huddled, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
And go your journey of all days
With not one kiss or a good-by,

And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d,

’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.”[120]

It goes without saying that such a loss must tell with incalculable force on a man of intense sensibility. Trials of this kind best prove a man. Some they crush; others they humiliate only to exalt. If we may judge by the silent testimony of the book before us, his great loss made this man greater. He felt, if not for the first time, more keenly than ever before, how uncertain and passing is all merely human happiness. The known Eros that had charmed his life suddenly passed away “with sudden, unintelligible phrase,” and in the darkness that fell upon his soul his humbled eyes were opened to the unknown Eros who was near him all the while.

But, beyond and beside this, between the publication of his earlier poems and the latest his conversion to the Catholic faith took place. So we judge, at least, from internal evidence in the books. Here was a new and most powerful agent introduced to act upon his nature. Moreover, the world had moved in the interval. Many and mighty changes had taken place in the world, and they did not pass unfelt or unobserved by the silent poet. But before we come to these we will give one more response to his questioning of the oracle before whom of all he burns his incense. In the “Deliciæ Sapientiæ de Amore” he sings joyously:

“Love, light for me
Thy ruddiest blazing torch,
That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch
Of the glad Palace of Virginity,
May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see....

Bring, Love, anear,
And bid be not afraid
Young Lover true, and love-foreboding Maid,
And wedded Spouse, if virginal of thought;
For I will sing of naught
Less sweet to hear
Than seems
A music in their half-remember’d dreams.

... The heavens themselves eternal are with fire

Of unapproach’d desire,

By the aching heart of Love, which cannot rest,

In blissfullest pathos so indeed possess’d.
O, spousals high;
O, doctrine blest,
Unutterable in even the happiest sigh;
This know ye all
Who can recall
With what a welling of indignant tears
Love’s simpleness first hears
The meaning of his mortal covenant,
And from what pride comes down
To wear the crown
Of which ’twas very heaven to feel the want.

Therefore gaze bold,
That so in you be joyful hope increas’d,
Thorough the Palace portals, and behold
The dainty and unsating Marriage-Feast.
O, hear
Them singing clear
'Cor meum et caro mea’ round the 'I am,’
The Husband of the Heavens, and the Lamb
Whom they for ever follow there that kept,
Or, losing, never slept
Till they reconquer’d had in mortal fight
The standard white.

Gaze and be not afraid,

Young Lover true and love-foreboding Maid.

The full noon of deific vision bright

Abashes nor abates

No spark minute of Nature’s keen delight.

’Tis there your Hymen waits!

There where in courts afar all unconfused they crowd,

As fumes the starlight soft
In gulfs of cloud,
And each to the other, well-content,
Sighs oft,
'’Twas this we meant!'
Gaze without blame,

Ye in whom living Love yet blushes for dead shame.

There of pure Virgins none
Is fairer seen,
Save One,
Than Mary Magdalene.

Love makes the life to be
A fount perpetual of virginity;
For, lo, the Elect
Of generous Love, how named soe’er, affect
Nothing but God,
Or mediate or direct,
Nothing but God,
The Husband of the Heavens:
And who Him love, in potence great or small,
Are, one and all,
Heirs of the Palace glad
And only clad
With the bridal robes of ardor virginal.”

The Love that our poet has been seeking, has found, and here hymns in strains that at times are truly little short of seraphic, will now be known to the reader; and we leave this high, ethereal Court of Love that is human indeed, yet more than human, to glance at other and more ordinary, though still lofty, subjects which the poet has touched.

In a sense it is really refreshing to find that he is not always in the skies; that he is very human and made of flesh and blood like ourselves. Indeed, so human is he that he openly confesses, in a poem of matchless beauty and delicacy, to having found a substitute for his dead wife. Ordinary men, who are not poets, yet who nevertheless have hearts, will give a rough reading to the exquisite ode, “Tired Memory” (p. 93), wherein the poet, lamenting his wife, and confessing truthfully, albeit sadly, that

“In our mortal air

None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,”

and seeking round “for some extreme of unconceived, interior sacrifice, whereof the smoke might rise to God,” cries in agony:

“My Lord, if thy strange will be this,
That I should crucify my heart,
Because my love has also been my pride,
I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss,
Wherein She has no part.”

“And I was heard,” he adds, let us hope untruthfully; for the “crucifixion of his heart” took the shape apparently of a second wife, thus:

“My heart was dead,
Dead of devotion and tired memory,
When a strange grace of thee
In a fair stranger, as I take it, bred
To her some tender heed,
Most innocent
Of purpose therewith blent,
And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such
That the pale reflex of an alien love,
So vaguely, sadly shown,
Did her heart touch
Above

All that, till then, had woo’d her for its own.

And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn,

Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine,

And made me weak,
By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,
And Nature’s long-suspended breath of flame,
Persuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name,
Awhile to smile and speak

With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine...”

But this is not so much the humanity to which we referred. We think that three characteristics will strike the readers of these odes: 1, the high spiritual nature of many; 2, the deep pathos and human love of others; 3, the lofty scorn and fierce sarcasm displayed, mistakenly sometimes, in certain of the odes.

The poet is an Englishman of Englishmen, and, only for his Catholic faith, it seems to us that he would be one among the prophets of despair, whose name is legion and whose day is the present.

“O, season strange for song!”

he cries in the Proem;

“Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue

As other kingdoms, nearing their eclipse,

Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strong

The voice that was their voice in earlier days?

Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry,

The note which those that seem too weak to sigh

Will sometimes utter just before they die?”

To speak frankly, we do not think it is. We do not think England’s soul is parting yet. We think there is much good left in this world for England to do; at the very least there is much atonement to be made for the many and great evils and national crimes—among others that greatest of all, apostasy—for which that soul has to answer. She can do much, she has done something, toward making this atonement; and the time of grace was never nearer to her than at present. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny the intense pathos and exquisite beauty of the following sad lines:

“Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways,

There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard,

Her ancient beauty marr’d,
And, in her cold and aimless roving sight,
Horror of light....”

In the sixth ode, entitled “Peace,” he returns to this theme:

“O England, how hast thou forgot,
In dullard care for undisturbed increase
Of gold, which profits not,

The gain which once thou knew’st was for thy peace!

Honor is peace, the peace which does accord

Alone with God’s glad word:

'My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’

Beneath the heroic sun
Is there then none
Whose sinewy wings by choice do fly
In the fine mountain-air of public obloquy,
To tell the sleepy mongers of false ease
That war’s the ordained way of all alive,
And therein with good-will to dare and thrive
Is profit and heart’s peace?

Remnant of Honor, brooding in the dark

Over your bitter cark,

Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied seven days,

Upon the corpses of so many sons,
Who loved her once,
Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways,
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these!”

We do not altogether go with Mr. Patmore in this invective, however much we may admire its form. England has certainly acted meanly in many important European questions of late years. She will probably so act in many more in the future, if she finds it advisable or profitable. And it is a poor excuse to ask what other European nation has not acted or would not act, had it the chance, equally meanly with England. We may be very wrathful about the matter; we may have some very hard things to say against England for not drawing the sword in certain cases; yet between the nation that is too ready to fight and the nation that guards severely what are strictly its own primary interests without fighting, we certainly prefer the latter. The bloody road is a sad road to glory, and its end is never seen. While, then, we may for the moment side with the passionate poet who sits down in his studio and hurls his wrath in words of flame against the ministry for not leading the country into war and reviving ancient glories, as they are called, on second thoughts, while still, perhaps, thoroughly disgusted with the ministry and the meanness of their ways, we become gradually reconciled to the situation, and thank Heaven, though of course not the ministers, that we can sleep quietly in our beds. It may be an ignoble sense—doubtless it is; yet if it prevailed a little more generally throughout the world just now, the world would not, in the long run, be the sufferer from it.

There is another peace against which Mr. Patmore declaims in no measured terms in “The Standards.” This was written soon after the launching of Mr. Gladstone’s first pamphlet, not so much against “the English Catholics,” as the author states in a note—he would do well to remember that the world is a little larger than England—but against Catholics: against the Catholic Church and its chief.

“... That last,
Blown from our Zion of the Seven Hills,
Was no uncertain blast!
Listen: the warning all the champaign fills,
And minatory murmurs, answering, mar
The Night, both near and far,
Perplexing many a drowsy citadel

Beneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell,

With armed jar

And angry threat, surcease

Their long-kept compact of contemptuous peace!

Lo, yonder, where our little English band,
With peace in heart and wrath in hand,
Have dimly ta’en their stand,
Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,
Whence, o’er the dawning Land,
Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate
’Gainst the black flag of Hate.”

This call is most spirited and trenchant and bold. We can only find space for the strong end:

“The sanction of the world’s undying hate

Means more than flaunted flags in windy air.

Be ye of gathering fate

Now gladly ware.

Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought,

The brilliant shall be brought;
The white stone mystic set between the eyes
Of them that get the prize,
Yea, part and parcel of that mighty Stone
Which shall be thrown
Into the Sea, and Sea shall be no more.”

“1867” is a poem strongly written and of marked character, but with which we cannot agree. It was called out apparently by the passage of the bill extending the suffrage by the conservative ministry under the leadership of Mr. Disraeli. It is—so we read it, and we see no possibility of reading it otherwise—a direct and bitter attack on a rational extension of the popular liberties, which we take to be radically wrong in conception:

“In the year of the great crime,
When the false English Nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew

The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,

One said, Take up thy Song,
That breathes the mild and almost mythic time
Of England’s prime!
But I, Ah, me,
The freedom of the few
That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,
Can song renew?”

Let us here say that if a man cannot attack Mr. Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, on higher and fairer ground than on that of his being “a Jew,” he may as well let that statesman alone. A man who adopts this very small, very cheap, and very common mode of attack is not worthy the hearing of sensible men. Addressing the “outlawed Best”—by the bye, the poet is very arbitrary and perplexing in his use of capitals—England’s nobles, presumably, Mr. Patmore says:

“Know, ’twas the force of function high,
In corporate exercise, and public awe
Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law,

That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,

Which kept you in your sky!”

Does he mean that the “Best” are restricted to the English nobility? If he does mean this, he is quite wrong; if he does not mean it, then the lines immediately following are meaningless:

“But, when the sordid Trader caught

The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,

And soon, to the Mechanic vain,
Sold the proud toy for naught,
Your charm was broke, your task was sped,
Your beauty, with your honor, dead.”

And so the ode goes on to hope that

“Prayer perchance may win
A term to God’s indignant mood
And the orgies of the multitude,
Which now begin....”

We cannot help thinking, if God’s name must be introduced in the matter, that he is not especially indignant with Mr. Disraeli and the English nobles and people at the extension of the suffrage, and that for this reason to stigmatize 1867 as “the year of the great Crime” is nonsense. As for “the sordid Trader,” there has always been a considerable admixture of the “Trader” in the composition of the English government, noble or ignoble. The first Napoleon’s estimate of the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” was not an ill-judged one; and never was that government, at least since Reformation times, so pure and its members so honest as to-day, when “the sordid Trader” has a large hand in the administration. We do all honor to the spirit of chivalry; we do not object to class distinctions in countries where such distinctions are historic and hereditary; but we recognize manhood wherever we find it, and set it above all accidents of time or clime or artificial restrictions. At the end of the ode, however, the poet rises above his smaller self to a strain that is noble and true:

'And now, because the dark comes on apace
When none can work for fear,
And Liberty in every Land lies slain,
And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,
And heavy prophecies, suspended long
At supplication of the righteous few
And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,

Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear,

And the dread baptism of blood seems near

That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,

Hush’d be all song,
And let Christ’s own look through
The darkness, suddenly increased,
To the gray secret lingering in the East.”

We could linger with delight over many passages in these odes, and dwell with pleasure on the peculiar depth, conciseness, and expressiveness of the phrases used, the mere words often which the poet chooses. His power of condensation and deep philosophic comprehension and observation constantly strikes one. The concealed art of the whole is marvellous. But this, we have no doubt, will, from the copious extracts we have given, strike the reader as it has struck us. And we hasten on to quote a few more passages and take leave of the book.

We have called attention to the poet’s scorn. It is very bitter, and is at its best when it attacks not so much persons or matters which are at least open to question as when it deals with obvious shams and pretentious littleness. What could be better than this placid treatment of the modern scientific school which can see nothing more than its telescope and its instruments disclose to it?

“Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.
The best that’s known

Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.

View’d close, the Moon’s fair ball

Is of ill objects worst.

A corpse in Night’s highway, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst;

And now they tell

That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst

Too horribly for hell.
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap.
Put by the Telescope!
Better without it man may see,
Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.

Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye

The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails.
These at least do live.
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate

Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.

Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne’er wandering far.”

At other times his strong humanity seems to die in him, the struggle of life seems small and profitless, and the many ends that move us weak and purposeless as children’s plans. “Here, in this little Bay,” he says:

“Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

I sit me down.

For want of me the world’s course will not fail;

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.”

Of course we need not remind the poet that it is just the duty of honest men to see that the truth prevails and the lie rots, for his poems are a very pæan of Truth and its high offices; but in this as in others of the odes he gives complete expression to the weariness that at times creeps over all who are struggling for the right. It is like the song of the tired mariners in Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters.

Again he sings:

“Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest

Of mankind’s progress; all its spectral race

Mere impotence of rest,

The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,

Crest altering still to gulf
And gulf to crest
In endless chase

That leaves the tossing water anchor’d in its place!

Ah, well does he who does but stand aside,

Sans hope or fear,

And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear,

And prophesies ’gainst trust in such a tide:
For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught,
Whose message is that he sees only naught!
Nathless, discern’d may be,
By listeners at the doors of destiny,
The fly-wheel swift and still
Of God’s incessant will,

Mighty to keep in bound, tho’ powerless to quell,

The amorous and vehement drift of man’s herd to hell.”

We can quote no further at any length, though we find something to attract us in every ode; and the more we read the odes the more we find in them, the more we admire them, and the clearer they become. Though independent of each other, a secret string of purpose, of aim and aspiration, of a yearning after something that the poet has not yet quite caught or cannot as yet fully express, becomes apparent. To this is due much of the obscurity and dimness that at first offend the eye. Closer study, however, reveals a throbbing passion, a high ideal, gleams of light from heaven, the flashes of a bright intelligence warmed by a pure heart and looking from and through all things earthly heavenwards. We have seen no man of late who can lash the follies and lay bare the falsehoods of the time so thoroughly. A man of intense and rooted convictions, he may make mistakes sometimes, but at least he makes them nobly. He is very human, as we have already said. Indeed, there are touches here and there in some of the odes that are strongly sensuous, and the two last poems, “The Rosy Bosom’d Hours” and “The After-Glow,” were better omitted from the volume. Their littleness offends and breaks with a discordant jar on the high and serene atmosphere through which we have been passing. It is almost like what the introduction of one of Offenbach’s airs would be into a solemn Mass. From the poet whose “Proem” is pitched in so high a key as this:

“Therefore no 'plaint be mine
Of listeners none,
No hope of render’d use or proud reward,
In hasty times and hard;
But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throat
At latest eve,
That does in each calm note
Both joy and grieve;
Notes few and strong and fine,
Gilt with sweet day’s decline,
And sad with promise of a different sun,”

we certainly expected no such stuff as the following, addressed to his bride:

“At Dawlish, 'mid the pools of brine,
You stept from rock to rock,
One hand quick tightening upon mine,
One holding up your frock.

I thought, indeed, by magic chance,
A third [day] from Heaven to win,
But as, at dusk, we reach’d Penzance,
A drizzling rain set in.”

There is so much that is high and noble and full of great promise in this new writer—for such he really is—and we have been so honest in our admiration of it, that we feel all the more at liberty to point out some of the blemishes that mar a work of rare excellence and strange beauty. Here and there throughout the volume are lines and couplets that linger lovingly in the memory; as, for instance:

“Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe the trodden ground

Till passion’s buried floods be found....”

And again:

“Till inmost absolution start
The welling in the grateful eyes,
The heaving in the heart.”

What could be more tenderly and naturally expressive than those two last lines? Or than this:

“Winnow with sighs, and wash away

With tears the dust and stain of clay.”

Often have we heard aspirations of the following kind, but never sweeter than this:

“Ye Clouds that on your endless journey go,
Ye Winds that westward flow,
Thou heaving Sea
That heav’st ’twixt her and me,
Tell her I come....”

The poet yokes all Nature to the wings of his fancy, and makes it the loving slave of his Love.

How simple, yet how subtly told, is this great truth:

“Who does not know
That good and ill
Are done in secret still,
And that which shows is verily but show!”

And this deep reflection contains a volume:

“How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood:

But not all height is holiness,

Nor every sweetness good.”

Here is a proverb, only too often verified:

“One fool, with lusty lungs,

Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues,

Shall ne’er undo.”

In “Victory in Defeat” he says—how truly!—

“Life is not life at all without delight,

Nor has it any might;

And better than the insentient heart and brain

Is sharpest pain;
And better for the moment seems it to rebel,
If the great Master, from his lifted seat,

Ne’er whispers to the wearied servant, 'Well!’”

We hope to hear again and soon from Mr. Patmore. If he can avoid a certain obscurity that will repel many who would be sincere and honest admirers of so noble a writer, it will be better for himself and those whom he addresses. Even as his work now stands we are happy to say of it, in closing our review, what a true poet whose name often adorns these pages has said: “Many parts of the book seem to me both to ascend higher and descend deeper than almost anything we have had for a long time.”

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Priesthood in the Light of the New Testament. By E. Mellor, D.D. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.

The author in the preface of the book before us says that his lectures were prepared at the request of the Committee of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, and though not considered as exhausting the subject, yet they furnish a contribution toward the settlement of the question of the priesthood and its claims; which settlement in the author’s aim means toward doing away altogether with the priesthood and its claims. After a careful perusal of the volume, we must confess that we think the contribution exceedingly small, and not calculated to settle anything at all in the reverend gentleman’s sense. For the doctor’s lectures are a rehash of all the old objections brought forward against the priesthood, from the time of the Reformation downwards; and which have been time and again triumphantly refuted by our controversialists; but of which refutation the author takes no heed, as if such men as Bellarmine, Petau, Suarez, Thomassin, and a host of others down to our day had never existed. If the author had wished to bring towards the settlement of the subject a real contribution, the proper course for him to pursue would have been to state the objections, to bring forward the answer to each one of them given by our controversialists, to show the futility and untenableness of their answer, and to conclude that the objections yet hold good against the subject. His having, therefore, of a set purpose, or most innocently, ignored those answers leaves the question just where it was, and no one the wiser or better by the author’s lectures.

It is not possible for us in the brief space of a passing notice to attempt a refutation of all the objections he rehashes so carefully. It will suffice to remark that all his objections, even if nothing at all could be said against them, would prove nothing positive against the priesthood. For they may be classified under two heads. The first are those of purely negative character, which, as they prove nothing in favor of the priesthood, neither do they prove anything against it. Under this head we put the old objection, drawn from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews, which exalts the priesthood of Christ above the Jewish priesthood, and which says at least nothing against the Christian priesthood, which is identical with that of Christ.

The other class of objections is when our author examines the positive proofs brought in favor of the Christian priesthood. These proofs, so clear, so satisfactory, so weighty, the author dismisses very summarily by throwing doubt on the meaning of the words, after the fashion of the Protestant method. One example will suffice to prove our assertion. Examining the text, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained,” he disposes of it as follows: “It is not needful to enter into a consideration of the meaning of the words [as if the question was not just about the meaning of the words; or as if our Lord was speaking merely for a joke] which set forth the high powers of the apostles; whether the sins they were to remit or retain were spiritual sins [are there any corporal sins?], or ecclesiastical ones, or both. The question before us is, be the function here referred to what it may, to whom was it accorded and by whom was it meant to be exercised? Almost every word in the passage has been a battle-field.” We would remark on this passage that there is no reason for waiving the question, be the function here referred to what it may, when our Lord says expressly it is to remit or to retain sins; that it is evident from the text, if words or language mean anything any more, that this function was to be exercised by those to whom our Lord spoke, and by those whom they preceded, as the apostles were essentially first and representative men; but it is useless. We only wish to call the attention of our readers to the fact that, if a text clear and palpable in itself, proving a truth or a dogma, can be disposed of in this manner, no Christian truth can stand any longer, and we may as well have done with all Christian revelation. For suppose we want to bring a contribution towards the settlement of the question of the Divinity of Christ, all we have to do is to throw doubts on the meaning of the words of those texts which assert it, and the contribution is made, and so on to the end of the chapter.

We think we have made our statement good, that our author has proved nothing in his book against the Christian priesthood, as all his objections are of a negative character.

But we will exceed him in liberality, and grant for a moment that those texts by which we assert the nature and prerogatives of the priesthood prove nothing in its favor, as his negative objections prove nothing against it. What then? Has he gained anything by our concession, or has he made any step forward towards the settlement of the question? Not at all. There will always be the fact of the existence of the priesthood, in the full exercise of all its claims, staring him in the face. How to account for that fact? Our author sees the difficulty, and admits that to account for it by urging an ambitious conspiracy on the part of the presbyters or bishops is absurd, that such a conspiracy could not have succeeded in establishing itself (page 74), and endeavors to account for it by a bias of humanity towards the priesthood identical with a bias towards selfishness and sins. And he goes on developing the thought by saying that the priesthood was called into being by ill-defined terrors of the future, by a fear of God not yet cast out by love, by the irksomeness of the duties of self-discipline, by the intolerable oppressiveness of the sense of personal responsibility seeking relief by its transference to others.

Whether all these reasons can produce a bias towards the priesthood in humanity identical with the bias it has unfortunately towards selfishness and sin, we will leave to the author to assert. We think that all those reasons, when well understood and stated properly, dispose humanity towards the priesthood—in fact, create an instinct for it—and that that instinct is a legitimate, noble, generous craving of the human heart; and to say that they create a bias identical with a bias to sin is to show the most supine ignorance of human nature, of the history of mankind, and the true philosophy of history. But let that pass; do all these reasons account for the existence and claims of the priesthood? According to the author himself they do not. For he says himself all this contributed to prepare the way for a transformation of that religion which knows no earthly mediator (page 75).

Well, Dr. Mellor, you have accounted for the preparation of the way, but not for the fact of the existence of the priesthood. When and how did it come into existence? Who were the first who hatched it? Where was it established first? Who were the first Christians they imposed it upon? How did they succeed in persuading them to accept it? Was there any opposition on the part of the Christians who first heard of such a thing? Must not the imposition on any Christian people of a priesthood well organized into a compact body, strong and valiant, and exceedingly sensitive about its rights and claims, have been brought about by a conspiracy of somebody or other? And have you not said—page 74—that to account for the existence of the priesthood by a conspiracy is absurd?

We wish to advert to another theory before closing these remarks. He is not satisfied to have proved more suo that the priesthood has no place in the New Testament; he strives to prove that it was congenial with the whole spirit and nature of it, and the proof, he alleges, is drawn from the words to the Samaritan woman: God is a spirit, and in spirit and truth he must be adored; that is, by having recourse to an invisible church, is the sense he attaches to those words. Of course, if the church is not a visible body, the mountain placed on the top of mountains, we must necessarily do away with the priesthood and sacraments, etc., for they can have no scope in an invisible, abstract thing. But in that case why not abolish Christ the Emmanuel, the God-man?

We could easily enough prove the congeniality of the priesthood with Christianity by showing to the reverend doctor that all the works of God are permanent. That the Incarnation is permanent in the church, and that Christ the High-Priest is permanent in the Catholic priesthood, and discharges all the functions necessary to bring all men to salvation in all time and space, in it, and through it, and so forth. But we fear the reverend gentleman has not philosophy enough to understand us, and we forbear. We will not, however, conclude our remarks without thanking the reverend lecturer for the polite courtesy which he uses towards the Catholic priesthood: first, using the nom de guerre popish whenever he has occasion to make mention of it; and, secondly, for associating it with the priesthood of the English Episcopal Church. In the lecturer’s mind, perhaps, it was to do honor to the Catholic priesthood by confounding it with the other. It is a goodly company, no doubt, and we ought to be highly flattered; but we respectfully decline through excess of modesty such unmerited honor, and would rather keep by ourselves, if it is all the same to the reverend doctor.

Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York, for the Year ending December 31, 1876.

Much has been written on the school question within the past few months; not, however, by opponents of the public schools as they exist here, but by those who pay for them—the taxpayers. Four million dollars for the Department of Public Schools alone is a great load. This tax increases yearly, and no doubt will soon reach the fifth million. The strange enthusiasm that led sects to trample on the religious convictions of their neighbors also led them to make light of the burden that came with the victory. But five millions is terrifying. Why not six? Will there be no end to the increase?

Perhaps the originators of the present school system recognized the moral baseness of severing the instruction which may enable the child to act with judgment from the training which teaches him moral responsibility for the judgment as well as for the action springing from it. They certainly desired to accomplish indirectly the chief end of education by placing the school machinery in the hands of philanthropists who serve without pay or emolument.

The result has been a gradual complication of the common-school system, so as to include technical education, and even the higher branches of learning. Years ago a Free College was successfully engrafted. Next came a Normal College for young ladies. In order to render this latter offshoot permanent, it was deemed necessary to provide the graduates with positions in the common schools. The first step was to raise the standard of proficiency for a teacher’s certificate; the next, to declare that the college diploma was sufficient evidence of qualification, without a public examination by the city superintendent. The report tells us that “under the by-law by which the graduates are licensed to teach without a second examination, the city superintendent and the president of the college have performed their duties in perfect harmony.”

When the mode of testing the qualification of applicants who are not Normal College graduates is discussed, the report states, “a system of rigid examinations in the superintendent’s office precludes the possibility of incompetent persons being foisted upon the system through political or social influence.”

Nor is this the only injury to the common schools. The favored graduates are not to be allowed to work for the low salaries received by primary teachers during the past thirty-five years. An adjustment of salaries is demanded. These primary teachers must receive as large a sum as grammar-school teachers. This simply means an increase in the cost of the common-school system.

If that system, as it now exists here, answer to the purposes for which it was intended, it is high time for that fact to appear. Yet the gentlemen who have charge of the board, from the president down, seem strangely to disagree on most important matters. Without committing ourselves to one side or the other in the discussion, we take a few instances. The grammar schools surely form a very important branch of the system. Here is how the president treats of them in the report: “Our primary-school teachers have a lower rate of pay than our grammar-school teachers, and the primary schools have been used as training places for the better-paid positions in the grammar schools. The plan for uniformity in salaries in these two departments has received serious consideration by a committee of the board, and deserves to be carried out. The majority of our pupils receive all the education they have in the primary, and never enter the grammar schools. This majority deserves the first consideration. Instruction and discipline are no more difficult in one than in the other, and in neither department is the range of knowledge required to be mastered extensive.”

The president asserts that the common-school system only succeeds in furnishing primary instruction to a majority of pupils, and he would seem to imply that the enormous sum of four million dollars should be spent on the primary schools, reserving, of course, a sufficient sum for the Normal College.

Lest his opinions as to the range of knowledge required in a teacher should dishearten those who are toiling through Normal College, he inserts a few lines for their benefit: “An erroneous idea seems to prevail that a primary teacher can dispense with the higher studies. The truth is that this class of teachers more than any other class needs trained faculties and sound judgment, and these are only obtained by the discipline of hard and close study. Normal study and normal practice, to be effective, must be based on the broad foundation of a liberal education.”

Compulsory education the city superintendent pronounces a complete failure, while those who are paid to enforce it consider it successful. In the discussion some interesting facts are brought to light. The city superintendent states: “Many parents, finding that our schools are unable to govern their wilful and unruly children, send them to the parochial schools. In connection with this, it is proper to call the attention of the board to the fact that, while the average attendance of pupils in the schools immediately under its care has, during the past year, increased less than two and a half per cent., in the corporate schools it has increased more than five per cent. It is also of interest to observe that, at the close of 1875, the number of pupils enrolled in the Catholic parochial schools was 30,732, while in 1867 it was only 16,342, showing an increase, in less than ten years, of nearly 90 per cent.; while the increase in the attendance of the pupils in the public schools has, during the same time, been only about 13 per cent. The increase in attendance at the corporate schools, during the same period, has been more than 57 per cent.... The question, therefore, very properly suggests itself, why should a system for compelling pupils to attend the schools be sustained at great expense to the city while there is no effective means of controlling and educating those children after they have been brought into the schools?”

These are but a few of the spots uncovered in this interesting report. Never was the want of harmony in the system more manifest. The iniquity of taxing a people for what it cannot use, and turning over the amount collected to the keeping of gentlemen who care more for pet schemes than for the real object for which the tax was levied, becomes more and more apparent. Higher education, technical education, and compulsory education are battling vigorously for larger shares of the funds; and the battle seems likely to end when the funds are made large enough to satisfy all demands. In the meantime the common-school system is slowly dying out. The primary schools are becoming departments for the employment of normal school graduates, and the grammar schools feeders for the colleges.

A Question of Honor: A Novel. By Christian Reid, author of A Daughter of Bohemia, Valerie Aylmer, Morton House, etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

A well-written novel, thoroughly American in its tone, its incidents, and its characters, and yet availing itself of none of the peculiar “isms” which form the chief stock in trade of our native novelists—shunning alike the “woman question” and the shallow metaphysics of “free thought,” depending for no share of its interest upon suggested immorality or social license, and vivacious in its dialogues without any reliance upon the slang which generally does duty in place of wit—was something for which some sad experience in recent fiction had forbidden us to hope. That Christian Reid is already well known to the novel-reading public is evident from the title-page of A Question of Honor, but that is the only one of her stories which we have read. We find in it everything to praise and nothing to condemn. It is thoroughly well written, to begin with, its descriptions of scenery being particularly artistic and well done. The author attempts nothing ambitious in the way of character-drawing, but her men and women live and have a true individuality. Their souls are not dissected after the manner with which the New England school of fiction has made us too familiar for our comfort, but their manner of life and speech and thought is indicated with a firm, graceful, and un-provincial touch which is extremely pleasant. Altogether, the book belongs to the best class of light literature. There is nothing in it to shock taste or to jar prejudice, and everything in the way of grace of style and purity of thought to recommend it. So much being said by way of praise, we may add that the author, who is evidently a Catholic, has drawn a picture of social life which is, no doubt, true to a reality of a better kind than the ordinary novel of the day aims at, but which is nevertheless un-Christian. Her characters are neither underbred nor vicious; with two exceptions, they are simply a rather pleasing variety of pagans. We do not quarrel with that, considered as a faithful transcript of reality. But we shall find it a cause for real regret if a writer so graceful and possessing so much genuine ability does not some day give us something better than a mere transcript of lives that might have been lived and ideals that might have been attained had the Creator never stooped to the level of his creatures in order to show them the one way in which he would lift them to himself.

Biographical Sketches. By the graduating class of St. Joseph’s Academy, Flushing, L. I. (Translated from the French of Mme. Foa.) New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Translation from the French is a literary exercise which cannot be too highly commended to young students. The publication in book-form of such students’ translations can scarcely be too severely condemned. Young ladies and young men “graduate,” as it is called, at an age ranging from seventeen to twenty or twenty-one. They are then popularly supposed to have “finished” their education, whereas not much more has been done than to set them on the right road of learning and appreciating what real education is. Indeed, if so much has been accomplished, both the pupils and their teachers may be congratulated.

To set these young persons straightway at book-making is a grave mistake—how grave may be gathered from the following specimens of translation which half a glance at the volume before us reveals.

The cover informs us that these are “Gems of Biography.” The first gem is entitled “Michael Angelo Buonarotti.” The opening page introduces us to “an old domestic” and “a young man of fifteen or sixteen” “at the door of the Castle of Caprese.” In page 2 the “young man” of fifteen is a “young interlocutor.” In the same page “to intercept the passage” is used in the sense of to block up the passage. In page 3, “to cover his curiosity” is used in the sense of to hide or conceal his curiosity. In page 4 we have this elegant sentence: “I don’t think that either of you does anything wrong in the place you go.” In page 5 the young man of fifteen, who was an Italian of four centuries back, indulges in this peculiar bit of slang: “One is not perfect at it right away.” A little lower on the same page he says of Michael Angelo: “He is even quicker than I in piecing his man.” “Mr. Francis Graciana” and “Mr. Michael Angelo Buonarotti” occur quite frequently. “Canosse” is always made to do duty for Canossa, “Politien” for Politian or Poliziano, etc. Such phrases as “You are not de trop, Signor Graciana,” constantly occur; but we have no patience to examine further.

Expressions such as these—and they characterize the book, with the exception of “The Mulatto of Murillo,” which runs fairly enough—should not have been allowed to pass in a written composition; but to embalm them in a printed volume is simply an act of cruelty. The sketches in themselves are good for nothing and were not worth the trouble of translating, inasmuch as they have been far better given in English over and over again. “Flushing Series” is the threatening legend on the cover. If this volume be a specimen of what is to come, we trust sincerely that we have seen the last of the “Series.” Catholic education is too serious a subject for trifling.

The Wonders of Prayer: A remarkable record of well authenticated answers to prayer. By Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T. Williams, Publisher.

It is not often that an author is his own publisher. In the present case this may have been a matter of necessity; but it should not have been so, for the volume is interesting enough. It is a collection of anecdotes, the authenticity of which Mr. Williams personally vouches for, showing that God answers in an immediate and direct manner the requests of those who in faith ask him for temporal blessings. “They demonstrate,” says the author, “to a wonderful degree the immediate practical ways of the Lord with his children in this world; that he is far nearer and more intimate with their plans and pursuits than it is possible for them to realize.” We have no disposition to scoff at the stories related by Mr. Williams, although the style in which they are told often provokes one to mirth. There is but one true faith in the world, but there are many people who hold more or less of this faith without knowing it. “Souffrons toutes les religions, puisque Dieu les souffre,” said Fénelon; and our Holy Father, the Pope, has not unfrequently expressed his affection as well as his pity for good Protestants. No doubt many of the people who are spoken of in this book were very good Protestants. And we are glad to observe in it this passage: “The present is the age of miracles as well as the past. Fully as wonderful things have been and are constantly being done this day by our unseen Lord as in the days of old when he walked in the sight of his disciples.”

The Little Pearls; or, Gems of Virtue. Translated by Mrs. Kate E. Hughes. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Will be found very entertaining and instructive reading for our young folks, and we recommend it as suitable for a present at the distribution of school prizes. We think, however, that the name of the writer whose work is translated should have appeared on the title-page.

Beside the Western Sea: A Collection of Poems. By Harriet M. Skidmore (“Marie”). New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

This gifted lady has done well to collect her scattered poems into a volume. They are chiefly of a devotional character, and, though unequal, none of them are without merit, some of a very marked kind. She has the gift of song, and she sings easily and gracefully on almost any subject. The following, though one of the shortest and least ambitious of the collection, strikes us as a very sweet poem, and affords a fair idea of the author’s powers. Its title is “The Mist”:

“I watched the folding of a soft white wing
Above the city’s heart;
I saw the mist its silent shadows fling
O’er thronged and busy mart.
Softly it glided through the Golden Gate
And up the shining bay,
Calmly it lingered on the hills, to wait
The dying of the day.
Like the white ashes of the sunset fire,
It lay within the West,
Then onward crept above the lofty spire,
In nimbus-wreaths to rest.
It spread anon—its fleecy clouds unrolled,
And floated gently down;
And thus I saw that silent wing enfold
The Babel-throated town.
A spell was laid on restless life and din,
That bade its tumult cease;
A veil was flung o’er squalor, woe, and sin,
Of purity and peace.
And dreaming hearts, so hallowed by the mist,
So freed from grosser leaven,
In the soft chime of vesper bells could list
Sweet, echoed tones of heaven;

Could see, enraptured, when the starlight came,

With lustre soft and pale,
A sacred city crowned with 'ring of flame,’
Beneath her misty veil.”

Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome. By R. H. Busk, author of Sagas from the Far East, etc. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1877.

These are very graceful and interesting legends. They furnish glimpses that could not otherwise be well obtained of the peculiar constitution, habits of mind and thought, of the common people in and about Rome. For the most part they are such as have not hitherto found their way into literature, being taken as they fell from the lips of narrators to whom they had been household words, handed down from one generation to another. The task of eliciting them seems to have been no easy one, but its results are pleasant enough to earn honest gratitude for the years of labor which have been spent in gaining them. The tales themselves range under four categories, concerning which the author notes that the Romans are rigidly exact in adhering to, never by any chance giving a fairy-tale if asked for a legend, or a fairy-tale if inquired of concerning ghosts. They comprise legends; ghost-stories and local and family traditions; fairy tales and ciarpe, or gossip. The book is particularly rich in stories of St. Philip Neri.

Philip Nolan’s Friends: A story of the change of Western Empire. By Edward E. Hale. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.

This volume traces the course of a journey into the heart of the great South-west at the beginning of the present century. This tract was still the border-land of the Aztec kings. Throughout its vast extent Spanish heroes had wasted their lives in ignis-fatuus searches. Rich discoveries of gold did not reward their diligence, and they resigned so inhospitable a region to a new order of pioneers. Even to this day the names of places bear token that the zeal of the Spanish missionaries was in no way inferior to that of the sons of Loyola along the St. Lawrence. Such was their indomitable perseverance that twenty-seven missions had been established in this region previous to 1626, and a century later the missionary spirit carried the Gospel among the Apaches, Moquis, and Navajoes.

The heroine’s escort through this terra incognita to Americans is ample, the weather delightful, and we do not care to question the adequacy of the motive for the expedition. Nor does it matter that we are led to believe that Philip Nolan possesses a sterling character, though what he says or does, or what apparent influence he has over the course of events, would hardly justify this conclusion.

The novel is readable, but not by any means artistic. The author lacks the power to create a character that can think and act like a human being. He wishes us to believe his heroine possesses beauty, sensibility, and vivacity; but he lacks the subtle power to invent actions and conversations which impress individuality, and we gather our notions of the lady more from his suggestions than from the movement of the story. This seems to be the author’s weakness: his figures act and he suggests the motives and impulses.

His male characters miss no opportunity to abuse the missionaries. They regard the “black-gowns” as the cause of Indian rascality and Spanish treachery. Ill-luck is always traced to them, and the torrents of abuse poured on the servants of God lend the only touches of nature that may be found in the author’s passive figures. Of course these outbursts of hatred reveal the true character of the adventurers. They are border ruffians.

The book is partly historical. It treats of a transition period. The allegiance of the inhabitants had suffered a violent dissolution. A border element existed, mainly recruited from the United States. This element was of service in manufacturing public opinion, and, in this way, might have hastened the transfer of the Louisiana tract to its natural owner, the United States. We are inclined to the opinion that Southern interests would have brought about the transfer without the assistance of European complications or scenes of border treachery.

Reply to the Hon. R. W. Thompson, Secretary of the Navy, addressed to the American People. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., of the Society of Jesus. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

In this pamphlet of eighty-six pages Father Weninger has undertaken the almost unnecessary task of replying to Mr. Thompson’s book, The Papacy and the Civil Power. If there is anything in that book to refute, it refutes itself. Mr. Thompson, however, over and above the rashness of attempting such a book at all, was rash enough to quote Father Weninger. The natural result is the present pamphlet. The pamphlet is addressed to “the American people.” If the American people take it up, they will be rewarded by some lively reading. The reverend author says at the conclusion: “We have handled our adversary throughout the whole discourse without gloves.” No reader of the pamphlet will be inclined to dispute that statement.

The Pearl among the Virtues; or, Words of Advice to Christian Youth. By P. A. De Doss, S.J. Translated from the original German by a Catholic priest. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

This work, written by one of the Jesuit Fathers banished from Germany, is an excellent treatise on the angelic virtue, which he considers from almost every point of view in a solid, instructive, and highly interesting manner. No more useful book could be placed in the hands of the youth of either sex.

God the Teacher of Mankind: A Plain, Comprehensive Explanation Of Christian Doctrine. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis: Benziger Brothers. 1877.

We have received advance sheets of this new and most interesting work by the indefatigable Redemptorist father to whom Catholics in this country are so much indebted for works that are really useful as well as popular. The book is too important in itself and on too important a subject to be dismissed with a hasty notice. We shall return to it later.

Edmondo: A Sketch of Roman Manners and Customs. By Rev. Fr. Antonio Bresciani, S.J., author of The Jew of Verona, etc., etc. Translated from the Italian. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1877.

This is a powerfully-written story that cannot but excite the liveliest interest on account of its faithful and beautiful description of Roman scenery and vivid delineation of Roman life and customs.

The translation is well rendered, but we do not approve of the omission of two chapters from the writings of such an author as the learned Bresciani. Such men do not write anything that can be cast aside without loss to their readers and admirers.

Dora. By Julia Kavanagh.

Bessie:

Silvia. By the same author. D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

We have not read any one of these three stories, and can only acknowledge their receipt. From others that we have read by the same author we think it safe to recommend these to persons who are fond of novels. Julia Kavanagh is, to our thinking, one of the purest, most graceful, and most interesting story-writers of the day.

The Catholic Keepsake. A gift-book for all seasons. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

The best encomium we can bestow on this collection is to say that it is worthy of its name. The numerous sketches and stories are short, entertaining, and very agreeably written, even though a little ancient.

Bessy; Or, the Fatal Consequence of Telling Lies. By the author of The Rat-Pond; or, The Effects of Disobedience. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1877.

A plain, simple story for children, and, as the title designates, with a moral attached.

The Story of Felice. By Esmeralda Boyle. London: Trübner & Co. 1873.

Songs of the Land and Sea. By Esmeralda Boyle. New York: E. J. Hale & Son. 1875.

In these poems Miss Boyle displays much true poetic feeling and a gift of melodious utterance.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 150.—SEPTEMBER, 1877.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE.

The number of versified translations of Greek and Latin poets which the English presses continually put forth must be a never-ending surprise to the practical American mind—if, that is to say, the practical mind ever thinks of so manifestly useless and absurd a thing at all. Authors are supposed to write and publishers to print for the purpose of making money; that either should work to any other end is a proposition which to the practical mind is simply bewildering. Yet one would think there can be but little money in laboriously turning into English a quantity of school-books which no one reads except at school, and whose only value is in their being in a foreign tongue. Original poetry is bad enough; the verdict of the practical mind on that point is pretty apt to be one with the view taken by Heine’s rich uncle, to whom the poet, at the height of his fame, was but a Dummkopf (may not the uncle, alas! have been right?); but poetry at second hand, the “old clo’” of the Muses, Apollo’s second table, the cold victual of Parnassus, a disaerated Helicon—the practical mind can only gasp at the notion (which, by the way, strikes it in quite another shape than the poetical one we have chosen to give it, but just as effectively) and seek to renew its faith in human nature over the credit column of its ledger.

Another class of minds, too, not quite so practical—a class that has been at college, we will say, that knows Virgil and Horace by name, or even by certain quotations (arma virumque, pallida mors pulsat, atra cura, etc.), and can read Greek letters at sight, but on the whole thinks Huxley a greater force in the world to-day than Homer—the cultured class, in short, about which some of our newspapers make so much to-do—can understand why the great classic poets should be turned into English verse (for the benefit of those who have not been at college), but not at all why such versions should be multiplied. If you want Virgil in an English dress, there’s your Dryden; or Homer, there’s Pope—say our person of culture is from an extreme northern latitude, geographically or mentally, he will perhaps put Chapman here, and pooh-pooh Pope with a reference to Bentley. Do you desire Horace in the vulgar, there’s good old Francis—pray, what better do you ask? What better, indeed, can you expect to get? Just look at your Cyclopædia Septentrionalis and see what it tells you! So what is the use or the meaning, what is the reason of being, of your Theodore Martins and your Coningtons, your Morrises and Cranches? What is there to be had of them all but vanity and vexation of spirit, and time and money mislaid?

Somewhat in that way, we take it, a good many folks, even of the book-buying, nay, of the book-reading, sort, must feel over every fresh announcement of a translation of one or other of the favorite classic poets. And as the supply of such things is in the long run, by a beneficent law of nature, tempered to the demand, and the mind of the book-buying many reacts upon, and often rules, the ardor of the book-making few—“book” in Lamb’s sense, be it understood—it is not surprising that the list of American translators should be of the scantiest. Mr. Cranch’s bold venture of last year—a blank-verse rendering of the Æneid—had few precursors or precedents. There is Mumford’s blank-verse Homer, which Professor Felton praised, and Professor Arnold, strange to say, seems not to have seen; and Mr. Bryant’s blank-verse Homer, which everybody praised and a smaller number read. Then, some years since, a Philadelphian gentleman put forth still another version of the Iliad in what he said was English verse, although the precise metre of such lines as

“For Agamemnon insulted Chryses”;
“But Agamemnon was much displeased”;
“Wounded is Diomed, Tydeus’ son,
Ulysses, also, and Agamemnon.”

unless it be hexameter—everything you cannot scan in English verse is hexameter, just as everything you cannot parse in Greek is second aorist—we have been unable to determine. We have heard, also, of a version of Horace by a professor in some Southern university, but this we have not seen. Are there any others? Mr. E. C. Stedman ten years ago printed specimens of a projected translation of Theocritus, in English hexameters, of considerable merit; but his reception does not seem to have encouraged him to go on. And that is all, a little Spartan band of four or five to oppose to the great host of British translators from Phaer to Morris. The practical mind may feel reassured of its country.

It is true that these English versions are often reprinted here; but it is only the chiefs of the army—those who shine pre-eminent among their fellows,

“sicut inter ignes

Luna minores,”

or who are already known to fame for triumphs in other fields. Prof. Conington made something of a critical furor by the bold breaking away from rule and precedent in his choice of a metre, though Dr. Maginn, in his Homeric ballads, had given him the hint. In like manner our booksellers have reprinted and our book-buyers bought Mr. Morris’ Æneid (we beg his pardon—Æneids), not because it was a new translation of Virgil, but because it was a new work of the latest popular poet; just as they printed and bought Mr. Bryant’s Homer because it was the latest work of our oldest living poet, as they printed and bought Lord Derby’s Iliad because it was the work of a nobleman, and not only that, but of a leading European statesman, and therefore, in both aspects, a very surprising and desirable thing for our people, who have never been used to connect that sort of accomplishment with the idea they had formed of a nobleman, still less with their notion of a statesman. But we did not reprint or buy Mr. Worsley’s, or Prof. Newman’s, or Prof. Blackie’s, or Mr. Wright’s Homer; and even if we printed, it is to be feared we did not extensively buy, Mr. Cranch’s Æneid, although in the way of buying English Æneids we might have done worse. Why? Not, certainly, because any of the versions named lacked merit, but because they appealed to us on their merits simply, without any outside helps to popularity, and we would none of them. The fact is, we do not care in the least for Homer or Virgil, and we care a great deal for Morris and Bryant—that is to say, while they are topics of talk; and it is one of the social duties, which persons of culture would die almost sooner than fail in, to have something, or even nothing, to say about the ordained subjects of fashionable gossip.

But in England it is otherwise. There is in that country a large class always to be counted on to buy any translation of a favorite classic which has successfully run the gauntlet of the reviews. This class is made up of diverse elements. First, the translators themselves, who in England form no inconsiderable percentage of the literary public; for every other graduate of either university who has not been a stroke-oar—that is honor enough to win or give—seems to feel within him a sacred void unfilled, a mysterious yearning unsatisfied, a clamorous duty unperformed, until he has translated some classic author in whole or in part. Every translator, of course, buys the publications of every other translator to chuckle over his failures or—let us do them justice—to applaud heartily and generously the happy dexterity which conquers a difficult passage. Then, too, even scholars who have Homer and Horace at their fingers’ ends, who think in Latin and dream in Greek, who dare to take liberties with the digamma and speak disrespectfully of the second aorist—even they to whom the best translation of a classic is as corked claret? or skim-milk—may still buy Prof. Conington’s Æneid or Lord Lytton’s Horace for a better reason than the pleasure of finding fault with it. They know, none better, that, as the former puts it, a translation by a competent hand is itself an “embodied criticism” and commentary; and even scholars, after twenty centuries or so of criticism and commentary, and even of mutual vituperation, have not yet quite made up their minds as to the meaning, or at least the shades of meaning, straight through of any poet of antiquity. This is not to say that we have not here, too, scholars who might buy a translation for the same reason; but in neither country, perhaps, are there so many as to be much of a stand-by in themselves.

But the mainstay of the English translator is that sort of fashionable sentiment in favor of classical learning necessarily fostered in a country where the university is a working element and influence in political, social, and literary life. This sentiment is not so powerful or wide-spread as it once was; as it was, let us say, when a couplet made Mr. Addison a secretary of state, or a burlesque made Mr. Montague a minister and Mr. Prior an ambassador—an improvement still on the age when Sir Christopher Hatton danced himself into the chancellorship. But it is still powerful; and the university is still such a force in English life as it never has been, as it probably never will be, here. The Oxford and Cambridge debating clubs used to be regularly looked to, and are still, perhaps, now and again beaten up, by experienced huntsmen for embryo statesmen, much as the metropolitan manager will scour the provincial stage for an undiscovered star. University men edit the leading organs of public opinion; university men fill the desks in Downing Street and the Parliamentary benches in Westminster Hall; university men yawn day after day in the club-windows of Pall Mall, and night after night in the dancing and supper rooms of Belgravia—no, not the supper-rooms; that is, perhaps, the one spot of the fashionable world where young England forgets to yawn. Like enough, the learning of many of these sages is no deeper than the lore of our own pundits from Yale and Harvard; and not a few of them, no doubt, would be far more at home criticising the boat-race in the Fifth Æneid (the contestants in which they would probably characterize, in their delightful idiom, as “duffers”) than construing the Latin it is told in. Such is the proud result of modern university education in a free and enlightened Anglo-Saxon community. Nevertheless, though the university may not actually give learning, it creates a sentiment in favor of learning; it develops almost unconsciously a taste for it. One may say that it is next to impossible for any man to go through college without taking in some sense of classical culture—through the pores, as it were—which shall ever after give him a feeling of companionship, a kind of Freemasonry, with authors he could never read. To have lived among books, in an atmosphere of books, is itself in some sort an education.

Now, with this feeling for learning diffused throughout a great nation, showing itself in its chief organs of public opinion, in its selection of public officers, and even to some extent in its popular elections, and centring above all in a great city, the headquarters of all the social, political, and literary activity of the nation—its book-making, book-branding, book-buying centre—we come to see why translations from the classics should have more vogue across the water than with us. If a cabinet minister choose to beguile his leisure by turning Aristophanes into English, it is but fit that society, before having him in to dinner, should know something about it, if only to avoid such a slip as is told of Catalani. The prima donna was seated, as a great compliment, next to Goethe at a state dinner, but not knowing the divine Wolfgang—or, indeed, much of anything but some operatic scores—gave her mind to the potage rather than to the poet. A friend nudged her: “Why do you not talk to M. Goethe?” “I don’t know him, and he’s stupid.” “What! not know M. Goethe, the celebrated author of the Sorrows of Werther?” “The Sorrows of Werther! Ah! M. Goethe,” cried the diva with empressement, turning to the great man, “how can I ever thank you enough for your charming Sorrows of Werther! I never laughed so much at anything in my life.” She had seen a parody of that immortal work in a farce at Paris. Here, when our cabinet minister lets loose his intellectual surplus on exposures of Popery, society runs no great risk. Everybody can talk a little Popery—an easier subject, on the whole, to talk or write about than Aristophanes; and one knows pretty well what our cabinet minister’s book is about without the fatigue of failing to read it.

Of the feeling we have mentioned the taste for quotation in Parliamentary debate is a good test. An apt illustration from Horace or Virgil had at one time almost the force of an argument. “Pitt,” says the late Lord Lytton, in the excellent preface to his unrhymed version of Horace’s Odes, “is said never to have more carried away the applause of the House of Commons than when, likening England—then engaged in a war tasking all her resources—to that image of Rome which Horace has placed in the mouth of Hannibal, he exclaimed:

“'Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damna, per cœdes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro.’”[121]

Pitt, indeed, is famous for such felicities. In his speech on resigning the chancellorship in 1782, after claiming “to have used his best endeavors to fulfil with integrity every official engagement,” he continued: “And with this consolation, the loss of power, sir, and the loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise, I trust I shall soon be able to forget.”

“Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit
Pennas, resigno quæ dedit ...
... probamque
Pauperiem sine dote quæro.”[122]

Sir Robert Walpole had worse luck in attempting a like feat on his retirement, made not so gracefully in the shadow of a threatened impeachment.

“Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ,”[123]

he quoted, and was at once taken up by his rival, Pulteney, who offered to bet him a guinea that the line read Nulla pallescere culpa. Walpole lost, and, tossing the coin to Pulteney, the latter, before pocketing it, held it up to the House with the grim remark: “It is the first money I have received from the treasury for many years, and it shall be the last.”

It may well be that there is less of this sort of thing nowadays, when Parliamentary illustrations, among the younger members at least, seem to be drawn more extensively from natural history than from ancient poetry. Yet it is but a few years since Mr. Gladstone, on going out of office, created a sensation in his turn by his application of Virgil’s fine line,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.”[124]

We cannot very well imagine a leading Congressman summoning Horace to enforce his argument, say, on the vital necessity to the nation of repealing the Seventh Commandment until such time as his constituents at Podunk can get enough of their neighbors’ currency to make resumption and patriotism convertible terms. Not only would he be doubtful of being understood, but he would be awed by that practical-minded public opinion at home which severely discourages in its chosen representatives such frivolities as unknown tongues. He would see behind the Speaker’s desk the grim phantom of the honest Granger transfixing him with a spectral finger, and asking him in hollow tones if he was sent to Congress to talk gibberish or to get that little appropriation; he would see the still more appalling phantom of the local editor grimly sharpening his quill and squaring himself for another of those savagely sarcastic articles about our erudite Congressman, who spends his time—the time we pay for, etc.—muddling his brains—the few brains, etc.—over obsolete rubbish in the Congressional Library, while he neglects his constituents’ interests and allows that little bill, etc., etc. He sees all this, and, instead of Horace, he quotes Josh Billings, and everybody is satisfied.

Now, this is not meant to the dispraise of either the Congressman or his constituents, but only to show that here political is divided from literary life in a way quite unknown in England. The scholar in politics is a fond illusion of youthful enthusiasm. Our politicians do not write; our literary folks do not go to Congress. A stray editor, to be sure, now and then gets in, tumbling over, as it were, from the Reporters’ Gallery, or a flourish is made of sending Mr. Motley or Prof. Lowell minister to some foreign court; but these are spasmodic exceptions, and usually result in a way to confirm the rule. We have no counterparts to Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mr. Lowe, or Sir George Cornewall Lewis, or the Duke of Argyle. Perhaps, however, a new era is dawning with the present Secretary of the Navy, who spells his literature with a “P.”

We have said enough—the reader may think more than enough—to show why translations from the classics should flourish better in England than here, and also, by implication at least, why of all classic authors, with the one exception of Homer, Horace and Virgil should most have taken the translators’ attention. From one or other of these are all the Parliamentary quotations we have given; and it is indeed, we believe, considered what our English friends call “bad form” to quote in debate any other Latin or Greek. The cause of this popularity it is easy to see. Horace and Virgil, in the usual college curriculum, are put into the student’s hands just as he has got over his initial struggles with the language, and his mind is a little freed to feel some of the beauties as well as the difficulties of the author—to know that the rose has fragrance as well as thorns. Homer, on the contrary, from his comparative ease, comes much earlier in the Greek course, and becomes so much the more distasteful to the learner as Greek is harder than Latin; its very letters are aliens to his eyes, its alphabet is a place of briers and brambles. It is hard to get over these early dislikes. St. Augustine confesses a hatred for Homer thus implanted in his school-days which he could never overcome, while he declares Virgil to be the greatest and most glorious of poets—a censure echoed by Voltaire, who pronounced the Æneid, le plus beau monument qui nous reste de toute l’antiquité, and asserts that if Homer produced Virgil, it was his finest work.

Both in Virgil and Horace there is much to captivate a youthful mind and everything to keep the affections won. The story of the Æneid is not only full of life and color and motion, with plenty of fighting, which all boys love of course, but, despite its later-discovered want of a reasonable hero or heroine, its episodes—the Trojan horse and the sharp street-fight in fallen Ilium, the mysterious journey through the shades under a spectral moon, the races in the Fifth Book, the midnight scout of Nisus and Euryalus, the plucky young Iulus fleshing his maiden shafts at the siege in Book Ninth, the gallant onset and tragic fate of the young champions Lausus and Pallas—all are apt to take the boyish imagination; and in older years the haunting melody of the verse, the pensive grace that suffuses the telling of the story, renew and rivet the early charm.

Horace, too, is full of matter that even boyhood can taste and manhood never tires of. The lovely bits of rural landscape scattered like so many cabinet pictures through the odes—the sweltering cattle standing knee-deep under the oak-boughs in the pool of Bandusia, the bickering, pine-arched rivulet by whose side Dellius takes his nooning; the sunny slopes of Lucretilis dotted with sheep; the romantic beauty of the Happy Isles—do we not all recall the delight we felt when these enchanting little sketches first smiled on us from the weary drudgery of Tacitus and Thucydides like vistas of fresh meadow and woodland and cascade caught by the wayfarer from the hot and dusty highway? We did not so well relish then, in that out-door time of life, the warm little interiors that contrast and set off these: the glowing fire-side piled high with logs, made merry with old Falernian, and laugh and joke and friendly talk, while the rain beats upon the roof and the snow whirls about Soracte, and, drawing closer to the cheery blaze, we hug ourselves in the “tumultuous privacy of storm”; the jolly dinner-parties, where we help to quiz Quinctius for his gravity or chaff that harebrain Telephus out of his affectation of wisdom; the more sober feasts with Mæcenas or Virgil at the little Sabine Farm—but these, too, we soon get to know, and linger over them with fond familiarity. Then, too, we win to the secret of that genial though pagan philosophy which comes home to the “business and bosoms” of all of us, and whose precepts are so pithily expressed we cannot forget them if we would: that there is a time when folly is the truest wisdom; that he alone is happy who is content with little; that a wise man takes care of the present and lets the future take care of itself, because, as Cowley puts it,

“When to future years thou extend’st thy cares,

Thou dealest in other men’s affairs”;

that we must pluck the blossom of to-day, or we may never have a chance at the morrow’s.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying,”

says Herrick, a later Horace. As we grow older and graver his sympathetic companionship keeps pace with us still, and in his deeper tones there are hints which even Christian civilization need not disdain to add to its scheme of a lofty and noble life.

So it is that England for three centuries back—indeed, ever since she began to have a literature to house them in—has been trying to naturalize and domesticate these Roman poets. In this, however, Virgil had nearly a century the start of Horace, owing, no doubt, to the nature of his great work, which appealed to the romantic impulses of that early time. Indeed, long before either the Æneid or the Iliad was generally known in Europe, the stories of both had been made over into the form of romances: the former by Guillaume de Roy in French, the latter by Guido de Colonna in Spanish. De Roy’s Livre d’Eneidos, translated into English and printed by Caxton, “no more resembles Virgil,” cries the good Bishop of Dunkeld wrathfully, “than the devil does St. Austin.” It was probably to clear the fair fame of his beloved poet that the bishop brought out his own quaint and spirited Scotch version in 1513. The first complete English translation came out in 1558; but in the previous year appeared the Second and Fourth Books, done into blank verse by the Earl of Surrey, notable as the first-known blank verse in the language, unless we are to take as such the unrhymed, alliterative metre used by Longland in The Vision of Piers Ploughman. It is thought to have been Surrey’s design, had he lived, to translate the remaining books. Had he done so, he would have added an ornament to our literature.

As it is, the distinction of giving the first full translation of the Æneid to the language rests with a Welshman—Dr. Thomas Phaer. He himself, however, did only the first nine books and part of the Tenth; when dying, the work was taken in hand and finished, with the Thirteenth or supplementary book of Maffeo Veggio, by another physician, Dr. Thomas Twynne. English doctors then and afterwards seem to have had a propension towards the Muse. Dr. Borde, Dr. Thomas Campion (“Sweet Master Campion”), and Dr. Thomas Lodge—they seem to have had a propensity to be named Thomas also—were only the first of a long line of tuneful leeches, ending with our own Drs. Holmes and Joyce. Is there any occult connection between physic and Parnassus, between rhyme and rhubarb, between poetry and pills? and is Castaly a medicinal spring? Phaer’s version, which is printed in black-letter, is in rhymed fourteen-syllable verse, or “long Alexandrines”—a metre which Chapman afterwards took for his Homer, and to which Mr. Morris, the latest translator of the Æneid, has reverted.

The long Alexandrine has perhaps as much right as any to be called the English national metre in the sense in which we call the Saturnian verse the national metre of the Latins. Chaucer took his heroic couplet from the Italian or French, and Surrey, no doubt, had from the same source, or perhaps the Spanish, the hint for his blank verse. A curious parallel might be drawn between Surrey and Ennius, who, like him, introduced a new or “strange metre—the Greek hexameter—and, like him, by doing so revolutionized the versification of his country. Another point in common is that each has been reproached for his action. Ascham impliedly finds fault with Surrey because he did not choose hexameters or unrhymed Alexandrines instead of his unrhymed verse of ten or eleven syllables; and certain of those dreadful German scholars, who know everything and a few things besides, assure us that Ennius dealt a fatal blow to Latin poetry when he foisted on it a metre unsuited to its genius. One can hardly help speculating on the result had Virgil had to content himself with the horridus numerus Saturnius as the vehicle of his tenderness and elegance, or if Hamlet had had to soliloquize in the metre of Sternhold and Hopkins. Would the rude instrument have cramped the player, or would the genius of the player have elevated the instrument? As Macaulay points out, the old nursery line,

“The queen is in her parlor eating bread and honey,”

is a perfect Saturnian verse on Terence’s model:

“Dăbūnt mălūm Mĕtēllī Nævĭō pŏētæ.”

How would Mr. Gladstone’s menace,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,”

have sounded in that shape? Should we recognize, do you think, those

“Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,”

done up in long Alexandrines or in such hexameters as those of Master Abraham Fraunce, which moved Ben Jonson to dub him a fool:

“Now had fiery Phlegon his dayes revolution ended,

And his snoring snout with salt waves all to be-washed,”

or even in Sidney’s or Spenser’s, which were, in truth, little better? No doubt Virgil and Shakspere, being great poets, would have subdued what they worked in to their own artistic uses. Yet all the same let us be thankful to the humbler artisans who furnished to their hands pipes fit for them to play on, and to make such music as the world shall never tire of hearing. It should be added that the likeness between the English and the Latin reformer does not extend to the degree of refinement attained by each. In this respect Surrey is much the more advanced. Ennius never got over the barbarism of excessive alliteration which seems to mark the early metrical efforts of all peoples.

“Sicut si quando vincleis venatica velox”;

“Sicut fortis equus spatio qui forte supremo”;

“Quai neque Dardaneis campeis potuere perire

Nec cum capta capei, nec cum combusta cremari.”

The last passage Virgil copied, as he did many others, and it is instructive to see how his more polished taste tones down his predecessor’s jingle:

¸ “Num Sigæis occumbere campis,
Num capti potuere capi? num incensa cremavit
Troja viros?”[125]

Surrey’s blank verse has the quaintness of his age, but not its defects of taste. Martial, writing about two centuries after Ennius, sneers at him, much as Ennius had sneered at his predecessor, Nævius—he who lamented that Latin poetry was to die with him!

“Ennius est lectus, salvo tibi Roma Marone.”[126]

Pope, writing nearly the same length of time after Surrey, has only praise for him: “Surrey, the Grenville of a former age“—at least, Pope meant it for praise.”

To return to Phaer. It may be of interest to the reader to contrast the manner of the earliest and latest English translators of the Æneid. Venus’ admonition to Æneas (ii. 607) is thus given by the Welsh doctor:

“Then to thy parent’s hest take heede, dread not, my mind obey:

In yonder place where stones from stones and bildings huge to sway

Thou seest, and mixt with dust and smoke thicke stremes of reekings rise,

Himselfe the god Neptune that side doth furne in wonders wise:

With forke three tinde the wall vproots, foundations allto shakes;

And qvite from vnder soile the towne, with ground-works all uprakes.

On yonder side with Furies most, dame Juno fiercely stands,

The gates she keeps, and from the ships the Greekes, her friendly bands,

In armour girt she calles.

Lo! there againe where Pallas sits, on fortes and castle-towres,

With Gorgon’s eyes, in lightning cloudes enclosed, grim she lowres,

The father-god himself to Greekes their mightes and courage steres,

Himselfe against the Troyan blood both gods and armour reres.

Betake thee to thy flight, my sonne, thy labours’ ende procure,

I will thee never faile, but thee to resting-place assure.

She said, and through the darke night shade herselfe she drew from sight;

Appeare the grisly faces then, Troyes en’mies vgly dight.”

Mr. Morris gives it thus:

“And look to it no more afeard to be

Of what I bid, nor evermore thy mother’s word disown.

There where thou seest the great walls cleft and stone turn off from stone,

And seest the waves of smoke go by with mingled dust-cloud rolled,

There Neptune shakes the walls and stirs the foundings from their hold

With mighty trident, tumbling down the city from its base.

There by the Scæan gates again hath bitter Juno place

The first of all, and wild and mad, herself begirt with steel,

Calls up her fellows from the ships.

Look back! Tritonian Pallas broods o’er topmost burg on high,

All flashing bright with Gorgon grim from out her stormy sky;

The very Father hearteneth on, and stays with happy might

The Danaans, crying on the gods against the Dardan fight.

Snatch flight, O son, whiles yet thou mayst, and let thy toil be o’er;

I by thy side will bring thee safe unto thy father’s door.

“She spake, and hid herself away where thickest darkness poured.

Then dreadful images show forth, great godheads are abroad,

The very haters of our Troy.”

The half-lines respond to the imperfect verses in Virgil, which, in the fashion of the Chinese tailor, both Mr. Morris and his forerunner conscientiously copy. Phaer has other oddities, such as “Sybly” for Sibylla, “lymbo” for Hades, “Dei Phobus” for Deiphobus, and “Duke Æneas”; while every book is wound up with a Deo Gratias by way of colophon. Let us hope it was not too fervently echoed by his readers. Indeed, Phaer’s version is better than its fame.

“After the associated labors of Phaer and Twynne,” says Warton in his History of English Poetry, “it is hard to say what could induce Richard Stanihurst, a native of Dublin, to translate the first four books of the Æneid into English hexameters.” The remark shows less than the wonted perspicuity of the historian of English poetry. What induces any translation, except the belief (the fond belief!) that the work it aims to do has not yet been done? Master Stanihurst, like many other learned men then and since, was firmly persuaded that the hexameter was your only measure for a translation of Virgil. But there are hexameters and hexameters, and Master Stanihurst’s were unluckily of the other sort. A poet who proclaims his intention to “chaunt manhood and Garboiles,” and gives us

“With tentive list’ning each wight was settled in hark’ning”

for

“Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant,”

or

“You bid me, ô princesse, to scarifie a festered old sore”

as an equivalent for

“Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”

must be content with “audience fit though few.” Sir Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and a few other choice spirits, all bitten with the same flea, patted poor Stanihurst on the back and told him that what Nash called “his [and their] foul, lumbring, boisterous, wallowing measures” had “enriched and polished their native tongue.” But the rest of the world laughed with Nash, and may still for that matter; for Stanihurst’s version is full of conceits even droller than Phaer’s. “Bedlamite” for furiatâ mente, “Dandiprat hop-thumb” for parvulus, Jupiter “bussing his pretty, prating parrot”—i.e., Venus—and Priam girding on his sword Morglay, are some of them. The last shows how the glamour of the Gothic romances, in which Virgil figured sometimes as a magician—the Sortes Virgilianæ long outlived their origin—still hung about even the learned, of whom Stanihurst was indisputably one— “eruditissimus ille nobilis” Camden calls him. It may be interesting to add that he was a Catholic, a friend of Campion the martyr, and died in exile because of it.

Stanihurst seems to have played the part of horrible example to all after-translators; for although Surrey’s metre has been repeatedly used, and Phaer’s of late by Mr. Morris, and we might add by Prof. Conington (for his octosyllabic verse is but a variation of the Alexandrine, which skipped capriciously from twelve syllables to sixteen[127]), the hexameter has never again, so far as we know, been applied to rendering the Æneid. Yet the measure which in English goes by that name seems far better adapted, pace Mr. Arnold, to the pensive grace of Virgil than to the grave majesty of Homer. It may be true, as scholars contend, that it by no means reproduces the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter, and it may be equally true, as other scholars tell us, that we have no conception of what was the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter on the Greek or Roman ear—though the second objection might, in malicious hands, prove an embarrassment for the first. Yet as we read Homer and Virgil there is no doubt that hexameters can be—indeed, that such have been—constructed which do go far to reproduce the effect of Homer and Virgil, according to the modern reading, upon the modern ear. Grant that this is an entirely wrong effect; that either Homer or Virgil, hearing his verses read in modern fashion, would be sure to clap hands to ear, and cry out in an agony with Martial:

“Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus;

Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus”;[128]

it is yet the only effect we are ever likely to get until the day of judgment; and what are you going to do about it? Of course it is hopeless to try to imitate Homer’s sonorous harmonies—the καλὰ τὰ Ὁμήρον ἔπη, as Maximus Tyrius calls them, the lovely Homeric words—the πολυφλοίς βοιο θαλάσσης and ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. It is not in ours or any other tongue but Homer’s own to do it. But Mr. Arnold has shown that we can imitate afar off his rhythm and metrical effect, and why should we not do that? If anybody can give us hexameters that please the English ear and make it fancy, without being conscious of too much elongation, that it is listening to the faintest echo of Homer’s mighty lyre or Virgil’s silver string, why, let us have them, prithee, and a fico for the grammarians.

In this desultory review of Virgilian translators we mean to confine ourselves to the Æneid; but we may say in passing that the Eclogues were, about 1587, put into unrhymed Alexandrines by Abraham Fleming, who thus nearly anticipated the metre Prof. Newman, after much experimenting, hit on as the proper one to render Homer, and which, as Prof. Marsh says, has the disadvantage (or the merit?) to American ears of suggesting our own epic strain of Yankee Doodle. Fleming, however, as will be seen from the following quotation, taken from the beginning of his Fourth Eclogue, only dropped into our national music occasionally:

“O Muses of Sicilian ile, let’s greater matters singe!

Shrubs, groves, and bushes lowe delight and please not every man.

If we do singe of woods, the woods be worthy of a consul.”

While Virgil was thus engrossing the attention of Elizabethan scholars Horace lay comparatively neglected, although it was an era of translation, as transitional periods in the literature of a country are apt to be. Nearly all the Latin poets then extant were done into English before the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Greek series began sonorously with Chapman’s Homer soon after. Even that most perfect of all actual or possible poets, as her courtiers called her—Queen Elizabeth—tried her hand at it in a translation of part of the Hercules Œteus of Seneca. But no complete version of Horace seems to have appeared prior to Creech’s towards the end of the seventeenth century. In 1567, however, Thomas Drant published Horace, his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyres Englished. In his preface is one quaint remark, to the truth of which all Horatians will bear witness: “Neyther any man which can judge can judge it one and the like laboure to translate Horace and to make and translate a love booke, a shril tragedie, or a smooth and platleuyled poesye. Thys I can truly say, of myne owne experyence, that I can sooner translate twelve verses out of the Greeke Homer than sixe out of Horace.”

The first version of the Odes was that of Sir Thomas Hawkins, about 1630. This, though it seems to have been popular enough to go through several editions, was far from complete, the lighter odes being omitted as being “too wanton and loose.” Our own edition, which is the fourth, dated 1638, contains about two-thirds of the odes and epodes. Here and there we find a tolerably good verse:

“What man, what hero [Clio] wilt thou raise
With shrillest pipe or Lyra’s softer lays?
What god whose name in sportive straine
Echo will chaunt thee back againe?”[129]

This will compare not too disadvantageously with the latest version—Lord Lytton’s—which, indeed, is not especially good:

“What man, what hero, or what god select’st thou,

Theme for sweet lyre or fife sonorous, Clio,

Whose honored name shall that gay sprite-voice, Echo,

Hymn back rebounding?”

As a rule, however, Sir Thomas is stiff—a fault common to almost all translations of the easiest of lyrists up to a much later period. Yet in this century there were many versions of single odes, epistles, and satires, some of which have scarcely ever been surpassed. Such, for instance, were Ben Jonson’s rendering of Ode IV. 1, Ad Venerem, and Milton’s of I. 5, Ad Pyrrhum, severally included by Mr. Theodore Martin and Lord Lytton in their respective versions as beyond their skill to better; Dryden’s fine paraphrase of III. 29, To Mæcenas, which Mr. Martin, non sordidus auctor, pronounces finer than the original; and, on a lower plane, however, Roscommon’s version of the Art of Poetry. Of these, Milton’s has been said to touch the high-water mark of translation, and is indeed very elegant and close.

Ben Jonson’s set translations are often injured by a rigid strictness which Horace might have warned him against:

“Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres,”[130]

and which evoked Dryden’s protest against “the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson.” Yet even in fetters he danced better than most; and some of his translations, notably the one mentioned above and one of Martial, Liber, amicorum dulcissima cura tuorum, it would be hard to pick flaws in.

In Jonson’s day, however, there was no mean between word-for-word rendering and the loosest paraphrase, until Denham laid down something like the true rule in his verses to Fanshawe on the latter’s translation of Guarini:

“That servile path thou nobly dost decline

Of tracing word for word and line for line....

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue

To make translations, and translators too.

They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,

True to his sense, but truer to his fame.”

Cowley, who translated largely from Horace, runs to the opposite extreme from Jonson: his versions are as much too free as Jonson’s are too close. Yet some of his single lines are unmatched for felicity and force:

“Hence ye profane, I hate ye all,

Both the great vulgar and the small”

(a phrase which has passed into a proverb) for Odi profanum vulgus et arceo; “The poor rich man’s emphatically poor” for Magnas inter opes inops; “From his toucht mouth the wanton torment slips” for Fugientia captat Flumina; and, best of all, perhaps, “He loves of homely littleness the ease” for Martial’s Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amet—which shows how a deft translator can, without leaving his original, breathe into it, so to speak, a beauty it scarcely had—such lines as these make us regret either that Cowley did not translate more or that he was unable to transfer to his own poetry more of the same simple elegance of thought and word.

All of Cowley’s contemporaries were not so happy, however, as he in their attempts to better Horace, though many tried it. One of them, Sir Edward Sherburne, claps a periwig on Mt. Soracte:[131]

“Seest thou not how Soracte’s head
(For all his height) stands covered
With a white periwig of snow,
While the laboring woods below
Are hardly able to sustain
The weight of winter’s feathered rain?”

He had evidently been reading and, with Dryden, admiring Sylvester’s Du Bartas:

“And when the winter’s keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic Ocean,
To glaze the lake, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow the bald-pate woods.”

The conceited style then in vogue was not well fitted to do justice to Horace’s simplex munditiis, although he was now universally read and esteemed—“The next best poet in the world to Virgil,” Cowley calls him—and has left the mark of his genial influence on all the writers of the time. One finds the Horatian sentiment running like a golden thread through the minor poetry of James and Charles I., at times informing whole poems with a pithiness of phrase and a dignity which Horace might call his own. Such are Marvell’s ode on The Return of Cromwell, such Shirley’s “The glories of our blood and state” and “Victorious men of earth, no more”—all three among the finest productions of their kind in the language.

After the Restoration the business of translation was resumed with vigor. Dryden in his Virgil, and, somewhat later, Pope in his Homer, set a fresh model which was followed by all their successors until Cowper’s Miltonic Iliad came to break the spell and pave the way to the modern style, which aims to combine freedom with fidelity, ease of manner with correctness of meaning, and so far as possible to reproduce the author himself, form as well as matter. Creech’s Horace was hardly a success, being stiff and ungainly without being particularly close, and, while showing in its metre some sense of the poet’s rhythmical grace, scarcely attempted to render the characteristic delicacy of his wording—that curiosa felicitas we all have heard of. In this—and indeed in every—respect the version of Dr. Francis, which came out about half a century later, was greatly superior as a whole to any previous one, and took with Horatians a position the best of its successors has found it hard to shake. Indeed, with such of the poet’s lovers as date from the golden age of Consul Plancus, Francis is still the paramount favorite, and you will talk to them in vain of the merits of Robinson or Lytton, of Conington’s fluent ease or Martin’s sprightly grace. Francis is in the main faithful, generally pleasing, and always respectable at least, but, like most of his rivals, he lacks a certain lightness of touch, an airy gayety of treatment in the minor odes which no one, we think, has hit off so well as Mr. Theodore Martin. They are, as that accomplished writer says, in many instances what would be called now vers de société, and their chief value rests in the poet’s inimitable charm of manner. Unless some notion of this can be given, the translator’s labor is lost, and he offers his readers but a withered posy from which color and perfume alike are fled.

ALBA’S DREAM.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC.
PART III.

Gondriac had seen many strange things come to pass of late years: stupendous things, as when M. le Marquis climbed up the cliff like a common man to condole with old Caboff; wonderful things, as when M. le Marquis was rescued by old Caboff in the storm; tragic things, as when he went forth and died in the place of young Caboff; but nothing so untoward as this had ever happened at Gondriac before: M. le Marquis was going to marry Alba. The wonder was both lessened and heightened by the romantic story concerning Alba’s birth, which was spread through the village simultaneously with the announcement. The fatherless girl, who had owned no name but Alba, was the daughter of a nobleman, who had been affianced by his family to a great heiress, but who fell in love with a penniless orphan and married her secretly; a few months after his marriage he was ordered off to Egypt with Bonaparte and was killed in his first engagement. The young wife lived to give birth to her child, and then died, leaving it to the care of an old friend of her mother, a childless widow, whom the Revolution had ruined, and who now gained her bread by needlework. Virginie accepted the charge, and adopted as her own the little one, whose sole provision was a pittance which the father had been able to secure to his wife as a dower. Her heart, hungering for some one on whom to lavish its great capacity for loving, bestowed upon the baby more than a mother’s tenderness; she loved it with a love that seemed to gather up into one passion all the loves that a woman’s heart can hold. She left the shelter of her native place, where all had known her from her childhood, and where, in spite of her poverty, she held her head high, and went to live at Gondriac, where no old familiar face would smile upon her, but where her secret would be secure, and none would know that she was not Alba’s mother. This was the story she told Hermann when he asked her for Alba’s hand.

“I thought to let the secret die with me,” she said, “and that the child might have loved me to the end as her own mother; but now she must hear the truth. To me she will always be my child, my very own—as truly mine as if I had given her birth.”

“Let her know nothing until she is my wife, and then I will break it to her,” replied the young lord; “and I doubt but she will love you more dearly still when she learns the truth.”

Alba was very happy—so happy at times that it was more than she could bear; she would often heave great sighs for very bliss as she sat upon the rocks, her hand clasped in Hermann’s.

“Why do you sigh, my Alba?” he asked her once reproachfully. “Are you afraid I shall not make you happy?”

“I am afraid of being too happy; I am so happy now that I could die of it. And by and by, when I am your wife, and you will never leave me, and that all I used to long for when I believed in fairies shall be mine—I feel as if the joy of it must kill me. Hermann, we will try to be very good together, will we not? We will do our best to make everybody good and happy. There shall be no poor people here, and when they are sick we will have a good doctor to come and take care of them, and I will go and nurse them myself. I hope they will all love me. Do you think they will? Sometimes I am frightened lest they shouldn’t care for me any more when I am a great lady, living in a castle.”

“You foolish child! They will care ten times more for you then,” said Hermann, “because you will be able to do so much for them.” Then, looking at her with a smile at once tender and suspicious, “What a greedy little thing it is for love!” he said. “You can’t care for me as I do for you, Alba, or else my love would be enough for you; I don’t long for anybody’s love but yours.”

“It is not so much that as that I long to make them happy,” explained Alba; “and how can I do that until I can make them love me?”

They quarrelled over this philosophy of hers, and then made plans for the future.

“You will take me to see all the beautiful places you have told me of, will you not?” said Alba.

“I will take you round the world, if you like it—that is, if you don’t get tired of it before we are half way.”

“Tired! with you? I should never be tired—never, never, never.” She repeated the word in a low voice, as if speaking to herself, while looking dreamily out over the sea, where a ship, with her white sails set, was drifting away into the sunset.

“Where shall we go to first?” said Hermann.

“To Egypt, I think; or perhaps to Italy—I am dying to see the city with the streets of water, and Spain, where the palaces grow, and Moorish temples; but let us go first of all to Germany and see the countries where you won the battles. I should like that best. O Hermann, Hermann! how happy we shall be.” And then, as if her heart were overfull of joy, she began to sing. Hermann liked this better. Those silent, rapturous moods sometimes frightened him, as if they were a demand for something that he could not give. M. de Gondriac was as much in love as a man could be, and so far he would have no difficulty in making his wife’s happiness his chief concern; but he was quite aware that this was not to be achieved by the usual commonplace means. Something more than ordinary love, let it be ever so tender and chivalrous, was needed to satisfy the cravings of a heart like Alba’s. She worshipped him as the noblest of men; and it was no easy thing to realize this ideal. Would he be able to achieve it, to live up to her exalted standard through the coming years, when the glamour of young love’s idealizing mists should have cleared away, and his wife would be at leisure to observe him with her clear, intelligent eyes?

But a cloud was gathering over these sunny days of courtship. M. de Gondriac was summoned to Paris by the chief of the War Office. The call, of course, brooked no delay. His arm, though nearly healed, still incapacitated him from joining his regiment; but he must go in person and certify to this. Though they might admit him unfit for active service, he might be retained in attendance on the emperor; Bonaparte liked to have high-sounding names upon his personal staff. But Hermann would not alarm Alba by suggesting this possibility. They parted in sweet sorrow, looking forward to meeting soon again.

Alas! is it a decree of fate that the course of true love never shall run smooth? Are poets prophets, or do the loves of all humanity conspire to make their voice an oracle? The days went by, and Alba waited; but Hermann neither came nor wrote, and they could get no tidings of him. Had he been ordered to the frontier, in spite of his disabled arm, and killed or taken prisoner? Doubts crowded upon Alba’s heart until they almost stopped its pulses. But Virginie feared even worse than this, and, if her fears were true, there was no comfort in store. M. de Gondriac had felt strong enough to brave the emperor’s displeasure at a distance; but how when he stood face to face with it, with the power of that magnetic will, with the ridicule of his equals, with the blandishments of refined court ladies? Was his love of the metal to challenge these antagonistic forces and prevail?

Spring passed, and summer, and now it was harvest-time; the reapers waded through the yellow fields, the sickle was singing in the corn, the grapes hung heavy on the vine. But no news came from Hermann. Alba pined and drooped, and at last fell ill. The doctor came from X—— and saw her, and said that it would be nothing; it was weakness and oppression on the heart; she wanted care and nourishment. But no care revived her. She grew weaker and weaker, and the low fever came, and there was no strength left to battle with it. But Virginie would not see the danger; when the neighbors came for news, she would answer, with a smile on her wan face: “Thank God! no worse. The child is very weak; but last night she slept a little.” Thus twenty days went by, and then there came a change, and on the twenty-first day, as the Vesper bell was tolling, the curé came, and Alba was anointed as a bride for heaven. The old man wept like a child as he blessed her and departed. “God comfort you, Mère Virginie!” he said, laying his hand heavily on the mother’s head. But Virginie was like one in whom the faculty of pain or of despair was paralyzed. “She will not die, M. le Curé. God is merciful; his heart is kind,” she said. When the sun was going down, Alba spoke: “Mother, bring me his picture and the pearls he gave me; I should like to wear them once before I go....” They brought the pearls and decked her in them; they smoothed back the moist, dark hair and crowned her with the queenly coronet; they clasped the necklace round her throat and the bracelets on her arms, while she lay quite passive, as if unconscious of what they were doing. Never had she looked so beautiful as at this hour in the deepening twilight, with the shadow of death stealing on her and touching her features with a celestial pathos. Virginie could not but see it now. Alba was going from her. But, no! it should not be. No, there was a God in heaven, a merciful, all-powerful God; it should not be. He would save her child even at this extremity. She had not cried to him loud enough before, but now she would cry and he should hear her, now that she knew how dire was her need of him. She knelt down at a little distance from the bed and began to pray. It was terrible to see her; to see how despair and faith wrestled within her. The agony of the strife was visible in her face; it was pale as death, and the big drops stood upon her brow, that was contracted as by breathless pain; her eyes were open, fixed in a rigid stare as on some unseen presence; her white lips, drawn in, were slightly parted, as if to let the words escape that she could not articulate; her hands were locked together, bloodless from the fierce grip of the fingers. Old Jeanne cowered in the corner as she watched her.

An hour went by. The tide was coming in; the waves were washing on the shore with the old familiar sound. The moon rose and stirred the shadows on the plain; its light stole through the latticed window and overflowed in a silver stream upon the bed, illuminating it like a shrine in the darkened chamber.

“Mother!” murmured Alba faintly.

“My child!”

“Kiss me, mother.... I am going....”

“Alba! my child!... O God! O God! have pity on me....”

But Alba had passed beyond the mother’s voice.

There are cries, we sometimes say, that might wake the dead—cries that sound like a disembodied spirit, as if a human soul had broken loose with all its terrors and hopes and concentrated life of love and agony, and, escaping in a voice, traversed the void of space and pierced into the life beyond. Those who have heard that cry will remember the silence that followed it—a silence like no other, infinite, death-like, as if the pulse of time stood still, hearkening for the echo on the other side.

The neighbors came and grieved. “How beautiful she is!” they whispered to one another, as they stood by the couch where Alba lay smiling in her death-sleep and decked in her bridal pearls. “No wonder our young lord loved her. How strange that he should have left her! Has she died of love, I wonder?” Many thought more of Virginie than of Alba. “She will die of grief,” they said. For Virginie had not shed a tear, not uttered one wail of lamentation, since that great cry that followed Alba into the dark beyond. She and Jeanne had arrayed her in her bridal dress—those splendid robes of silk and lace which her lover in his pride had prepared for her; it was a foolish fancy, but the mother, remembering how her lost one had loved these splendors, seemed filled with a vague idea that they might even now give her some pleasure. When this was done she sat with her hands lying loosely locked together on her knees, gazing on the dead face, as mute and motionless as if she were dead herself. Yet some said they noticed a strange look like a gleam of disbelief in her eyes now and then, as if she thought death but mocked her with some kind intent.

The night and the day passed, and the night again, and to-day at noon the dead bride was to be borne away. Friends crowded in for a last look; then, as the hour drew near, there was a movement without, a sound of voices chanting in the distance, the tramp of feet approaching, and they knew it was time for them to go. But Virginie still sat there, pallid, immovable, like a statue set up to stir pity and reverence in the hearts of the beholders. Mme. Caboff laid a hand upon her arm and pressed her gently to come away. “The child is not dead, but sleepeth,” she said; “take comfort in that thought.”

Then Virginie rose like one waking from a trance, and that strange gleam of disbelief which some had noticed in her eyes was now visible to all. “Go ye away, my friends,” she said, “and leave me here awhile with my child and God.” There was no murmur of dissuasion, though many thought that grief had made her mad; the majesty of grief subdued them to obedience, and one by one they passed out of the room in silence.

Then Virginie knelt down and lifted up her voice in a last supreme appeal to God.

“She is not dead, but sleepeth! Was that a message from thee, Lord? Thou hast whispered it to my heart before. And what if she were dead—are not death and sleep alike to thee? Canst thou not wake from one as easily as from the other? She is not dead, but sleepeth! When the Jews laughed thee to scorn, thou didst glorify thy Father and raise the dead girl to life again, and all the people blessed thee. Thou didst pity the widow and restore her son, though she knew not of thy presence nor believed in thee. Wilt thou be less pitiful to me, who believe and cry to thee? Son of David, look down upon me, have pity upon me, and awake my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Canst thou not wake her from this sleep as readily as thou didst raise Lazarus from the grave where he had lain four days? Christ crucified! Redeemer! Saviour! Father! hearken to my prayer and have mercy on me! By thy pity for the widow, and for Lazarus’ sisters, and for thy own Mother at the foot of the cross, and for John and Magdalen, and for thy murderers, have pity on me and call back my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Father! by the birth of thy dear Son, by his thirty-three years’ toil and poverty, by his bloody sweat, by his scourging, by the nails that were hammered into his hands and feet, by the lance that cut into his heart, by his death and sleep in the sepulchre, by his victory over the grave, by his resurrection and his reign of glory at thy right hand, hear me and give me back my child! She is not dead, but sleepeth. Lord! I believe in thy name, I believe in thy love, I believe in thy mercy and omnipotence. I believe; O God! help thou my unbelief. The child is not dead, but sleepeth.”

She rose from her knees, and, pressing the crucifix with one hand on the breast of the dead, she held the other uplifted with priest-like solemnity. There was a pause of intense and awful silence; the chanting without had ceased; every ear was strained, every heart stood still, listening to the prayer they dared not say amen to. Then Virginie’s voice arose again, sounding not like hers, but rather like a voice that came from some depth of life within, beyond her, and making the mute void vibrate to its solemn tones: “Alba! in the name of the living God, awake!...”

Then silence closed upon her speech, and every pulse was stilled to a deeper hush.... The white lids quivered, the sleeper’s breast heaved beneath the pressure of the cross, sending forth a soft, long sigh, and Alba was awake.

“Mother!”

And now a cry arose from without the cottage which must surely have been heard in heaven; for the rocks took it up and bore it out to sea, and the waves rolled it back to the reverberating shore, and deep called unto deep, and louder and louder it rose and rang, until it thrilled the welkin, and heaven sent back to earth the shout of jubilee and praise.

But there was one who did not join in it. When the first ecstasy of her thanksgiving was past, and Virginie had clasped the loved one in her arms, and felt the warm blood returning to the cold lips under her kisses, she saw that Alba was like one whose spirit was not there; her eyes were open in a wide, intense gaze, as if straining to see beyond their ken, her ears were deaf to the sounds around her, hearkening for a voice that others could not hear.

“My child, my darling, let us give thanks together!” Virginie said when they were once more alone. But Alba turned her eyes upon her mother with that far-off gaze that seemed to reach beyond the veil. “Mother,” she said, speaking in low, fearful tones—“mother, why did you call me back? Did you not know I was with God? I was with God,” she continued in the same hushed tones; “I was in heaven with the angels and all the blessed ones, so full of happiness that I have no words to speak of it.”

“Tell me what you saw, my child. It was a dream; but God sometimes gives us visions in a dream.”

“It was no dream, mother. I was dead. My soul had left my body and taken flight into eternity. I stood before the throne and saw the vision of God. But of this I cannot speak.”

Alba paused like one whom reverence made dumb, and then continued: “I sang. O the joy of victory that thrilled through me as I lifted up my voice, and heard it amongst all the voices of the blessed! That was the wonder. Voice upon voice uprose, till all the hosts of heaven were singing, and yet you heard each singer distinct from all the rest; each voice was different, as star differeth from star when all are shining. And there was room in the vast space for silence. I heard the silence, deep, palpitating, as when we hold our breath to listen, and I heard the songs as they rolled out in full organic numbers from the countless choir. I heard my own voice, clear and sweet and loud like the clarion of an archangel; thousands of nightingales singing as one bird in the stillness of the summer night were nothing to it! And then the joy of recognition and of love—the very air was warm with love. Every spirit in the angelic host—the saints, the prophets of the old law, the martyrs and confessors and virgins—all loved me and knew me with an individual knowledge, and I knew them. And—I know not how it was—though all were resting in a halcyon peace, none were idle; they were busy at some task in which the faculties of mind and soul, new-born and glorified and quickened a thousand-fold, were eagerly engaged. I seemed to see that they were governing the world and caring for the souls of men—of those chiefly whom they loved on earth. For this I know: that no true bond is broken by death; the loves of time live on into eternity; the sorrows of earth are felt and pitied up in heaven, and the blessed clasp us in their cherishing sympathies closer than they did on earth. For the life in heaven is manifold, and, while the blessed citizens toiled, and sang as if their very being were dissolving into music, their souls were dwelling in the light of the vision of God, feeding on its beauty in unbroken contemplation. All was activity, and a fulness of life compared to which our life is death, yet all was steeped in peace, in rest unutterable. O mother! why did you call me back from it?”

“It was a dream, my child; your soul was in a trance; perhaps it was at my prayer God woke you from it in time. But, Alba, are you not glad to be with me again? It seems to me that even in heaven I should have missed you!”

“I did not feel that I was parted from you; you seemed nearer to me there than when I was on earth. But, mother, I saw standing near the martyrs, yet not of them, a soul arrayed in crimson—that flaming light that I call crimson, not knowing its real name—and she stretched forth her arms to greet me with a greater joy than all the rest, and she called herself my mother?”

Virginie’s heart stood still. Had heaven betrayed her secret? If so, it were vain to try to hide it any longer. She told the truth to Alba. “And now,” she said, “you will love that mother in heaven better than you love me!” There was a look of humble, beseeching misery in her face as she said this that was most pitiful. But Alba did not answer; that far-off gaze was in her eyes again. At last, slowly turning them upon Virginie, she said: “Now I can understand why you called me back. If you had been my real mother you would have let me go; your love would have been brave enough to part with me, to suffer when you knew that I was happy.”

There was no anger in her voice, no reproach in her look; but the words held the bitterness of death to Virginie, and pierced her heart like blades of poisoned steel.

The mystery of the young lord’s silence ceased to occupy the first place in local gossip, now that a more exciting theme had been provided, but it held its place in Virginie’s mind and was seldom out of her thoughts.

“Would it not be a great joy to you to see him again?” she said to Alba.

“I should be glad of it, mother; but the time is so short it matters little whether I see him here or not.”

“You never loved him, Alba.”

“I loved him with my whole soul; I loved him too well. I would have died for love of him.”

She had died for love of him, the mother thought.

“And yet you do not care to see him again?”

“I am satisfied to wait until we meet in heaven.”

The spark was dead; it was useless trying to blow the cold ashes into a flame. Virginie devoured her heart in uncomplaining silence. If Alba’s reproach was merited, if her love had been at fault, tainted in its origin with egotism and cowardice, then it was meet that she should suffer and expiate the sin.

But Hermann, meantime, was on his way to Gondriac. He had not been killed or wounded or faithless; he had been confined at Vincennes by order of the emperor, in hopes that solitude might help him to see the folly of this intended marriage, and bend his stubborn fancy to the reasonable will of his imperial master. The experiment had failed. The emperor was dethroned, a captive now himself, and M. de Gondriac was free and speeding on the wings of love to claim the reward of his fidelity.

Before he reached the cottage on the cliff he had learned the story of Alba’s—resurrection, was it?—of her having passed in spirit through the gates of death, and come back to life so changed men hardly knew her for the same. “It was a trance,” the curé said, when Hermann stopped on the road to take his greeting.

“It was death, monseigneur,” said the fishermen who gathered round his saddle-bow. “She died of love, and the mother’s prayer called her back to life; but the child left her heart in heaven and pines to be gone again.”

Hermann sent his horse on to the castle and made his way up the cliff, pondering this strange story. She had died of love of him, they said in their simple superstition, and was pining to die again. Sweet Alba! He would make her life such a paradise of love that she should have no reason to regret her glimpse of heaven. As he drew near the low, thatched cottage the purr of Virginie’s spinning-wheel came to him with the old familiar welcome. He opened the door and entered unannounced.

“Monseigneur!” She dropped her yarn with a cry.

The glad surprise subsided, Hermann in a few words explained all, and then heard the details of the wonderful tale Virginie had to tell.

“You will find her somewhere on the rocks,” she said. “It may be that the sudden sight of you will startle her dead heart into life and bring back a thrill of the old happiness; if not, I pray God to take her to himself, for the sight of the child’s patient misery is killing me.”

But M. de Gondriac had no such dismal apprehensions as he went out to seek his beautiful one. How would she meet him? Would it be with the old shy glance of pleasure, giving him her hand to kiss, and forbidding any tenderer caress by that air of virgin pride that sat on her so queenly? Or would joy break down the barriers and send her bounding into his arms? He trod the sandy grass with a quick, strong step, but the sound of his footfalls fell upon her ear unheeded; she sat motionless, with her face set towards the sea till he was at her side.

“Alba!”

Then she looked up, and a pale blush, faint as the heart of a white rose, clouded her face.

“Hermann!”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, and she took his caress as she might have done a brother’s. The placid tenderness of her manner chilled him.

“Alba! my wife! You are glad to see me back again!” he said, still holding her close to him and looking into her eyes for some answering sigh, some flash of the old coy, shrinking fondness; but they looked back into his limpid, calm, passionless as a dove’s. She smiled and lifted up her face to kiss him. He bent down to receive it, but that proffered kiss was like the iron entering into his soul. The Alba whom he had left was not here; she had gone, he knew not whither, and in her place another being had come—a shadow of the woman who had loved him with all a woman’s tenderness. He sat down beside her and related the history of his life since they had parted, all he had suffered for her sake, and how light he held the suffering now that the reward was his; and she listened calmly, and spoke her gratitude with a gentle humility that was very touching. Then they were silent for a while, Alba apparently not caring to speak, Hermann longing to do so, but not daring to say what his mind was full of. At last Alba broke the spell.

“You know that I was dead,” she said; “I should be in heaven now, if mother had not called me back.”

“My darling! I will make a heaven for you on earth.”

“I once thought that was possible. I thought that heaven could give me nothing better than your love; but now I know that all the love of earth is but a shadow, a mockery compared to the love of heaven. It is nothing, nothing beside it! O Hermann! when we talk of happiness we are like blind fools. We don’t know what happiness means.”

“Alba! you have ceased to love me, or you would not speak so!”

“I love you as well as ever—nay, better than I did before; but, O Hermann! I should have loved you so infinitely better up in heaven. If you knew what the life of love is there!”

She clasped her hands, and her dark eyes shone with a supernatural light, as if the brightness of glory, invisible to him, were reflected there.

“You will tell me about it, darling, but not now,” he said, a terrible dread seizing him. “I want you to think of me a little now, and not so much of heaven. We must fix our wedding-day; it shall be soon, shall it not? There is no need for any delay.”

“No, there is no need,” she repeated. Then, after a pause, she said, looking calmly into his face: “Hermann, why should we not wait to wed one another in heaven?”

“There is no marrying or giving in marriage there,” he replied: but he had grown ashy pale, and the chill of a horrible fear was in his heart, deepening with every word that Alba spoke.

“You are angry with me,” she said, misunderstanding his pallor and the changed expression of his face. “O Hermann! don’t think that I have ceased to love you. I love you with all my heart. I have never loved any one, never could love any one, but you. Say you are not angry with me!”

“No, darling, I am not angry; but I thought we were to be so happy together, and I see that you are changed. But, Alba, I will not hold you to your promise; you shall not marry me unless you wish it.”

“I do wish it. I wish to make you happy. I have no other wish on earth now.”

He kissed her without answering, and they went home.

The terrible fear which for a moment possessed him was soon dispelled. Alba was not mad. Whatever was the mysterious change that had come over her, her reason was unimpaired. But all else was changed: the conditions of life had become reversed, the spiritual relations between the seen and the unseen were in some way disturbed, and things thrown out of their natural proportion. But the nature of the experience by which this change had been wrought eluded Hermann’s grasp, baffling reason while it compelled belief. Belief in what? Had Alba’s spirit, infringing the laws that rule our mortal state, broken loose from its prison, and been permitted to stand before the gates of pearl and taste of those joys which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive, and then been sent back to earth, home-sick as an exiled angel? Was this thing possible? Is anything not possible to Him who bids the lilies blow and the stars shine, and who holds the sea in the hollow of his hand? Hermann de Gondriac did not stop to investigate the mystery. His was one of those human souls whose deepest convictions lie dormant in their depths, not only unanalyzed but unrecognized, for want of a voice to question them. He loved Alba, and he would trust to his love to mend the broken spring and reconcile to the happiness of earth this heart enamored by the bliss of heaven.

The wedding-day rose bright and fair; a golden glow was on the flood; the sun shone on the breakers, turning the green to sapphire blue, while the tide flowed in, swelling the anthem of the dawn; the yellow woods round Alba’s home glistened like a golden zone, fit symbol of the enchanted life awaiting her within their magic ring. No sad Vesper bell was tolling; merrily the silver-footed chimes, like messengers of joy, tripped on to meet her on the morning air, as she came forth, once more arrayed in bridal pearls. A train of little children, clad in white and piping canticles, went on before, strewing flowers upon her path.

Pale as a lily in her snow-white robes was Alba, her dark eyes glowing with a light that was most beautiful; and when the bridegroom turned to greet her at the altar, her smile, they said, was like the smile of an angel.

The wedding rite began; the ring was passed, the solemn words were spoken: “Until death do part ye....” Then Alba, with a cry of joy, as when we greet some vision of delight, fell forward and was caught in Hermann’s arms.

“Farewell, beloved!... Mother, farewell!...”

“Alba! my wife! O God! can it be possible?...”

But loud above the lover’s wail and that of all the people Virginie’s voice was heard in tones more of jubilee than lamentation: “Thy will be done, O Lord! Blessed be the name of the Lord!”

That night the moon rose late; the sea-gulls, poised above the purple flood, heard the waves wash softly on the noiseless shore; the stars came out and looked into the shining sea below; the rocks gleamed white as snow-peaks in the moonlight, and all the land lay listening to the silver silence. From out its depths a voice was calling, though only those who hearkened heard it, and the voice said: “Thou shalt see His face, ... and night shall be no more, and they shall not need the light of the lamp, nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall enlighten them, and they shall reign for ever and ever.”

THE END.

ITALY.
WRITTEN AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

I.

Amid those shining ways of Italy

I thought of one who walks with bandaged eyes,

Led by some loving guide who, in sweet guise
Of eloquent speech, makes blinded vision see
The very lines that make tall towers fair,

The peaceful saints that guard cathedral door—

In death still keeping watch the people o’er—

Lifting tired souls to holy heights of prayer.

Even frail nest familiar form doth wear
Built far above upon the shoulders broad
Of sculptured friar, bearing light the load

His brother birds give, trustful, in his care.

So, poet-led, seemeth scarce need of eyes,

Pictured earth’s loveliness in words so wise.

II.

The blinded wanderer sees the far-off light
Of shadowy Alp, and his the lingering glow
That breathes in western skies along the low

And gleaming marshes darkening with the night.

Not bluer to fond eyes that see most clear

Are Naples’ waves than break they in his sight;

Nor floats St. Peter’s dome in softer light,

Seen from the Pincian, than its image fair

Rests in the pilgrim’s heart that in Rome sings

Its Nunc dimittis, whether it hold dear

For Brutus’ sake the city, or revere

The holier presence shadowing with strong wings

The mighty one, earth’s new Jerusalem,

Whose virtue fills her very garment’s hem.

III.

He sees the shadows o’er the valley creep—

Nay, even knows he, through his guide’s clear speech,

Where, at each hour, the ilex shade shall reach.

Though blinded, he can feel the sunshine steep

The hill he climbs; fair Italy’s soft air
Grow yet more soft with pity for poor eyes
That only feel the brightness of her skies,

Not know the infinite depths that glisten there.

And quick his ears catch sound of falling stream,

Twitter of leaves in Vallombrosan woods,

Bird-carol flung from chestnut solitudes;

While soft-voiced waves, like music in a dream,

Now tread with rippling touch Sorrento’s shore,

Now rise and fall Venetian stairway o’er.

IV.

He hears in Roman mouth the Tuscan speech;

Hears Naples chant the light of Syracuse,

Siena’s tongue, in guileless praise let loose,

In its pure utterance ancient glory teach.
And tells the poet to the wondering heart
Old histories of older Latin days;
Of distraught Italy’s sad, stormy ways
When feud and treason tore her sons apart,
When Dante ate the exile’s bitter bread,
When eagles dark swept down upon the land,

And lilies white, that should all stain withstand,

With deeds unworthy were discolorèd.

While from the Vaudois’ shivering mountain crown

The echoes of their bard-sung wars sweep down.

V.

Singeth the poet of still nearer days
When all the little lands fade one by one,
Like wan stars melting 'neath Sardinia’s sun—

While, for her crowning, 'mid the strangers’ praise,

Hastes Italy unto the Capitol.
Life of her sons laid down for her new life,
Maidens their soldiers arming for the strife,
Weeping the field where love and banner fall.
Sings he of carbine and of bayonet
That gleam and darken on Perugian hills,
Of sorrow that a frightened city fills,
And priestly robe with blood defenceless wet.
White Roman robe earth’s shadow marketh dark—
World-licensed target for the poets’ mark!

VI.

The pilgrim hearkens to his guide’s strong words,

Basks in their sunshine, thanketh for their dew,

Yet wonders, could his eyes behold the blue

As well as ears can mark the song of birds,

If something still he lacks he might not find—

Some perfect key of heavenly harmony
That should attune all sad discordancy,
In true accord the clashing fragments bind.
Soft fall the Angelus bells on listening ear,
The Miserere, in distress divine,
Wails from the heart of city Leonine.

Feels he the light that makes his darkness clear,

Grasps he the chord of pure and infinite blue

His picture lacks to make its color true.

VII.

So, poet-led, I trod Italian ways,
Seeing the glimmer of pale olive-trees,
Drifting, entranced, o’er warm Sicilian seas,
Hearkening Siena’s perfect speech of praise,
Drinking of Trevi’s fountain, o’er and o’er,
Yet craving ever something still more rare,
Some gift of grace that Italy must wear
To make her so the heart’s-best evermore;

Some crown above her hills, than her blue seas

More luminous, beyond her painters’ fame,
Or passionate poets’ soaring words of flame,
More than all proudest earthly destinies.
So drowned, amid the peal of Saxon bells,

Thought of that life wherein her true soul dwells.

VIII.

Seemed it as if the poet built a shrine—

Lifting its towers in the radiant air

The doves might haunt to make it seem more fair,

Lifting its columns that an art divine

With watching saints should crown, setting its floor

In firm mosaic, where, alas! inwrought
Should forms misshapen of ungentle thought
Sadden the Roman sunshine wandering o’er,

That, creeping onward, still should hope to kiss

The gladder sunshine of St. Philip’s feet.
Heaped high the altar with all flowers sweet—
Rich Italy’s unstinted loveliness—
Kindled the lamp before the inmost shrine,
Withheld the presence of the Guest Divine!

THE SEVEN VALLEYS OF THE LAVEDAN.

On the 4th of July, 1876—the day after the coronation of Notre Dame de Lourdes, la plus noble dame qui fut jamais, to use the expression of an old chronicler—we set out for the springs of Cauterets. South of Lourdes the mountains seem to stand apart to afford a passage to the headlong Gave. Here begins the Lavedan, the old Pagus Lavitanensis, which comprises seven valleys that extend to the very frontier of Spain. This was the ancient country of the Sotiates, who were famous for their horsemanship, as Lavedan has always been for its horses. In the middle ages it became a vicomté, which dated from the early Carlovingians and flourished for more than seven centuries. The vicomtes of Lavedan figured in all the great wars of their time, particularly against the Moors in Spain, and became so powerful as to defy the Count of Bigorre, their own liege lord. They displayed great valor, too, against the English, who for sixty years held the citadel of Lourdes that commanded the entrance to their valleys, as well as several fastnesses among the mountains. We find members of their race among the bishops, abbots, and Knights-Templars of the province, as if able in every path of life to assert their capacity. The last of the old lords fought with Dunois the brave under the banner of Joan of Arc at Orleans. His only grandchild married Charles de Bourbon, a favorite of Henry IV.’s. The glory of this family, however, is mostly confined to the Pyrenees, and might never have come down to modern times had it not been for the faithful chroniclers of the Lavedan monasteries. It is, in fact, first mentioned in 945 in a cartulary of the abbey of St. Savin, of which it was a benefactor.

Hardly had we entered the valley of the Lavedan before we saw, on an isolated mount at the left, the dismantled tower of Hieou, one of the signal-towers that, in times of border warfare, used to transmit messages from the Spanish frontier to the heart of France. The shores of the Gave were deliciously fresh, but the mountains on both sides are at first treeless and uninteresting. Nothing grows on them but the purple heather, and patches of odorous shrubs that perfume the valley. Here and there on their sides are great heaps of black slate from the numerous quarries. But these mountains have a certain austere charm of their own, not unbefitting sentinels that guard the approaches to the grotto of the Virgin. We passed group after group of pilgrims returning from the recent celebration, with red crosses fastened to their breasts, or blue-and-white badges of the Immaculate Conception, saying their rosaries or singing a hymn. They invariably saluted us politely as we drove past, and two bronzed mountaineers whom we stopped for information sped us on our way with the pious wish: “May God accompany you!”

After several leagues the mountains became wooded, and a bend of the river, along which we kept, brought us into the delightful basin of Argelés, one of the valleys of the Lavedan. This is the Eden of the Pyrenees. On the mountain slopes grow the walnut and the oak. The roads are shaded with long lines of ash-trees. The meadows were covered with rich harvests. The thickets were blooming with roses. The houses were almost buried among fruit-trees of all kinds. Every now and then we came to a tall cross with the insignia of the Passion, or some wayside niche with its Virgin and fresh flowers before her. We passed the square tower of Vidalos on a height, and farther on came to the ancient castle of Vieuzac, once a military post that kept alive the signal-fires in troubled times. On every hand were quaint-looking villages with pretty chapels half-hidden in the folds of the mountains, each with some old monument, or older tradition, to which it fondly clings. From Agos to Pierrefitte, only about six miles, there are ten charming villages set in a framework of mountains no poet could describe. They close around this happy valley, as if to shield it from all outward influences. During the Huguenot ascendency in the neighboring province of Béarn it is said no taint of the new religion ever found its way into this valley. At the north is Mount Balandraü, easily ascended, that affords a fine view of the country, which is full of wonderful contrasts. The Gave winds swiftly through the most beautiful of valleys; on every hand are the mountains, sometimes like a vast rampart of verdure, sometimes swelling up, one after the other, like great waves, with a high peak occasionally, jagged as a saw, and in the distance the eternal glaciers glittering in the sun and feeding the numerous cascades and torrents that lash the mountain sides.

To this peaceful valley came St. Orens from his native Spain, in the fourth century, before whom, according to the Spanish legend, a supernatural light burned and a mysterious hand pointed the way. And it was yonder umbrageous mountain that, when he sought to escape from the fame of his sanctity, opened at his approach and hid him in its bosom.

Here, too, four centuries after, came St. Savin, son of the Count of Barcelona, when he forsook the grandeurs of the world for a cell in the wilderness. A few years since there were vestiges of his cell at Pouey Aspé, after a thousand years; and tradition points out the fountain that sprang up from a blow of his staff when the stream that flowed past his cell dried up in the summer. His tomb is still honored in the abbey church of St. Savin, which is one of the most conspicuous objects in the landscape, with its queer steeple, shaped like an extinguisher.

No tourist fails to visit St. Savin: the archæologist on account of its old Romanesque church of the tenth century; the artist for its picturesque site; the pious to honor one of the most popular saints of the seven valleys; and the political economist because, in the middle ages, this abbey was the nucleus of a little republic of eight villages, called the Pascal of St. Savin, the inhabitants of which had from time immemorial the right of universal suffrage, and where even the women, without the advantages of modern progress, were admitted to vote!

The abbey of St. Savin—that is what remains of it—stands on the side of a mountain amid dense groves of chestnut-trees. According to the old cartularies, it was founded by Charlemagne on the site of the Palatium Æmilianum erected by the Romans after the conquest to keep the country in subjection, but ruined by the Saracens. Roland himself is said to have received hospitality from the monks. Pulci, in his Rotta di Roncisvalle, relates how he delivered them from the giants Alabastre and Passamonte, and their brother Morgante only escaped being cleft in two by submitting to be baptized in the church. This monastery, renowned in legend and song, was burned to the ground by the fierce Normans, and it was more than a century before it rose from its ashes. It was restored by Raymond I., Count of Bigorre, about the middle of the tenth century. He gave the house to the monks of St. Benedict, and bestowed on them the valley of Cauterets, on condition that they would build a church there in honor of St. Martin, and provide accommodations for those who should frequent the springs. He also made over to them his rights to the game in the pascal valleys, as well as certain claims on the produce of the dairy. The abbey became likewise an object of bounty to other neighboring lords, who confided in St. Savin when alive, and in death wished to lie near his hallowed shrine. Cornelia de Barbazan, grandmother of a Vicomtesse de Lavedan, had great devotion to St. Savin, and gave the monastery one-half the abbey of Agos. The other half belonged to Arnaud de Tors, a lord who only had two children, and they were deaf mutes. He offered them both to God and St. Savin, and subsequently his wife, himself, and all he possessed. Cornelia’s husband outlived her, and on his death-bed asked the monks of St. Savin for the monastic habit, and gave them also all he owned at Agos. The kings of Navarre, the vicomtes of Béarn, and Henry IV. himself proved themselves the zealous patrons of this monastery.

The abbey of St. Savin became the intellectual as well as moral centre of the valleys around. Several of the abbots were noted for their sanctity, and most of them were from good families. They figured among the great lords of the province, and when they visited the little states of their republic the people came out to meet them with young maidens bearing flowers in a basket. They had certain feudal rights over the eight villages, but bound themselves, on taking possession of their office, to respect the customs and privileges of the inhabitants, believed to have been handed down from the beginning of time. The people were none of them serfs, but all free citizens who had the right of deciding by majority of votes every question that affected the interests of the republic. Each village was a little state by itself, and sent its representatives to the general assembly, which was held in the cloister of St. Savin. The women themselves, as we have said, had a voice in public affairs. An old record of 1316 says that when the people of Cauterets came together in the porch of the church to decide whether they should yield to the abbot’s proposition to change the site of the town and baths, they all consented, except one strong-minded woman, named Gaillardine de Fréchou, who stoutly held out against the lord abbot. Women seem to have been regarded in these valleys as something sacred. In the old statutes of the country, drawn up by the abbot of St. Savin and other dignitaries of the province, one of the articles declared that if a criminal took refuge under a woman’s protection, his person was safe, on condition of his repairing the damage. She gave him asylum, as if a temple, or had something of the nature of a divinity! This code also forbade the creditors seizing the oxen and agricultural implements of the laborer. The people elected seven judges to try all criminal cases, but the abbot exercised the higher prerogatives of justice. He never stained his hands with blood, however; it was the Count of Bigorre alone who could impose the sentence of death. The abbot had special rights, also, which he jealously guarded as a means of revenue. The pastors of the eight villages could say Low Mass for their flocks and administer the Holy Communion, but High Mass had to be attended at St. Savin, where the children were also brought to be baptized and the dead for burial, unless in exceptional cases. The obligation of baptism and burial at St. Savin was not confined to the Pascal, but extended to the sixty villages of the valleys of Argelés and Azun. The people had the privilege of hunting in the forests and fishing in the streams—and the game and trout are not to be despised in these days—but the abbot had a right to the skins and a shoulder of certain animals, and an annual tribute of fish.

The monks of St. Savin were noted for their hospitality, and they often received visits from those who frequented the baths of Cauterets. In the sixteenth century they welcomed Catharine of Navarre in spite of her Contes and taste for the doctrines of Calvin; and in the seventeenth the poet Bertin, who, in his light, scoffing way, has celebrated “the long dinner and short Mass of the good abbot of St. Savin,” though he does not seem to have attended the latter, brief as it might have been.

Margaret of Navarre had been staying at Cauterets, where she is said to have composed the Heptaméron. She set out thence for Tarbes, but the bridges had all been carried away by rains, which she says were “so marvellous and great that it seemed as if God had forgotten his promise to Noe not to destroy the earth again by water.” The preface to her work says: “After riding all day she and her suite towards evening espied a belfry, where, as well as they could, but not without great trouble and difficulty, they succeeded in arriving, and were kindly received by the abbot and monks of the abbey, called St. Savin. The abbot, who was of an excellent family, lodged them very honorably, and, as he conducted them to their rooms, made inquiries as to the dangers they had undergone. After listening to their account he told them they were not alone in their misfortunes, for there were two young ladies in another apartment who had escaped great danger. These poor ladies, at half a league from Pierrefitte, had met a bear descending from the mountain, from which they fled at such speed that their horses fell dead on arriving at their place of refuge.”

When the princess left St. Savin the abbot furnished her party with “the best horses in Lavedan, thick Béarn cloaks, substantial provisions, and excellent guides across the mountains, which they were obliged to traverse partly on foot, in spite of the horses, and, after great sweat and labor, arrived at Notre Dame de Sarrance.”

The sceptical poet Bertin, too, thought his visit worthy of recording: “We chose that day to pay our brief devotions at the Abbey of St. Savin; that is to say, to dine there at the expense of St. Benedict. The steeple of the Abbey comes in sight between Pierrefitte and Argelés. The road ascends amid the trees, a little rough, but cool, impenetrable to the rays of the sun, and watered by an infinite number of living streams that come down from the mountains. It may be well to say that some of us were in a carriage and others on horseback, but the greater part were perched, well or ill, as the case might be, on donkeys. Our arrival was triumphant. The ladies were received by the prior to the sound of the organ, the only instrument he could strike up, thanks to the talent of his cook. He likewise presented them a bouquet of flowers and made them a compliment.... The house is well built, spacious, and in the finest position in the world. From the upper terrace of the garden the eye wanders over the magnificent plain of Argelés, which bears comparison, to say the least, with the famous valley of Campan. The day was spent very agreeably, but almost wholly at table. We returned a little late in the evening, without any other accident but the loss of one of our donkeys, which took it into its head to die on the way, under the pretext that he had been overworked in the morning and could go no farther. We celebrated in couplets, half sad, half merry, to which every one contributed:

“'Le trépas de la veielle ânesse,
Qu’on magnétisa, mais en vain
(Trop sotte était la sotte espèce);
Le long dîner, la courte messe,
La chère fine, et le bon vin,
L’enjoûment et la politesse
Du bon prieur de St. Savin.’”

None of the local traditions or documents contain anything to the disparagement of the monks of St. Savin, and their memory is still dear to the inhabitants of the valley. Madame de Motteville, lady of honor to Anne of Austria, when she came to the Pyrenees on the occasion of Louis XIV.’s marriage, visited St. Savin, and thus speaks of it: “There is an abbey here of great importance and renown. It is well built and the monks lead an exemplary life.”

The abbatial church escaped at the Revolution, and the tomb of St. Savin was respected. But it became the property of the government, and it was not till 1874 that it was purchased by the Bishop of Tarbes. The greater part of the abbey has disappeared. The old chapter-hall, however, is still standing. It is of the twelfth century, and has six low arches supported by two central pillars, cylindrical in form. This hall opened into the cloister, which has been totally destroyed. The fine Romanesque church is in good preservation. Around the deep embrasures of the entrance are symbolic animals of evil import somewhat coarsely sculptured, such as the scaly dragon of adverse influence, a bear devouring a sinless child, and the screech-owl, symbol of Jews, traitors, and the foul fiend:

“En cest oisel sunt figuré

Li felon Jeve maleur”

—by this bird is figured the felon Jew malign. And, in fact, the Jews closed their eyes, like the owl, to the light, not to recognize the Messias.

We descended by several steps into the church, into which the sun was streaming from the rose window at the west. The tomb of St. Savin is at the apsis, beneath a gilded canopy of rich design. It is of schist, about six feet long and three broad, and rests on double columns of marble, which have carved capitals. It was long used as an altar, according to the custom of the early church. Above is an ancient statue of the Virgin, said to have been brought from the East by the Crusaders, and in another part of the church is a revered crucifix of great antiquity. One of the most interesting ornaments is a painting in eighteen compartments that presents a complete epitome of St. Savin’s life, and is curious for its details of costume and architecture. Here we are told how St. Savin was sent by his mother, the Countess of Barcelona, to complete his education at the brilliant court of her brother, the Count of Poitiers, who received him with great favor and entrusted his son to his care. St. Savin, for whom, young as he was, life had no illusions, inspired his cousin to lead a simple, unostentatious life in the midst of worldly luxuries, and the latter, not satisfied with this taste of self-renunciation, soon betook himself to the convent of Ligugé, near Poitiers. His mother, in despair, threw herself at St. Savin’s feet, crying: “Give me back my child! It is you who have robbed me of him. You have a mother; think of her grief should you abandon her for ever.” Alas! this was the very thing the saint was thinking of, but he could not resist a higher will. He soon followed his cousin’s example, and they took the monastic habit together. St. Savin’s heart, however, yearned for a more profound solitude, and a celestial inspiration directed his steps toward the Pyrenees. Coming to the valley of the Gave, he followed its windings till he reached a spot overshadowed by three lofty mountains that were covered with snow nearly all the year round—cold, stern, wrapped in gray mists, and infested with wild beasts. Here he looked down on the lonely valley once inhabited by his countryman, the great St. Orens, and resolved to build his cell in a place so favorable to meditation and prayer, and give himself up to a life of austerity. He trod the rough mountain paths with bare feet—he who had been brought up in the court of princes. His only garment lasted him thirteen years. He dug a grave seven feet long and five deep, and there he slept, or lay buried in divine contemplation. Chromasse, a neighboring lord, angry to see a stranger on his lands, sent a servant to drive him away, but the latter only rendered St. Savin incapable of obeying by the blows he inflicted on him. Both master and servant were punished for their cruelty. The former was struck blind, and the latter became possessed by the devil. The moral condition of the servant particularly excited the compassion of the saint, who obtained his deliverance by the power of prayer.

An old legend says that when St. Savin wished to have a light in his cell he used to hold a torch to his breast, and in that furnace of divine love it was at once lighted. This torch used to burn all night long without being consumed, and only grew pale when the morning light came to surprise the saint lost in prayer.

St. Savin, in his last illness, was attended by Sylvian and Flavian, two monks from the neighboring abbey. When he felt his end was drawing near he requested to see Abbot Forminius, who, detained by important business, sent word that he would come on the following day. The dying hermit replied that the morrow would be too late, for then a higher occupation would engross him. As soon as his condition became known a great number of priests and monks hastened to his cell. He received the Body of the Lord, and, with his arms stretched towards heaven and a face radiant with joy, he fell asleep in the midst of a prayer which he finished in heaven.

All the people of the neighboring valleys followed St. Savin’s body to the grave. The repentant Chromasse himself joined the procession, and, pressing close to the bier, he touched with trembling hands the body of the saint, and his eyes, so long closed to the light, instantly recovered their sight.

Such is the legend of St. Savin, who became of so much repute in these mountains that it is not surprising his name should be given to the abbey where he was buried.

From a terrace before the church is a superb view of the vale of Argelés, around which rises mountain above mountain; the lowest rich with vegetation, the upper peaks bare and covered with eternal frosts. Not far off are the remains of the old feudal castle of Baucens, formerly inhabited by the Vicomtes de Lavedan, lords of the Seven Valleys. Madame de Motteville, who stopped here, compares it in her Mémoires to the palace of the fairy Urgande.

Just below St. Savin is the village of Adast with the château de Miramon, the heiress of which married Despourrins, the bucolic poet of the Pyrenees, who composed here, in the idiom of the valley, pastoral songs full of grace and feeling, which have made his name popular in the mountains, where they are still sung by the herdsmen. Béarn and Bigorre contend for the honor of being his birthplace, as the Greek cities of old for that of Homer. Here Boieldieu, struck by the beauty of the country and its poetic associations, wished to found an academy of artists. His plan was, as he wrote his friend Berton in 1832, “to buy an old château in the beautiful valley of Argelés, as finely situated as that of the poet Despourrins. The sight of so glorious a landscape would rouse the torpid imagination, and perhaps awaken in the exhausted brain fresh inspirations that might rival the vagaries of certain artists of the new school. The sky of the Pyrenees ought to be as propitious as that of Italy. The Pic du Midi is not a volcano, but it is covered with flowers. And Marboré, the Brèche de Roland, and the Cirque de Gavarnie, with its cascade that falls down twelve hundred feet, are monuments capable of electrifying the imagination as well as St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, and the Pantheon at Rome.”

On a promontory near Miramon is the votive chapel of Piétad, with its Romanesque lucarnes and low arches, that dates from the ninth century. It was saved at the Revolution by the mountaineers, among whom, as in Spain, Our Lady of Sorrow (or of Pitié, as she is called here) is especially popular. There is, too, the chapel of Soulon, with its crenellated tower, and near by the hermitage of St. Aoulari, with its Roman apsis—a rural oratory, once supported by the offerings of pilgrims and a field that yielded three sacks of wheat, but where services are now held only on certain festivals of the Virgin.

On the other side of the Vale of Argelés stood the hermitage of St. Orens between two cliffs, where, in the tenth century, the Countess Faquilie of Bigorre built a monastery, that this great saint might come to her aid on the dread day of judgment; but only a few picturesque ruins now remain on the edge of a frightful abyss. An old charter enumerates the gifts of the countess for the support of this abbey, called St. Orens of Lavedan: fields, vineyards, books, vestments, and sacred vessels. Nay, more: twenty cows with their calves, six horses, cattle, sheep, swine, and a donkey. The neighboring lords verified the boundaries of the land she gave, and swore thereto by six saints popular in the mountains: St. Saturnin, St. Paul, St. Andrew, St. Martin, and St. Orens.

St. Orens rivals St. Savin in popularity in southwestern France, where many churches and convents still bear his name. Nor is his fame confined to this region. St. Hugo consecrated a chapel to his memory in the magnificent church of Cluny. In Spain there is a church bearing his name at Huesca, which claims to be his native place. In it is the tomb of St. Patience, his mother. And we remember seeing a marble statue of St. Orens beside the shrine of St. Isidro in one of the finest churches of Madrid. The Spanish say St. Orens was the brother of the great St. Lawrence, so honored by the church universal; but the traditions of France only speak of him as the son of the Duke of Urgel, who crossed the Pyrenees to bury himself in the solitude of the mountains. Here he found a cave in a melancholy valley—the Val Caprasie—where the only noise to break the everlasting silence was the torrent that escaped from Lake Isaby. No place could have been better suited to the poetic soul of St. Orens; for a poet he was. His hymns and other writings are still admired in our day, and his Latin poem, entitled Commonitorium, has recently been translated into French. Fortunatus mentions it:

“Paucaque perstrinxit florente Orientius ore.”

This is a treatise of Christian morality in elegiac measure. It is pleasant to read it in the place where it was written and among people whose ancestors probably first read it. We quote one passage, worthy of being written over the doors of the hospitable monasteries that bear his name, in one of which we have so often found shelter: “Fail not to receive under thy hospitable roof the traveller overtaken by darkness. When thou art naked, thou desirest a garment to cover thee; thirsty, a cup to refresh thee. Let similar wants, therefore, excite thy compassion. Share thy mantle, thy loaf with the unfortunate.”

It is said that this saint, so benevolent to others, exercised such severity towards himself as to gird his body with an iron chain and recite the Psalter daily standing in the icy waters of Lake Isaby. He may be cited as an early example of the benefit of hydropathy, for he lived to a good old age in spite, or in consequence, of the rigors of penance. He erected a flour-mill on the borders of the lake for the use of the people around, which tradition says lasted most miraculously seven centuries without ever needing the slightest repair. The remains of it are still pointed out with respect by the herdsmen of the valley. And the stone on which the saint used to kneel in his cave has been carefully preserved; for nothing can exceed the tenacity with which these mountaineers cling to their ancient traditions and memorials. It is worn by the knees of generation after generation who have knelt to pray where St. Orens prayed fourteen hundred years ago.

St. Orens became noted throughout the province for his sanctity and eminent abilities, and the inhabitants of Auch, after three days of fasting and prayer, chose him as their bishop. The messengers they despatched to the mountains found him cultivating the earth. “Deign, O Lord!” cried he, planting his spade in the ground, “deign, I beseech of thee, to manifest thy will in an unmistakable manner.” And in an instant the handle became a bush, which put forth branches and was covered with foliage. The saint no longer hesitated, but departed with the messengers. When he entered the city of Auch all the sick are said to have been instantly healed. He found his diocese partly under the influence of paganism, and showed his zeal in demolishing the altars of the false gods. He saved it also from the ravages of the Vandals at the beginning of the fifth century, and was deputed by the king of the Visigoths to avert the danger that threatened Toulouse, on which the Romans were marching. He is believed to have saved that city by his prayers, and his statue was afterwards placed over one of its gates out of gratitude. A portion of his relics is likewise borne through the streets in the magnificent annual processions for which Toulouse is famous.

St. Orens is said to have regretted the solitude of this peaceful mountain valley, and once, when overwhelmed with the responsibility of his office, he secretly escaped and fled to his cave. His people, however, went in pursuit of him and succeeded in bringing him back. But the time of release came. On his death-bed he had a wondrous vision of Christ surrounded by a multitude of angels, and while in mystic converse with them his soul took flight for heaven. He was buried in the church of St. Jean de l’Aubépine at Auch, and his tomb became famous for miracles, particularly in cases of epilepsy and diabolical possession.

A Benedictine monastery was built here in the tenth century and called St. Orens’ Priory. Its third prior, Bernard de Sédirac, afterwards Archbishop of Toledo, had the remains of St. Orens exhumed and placed in a coffer covered with silver bas-reliefs relating to the saint’s life. This châsse was suspended on the wall of a chapel behind the high altar, and could only be reached by means of a ladder. Notwithstanding, it was robbed of its silver covering some time after by two soldiers, one of whom exclaimed in the true modern spirit: “What! workest thou miracles at this late hour?” But he speedily expiated his sacrilege. He was seized inwardly with a terrible fire that soon consumed him. After this the pavement beneath was covered with bristling iron spikes to prevent another profanation. But the relics of St. Orens, that had escaped the Moor and the Norman, and were even spared by the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century, were less fortunate at the Revolution, when the church of which they were the glory, with its tombs of the early bishops, and the mausoleum of Sancho Mitarra, the scourge of the Moors, from whom sprang the great family of the Armagnacs, so celebrated for their power and their misfortunes, was mostly destroyed, together with a part of St. Orens’ Priory.

The last prior of this monastery was a member of the illustrious house of Montesquieu, one of the most ancient in the province. His brother, a writer of some merit, when the family name and arms were claimed by the sires of Boulbène, instituted a lawsuit against them, and wrote a work to prove his descent from Clovis, which led the Count de Maurepas to exclaim with affected alarm after M. de Montesquieu had gained his suit: “Now, we really hope you are not going to claim the throne of France!” And among the epigrams that rained on him when he was made a member of the French Academy was the following:

“Montesquiou-Fezensac est de l’Académie.

Quel ouvrage a-t-il fait? Sa Genéalogie!”

The prior was one of the deputies of the Etats-Généraux, and made himself conspicuous for his mild, persuasive eloquence. One day Mirabeau, perceiving the effect of his discourse, cried out: Méfiez-vous de ce petit serpent: il vous séduira! After being in exile twice he was, at the Restoration, made a duke and peer of France.

How dear St. Orens’ memory still is in the diocese he once governed we well know who have spent several years of our life there. How joyous is the 1st of May, on which his festival falls! His relics are exposed at the priory, a procession, with lights and music, gathers around the place where his shrine once stood, and at night bonfires are lit on the other side of the Gers and the people dance in the open air.

But to return to the pastoral valleys of the Lavedan. Out of Argelés you pass into the valley of Azun, one of the least known, but one of the most picturesque in the Pyrenees. It is high up among the mountains and divided by the deep and turbulent Gave.[132] The entrance was once defended by the castle of Vieuzac, the ruins of which remain, associated with the memory of the too famous Barère. The valley is inhabited by people of primitive manners with few artificial distinctions. Here every year, at Carnival time, is to be seen the peculiar dance of the country called the Ballade, performed by the young men, who often assemble from different villages in short vests gaily adorned with ribbons, with the most efficient balladeur at their head, playing on the fife and tambourine and waving their flags. The tambourine of the Pyrenees is a primitive instrument of pine wood, as simple as the lyre of Apollo, and with the same number of strings, which the performer beats with a little rod. These dancers are escorted to the edge of their villages by young girls, who welcome them at their return and lavish praises on those who have distinguished themselves. They are presented with eggs, ham, and butter in all the villages they pass through, on which they feast the following day.

Among the curious old usages of this valley, before 1793, was the tribute of butter to the shrine of St. Bertrand of Comminges, a popular saint in the Pyrenees, where he labored in the eleventh century. The people of Azun were then almost out of the bounds of civilization, and for what religious instruction they had they were chiefly indebted to the holy hermits of the neighboring mountains. It is said that when St. Bertrand came to preach among these rough mountaineers, he was treated with so much indignity that the tail of his mule was cut off, for which the land was cursed with sterility for several years. Touched by the repentance and sad condition of the inhabitants, the saint, by his prayers, obtained the cessation of their punishment, and they, in their gratitude, promised to give him henceforth all the butter made the week before Whitsuntide. This vow was kept for nearly seven centuries. A canon and two prebends from St. Bertrand’s came every year to the valley in acknowledgment of this tribute, bringing with them water that had been passed through the saint’s pastoral staff while chanting some orison in his honor. This they gave to the people as a remedy for disease among cattle. These deputies never failed to pass before the house, which is still standing, where St. Bertrand had been so disrespectfully treated. The master stood in the door and humbly prayed them to enter and partake of the refreshments he had prepared, which they did with emotion, like angels of peace and reconciliation.

At the farther end of the valley of Azun, not far from the Spanish frontier, rise the dome and square tower of Notre Dame de Pouey-la-Hun, that stands on an isolated peak overlooking the village of Arrens, between the two roads that lead to Spain and the province of Béarn. The present edifice is comparatively modern, but its foundation is so remote as to be lost in obscurity. You enter by a fine porch supported by four marble pillars, and are at once surprised at the richness of the interior. The walls are brown and gold, and the pillars, carvings, statues, and the very mouldings of the blue arches are all gilded, producing a most brilliant effect. Around the nave are two galleries, one above the other, for the men, who are generally separated from the women in the churches of Bigorre; at least, in the villages. The pavement is the unhewn granite cliff, which is worn quite smooth by the feet of so many generations of worshippers. It descends like an amphitheatre, enabling every one to see the altar distinctly. Across it is a groove, worn by a mountain stream at certain seasons of the year. All the joys and sorrows of the valley are brought to the feet of Notre Dame de Pouey-la-Hun, and numerous pilgrimages are made here at certain seasons of the year.

In 1793 orders came to destroy this venerated chapel, but when the emissaries entered it they were saluted by mysterious voices among the arches, as if reproaching them for their blasphemies and imprecations, and, terrified by the unearthly sounds, they at once made their escape. There was nothing supernatural in this, however. It was a mere stratagem on the part of the peasants to save their beloved chapel, and they boast of it to this day.

During the troubles with Spain this chapel was used as a military post, and consequently much injured. As soon as it was no longer needed for this purpose the government again decided to demolish it and sell the materials. The people became excited, and the women assailed with stones the agents sent to examine the building, who fled for their lives. Then a pious widow, to save it from further profanation, bought it for about fifteen thousand francs, which was nearly all she had, and, when she died, bequeathed it to her nephew, a priest, till better days should arrive. Time and neglect were beginning to leave their traces on the chapel when Queen Hortense came to the Pyrenees. She had just lost her son, the Prince Royal of Holland, and the wild, melancholy grandeur of these mountain valleys harmonized with her sadness. She was particularly pleased with the quaint village of Arrens and its picturesque chapel, and made a sketch of the landscape herself. The devotion of the people to the Virgin of Pouey-la-Hun touched her, and she sympathized in their wish it should be reopened for public worship. She went there to offer her vows, and founded an anniversary Mass for her son, which was to be celebrated with all possible solemnity, as recorded by the authorities of the place. This was shortly before the birth of Louis Napoleon. She never forgot her visit to Pouey-la-Hun. She alludes to it in her travels, and excited the interest of the government in its neglected condition. In 1836 it was made over to the Bishop of Tarbes, who founded a seminary here under the care of missionaries from Garaison, who have rendered it one of the most popular chapels in the Pyrenees.

But to return to the basin of Argelés. The valley of Cauterets begins at Pierrefitte. A carriage-road has been hewn along the steep mountain side on the very edge of a precipice, three or four hundred feet deep, at the bottom of which rushes a fierce torrent that breaks into foam over the sharp rocks that encumber its bed. On each side of this gulf rise steep cliffs almost perpendicularly, down which dash here and there miniature cascades, all in a foam. A bend in the river enables you to look back through the gorge over the wild Gave, the waters of which are of the color of beryl. Nothing could be more delicate than the tint of the foam. Beyond the bold arch of the bridge at Pierrefitte can be seen the fair vale of Argelés, forming a lovely picture framed by the lofty palisades of this wild pass. We left the carriage and wandered on afoot, gathering the eglantine and other wild flowers, inhaling the delicious mountain air, and drinking the cool waters of its numerous streams. By moonlight the scene is particularly sublime. The gloom of this narrow gorge shut in by the lofty mountains, the deep shades of the forests that cover them, and the abyss below, with the ceaseless rush of the mad stream, produce a profound impression on the mind. We remember driving through it on one occasion at midnight. The full moon hung over the mountains of Gavarnie, its light streaming down here and there into the gorge with mysterious, enchanting effect. Before us was the peak of Péguère, like an enormous pyramid with one tremulous star above, its summit bathed in the soft radiance, while its furrowed sides and unfathomable gulfs were veiled with a thousand shadows. As you wind up the Côte du Limaçon, the whole Gave is beaten into spray among the huge rocks. Here the lateral mountains recede somewhat, and you shortly come to the triangular valley of Cauterets, completely shut in among majestic mountains. Its springs were well known to the Romans, and some pretend that Cæsar himself visited them. It is more certain that the kings of Aragon and Navarre did, as well as the ancient lords of Bigorre and Béarn. The little town is more sumptuous now than when under the rule of the abbot of St. Savin. Wooden cabins have been replaced by marble edifices, and the artificial appliances of modern times substituted for the primitive observances of St. Orens. But one gives a sigh now and then for the good old simple days when the lord abbot, to prevent all imposition on the stranger and the poor, forbade the sale of provisions except on the public square. The wine, too, which had to be of good quality, could only be sold a liard more on a pint than at St. Savin, and if false measure was given a fine of ten crowns was imposed on the vender, one-half of which went to the poor and the rest to the abbot.

Cauterets is a very agreeable residence in the season. Here you meet strangers from all parts of the world, and there is a certain charm in the unrestrained intercourse. At certain hours, of course, every one goes to partake of the waters and to bathe. There are pleasant walks along the banks of the Gave, and fatiguing ones up the steep mountain sides. At table you have trout from the river and game from the forests, fowl and vegetables from Argelés, apples and plums from St. Savin’s, peaches from Béarn, and berries of rare flavor from the mountains. Buried in this quiet valley, away from all human agitations, in daily communication with nature, that puts on here its fairest aspect, the invalid returns to a simple, inartificial life which produces more effect than the waters. Rousseau thought no violent agitation whatever, no vapors of the mind, could long resist such a place of residence, and he was astonished that the salutary air of the mountains was not numbered among the chief remedies of medical and moral science.

The valleys of Barèges and Gavarnie also belong to the Lavedan. Another gorge near Pierrefitte leads to them, which is even gloomier and more savage than that of Cauterets. A little more than a century ago it was inaccessible to carriages, but since, by a miracle of engineering, a road has been constructed along the edge of the precipice, and when it cannot find room on one side it springs boldly across the abyss to the other by means of a bridge from which you look down a terrific depth at the Gave, that roars and struggles along with scarcely room enough in its bed. The road thus crosses and recrosses the river seven times. It was completed in 1746, when a carriage was for the first time seen in the gorge. Anything more wild and melancholy than this defile cannot be conceived. The mountains rise perpendicularly up on both sides, with nothing growing on them but a few wretched pines twisted by the winds. The height of these grim walls, the depth of the abyss over which you hang, the gloom, the silence only broken by the roar of the torrent, appall. From time to time you see an isolated house, and at length the village of Viscos, hanging like an eagle’s nest on the rocks. There are two ferruginous springs in the gorge, but they cannot be utilized on account of their position.

Just as you are beginning to yield to the horrors of this wild pass, it opens, and you soon come to the sweet, fresh valley of Luz, one of the most beautiful in the Pyrenees. It is three thousand feet higher than the Vale of Argelés. Here the Gave is a peaceful, well-behaved stream. Its shores are planted with long lines of decorous poplars. The meadow is dotted with trees and covered with harvests. Lofty mountains keep guard around, the lower ones wooded and crowned with the ruins of some old castle, the upper covered with glaciers. In the depths of this valley is the town of Luz, with narrow, tortuous streets, and at the right, on the side of the mountain, is the fashionable watering-place of St. Sauveur. The church of Luz, built by the Knights-Templars in the twelfth century, looks like a fortress with its battlements and great square tower. As in many churches of this region, there is a low, narrow door, now walled up, by which the Cagots—those unhappy pariahs of the Pyrenees—were once obliged to enter. This proscribed race is known to have existed in the time of the early French monarchy. It is said that they descended from the Goths or some vanquished nation, which made them an object of contempt. They were denied citizenship and obliged to live apart and wear a red badge on their breasts, shaped somewhat like a duck’s foot. The church endeavored to triumph over this prejudice by reminding the people that all men are brethren. She would not allow the Cagots, though they were deemed infectious, to be banished from the churches, but gave them a separate place till they should be regarded with more favorable dispositions. They had their own stoup, and it was a defilement to pass through their door. In one church of the diocese of Tarbes the archdeacon with the other clergy, to do away with this odious distinction, passed through their door at some public procession, and the people were obliged to follow. From that time they passed indifferently through either door. The race is nearly extinct now, or has gradually become almost identified with the other inhabitants.

Ascending one of the church towers to the battlements, you find broken lances, stirrups, and other accoutrements—perhaps left behind by the old Knights. There are also four cannons placed here by the Leaguers to defend the edifice against the Huguenots, who always made churches the principal object of attack.

East of Luz, on a high mount, are the picturesque ruins of the Castle of Sainte Marie, which once defended the valley, likewise attributed to the Templars. This was one of the last holds of the English in Bigorre. It is also associated with Burke of the “Sublime and Beautiful,” who surely found both in this incomparable valley. Was it in France that he found reason to prefer “the furniture of ancient tyranny, even in rags,” to the torrent of liberty that swept it violently away?

St. Sauveur is built in a curve of the mountain side, and its houses on the cliffs and terraces produce a charming effect. It is only ten minutes’ walk from Luz, through a long avenue of Lombardy poplars, across a marble bridge over the Gave, and then up a spiral rampe which affords a new and more extensive view at every step. You see the verdant meadow, pretty hamlets on the mountain slopes, foaming cascades, on every hand a landscape varied, brilliant, and imposing.

The first to discover the virtues of the thermal springs of St. Sauveur was a bishop of Tarbes who took refuge here when his diocese was ravaged by the Huguenots of Béarn in the sixteenth century. Surely he had need to drink of their soothing waters! After experiencing their virtues he placed the following inscription over the principal spring: Vos haurietis aquas de fonte Salvatoris, whence the name of St. Sauveur. But the place did not become a fashionable resort till the present century. At the Restoration the French aristocracy, diplomatic highnesses, and military officers flocked hither to enjoy the scenery and allay the fever of their uncertain political life by drinking of the sulphurous waters.

Not far from Luz, on a verdant hill, are the ruins of a hermitage where from time immemorial lived a succession of hermits down to the end of the eighteenth century. Beside it was the chapel of St. Pierre, held in great veneration by the mountaineers, who, on solemn occasions, went there to pray for some special blessing or be delivered from some evil. The statutes of Luz forbade under severe penalty any person over twelve years of age to ring the bells of this chapel without orders. They required, moreover, a general procession to be made here on St. Mark’s day in order to “obtain a blessing on the fruits of the earth, peace with the neighboring valleys, power to resist the devil and all wickedness, and strength to perform those works agreeable to God by means of which is attained the glory of Paradise—Amen.” When the bells rang out on the 25th of April, the master and mistress of every house in the valley were to present themselves, as well dressed as possible, in the church of Luz, and thence proceed, reciting a prescribed number of Paters and Aves, to the hermitage, where the Mass of St. Mark was said and a portion of the four Gospels read. Those who failed to take part in the procession of “Monsieur Saint Marc,” without a legitimate excuse, were obliged to pay a fine of two quarts of wine and half a pound of wax.

St. Peter’s chapel was latterly restored by Napoleon III. under the name of St. Pierre de Solferino. The last hermit who lived here was a Capuchin named Father Ambrose, who consecrated himself to God at the age of sixteen and was all his life a model of holiness. When he took possession of his cell he exclaimed: “I wish to live here as in a tomb—to be counted as nothing—to live unknown, a simple, prayerful, abject life, in utter ignorance of all that is passing in the world.” How complete his renunciation of the world was, how profound the peace he found here, may be seen by two works he left behind, which breathe the deep piety of his nature. They are entitled: Traité de la Paix Intérieure and Traité de la Voie de l’Ame. In the latter he says: “It is in the silence of the passions, interior calmness, exemption from unruly desires, and the government of one’s self that true happiness consists.” This work acquired great renown. The Queen of France accepted the dedication, and nine or ten editions were published during the author’s life without disturbing his profound humility or love of solitude. He died here in the odor of sanctity, in 1778, at the advanced age of seventy.

One of the excursions generally made from Luz is to the hermitage of St. Justin, the first bishop of Tarbes, who fled from persecution to the summit of this lofty mountain, where he and his companions built three cells and gave themselves up to austerities and prayer. They were succeeded by other hermits for ages. The ruins of their cells are still to be seen. St. Justin, says the Martyrology, “rendered himself glorious by the multiplication of his talents.”

At the foot of the castle of Sainte Marie is the gorge to the valley of Barège along the river Bastan, which you follow a few miles, through the poplars and willows, till you come to the village at the head of the valley, which is here so narrow as to leave barely room for a single street. Nothing could be sterner and wilder, and the place would long ago have been abandoned to the bears and the elements but for the reputation of its mineral waters. It is, in fact, nearly abandoned in the winter, when a part of the village is generally carried away by the avalanches or the inundation of the most insubordinate of streams. It was Madame de Maintenon who came here with the Duc du Maine, that gave a reputation to the springs of Barèges. Louis XV. built a military hospital here, as the waters are efficacious in the healing of wounds.

The heiress of Barèges in the middle ages married a knight named D’Ossun, but the mountaineers, unable to tolerate the rule of a stranger, resolved to slay him. He was warned and took flight. All the mountain passes were guarded, but he had, says the legend, a wonderful horse, by means of which he leaped from cliff to cliff, and thus made his escape. This place is still called the Pas d’Ossun. The house of Ossun was famous for its warriors. Pierre, a member of this family in the sixteenth century, was a great captain and chiefly contributed to the victory at Dreux. Disheartened at one moment, he followed the example of his fellow-soldiers who were flying from the battle-field, but a feeling of honor brought him back and he covered himself with glory. He could not, however, forgive himself for a moment of weakness, and, in punishment, suffered himself to die of hunger.

There are numerous hollows among the Pyrenees called Oules (a word in patois signifying a large pot or kettle), around which the mountains rise almost perpendicularly. These basins are also called Cirques. The most famous, as well as most perfect, is that of Gavarnie, surrounded by the mighty walls of Marboré with its towers and embattled summit. The emotion that seizes one in this sublime spot is unparalleled. But its chaos of terrific aspect, its mountains with their glaciers, the famous Brèche de Roland, and the thread-like cascade that falls down so many hundred feet—the source of the Gave that flows past the grotto of Lourdes—have too often been depicted to need repetition. The scene is to be felt, not described. Here end the seven valleys of the Lavedan on the very boundaries of Spain.

JOB AND EGYPT.[133]

There is perhaps no fact more important in the history of the human race, or which, in its striking corroboration of revealed truth, is worthy of higher consideration, than the accumulation of proof, resulting from the exhumation of past ages by modern research, that there are certain beliefs which are the inalienable inheritance of the great human family—beliefs which modern scepticism attacks by a process of false reasoning incomprehensible to any simple and upright nature.

For some years past the sacred texts have been put to the proof by tests of a character as severe as they were unexpected; and thus, from the moment that the key was obtained for deciphering the inscriptions of a far-remote antiquity, it was not without eager anxiety that the judgment was awaited which science was about to pronounce.

But on this occasion, as always when interests of this description are at stake, the first conclusions were too hastily arrived at, and precipitation led to mistakes.

After the vain attacks made on the one hand, and the groundless anxieties raised on the other, with regard to the question of the zodiacs, it was soon found that greater circumspection as well as more accurate criticism must be brought to the examination of evidence before it could be quoted in proof or disproof of any theory. Since that time the lapse of a century has witnessed a vast accession of documentary testimony, and it may be affirmed that up to this moment the whole concurs in establishing the veracity and authenticity of the Holy Scriptures. As the inscriptions of the kings of Assyria bear witness to the fidelity of the Bible narrative, and the Babylonian tradition of the Creation, the Fall, the Tree of Life, the Tower of Babel, and the Deluge confirm the grander, more logical, and simpler account given in the Book of Genesis, so do the annals and theological teachings of ancient Egypt testify to the truth of those doctrines contained in the inspired writings of which they are the traditional echo—an echo mute for ages, and but now reawakened as if to add its protest against the miserable scepticism which is one of the signs of a degenerate and decaying world.

M. l’Abbé Ancessi, whose work on the sacerdotal vestments of Israel and Egypt we have already noticed,[134] has lately published one of more extensive interest, the object of which is to establish from the most ancient documents in existence, outside the Holy Scriptures, that the dogmas necessary to the religious and moral life of man were, from the very origin of society, the heritage of our forefathers, and that, more than a thousand years before Moses, well-nigh all our doctrines and all our hopes existed in the most remote civilization in the universe; and from thence to draw the conclusion that these doctrines and principles would not have remained indestructible in the human mind, diversified and restless as it is, had they not been a part of itself, the foundation of its nature, and one final reason of its being.

The author proceeds to group the Egyptian belief with respect to God, a Redeemer, and the life to come around the well-known text in which Job, overwhelmed by the reproaches of his friends and the weight of his misfortunes, despairing of consolation in this world, declares his certainty of a life to come, where, after death, he will meet with a powerful Avenger, who will put his enemies to shame and make his cause triumph, end his trials, and recompense his virtues by the supreme blessedness of the Vision of God.

The argument of Baldad the Suhite, put briefly, is that The impious man is always unfortunate in this world, with its counterpart, Whoever is unfortunate is impious; but, in spite of this most imperturbable of theorists, Job is conscious of his own innocence, and after listening to a long outpouring of eloquent imagery, amid the desolate splendors of which there shines no ray of hope or comfort for him, he bursts forth like a tempest:

“How long, then, will you afflict my soul, and break me in pieces with your words?... Have pity, have pity upon me, at least you my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath touched me.... Who will grant me that my words may be written? who will grant me that they may be marked down in a book with an iron pen, and in a plate of lead; or be graven with an instrument in the rock? For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at last upon the dust. That these bones shall again be covered with their skin; that in my flesh I shall see God. I myself shall behold him; mine eyes shall behold him, and not another.”

This rapid incursion into the world beyond the tomb, with which the Semitic races were never familiar, and which they appeared in thought to avoid with a singular reserve, contains all the solution of the redoubtable problem; but though the question was settled, the arguments of the pitiless sages began again with renewed volubility, until the voice of God himself interposed, on behalf of his servant, to silence them.

The words quoted above contain evident allusions to traditions and dogmas which appear to have become obscure or been forgotten among the Semitic races. This profession of faith remains isolated, without a precedent which explains it; there is, in fact, nothing analogous to it in the most ancient texts of the Pentateuch, in the Songs of Israel, or the promises and teachings of the prophets.

In the family of Israel, with the Mosaic legislation, the primitive world closes and another begins. The doctrines and hopes freshly implanted by God develop like a plant from its seed, each part being necessary to the other parts; but amidst all the Hebraic literature the Book of Job and his profession of faith remain isolated, and on this account the value of both have been disputed by persons interested in lessening their importance. From this point of view, therefore, it is of moment to find an analogous doctrine in the outlying records of a remote antiquity, and to discover the edifice from which this fragment has been detached.

On the rolls of linen and papyrus preserved in the tombs of Thebes or of Serapeum we find not only the belief mentioned in the Book of Job, but the very expressions there made use of. On these rolls not only is this belief repeated in a multitude of forms, but a community of traditions in the two great families of Sem and Cham is also proved.

Long centuries had elapsed since their dispersion; they were separated not only by their intervening deserts, but by their difference of language, customs, laws, and worship; and yet, where the Semitic text is obscure, we have but to compare it with the writings left by the old Egyptians to make clear its meaning.

The opening words of the quotation above apparently allude to some contemporary usage well known to the patriarch and his friends, but still not in use among themselves: “Who shall grant that my words may be written ... and engraved in the flint-stone?” M. Ancessi asks if we have not here an allusion to the styles or small obelisks which then abounded in the temples and tombs of Egypt, and which, if not in use among the tribes of the land of Uz, had nevertheless been seen by these families of shepherds in their distant wanderings. Besides the great inscriptions commemorating the conquests of the Pharaos, there are, in or near the Egyptian temples, at the gates of the tombs, or within the sepulchral chambers, innumerable smaller monuments placed there by private individuals, and inscribed with their confession of faith. Of this we shall speak further on.

Numerous passages in the Book of Job seem to indicate that he had visited the land of Egypt,[135] and, among these, allusion is made to the tombs of the “kings and counsellors of the earth,” with whom he would fain “be at rest,” and “with princes, who possess abundance of gold and fill their dwellings with silver”[136] (alluding to the Egyptian custom of heaping precious objects in the tombs for the use of the departed at the resurrection). Like them, Job desired to leave his tablet, in which, after the manner of the commemorative obelisks of the valley of the Nile, he would declare the innocence of his life, his faith in a divine Avenger, in the resurrection of the body, and the vision of Him who recompenses the just and punishes the wicked.

The funereal inscriptions of ancient Egypt are of two kinds: those written on rolls of papyrus or linen bands, enveloping the body of the mummy or enclosed with it inside the sarcophagus; and the incised monuments of stone or granite, erected in the chambers or cut in the walls of the tombs and temples and at the entrance of the pyramids.

Almost all the texts[137] found upon the mummies are extracts from a book which Champollion called the Ritual, but which is now styled the Todtenbuch, or Book of the Dead; the term “ritual” being confined to the liturgical manuals relating to the ceremonies of inhumation, etc., some curious copies of which may be seen in the Louvre.

The Todtenbuch is a collection of hymns, prayers, and theological instructions, divided into one hundred and sixty-five chapters, with their titles and rubrics. These rubrics, as in the Catholic missals and breviaries, consist of a few words in red ink to guide the celebrant. The titles of the chapters are also in red. The lines are usually vertical, and, in the richer copies, the upper margin of the roll is adorned, by the side of the title of each chapter, with an illustration or vignette representing the subject there treated. Finally, a whole page is taken up by a picture of the judgment of souls and the ingathering of the harvest in the blessed fields of Ker-Neter.

These texts were to be recited by the soul during its journey, as a safeguard from danger and to purify it at the moment of the solemn judgment which should decide its eternal destiny. The manuscript is intended to assist the memory of the departed. Under the twelfth dynasty these texts were often engraved on the sarcophagus itself.

Thoth, the God of Wisdom, was said to have dictated the Book of the Dead, the greater portion of which Bunsen does not hesitate to relegate to prehistoric times.[138]

In support of this supposition, M. Deveria notices two very ancient annotations. The first of these, at the sixty-fourth chapter, states that this portion of the Book of the Dead was found at Hermopolis, written in blue, on a cube of Baakes, under the feet of the god, where the royal son Hardanouef found it in the time of King Menkera when making the inventory of the temple. The second annotation tells that chapter one hundred and thirty was found[139] in the pylone of the great temple in the reign of King Housapti, who was the fifth monarch of the first dynasty, and Menkera built the third pyramid. Thus, at these periods, certain parts of the Todtenbuch were discovered as antiquities, the memory of which had been lost; and certainly we find on the wooden mummy-coffins of the eleventh dynasty long passages from it, proving, therefore, its composition to have been long anterior to the Shepherd Kings, and consequently long before Abraham.

The obelisks, or inscriptions in stone, have not, however, the impersonal and theological character of the writing on the rolls. On the obelisks the name of the departed is usually inscribed side by side with the names of his family, parents or children, and his titles and occupation are there given. At the head of the monument he is represented making an offering to Osiris, his judge, or his children are there depicted offering libations before the image of their father and reciting the liturgical hymns for his soul.

It is not rare to find the dead himself asking for prayers. The funereal obelisk of Neb-oua at Boulag ends thus: “To the living; to the ancients of the earth; to the priests; to the panegyrists; to the divine fathers; to all who see this obelisk: make for me your songs, beloved of Osiris, the Eternal King. Say: May the delicious breath of life breathe in the face of Neb-oua, the first prophet of Osiris, the acknowledged just one.”[140]

Again, on the lid of a sarcophagus in the same museum (No. 978) we find a “Prayer to be said by every person who draws near to this tomb: May God give thee light,[141] and may its beams shine into thine eyes; may he breathe into thy nostrils the breath which thou must breathe to live.”

The personal details, which vary upon every obelisk, are accompanied by formulæ taken from the Book of the Dead, which recall the faith of the departed in the resurrection of the body; the rewards and punishments of a future life; the judgment, presided over by Osiris, his redeemer; and the hope of an eternity of happiness flowing from the beatific vision.

Here we have, in fact, the profession of faith of the patriarch Job, a further examination of which will show us that the analogy is carried into the minutest details. In regard to it we will first consider briefly the Egyptian doctrine about God and the Redeemer.

Although nothing was originally more simple than the theology of Egypt, yet nothing could well be more confused and perplexing than it became as the commentaries of the schools and the mythological superfetations of each temple developed in the course of time. From its earliest to its latest days Egypt believed in one God, personal, uncreated, almighty, the author and watchful preserver of the universe. How, then, it may be asked, can its exuberant polytheism be reconciled with this doctrine? In traversing the galleries filled with long ranks of the Egyptian deities—Thoth with the head of an ibis and the hawk-headed Horus being conspicuous among them—we pass along the stony piles of these antique and impenetrable monstrosities as if under the influence of a nightmare, while the words of liberated Israel echo from distant ages in our ears: “Os habent et non loquentur; oculos habent et non videbunt; manus habent et non palpabunt; pedes habent et non ambulabunt; non clamabunt in gutture suo.” And we ask what there can be of just and true behind the strange forms of these old-world phantoms.

The answer is contained in the fact that the Egyptians attributed to God different names and forms, according to the aspects and attributes to which they wished to give prominence, while, under each of these names and forms, God, in his inalienable infinity, remained always the same; and, as if they had anticipated our perplexities at the sight of these battalions of divinities, they have taken exceeding pains to instruct us on this point. As the Eternal, God had one name; as Creator, he had another; as Providence or Preserver, another; and as Judge and Redeemer of souls, the name of Osiris. In each sanctuary the one God of the whole country, living in a Triad which, without division of substance, expressed the phases of his threefold existence, was worshipped under a particular form and name. He had a special worship, rites, chants, and ceremonial, unknown in the neighboring temples; but the hymns and inscriptions constantly dwell on the fact that each temple and each ritual was in honor of the only God, to whom belong all temples, and to whom all prayers are addressed.[142]

The One who alone is: there is of him no second.

The Egyptians knew that the Deity is an unfathomable mystery and can have no name. “His name,” say the texts, “is mysterious as his being.” Considered from this point of view, he is called The Hidden One—Ammon, whose image is enveloped in an impenetrable veil. In his uncreated essence God is invisible, but he has revealed himself in his acts, expressive of his wisdom, power, and goodness, and each of these attributes presents an accessible side, by which the mind can take hold of the incomprehensible, see the invisible, and name the nameless One. Having in himself all powers and every form of greatness, his names and forms are without number, and the texts, as in the Hymn to Ammon, expressly designate him as The Many-Named—the Multitude by the Names.[143]

The true name of God appears to have been, with the Egyptians as with the Hebrews, the greatest of mysteries. Probably it was not allowed to be written; in any case, as in the papyrus Harris, its utterance was forbidden. “I am He who makes trial of the warriors, he whose name is known to none. His name must be kept in silence on the borders of the river: whoso shall utter it, he shall be consumed. His name must be silent upon earth.”

We find this in the hymn to Ammon,[144] and the remainder of this text leads us further into the doctrine of a Trinity which Egyptian theology had preserved amidst other primeval traditions.

“Creator of the pastures whereon the cattle feed, and of the plants which nourish man; he who provides for the fishes of the sea and the birds of heaven, who gives the breath of life to the germ yet hidden in the egg, who feeds the flying insect and the creeping thing, who provides the stores of the mouse in his retreat and of the birds in the forest[145]—homage to thee, the author of all, who alone art, ... who watchest over men when they repose, and seekest the good of thy creatures; God, Ammon, the preserver of all; Tum and Armachis worship thee in their words, and say, Homage to thee, because of thy immanence in us; prostration before thy face, because thou producest us; ... the gods bow before thy majesty, and exalt the soul of him by whom they were produced, happy in the immanence of their generator,” etc.

It will be perceived that Tum and Armachis appear to form, with Ammon, a triad, of which the persons are distinct without being separate, each person being represented as reposing in one divine substance, of which each is an aspect, of which each expresses an attribute, and of whose indivisible essence each forms a part.[146]

It is not to be supposed, however, that this lofty and abstract conception was appreciated by the multitude, with whom, on the contrary, the numerous names and forms of their deity degenerated into a monstrous polytheism, and who, in spite of the reiterated affirmations of the hymns and inscriptions, crowded their altars with fantastic idols.

But for the depositaries of the sacred doctrine there was but one God, living in the midst of the divine triads, uncreated, and the principle of life. He was also the principle of truth: “Hold nothing as truth but the Eternal and the Just.... Man is only the appearance; and the appearance is the supreme lie.... What is the First Truth? He who is one and alone, the Lord of Truth and Father of the gods.”

The explanation to this formula is to be found in the other text which supposes the Word to be the principle of the divine persons:

Giving utterance to the Word, exist the gods.

Hermes Trismegistes, commenting upon the above, says: “He who made the world made it not with his hands, but with his word.” And again:

“The luminous Word (Verbum), which emanates from the Intelligence, is the Son of God.... The Intelligence of life and light engendered, by the Word, another creative Intelligence, the god of fire and fluids, who in turn formed seven ministers, enveloping in their circles the sensible world, and governing it by what is called destiny. This spirit is necessary to all; he gives life to all, sustains all. He flows from the holy source, and unceasingly comes to the aid of the spirits and of all things living.”[147]

This spirit, Tum, or Tum Cheper (creator), is described in the texts as “Master of understanding, ... giving to all things their motion: when he wrought in the abyss of the waters,[148] then was produced the gladsomeness of the light. The gods rejoiced at its beauty.”

The Author of the universe is also worshipped as the principle of Goodness under the name of Oun Nofrè—the Good Being; and the inscriptions reiterate the appellation:

The good God; greatly beloved ... greatness of loves.

“His love is in the south: his graces in the north: all hearts are transported with his beauty.... When he traverses the heavens in his bark, and travels in peace through celestial space, his rowers are in gladness.”[149]

Again, in the wisdom of his secret counsels, God is described as holding in reserve all that may happen in the future. “He is that which is, and that which is not,” says the Todtenbuch; “for that which is, is in my hand, and that which is not is in my heart.”

It has been necessary to dwell at some length on the Egyptian doctrines respecting the nature of God and his relation to the world before approaching another feature of exceeding interest in their theology—namely, the history and office of the Redeemer.

This mighty Liberator, the first hope of whom was given by God to our first parents, appears under various forms in the traditions of all the peoples of a distant antiquity, and among these traditions the most ancient and the most pure is certainly that of Osiris, whose noble and beneficent attributes raise him above all the divinities of other nations, represented as coming to bring succor to man. The Doctors of the church were themselves struck with admiration before this august figure, and did not hesitate to identify the name of Osiris with that of our Lord Jesus Christ,[150] being convinced that the belief respecting him was but an echo of the primitive revelation. It would indeed be difficult to explain otherwise its correspondence to the Messianic prophecies given later to the chosen people, or the analogies of the Osirian teaching with the accomplishment, in the life of our Lord, of the hopes which, during long centuries, it kept alive in the countless generations of Egypt.

The special attribute of Osiris is goodness; it is he who is Oun-Nofre the Good Being par excellence; it is he who, with Tum (or Phtah) and Thoth, partakes of the divine essence, and is called, like Ammon, Neb-oua—the Lord alone.

In the papyrus 3292 in the Hall of Tombs in the Louvre is the following passage: “Hail to thee, Osiris, ... the great eldest Son of Ra, Father of fathers,... King of immeasurable time and lord of eternity.... None knows his name; innumerable are his names in the cities and the nomes.[151]... Hail to thee, ... the one who didst rise from the dead. He is the lord of life, and we live by his creations; none can live without his will.” The second aspect of the life of Osiris is his sojourn upon earth in human form, his death, and passage into the land of the departed. Plutarch tells us that Osiris, lord of time, made himself man and reigned on earth, giving his people wise and holy laws; that he taught them agriculture and reverence to the gods, going through all the country to instruct his subjects, whose attention he won and whose manners he softened by the penetrating charm of his words and by music.[152]

Even according to the myths, however, righteousness does not long prosper upon earth. The Principle of Evil, enraged against him, compassed his painful death when his life upon earth had attained twenty-eight years[153]—often represented by twenty-eight lotus-flowers in the inscriptions, and fixed by the traditional age of the Apis.

But for Osiris, as for the true Saviour, the hour of death is the hour of victory. He rises again, and reigns henceforth, king of an eternal kingdom.

The priests and faithful of Osiris could not endure the attempts made by travellers and philosophers to find a resemblance between this pure and lofty divinity to any of their own disreputable gods, or to fix in the depths of the earth and the abode of the dead the dwelling-place of him who had “no kind of communication with substances subject to corruption and death.” No other god had in Egypt so many temples and worshippers as this the favorite deity of the country, since, besides its own local divinity, each of the nomes worshipped Osiris and Isis, and thus the “Protector of souls” was, from the Mediterranean to the cataracts, the god of all the Egyptians.

The anniversary of the death of Osiris[154] was every year observed with lamentations throughout the land, until the hour of his resurrection, which was hailed with joy, festivities, and triumph; this people, always so anxious and interested about the future beyond the tomb, having for the “Lord of the life to come” the most deep and tender devotion. For, of all the phases of his worship, that which occupied the largest place and exercised the profoundest influence on the religious life of this great nation is connected with the office of Osiris in regard to each separate soul. All the funereal inscriptions dwell upon this. Osiris was not only their saviour but their judge. In the paintings and sculptures, and the vignettes of the ritual, he is usually represented enthroned in the Hall of the divine Justice, where, enveloped, all but the face and hands, in the shroud which had enfolded him in the tomb, and holding in his right hand the hyk, or pastoral staff (not unlike an episcopal crosier), and in the left a double-thonged scourge, he awaits the soul of the departed. At his feet are the divine balances, wherein will be weighed the heart of the dead. At the threshold of the hall Maat, the symbol of justice and truth, receives the soul and presents it to the Judge.

The soul’s first words on being brought into the presence of its God were: “I am the Osiris [such a one],” giving his earthly name.[155]

This assimilation of the faithful worshipper with his divine type is one of the most elevated and touching characteristics of the Egyptian doctrine; nor does anything analogous to it exist in any other religion of antiquity—it is only in Christianity that we find it again. In the same way that the Christian is a living member of Christ, sharing in his life, rights, and merits, bearing his name, taking refuge behind the person of his Saviour, so does the worshipper of Osiris become a living member of his liberator, and another Osiris; and at the hour of death the soul calls for aid from him who had also passed its dark portal and come forth again victoriously.

Nothing is more touching than the prayers addressed by these suppliant souls to their protector; thus we read, in a papyrus of the Louvre: “Amensaouef the departed says to Osiris: Receive in peace this Osiris, Amensaouef justified.... Open to him thy gates, that I may enter there when my heart shall desire: may the guardians of thy pylones not fight against me, and may I not be thrust back by thy guards, that I may see God in his beauty; that I may serve him in the place where he dwells.”

To obtain a right to these favors, the soul, as in the litany already quoted from the Book of the Dead, recalled its innocent life; in the Book of the Breathings the dead continues his justification by enumerating his good works: “O gods who dwell in the lower hemisphere! listen to the voice of the Osiris [such a one]; he is come before you. There is in him no fault; no testimony arises against him.... He gave bread to the hungry and water to the thirsty; he gave clothes to the naked;[156] he offered peace-offerings to the gods and oblations to the manes.”

According to the result declared by the unerring balances, judgment was given, and the name of the righteous written down by Thoth in the Book of Life. The just had right to enter into the “Mysterious Retreat,” the place of eternal bliss, to eat the fruit of the tree of life, Astu, and rest in its shadow; to drink the waters of the river of life, to sit down at the heavenly feast with Osiris, and to find the fulness of happiness in the contemplation of the face of God. The impious were driven to endless punishment in the fiery gulfs of Amma, while “intermediate souls” were purified, by an expiation proportioned to their faults, in the Lake of Fire.

The most curious document, after the Todtenbuch, which Egypt has bequeathed to us on the subject is the long MS. entitled The Book of that which takes place in the Lower Hemisphere.[157] The author there describes, as if he himself had visited them, all the various localities of these regions of darkness. In it we advance, with Osiris and his dead, along the gloomy paths which frequently remind us of the wanderings of Dante. The way is divided into twelve “Hours” with their corresponding stations, and is peopled with mysterious phantoms and mythological forms, who sometimes stop the travellers and at others favor their progress. It is said at the seventh hour: “Who knows this, the panther devours him not.”[158] The name of this hour is, “He who repulses the reptile, who wounds the serpent Ha-her.”[159]

The most detailed description of the Egyptian hell is given in the third register of the eleventh hour. There we are shown seven goddesses standing, each armed with a sword;[160] the flames which spring from their mouths fall into seven gulfs, wherein condemned souls, hieroglyphic symbols of spirits, heads cut off, etc., are confusedly mingled amidst the fire. Each gulf is designated in retrograde characters by the word Had, reminding one of the Greek Hades; and each goddess has a name which indicates her powers and functions. It was this hell that was called also the second death—an expression preserved by tradition to the days of Christianity, and repeated by St. John in the Apocalypse, in which we find almost all the ancient formulæ of the religious beliefs of primitive times.

We have now briefly to consider Osiris under the aspect of the Risen One. When, like the sun overcoming the shades of night, he rises from the dead, he is called Horus; and although the texts insist upon the absolute identity of the divine personality who manifests himself under these two aspects, Horus nevertheless, in the mythological form of the doctrine, is called his son—the Avenger of his father Osiris.

This formula, “I am Horus, the Avenger of his father,” occurs repeatedly throughout the Todtenbuch; the Avenger being the God himself awakening from the tomb under a new form, and taking possession of the second life that knows death no more; that which happened to Osiris being repeated in each departed soul, of whom he was the type and the Saviour.

Later on Egyptian mythology furnished Osiris with assistants for this combat with death. The Book of the Lower Hemisphere represents, at the tenth hour of the journey through the lands beyond the tomb, and at the moment when the trial is about to end, four gods, each bearing a bow and arrows, with the legend: “These with their bows and arrows, going before the great God, open to him the eastern horizon of heaven. This great God says: Choose out your arrows, draw your bows; wound for me mine enemies who are in darkness at the gate of the horizon.”[161] This combat is renewed for each soul, and the avenging God invariably intervenes with his attendant spirits. M. Ancessi considers that we have here an unexpected and natural commentary upon the words of Job, “I know that my Avenger liveth,” and proceeds to examine the sense of the word goel, or avenger, of the Hebrew text.

In the social order of the wandering tribes a traditional law regulated that, in case of murder, it rested with the family of the victim to take vengeance on the murderer. It was for the son to avenge his father, or, in default of a son, the nearest relative, who thus became the goel of the slain. It is easy to imagine the terrible effects of this fatal law, which still prolongs itself through centuries, and sometimes does not end before a whole tribe has been cut off.

But besides the earthly avenger, there was another—God himself, who intervened at the hour of death to adjudge the punishment of the wicked and take in hand the cause of the departed. Such is, in fact, the character of the mysterious protector whose aid is claimed by Job when he exclaims, “I know that my Goel is living”; he can count upon him, as in his tribe he counts upon the never-failing avenger of the cause of the oppressed.[162]

We need only allude to the frequency with which, in all poetical and imaginative nations, a metaphor becomes a myth, to perceive the facility with which the idea of the resurrection of Osiris became the birth of Horus in the cradle of his father’s tomb. Thus there was a violent death; there was a son; the next step naturally transforms Horus into the avenger.

How often is it the case that a word of apparent unimportance, having found its way into a dogmatic explanation, ends by entirely disfiguring its sense, like a graft left by an unknown hand in the bark of a tree, and which produces a complete change in its fruit![163] Thus, as time goes on, we find grouped around Osiris, Horus the Avenger, who is called his son, Isis and Nephtys, who are his sisters, forty terrible assessors who surround his tribunal and aid him as judge, besides a multitude of details which compromise and disfigure the ancient doctrine; while the text of Job preserves the mysterious germ of the Osirian doctrine in its simplicity and grandeur, and then applies it in prophetic allusion to the death and resurrection of Messias the Redeemer.

An additional probability that the words of Job contain an allusion to this doctrine is to be found in the remarkable identity of the remaining portion of this text with the formula of the Egyptian papyri. After his affirmation of faith in a living Redeemer Job immediately adds, with the theologians of Egypt: “In my flesh I shall see God, whom I, I shall see for myself; mine eyes shall see him, and not [those of] another.”

The passages in the Todtenbuch and funereal inscriptions are numberless in which we find it said of the departed:

This glorious spirit, in his flesh, he himself, he sees (God).

Again: “I come to thee, Lord of gods and men; I come to contemplate thy beauties.” “I behold the great God in the interior of his tabernacle; in this day of the judgment of souls.”

The resemblance is so striking between the Hebrew and Egyptian texts that comment is needless; nevertheless, we would guard against the supposition that the ideas uttered by the patriarch were borrowed from Egyptian theology; for, besides that in the words of Job there is the absence of any myth or secondary personage whatever, it appears certain that these doctrines, preserved in greater purity in their primitive form among the Semitic races, may be traced back to the time of the separation of the families of Sem and Cham, whom they respectively accompanied into their distant wanderings as their most precious heritage; but whilst the scribes and doctors of Egypt gradually enveloped them in an exuberant mythology, the pastoral tribes of Sem preserved them in the simplicity of the first ages.

And yet all these doctrines, which are proved to be the heritage of humanity, would have been lost and buried with the Egyptian dead had it not been for the intervention of Christ. In vain for three centuries did the loftiest intelligences of Greece weary themselves in studies whose result was to prove that man was incapable of forming true notions of God, the soul, and our destinies from the chaos of systems which enveloped the original revelation when our Lord brought to the human race the realization of its venerable traditions and the faith of its earliest days.

Let it not be objected that the doctrines of the Redeemer were more ancient than his advent and known to man before he taught them upon earth; for man having always had the same duties to fulfil in regard to his future destiny, of necessity God did not leave him in ignorance of them from the time of his origin; and when, later on, they were forgotten, and the whole world lay in darkness, then arose the Light of which a faint reflection in the firmament had long heralded the approach, though clouded most before the dawn.

MILLICENT.

I.

About two years ago we were sitting in our sunny salon in the Avenue Gabrielle, my mother and I, she reading, I at my harp, when Tomlins, our English maid, opened the door, her face all alight with suppressed laughter.

“Well, Tomlins?” said my mother.

“Please, ma’am, it were such a joke!” said Tomlins. “I was a-comin’ past the porter’s lodge when I 'eard a gentleman trying that 'ard to explain himself, and he 'adn’t 'alf a dozen words o’ French, he 'adn’t; and the concierge he could make neither 'ead nor tail of what he was wanting to say; and it was that funny I couldn’t for the life of me but burst out a-laughin’!”

“That was a shame! You should have gone to the gentleman’s assistance, instead of laughing at him,” said my mother reprovingly; “he would have done so had he seen you in a difficulty.”

“I think he was Hamerican, ma’am,” said Tomlins, in a tone which clearly indicated that she thought this fact an extenuating circumstance of her misbehavior.

“That makes no difference,” said my mother; “you know enough of French, such as it is, to have been useful to him, and you should have come forward. But how do you know he was an American?”

“He wore a white 'at, ma’am, and that’s what Henglish gentlemen don’t use to, leastways not this time of year. He be the family that has took the flat down-stairs for the winter.”

“Oh! he is a neighbor, then!” remarked my mother; and, turning to me, she added: “Perhaps I ought to go down and see if we can be of any use to them?”

“Indeed, mamma,” I replied hastily, “you will do nothing of the sort! We have had enough of American acquaintances. These are most likely enormously rich people, whose neighborhood, if we knew them, would be nothing but a bore.”

“We have known some very rich ones who were exceedingly pleasant,” urged my mother.

“Yes, and that is why I have registered a vow never to know another—not if I can help it, at least,” I replied. “Just as you have grown to care for them they sail away across the Atlantic, and you never see them again! No, please, let us have nothing to do with these people down-stairs! They may be perfectly charming, and, if they are, all the more reason for keeping clear of them.”

“This is all very selfish and not at all like you,” persisted my mother. “These people are at our door, strangers, and at the mercy of the concierge, who will fleece them and worry them till they are driven wild; it is a real act of charity to come to their rescue. I will send Tomlins down with my card.”

I gave up the contest. I knew that, when there was an act of kindness to be done, it was no use trying to oppose my mother, especially on such selfish grounds as my present ones. The card was sent accordingly with a message, and about ten minutes later up came the whole tribe—Dr. Segrave, Mrs. Segrave, and Miss Sybil Segrave. They were simply beside themselves with gratitude. Their delight on discovering that there was a deliverer at hand, under the same roof with them, was quite affecting. How they ever found the courage to come and face the situation at all, with such a lively horror of its consequences, was a matter of great surprise to us. Miss Segrave spoke French fluently, but this accomplishment apparently was reserved solely for ornamental purposes; her disconsolate parents had evidently not thought of pressing it into such vulgar service as parleying with the concierge and the cook—two domestic enemies before whom they had already learned to shake in their shoes.

There was something about the three that smote my heart at once. There was a freshness, a frankness, a spontaneous trustfulness that it was difficult to resist. I made a stand for it, nevertheless, and was as coldly unresponsive to their exuberant warmth of manner as was consistent with politeness. The doctor, however, took me by storm, and in one minute and a half I had capitulated.

He was only doctor by courtesy; he had taken every degree that could be taken, but he had only practised as an amateur, being, as my prophetic soul had warned me, “enormously rich.” He was about fifty-five years of age, tall, slim, dark, but he had a quizzical expression of face, a twinkle in his eye, and a spring in his manner that made you forget he was not a boy.

Mrs. Segrave was a complete contrast to him. Middle-sized, stout, and unfashionable in appearance, she had the gentleness and the kindliness of half a dozen mothers rolled up into one; her voice was low, her manner simple almost to homeliness, but full of that easy self-possession that stamped her at once as a lady—a most winning woman.

Sybil—O Sybil! How shall I describe her? She was not a beauty, and yet she made the effect of being one. There was a brilliancy about her that is indescribable; it lighted up the room the moment she entered. Pull her to pieces, and she was nothing; take her as a whole, and she dazzled you. Her features were irregular, her complexion was nothing particular, but there was a sparkle, a glow, a grace about her altogether that were more striking than the loveliest coloring or the most perfect symmetry. I can see her now as she appeared to me that first day, standing on her high heels, a little behind the doctor and Mrs. Segrave, her black eyes glancing right and left like flashes of lightning, her scarlet feather, set like a flame in her black velvet hat, illuminating her olive skin, and her gold-brown silk dress glistening like a separate patch of sunshine in the sunlit room. A most picturesque creature she looked. I longed to hear her speak. No one was kept long waiting for this in Sybil’s presence.

“This is the very kindest thing I ever heard of!” said Mrs. Segrave, holding out her fat little hand to my mother.

“You have saved a family man from suicide, my dear madam!” said the doctor in the heartiest tone.

“Father!” protested Sybil, “there you are making such a character for us! Mrs. Wallace will set us down as a family of mad Americans. I assure you, Mrs. Wallace, we are all perfectly in our right minds, and very grateful to you.”

This sortie broke the ice into splinters. We all laughed, shook hands, and sat down, and the doctor began forthwith to pour out his troubles. Their name was legion. He had not been twenty-four hours in the house, and the concierge had already driven him to the verge of insanity.

“If I could speak to the rascal, I’d be a match for him, and soon make him know I would stand no nonsense,” he went on to explain. “But that’s where he has me on the hip, as Shakspere says; he keeps jabbering on, and I can’t answer the fellow. I know what he’s driving at, I know he’s robbing me; but what aggravates me most is that he thinks he’s fooling me.”

My mother poured all the oil she could on these angry waters, and in ten minutes I could see that she and the doctor were sworn friends.

Sybil listened so far to the conversation with an air of amused interest, just as I was doing; then abruptly turning from it, as if she had had enough of the subject, “You are a musician, I see,” she said—my harp and piano stood open ready for action. “I am perfectly devoted to music! I will come up and play duets with you, if you let me?” I said I should be delighted.

“But I like talking ten thousand times better than music,” she went on. “Music is a way of expressing one’s self with another instrument than one’s tongue; but one tires of it after a while. One never tires of talking; I never do.”

I could readily believe this, but assented as to a general proposition.

“Do you read a great deal?” she continued. “I don’t. I find life is too absorbing, too full; one has no time left for reading. Have you? Human beings are the books I enjoy most. I am so intensely interested in my fellow-creatures! I like to study them, to turn them inside out, to analyze their characters, to exchange views with them. I do so enjoy discussing life. Don’t you?”

This time she did “pause for a reply,” and I was able to make one. It was not very satisfactory.

“No, really! You don’t care for discussing life! Well, I am surprised at that. Dangerous! What a funny idea! But if it were, that would only make it ten times more interesting to me; there is such an excitement in danger! If I had been a man I should have been passionately devoted to tiger-hunting. Now, life is a kind of tiger-hunt, when one comes to think of it; one can always get some excitement out of it—watching other people at the hunt, I mean. Don’t you think so? People take such different views of life. Good gracious! one would never get to the end of one’s friends’ views, if one began, even on one particular subject. Take love and marriage, for instance; what can be more intensely interesting than to discuss marriage with a person who holds views diametrically opposite to one’s own?”

She rattled on in this way for half an hour: it was very amusing. I felt very tame beside her, and I fancied she must have found me insufferably dull and unsympathetic. I found out afterwards that I was mistaken in this; her estimate had been very flattering. On reflection it need not have surprised me; there is nothing a great talker likes so much as a good listener.

We all parted most cordially, with mutual congratulations on the chance that had brought us together.

“I feel as bold as a lion,” said the doctor as he shook hands with my mother. “I am ready to brave an army of concierges.”

“Oh! keep the peace; keep friends with him at any cost. If you make him your enemy, he will worry your life out,” was her parting injunction.

“Well,” she said, when the door had closed on our new acquaintances, “what do you think of them?”

“I think them perfectly odious!” I replied.

“My dear Lilly!”

“Yes. They are just the kind of people we are sure to get fond of, to make a friendship with, and then away they will fly, and we shall never hear or see them for the rest of our lives.”

“You are determined to make a tragedy out of it, so I will not contradict you,” said my mother. “Meantime, I shall enjoy the pleasant neighborhood, and trust to its not ending so badly. They are here for six months certain, and if they like it, and the countess likes to renew their lease, they may remain for six months more. They intend to make themselves very comfortable, meantime, and to receive a good deal.”

“Humph! They will be sending us invitations to their entertainments, I suppose,” I said.

“That is very likely.”

“They will have their share in their thanks, as far as I am concerned,” I said; and I sat down to my harp again. “I have no fancy to go and figure as a housemaid amongst their magnificent American toilettes.”

“I am vain enough to flatter myself that my child would look like a gentlewoman, whatever her surroundings might be,” observed my mother quietly, “and that she does not depend on dress for her individuality.”

What else could I do but jump up and kiss her for this speech, and declare myself ready to go and sport my white muslin and pink ribbons in the midst of all the latest wonders of Worth & Company?

It was not many days before I had an opportunity of putting this heroic resolve into execution.

You may laugh; but it was heroic. I realized this distinctly, even before the supreme crisis of the eventful evening came. Sybil herself came up with the card of invitation.

“Mamma was putting it into an envelope to send it by Pierre,” she said; “but I said that was the veriest nonsense, and that I would take it myself. Of course you are disengaged? You must be disengaged!”

“Unfortunately, we are,” I replied.

“Why, Lilly Wallace, what do you mean!” screamed Sybil.

“Just this: that I am a trifle proud, and just vain enough not to care to look a guy wherever I go, and that I am pretty sure to look that at your house on the 22d. You will all be dressed to kill, as you say—rigged out in the very newest fashions by the most expensive dressmakers in Paris—and I shall have to appear like a school-girl in plain white muslin. I never wear anything else; mamma can’t afford it. I shall have a new one, and she will give me a handsome sash and fresh flowers; but that is all. She will appear herself in plain black velvet, without either old point or diamonds. If you think we will make too hideous a blot on your splendor, say so honestly, and we will spare you the disgrace.”

“Lilly, you are the very oddest girl I ever came across in the whole course of my life!” protested Sybil. “Why, how can you talk so? You will look perfectly lovely in your sheer white muslin. I only wish we Americans were not such fools as to spend all our money on our backs as we do; I can tell you most of us hate it and think it awfully hard to have to do it. But we can’t help it; we should get so laughed at if we went to a ball in white muslin that we should die of shame.”

“Well, that’s a pleasant lookout for me!” I remarked.

“Oh! it’s quite a different thing with you,” Sybil declared, and with a warmth I felt was sincere; indeed, I felt she was sincere all through. “You are English, and we know perfectly well you have a different standard in those things.”

“And my mother?” I said. “What sort of effect is she likely to produce in her plain black velvet?”

“She will look like a queen—that’s all; you know she will, Lilly.”

I did know it; I had known it as long as I could remember. I had been brought up by my mother in a black velvet dress, and believed, nay, knew, that she looked as beautiful and queenlike in it as if its soft and sombre simplicity had been embroidered in gems and beflowered by all the Worths in Christendom.

I confess, nevertheless—and I do so with shame—that I felt mortified at her having to present herself in this splendid gathering of Transatlantic rank and fashion in the attire which had borne her triumphantly through many a stately Parisian crowd. I was really dazzled by the splendor of the dresses when we stood in the midst of them. There was no distinguishing the young from the old, the maid from the matron; silks, satins, laces, jewels glistened indiscriminately on all. There was a great deal of beauty amongst the women—there is sure to be in an American assembly; but the richness of their dresses surpassed anything I ever beheld. In a French salon you may expect to meet a great deal of elegance—some dresses that stand out from the common level of taste and becomingness by their more brilliant hues and elaborate trimmings; but here all were brilliant, all were elaborate, all were magnificent. I really did feel an anachronism as I stood there in my innocent, fluttering muslin, while these superb, many-colored birds-of-paradise floated and rustled all round me, sweeping the dark carpet with miles of silk, and satin, and velvet, and lace of every hue in the rainbow. It was like being shut up in a kaleidoscope; the pattern shifted, flashing into new forms before my eyes at every turn, until I felt fairly bewildered by the moving glory. What kind of conversation could go on under external conditions like these? How were people, women at any rate, to collect their thoughts to converse on any possible subject except the one that was under their eyes, brought before them in such victorious, fascinating guise? If they were not talking of dress, their own dress, their friend’s dress, dress in general or in particular, they were most assuredly thinking of it. And small blame to them. I know I, for one, could think of nothing else.

Nothing could exceed the courtesy of our hosts. They led up guest after guest to introduce to us; all the magnates were presented to my mother, all the young ladies to me. They were very gracious, every one of them, but we did not get on well after the first exchange of commonplaces. How could we? What interest could a white-muslin creature like poor me have in the eyes of these sumptuously-attired young ladies? I said simply nothing to them, I suggested nothing; I was a blank. Sybil never sat down for a moment. She was untiring in her efforts to make everybody happy and pleasant and at home. She kept flitting about from room to room, bringing young gentlemen up to young ladies, seeing that no one was overlooked, that congenial elements were drawn together, that antagonistic ones were kept asunder. There probably were some antagonistic ones, though they were invisible beneath the gay, harmonious surface—that pale, stately-looking girl, for instance, whom I had noticed sitting apart beside a large console that separated her from the gaudy group standing close by. I knew she was a great friend of Sybil’s, because I had seen her photograph in a dainty gilt frame in the place of honor on her writing-table. I saw Sybil making a dart to her side every now and then, and interchanging a few hurried words in a tone of close confidence; and yet she took no pains to bring her forward or to introduce people to her. There was something peculiar about the girl’s air and countenance that drew my attention and made me wish to speak to her. I seized the first opportunity to whisper this wish to Sybil.

“The pale girl in the corner? Whoever do you mean? Oh! Millicent Gray. Yes, by and by. I don’t think you would care much to talk to her; I mean I don’t think you and she would hit it off very well,” said Sybil in a hesitating way; and somehow it was borne upon me that she thought exactly the contrary; that we should hit it off too well, and that she preferred, for reasons of her own, not to bring us together. I there and then resolved that I would make Millicent Gray’s acquaintance before I left the room—or die.

Did Sybil see this in my face, I wonder? She had a way of flashing a look at you with her round black eyes that suggested a power of reading you through and through which was sometimes uncomfortable. I felt it so now, and, trying to assume an air of supreme indifference, I observed, looking in another direction:

“Then never mind. I only fancied talking to her because no one else has been doing so; she looked lonely.”

Sybil’s rose-colored skirts floated away in the direction of Millicent Gray, and for a moment I half-expected she was going to bring her up to me. I was mistaken; she bent over her friend, and began talking in animated tones, gesticulating with her fan in an excited manner. Millicent listened apparently with more surprise than approval; there was a faint expression of sarcastic resentment on her pale, thoughtful face, and an imperceptible movement of her shoulders seemed to shrug away some remark of Sybil’s with smiling dissent; as she did so, her eyes turned towards me and our glances met. There was a mute recognition in them which we both felt. I blushed, feeling rather guilty for watching her so closely; she smiled, and, in spite of myself, I obeyed a law of nature and smiled too. The rooms were now so full that it was difficult to move about; there was small chance of the crowd swaying me across towards Millicent, and she sat on, surveying the scene from her nook with a face that was more expressive of quiet observation than enjoyment. She was dressed in white silk, with waves of tulle flowing over it, but without further ornament—neither ribbons nor flowers; she wore one large crimson rose in her hair, a long trainée of leaves dropping down from it and entangling a rich curl of her dark hair. The relative simplicity of the dress singled her out as a very remote cousin to my white muslin, and I felt more than ever convinced we should prove sympathetic to each other. How was I to make good my vow to speak to her or die? The chances were that I should die, for just at this moment Sybil bore down on me from the rear, and took me in tow through the billows of silks and lace into her own boudoir, which was two rooms off from the central salon where my pensive heroine abided.

“Are you having a good time of it, Lilly?” she inquired, darting her bright black eyes through me, when we came to a little breathing space. “What do you think of our American society? Are our women as handsome as yours? Are our young men as agreeable?”

“Four questions in one breath!” I cried, pretending to gasp. “Let me answer the first—the only one I can meet on such short notice: I am having a capital time of it. You are the best hosts I ever saw, all three of you. But, Sybil, do introduce me to that girl in white silk.”

“No, I won’t,” said Sybil. “You must want some refreshment. I don’t believe you’ve taken so much as an ice; I’ve seen you let the trays pass a dozen times untouched. Come into the supper-room and have something. Stay,” and she bent close to me and went on in a whisper: “I will make Mr. Halsted take you in. You see that young man with the fuchsia in his buttonhole? He is perfectly charming. I have had such a delightful talk with him just now!”

“About what?”

“Good gracious! About everything.”

“You have been discussing life with him?”

“Precisely.”

“And what has come of it? Has he proposed, or is he only hovering on the brink, poor wretch?”

“How absurd you are, Lilly, with your English ideas!” cried Sybil, still in a sotto voce, although the music drowned everybody’s voice. “You won’t understand that one may discuss life with a young man without meaning any harm!”

“Harm? To his heart, do you mean?”

“Or to one’s own.”

“Have you got one, Sybil?” I asked quite seriously.

“Yes, I have, and a very sensitive one too, let me tell you,” she said in her vehemently emphatic way. “Mr. Halsted, will you take my friend to have some refreshment? Mr. Halsted—Miss Wallace.”

And off I went with this perfectly charming young man.

The first person I met in the supper-room was my mother, whom the doctor had just taken in and was plying with some delicious nectar of an American drink.

“My dear, I was beginning to wonder what had become of you,” she said. “It is growing rather late, is it not?”

The doctor protested, but we made good the opportunity as soon as his hospitable back was turned, and disappeared from the brilliant scene.

And Millicent Gray? I was of course in honor bound to die, as I had not spoken to her; but I thought it better to live, and try and make good my resolution in some other way. Chance favored me unexpectedly. A few days after the magnificent reception on the first floor I went down to discuss life quietly with Sybil for half an hour, when the servant said she had been obliged to run out for a few minutes to her aunt’s, next door, but that she would be back presently, and had begged I would go in and wait for her.

I had not been many minutes in the salon when the doctor came in. He had been “down town” to Galignani’s, and had gleaned all the news that was abroad, what steamers were signalled, which had come in, which had sailed, and who had come in by the last arrival. The doctor was a terrible flirt. He sat down on the sofa beside me, and began to repeat verses from Tommy Moore about my “bright eyes that were his heart’s undoing,” and I know not what besides. Mrs. Segrave heard us laughing, and came in to see what it was all about.

“Ah! my dear,” she said, “he whispered those very same verses to me five-and-twenty years ago. Don’t believe him; he’s a gay deceiver. Charles dear, did you ask Mrs. Wallace what we were going to do about this claim the concierge is making of twenty francs a month extra for bringing up our letters?”

“No, I did not,” said the doctor. “In fact, I had not time yet; but I dare say Miss Lilly can tell us just as well!”

“Oh! if it’s anything about the concierge you had much better appeal to mamma,” I said to Mrs. Segrave. “She is at home now, and if you go up you will find her alone.”

“I see how it is: you want to get me out of the way!” said Mrs. Segrave. “You want to hear what more Charles has to say about your bright eyes. Well, well, I’ll go; I’ll not be a spoil-sport.”

She was going to open the door when Pierre opened it, and in walked—Millicent Gray. After the usual greetings Mrs. Segrave said, turning to me:

“You know Sybil’s friend, Miss Gray, of course? No! I was sure you had met. Then let me introduce you—”

As soon as we had got “well into conversation,” the doctor proposed that he and Mrs. Segrave should leave us young ladies together, and go up to consult my mother about this new imposition of the concierge.

When Millicent and I found ourselves alone there was an awkward pause for a moment; we felt as conscious as a pair of lovers thrown together for the first time. At last we looked at each other and began to laugh.

“I am so pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Not so much pleased as I am,” she replied. “I have been entreating Sybil to make me acquainted with you, and she would not. We came near quarrelling over you the other evening.”

“So did she and I! What could have been her motive?” I said.

“Did she not tell you?”

“No.”

“And you don’t guess?”

“No! Pray tell me, if it is not a secret,” I said.

“Oh! no, it’s no secret,” replied Millicent, laughing. “You are a Catholic. She was afraid to let me know you.”

“Lest I should contaminate you!”

“Lest you should convert me.”

I was silent from sheer surprise.

“You see what a dangerous person she thinks you!” said Millicent, laughing.

“I don’t see why she should,” I replied, rather nettled. “I never tried to convert her.”

“Perhaps because you felt it was a hopeless case,” said Millicent, who could not apparently see the thing in a serious light; for she was laughing still, and looked altogether highly amused.

“I don’t know whether I felt about it one way or the other,” I said. “I am utterly bewildered that Sybil should have laid hold of the idea of my being so dangerous in that line; from the moment I discovered what her notions on religion were I avoided even touching on the subject directly or indirectly, and yet she looks upon me as a lion or a fox going about and seeking whom I may devour!”

“No, no; you must not think that,” protested Millicent. “She looks upon you as dangerous, but in quite another sense from proselytizing. She suspects me—very unjustly, I assure you—of having what she calls Roman Catholic proclivities; and when I expressed a wish to know you—she raves about you in the most enthusiastic way—she said nothing would induce her to make us acquainted; that you were just the kind of person to whisk me into the Catholic Church before I knew where I was.”

There was something at once so absurd and so thoroughly characteristic of Sybil in this remark that, in spite of myself, I burst out laughing.

“I promise solemnly,” I said, “that I will not whisk you in without giving you due warning, and, moreover, having your full and free consent to the operation beforehand.”

“Thank you. That is generous,” said Millicent; “and to prove my sense of it I solemnly promise not to whisk you into my church without having your full and free consent beforehand.”

“Yes, by the bye,” I said, “it never seems to have occurred to Sybil that the danger might be mutual; that I ran a risk as well as you by our becoming acquainted?”

Millicent was hesitating in her answer when we heard a loud ring at the door, and in an instant Sybil burst into the room. She stood for an instant looking at us, and then cried out in her ringing tones:

“Well, is it all over with you? Has she done it?”

“Done what?” I said. “Miss Gray has not attempted to do anything except to make herself exceedingly agreeable.”

Sybil laughed merrily.

“I call that exceedingly smart—quite worthy of a Yankee!” she cried. “By the way, it puts the thing in a new light. Milly, turn on the guns and try and convert her.” And she pointed to me with her chinchilla muff. “That would be a feather in one’s cap! Good gracious!”

“Then why should you not try for it yourself?” I inquired. “Sybil, I am inclined to be very angry with you for making me such a reputation. You know perfectly well I have never had a word of controversy with you since we have known each other; never done the least thing to try and make a Catholic of you. You know I have not!”

“I know nothing of the sort,” protested Sybil. “I know this: that you and your mother are the very most dangerous pair of Catholics I have ever met—just the kind of Catholics to knock one’s prejudices on the head with one blow.” And she banged the table with her pretty little muff. “You never preach, either of you, or talk controversy, or do any mortal thing to put one on one’s guard; but you do every conceivable thing to make one fall in love with your religion: you are the very milk of human kindness, you never speak ill of any one, you are always ready to help people, you spend your time going after the poor, nursing the sick, and heaven knows what besides; for you are up at cock-crow, and out by candlelight saying your prayers, when we are fast asleep in our beds. Milly Gray, now mark my words”—and she faced round and confronted Millicent with uplifted muff, in a Sibylline attitude of warning—“mark my words: this is none of my doing, and whatever comes of it is not to be laid at my door.”

“Sybil, I promise that, whatever catastrophe the future of this day may have in store, it shall not be visited on you,” said Millicent. “You have warned me of my peril, and, you know, he who is forewarned is forearmed. Tell me, now, what have you done with Mr. Halsted?”

“Done with him? What did you want me to do with him?”

“Either kill him or cure him.”

“I should kill him, if I could,” said Sybil. “I never knew so perverse a man in the whole course of my life.”

She dragged out the last words with an emphasis that might have led one to suppose the course of her life embraced a period of at least ninety-nine years.

“What is he perverse about?” inquired her friend.

“He won’t change his politics, he won’t go back to the States, and he won’t marry the girl he ought to marry.”

She enumerated these grievances with a gusto of indignation that made us scream with laughter.

“I thought his politics were on the right side—that is, on your side,” said Millicent when she had recovered her gravity.

“That’s the wrong side,” said Sybil; “her politics are strongly Democratic, and there is not the ghost of a chance for him, unless he turns Democrat too.”

“But if he does not want a chance?” I ventured to put in.

“But he ought; I want him to want it. She’s the very sweetest girl in the whole of the United States; and her father is the dearest old man, and would give her a splendid fortune if Mr. Halsted would marry her. And everybody believed he would; only old Nick put it into his head to come out to Europe, and he has gone and fallen in love with another girl!”

“Who won’t marry him?” suggested Milly.

“Certainly not!” declared Sybil.

At this juncture Dr. and Mrs. Segrave came in, bringing my mother with them. She was dressed for me to go out with her, so I had to run off to equip myself, having first cordially invited Millicent Gray to come and see me as soon as possible.

She came the next day, and on a strange errand, considering the warnings of Sybil.

“I am anxious to be of some use to the poor,” she said, after we had talked some little time, “and I don’t know how to go about it here. I suppose there are no Protestants to visit, or at least they must be very few; would there be any objection to my visiting Catholics?”

“Not the slightest,” I replied, “unless you intend to whisk them into the Protestant Church before they know where they are; in that case I don’t think M. le Curé would care to enlist your services.”

“I have no sinister designs of that sort, I assure you,” said Millicent; “and to prove it, I want you to let me go with you on your rounds. I will make myself useful in any way you appoint, and I will do exactly as you tell me—as far as I know how, that is.”

I said, of course, that I should be delighted to have her as a companion, and that we should begin our partnership to-morrow; but my mother came in as we were settling about the hour we were to meet, and unexpectedly put a spoke in the wheel.

“Does Mrs. Gray approve of this arrangement, my dear?” she inquired.

“I have not mentioned it to her,” replied Millicent, her American ideas of independence evidently a little shocked by the question; “but she is sure to approve of it when I do. Is there any reason why she should not?”

“There may be. You are a Protestant, and this scheme of visiting the poor with my daughter must bring you in contact with Catholics of various classes—the poor, the Sisters of Charity, perhaps incidentally with M. le Curé and other priests. Before you embark on these perils I should prefer that your mother’s consent was secured. We English mothers have Old-World prejudices about parental authority, you perceive,” added mamma, smiling; “you will not mind humoring mine in this case.”

Millicent declared her perfect readiness to do so. She looked like one who would gladly humor everybody’s wishes. I was already in love with her. The charm which attracted me that night amidst the gay crowd had not fled “like the talisman’s glittering glory” on a nearer approach. I was at a loss to see where the point of mutual attraction lay between her and Sybil; but Sybil was one of those creatures who spirited away your sympathies before you had time to challenge the thief or lay a protecting hand upon your treasure. She was a siren, who drew you to her cave and did not devour you. Millicent was a complete contrast to her in appearance as well as in character; her eyes were deep blue, and her hair, which was very dark, whitened her fair complexion to the transparency of alabaster, and gave a stronger individuality to her delicate features than blond hair, which seemed their natural birthright, could have lent them. She was very tall, and her small, beautifully-formed hands and feet put the seal on the character of singular refinement which pervaded her whole exterior.

My mother was greatly taken with her. “You have committed yourself more seriously in this case, it strikes me,” she remarked when Millicent had taken leave.

“They are settled in Paris permanently,” I replied; “I asked her that at once. I should not have embarked on an intimacy with her, if they had been only birds of passage.”

Mrs. Gray made no difficulty about Millicent’s joining me in my visits to the poor; she observed, indeed—very naturally, I thought—that “Mrs. Wallace ran just the same risk in allowing her daughter to associate with Millicent.” Millicent returned next morning quite jubilant with this message, and we set out on our first walk together. We agreed that we were not to improve this or any future opportunity to convert each other. Was I quite sincere when I entered on this agreement? Looking back on it, I think I can honestly say I was. I meant that I would not discuss religion or say anything to prejudice Millicent against her own; that I would rigidly avoid controversy; and in all this I kept my word. But I did not disguise from myself that I had a great longing to see her a Catholic, and that I should do my best in another way to bring about this result. For this purpose I had her name put down at Notre Dame des Victoires for prayers. I asked several of my friends to pray for the same intention, and I made a point of praying every day for it myself. I took her to see Sœur Lucie, a Sister of Charity I was very fond of, and I interested her in the same object. I counted a good deal, too, on the impression which the faith of the poor was likely to make on her.

I was just then much occupied with a poor woman named Mme. Martin, who was dying, who had been dying these five years of a very painful malady. I think she was the first person I took Millicent to see. She lived in a room on the sixth floor—that is, in the attic—of a house where her mother was concierge. She had been better educated than the generality of her class, having been brought up as a teacher of singing. This pursuit had subsequently thrown her into the society of persons much above her in position, and the contact had contributed still more to educate and refine her. She had consequently acquired something of the varnish of a lady, and, without being really educated, she had gained that increased capacity for suffering which even imperfect education gives. Her illness had thrown her back into her original position and surroundings, and these were perfect misery to her. She could not bear the society of the servants—her constant one now, owing to that horrible French system of stowing away the servants of every flat in the same house into pigeon-holes under the roof, old and young, men and women, innocent, honest girls and vicious old veterans in dishonesty, all crammed higgledy-piggledy in a proximity full of dangers to both soul and body. This population of the pigeon-holes was insupportable to Mme. Martin; she had nothing in common with them nor they with her. They pitied her—for the French are always kind-hearted—but they resented her evident superiority, and often showed their pity in a way that hurt more than it soothed. She writhed under the compassion of these coarse, vulgar-minded men and women, whose conversation turned chiefly on the domestic concerns of their masters, how they cheated them, the tricks they practised on them.

They came to see, after a while, that she did not care for their society, and they ceased to inflict it on her, and Mme. Martin came gradually to be as isolated as if she had been living in a desert. She was glad of it in one way. We most of us prefer solitude to unsympathetic company; we had rather be left alone than intruded on by those loud voices and heavy steps that jar so painfully on the nervous atmosphere of a sick-room; but there were times when her loneliness weighed terribly on her, when she longed for any hand that would but raise her paralyzed limbs from a posture that had grown agonizing from prolonged immobility, that would give her the drink that was just beyond the reach of her arm. Her mother could come to her but very seldom; she dared not absent herself during the busy portion of the day from her lodge downstairs. Sœur Lucie was very kind, and came as often as she could; it was she who had taken me to her and begged me to look after her. I was the better able to do so that Mme. Martin lived only five minutes’ walk from our house. I don’t think I ever came in contact with a sufferer who edified me more than this poor woman. It was not that she was so wonderfully pious, or heroic, or resigned; she was all three by turns, but none constantly. Perhaps it was this very fluctuation that made one realize so vividly the supernaturalness of the struggle she was carrying on. You saw the power of the sacraments, the action of grace working on her soul, almost as visibly as that of medicine on the body. She was a woman of very strong passions, acute sensibilities, and ardent imagination; you can fancy what it was to such a nature to be immured in a room about twelve feet long by eight, with a roof slanting to the floor at one side, and a window in the slant, incapable of moving in her bed without help, dependent on charity for even that bed and for the bread she ate. For the first years of her illness this misery was so unendurable, she told me, that she thought it would have driven her mad, and the terror of this prospect was the most unbearable thing of all. She had not the consolations of religion then. Her artist life, with its alluring perils, its wild companions, its passionate aspirations, had led her away from the realities of the faith and gathered a mist before her eyes. But she fell ill, and then the mist began to clear away. The Sisters of Charity found her out, and the old sacred memories of childhood were awakened; her First Communion, with its sweet, pure joys, its lovely, solemn pageant, the bright companionship of kindred hearts starting with the fervent promise to the divine Guest whose first coming was the grand event, the supreme crisis of their little lives, the goal to which, thus far, their lives had tended—all this came back like a well-remembered dream at the sight of the gray habit and the white cornette. It was the old, old story: the prodigal had wandered into a strange country, and had grown homesick and turned back, and the Father had met him half way on the road. She had not fed upon the husks of swine, poor Mme. Martin; only “forgotten to eat her bread,” and hunger had driven her home. She spoke to me of her conversion in terms of such deep humility and compunction that I might have fancied her the most appalling sinner who had ever lived, if Sœur Lucie had not told me the exact history of it.

But it was not all sunshine and smooth waters even after this blessed welcome home. There were dreadful battles to be fought yet. She fought bravely, but not always with a smiling face and a glad heart. Oh! no. There were days, of such terrific anguish, such utter, black despair, that it used to seem to me sometimes that her faith must fail this time, that nothing short of a miracle could save her now. And nothing else did. What greater miracle is there than the triumph of God’s grace over our corrupt and fallen nature, the victory of sacraments over the devil that holds our soul? It was a greater wonder to me every time I witnessed it in Mme. Martin. This presence of an evil spirit in her—a real though invisible presence of tremendous, almost omnipotent power—was so palpable that I used to feel something like the kind of terror one would feel near a person possessed. I always felt perfectly helpless while the crisis lasted, and would sit there and listen dumbly while she uttered her bitter, fierce words, not raving in loud, wild accents, but with a sort of hard, suppressed anger, a deep-down rebellion against the cruel, all-powerful will that was torturing her. There was no use arguing or preaching, or trying to make her see the sinfulness and the stupidity of it all; one could do nothing but bear with it, praying silently to God to come to her, and lay his finger on the wounded soul, and speak with his voice, and bid the winds be still.

One thing struck me with peculiar significance: no matter how fiercely rebellious she was towards God, she could always turn with a softened glance towards his Blessed Mother. There was an old print of the Mater Dolorosa on the wall over her bed, and it was the strangest thing to see the poor sufferer lift her dark, vindictive eyes to it with a tender, compassionate, entreating glance, while words of almost savage petulance against the Son were still hot on her lips. Once I remember her bursting into tears as she turned towards it in one of these sudden appeals. The fiend was exorcised for that day. I sat beside her till she had cried herself to sleep like a tired, naughty child.

These terrible days were invariably followed by periods of compunction, humble self-reproach, and love so fervent and consoling that it used to seem to me they could never pass away, that the darkness could never return, that this time the rescue was complete and irrevocable. The humility with which she would beg my pardon for the scandal she had given me, the way she would upbraid herself for her base ingratitude to our Blessed Lord, were more touching than I can describe. She would look up fondly towards the Mater Dolorosa with such an expression of tenderness on her haggard, sunken face, and say, as if apostrophizing it: “Ah! I knew she would gain the victory. I knew she would not desert me! Pauvre mère! Elle a tant souffert!”

The first day that I took Millicent Gray to see her she was in one of these blessed, penitential moods. It had lasted through several days—days of fearful suffering, and nights of sleepless weariness. She uttered an exclamation of joyous welcome when I appeared.

“Que le bon Dieu est bon! I knew he would not keep me waiting much longer. My little stock of patience was just coming to an end!” And she smiled good-humoredly.

“What is it you want?” I inquired.

“I was dying with thirst,” she said, “and I managed to draw this cup to me by hooking my finger in the handle, but I was in such a hurry to drink it that it slipped from me, and I am all wet and half-perished!” And, indeed, she was trembling with cold; her hands were like ice and her teeth chattered. I hastened to lift her up on her pillows and repair the accident, Millicent helping very dexterously. I had prepared Mme. Martin for her visit, so merely introduced her as a friend of mine, who would be glad to come and see her sometimes, if she allowed it.

When we had settled her in some degree of comfort, Millicent and I sat down and began to converse. Mme. Martin was in too great pain to join in the conversation, except by throwing in a word now and then to show she was following it, but one could see she was interested in what we were saying. There was an unusual brightness and peace about her, in the expression of her face and the tone of her voice; I rejoiced that Millicent should see it, for I knew it could not fail to impress her.

“Was last night as bad as the preceding ones?” I said when we were going away.

“Yes; it was very bad. I did not get a moment’s rest till it was daylight,” she said; and she smiled quite serenely.

“My poor friend! How cruelly tried you are!” I could not help exclaiming. “May God give you courage!”

“He does! he does!” she cried fervently. “It is a miracle how good he is to me—a miracle.”

“We must ask him for another one, that your courage may be rewarded by a cure,” said Millicent kindly.

“Oh! no. Don’t ask for that! I don’t want it!” said Mme. Martin quickly, as if she were frightened the miracle was going to be wrought on the spot. “I don’t want to be cured, only to be sustained, and to go on suffering a long time—as long, that is, as He likes—that I may prove I am not ungrateful; that I love him a little bit after all he has done for me! All he has done for me!” There was a look almost of ecstasy on her features as she said this, her face slightly upturned, but her eyes closed as if she were looking within her, into that sanctuary of her soul where God was present. I felt, rather than saw, Millicent turn a sudden, startled glance towards me.

“That is the most precious and most beautiful of all miracles,” I said presently, “that our hard hearts should be softened by the cross, and that we should come to love it for His sake; is it not?”

“Yes,” she replied; “it is the one I have most prayed for. It is to her I owe it.” And she turned to the Mater Dolorosa. “In my worst moments I always felt for her; that my cross was nothing compared to hers—nothing! Pauvre mère!”

When we were out of earshot, on the landing about half way down the narrow stair, Millicent stopped, and, looking round at me, said: “Her brain has begun to be affected; she is a little mad, poor creature, is she not?”

“Yes,” I replied, “she is; she has got what we call the madness of the cross. Many of our saints have died of it: la folie de la croix.”

Millicent stared at me for a moment with an expression that suggested some vague alarm as to my own sanity, but she made no further remark until we had got out into the street.

“What did she mean by saying it was the Virgin Mary that worked the miracle for her?” she then asked.

“She meant that the Mother of Sorrows had prayed for her and obtained a great grace for her.”

“But God would have given it to her, if she had asked him, without going to any creature for it, would he not?” answered Millicent.

“Perhaps; but he would be more willing to grant it to a creature who was sinless and his Mother, and who had stood by the side of his cross, than to a poor weak, rebellious creature who had sinned a thousand times and more. Does it not seem likely?”

“Oh! putting it in that way,” said Millicent dubiously. “But he is God, our Saviour; he must love us more than she does. He died for us; the Virgin Mary did not die for us?”

“Well, really, Millicent—almost,” I said, and, stopping, I looked her straight in the face. “Fancy a mother that loved her son, her only son, as Mary must have loved him, standing by while he was being executed—I don’t say scourged, and beaten, and hammered with nails to a gibbet, murdered piecemeal with the rage of devils let loose from hell, but simply hanged, or even beheaded; would it not be worse to her than any death that ever a mother died? And then fancy her blessing the men that murdered him, praying for them, adopting them! And you can say the Mother of God did not die for us?”

Millicent made no answer, but walked on in silence. We said no more until we got to my door, and then I asked if she would not come up and rest a while.

“No, I prefer to go home, thank you,” she said, putting out her hand. She held mine for a moment, as if she were going to say something; but she did not, and we parted silently.

She seemed strangely moved.

II.

I did not see Millicent until the following Sunday, when she came to ask me if I would go for a walk in the afternoon.

Sybil happened to be there when she came in.

“What hour do you go to church, Milly—the morning or the afternoon?” asked Sybil. I saw the drift of the question: she suspected Millicent had been to church with us.

“I generally go in the morning; mamma likes it best,” replied Millicent. “She was not well this morning, so we are going to late service. And you?”

“Me? I don’t go to late or early. I stay at home and think it over,” said Sybil.

“Think what over?” I asked. “The service?”

“Services in general, religion in its cause and effect—life altogether, in fact,” summed up Sybil. “Will you two let me join you in your walk this afternoon, or shall I be in the way?” We both protested we should be delighted to have her; and at four o’clock we were assembled down-stairs in her boudoir, ready to start, when a loud ring sounded at the door.

“Good gracious!” screamed Sybil; and she dropped into a chair, the picture of astonishment and vexation. “I’ll bet any mortal thing you like that that is Mr. Halsted! Was there ever anything so provoking! I so wanted to have a walk with you!”

“Why need his coming prevent you?” I said. “The doctor and Mrs. Segrave are at home, are they not?”

“Why, Lilly, how can you talk so!” she exclaimed. “What does that matter to Mr. Halsted? He comes to see me!”

“Then you throw us overboard?” I said. “That’s complimentary. What do you say, Millicent?”

Millicent laughed. She was not sorry at heart, I could see, that we were to be left to a tête-à-tête. Perhaps Sybil saw it, too, for she said, starting up suddenly:

“I won’t throw you overboard. Let him call again. Let him come with us, if he likes. Have you two any objection?”

Millicent said she had none. I, however, demurred.

“You will think it absurdly priggish,” I said, “but you know I am half-French—at least, I live amongst the French, so I can’t afford to knock against their hautes convenances; and if I were seen walking with a gentleman without my mother or some married chaperon, it would make quite a scandale.”

“How inconceivably ridiculous!” cried Sybil, staring at me with round, shining eyes. “What a grand privilege it is to be a free-born American woman! I wouldn’t be a slave like you—no, not for the empire of France, Lilly!”

Pierre came to the door to announce Mr. Halsted’s arrival, and we all sallied into the drawing-room. Sybil burst out into regrets at having to go out, and then, pointing a finger of scorn at me, “Only fancy!” she cried—“you’ll hardly believe it, but it’s a fact—Miss Wallace says she dare not come out for a walk with you without her mother, lest it should make a scandal in the town! Did you ever hear anything so preposterously absurd, Mr. Halsted?” I crimsoned to the roots of my hair, and longed to choke Sybil on the spot. Happily, gentlemen being the same in all countries, Mr. Halsted saw my embarrassment and turned it off with easy good breeding.

“Miss Wallace has been brought up in France,” he said. “It is quite natural she should have adopted the notions and manners of the country; but it’s rather hard on us poor fellows. We are cut off from our most cherished prerogatives here in this centre of civilization. May I call this evening? You promised to teach me the Polish mazurka?”

Sybil hesitated. There was to be a dinner-party that evening, so the dancing lesson could hardly take place, and I knew he wanted to figure in the mazurka at a Polish house the next night.

“I can’t this evening,” she said musingly; then, as if moved by a sudden inspiration, she flung down her muff. “I see I must victimize myself for my country’s sake, and give up my walk to save you from making an exhibition of yourself to-morrow before the assembled nations. You two go and take your walk alone.”

Mr. Halsted entered a feeble protest, which Sybil did not even so much as notice, but proceeded to take off her bonnet and prepare for the dancing lesson.

We were not long on the road together when Millicent opened the subject of religion; Sybil’s idea of “thinking it over” being the ostensible pretext.

“I wonder you don’t talk to her about it,” she said; “you might do a good work in that direction, if you tried.”

“By making a Catholic of Sybil?”

“By making a Christian of her.”

“Poor Sybil! Is she as bad as that?” I said, laughing. “She is more in your line than mine, at any rate. She hates popery like fire; I would as soon try to convert the Great Mogul.”

“You are a great puzzle to me, do you know,” said Millicent, looking at me with a glance of searching curiosity. “Catholics as a rule are such ardent proselytizers, and you seem to have no taste in that direction at all.”

“Have you known a great many Catholics before me?” I asked.

“You are the first I may say I have ever known.”

“Then how can you answer for what we are as a rule?”

“I have always understood it,” she replied.

“You have understood, or rather misunderstood, many things about us,” I remarked. “Is Mr. Halsted in love with Sybil, do you think?”

“Mr. Halsted is nothing of the kind. Nice conversation for the Sunday afternoon!” said a sharp, bright voice, and Millicent and I leaped half a mile asunder as Sybil popped her scarlet feather in between us.

“I made sure you would be discussing theology,” she cried, “instead of which I find you discussing me!”

“And why are not you discussing the mazurka with Mr. Halsted?” demanded Millicent and I together.

“Because I thought better of it,” was Sybil’s terse explanation, nor could we extract any other from her.

“What were you talking about before you began about Mr. Halsted and me?” she inquired, flashing her lightning glances from one to another.

“We were talking about you and the Great Mogul,” I replied, “and I was considering which of you I should first set about converting.”

“You had better begin with him,” said Sybil. “Have you done for Milly already?”

“Not—quite—” I said.

“I should like to have it out with you once for all, Lilly,” she said, “and just hear from beginning to end what your religious views are, and how far exactly they differ from mine.”

“You have views on religion, then?” I said in a tone of surprise.

“Certainly I have, Lilly Wallace,” retorted Sybil with indignant emphasis, “and I should like very much to compare them with yours.”

“That would be difficult,” I replied, “for I have no views.”

“What!”

“Not the ghost of one,” I repeated. “We Catholics never have; we listen to the church and accept all she teaches. There is not such a thing amongst us as a view; we would not know what to do with one.”

“Good gracious! That reasonable beings should let themselves be so gul—so—that you should—in fact, it’s beyond belief!”

“No, that’s just what it is not beyond; it is our belief that binds our reason and puts views out of the question,” I said. “We have our faith propounded to us by the church, and the church is the infallible witness of the truth; we have not to make out a creed for ourselves, as you Protestants have.”

“Then why did God give us brains, if we are not to make use of them?” demanded Sybil. “I would not hand over my conscience to any man or any body of men living; I would rather take my Bible and make out the right and the wrong of it myself.”

“Suppose you make it out all wrong—for you admit there is a right and a wrong to it—what then?” I said.

“It does not much matter, so long as our intention is good. God Almighty does not expect us to be infallible.”

“Certainly not!” I replied; “that is precisely why he made his church infallible, to save us from our own fallibility and teach us what to believe and what not to believe. If I believe black and you believe white, we can’t both of us be right; one or other must be in error, and God, who is Truth itself, can’t approve equally truth and error?”

“I tell you what it is, Milly,” said Sybil, turning round sharply on Millicent, who was walking on the other side of her, “it is very bad for you to be discussing theology with Lilly Wallace in this way. Mind what I tell you, no good will come of it!”

“Why, I’ve not opened my lips!” protested silent Milly. “It is you who are discussing it; it was you began it!”

“If I had not, you would,” retorted Sybil; “you are perfectly crazed on religious discussion. I see how it is going to end!”

I burst out laughing. Millicent, however, looked amazed.

“I will tell you what I see,” I said: “that you had much better have stayed at home and discussed life with Mr. Halsted than come out here to bully us. It would be serving you right if I made a papist of you on the spot.”

Sybil saw that Millicent was vexed, and, adroitly dropping the subject, burst out into vehement denunciation of French conventionalities. If it had been any other country in the universe, Mr. Halsted might have come out for a walk with us, and we should have had an excellent time of it; for he was the very best company she knew. We continued, nevertheless, despite his absence, to enjoy a very pleasant walk, and to steer clear of burning subjects the rest of the way. The incident, however, left its mark on us all three, and from that day forth there was an imperceptible but a very decided change in Millicent’s “views.” As to Sybil’s, I never got a glimpse of them, so it may not be rash judgment to express a doubt whether she had any.

I kept to my promise of avoiding controversy with Millicent, and she, seeing my reluctance to gratify her curiosity on this point, gave up trying to overcome it. We talked very freely on religious customs and institutions, but whenever she demanded my reasons for believing this or that I evaded controversy by that inexorable Catholic answer so aggravating to a Protestant—“The church teaches it.”

The winter passed, and the spring, and my mother and I were preparing to leave Paris to spend the month of June in London. One of my greatest difficulties in going away was how poor Mme. Martin was to get on in my absence. Millicent had come with me once a week to visit her. She would continue to do this when I was gone, I had no doubt; but the poor soul was in a state that required a visit every day, and I hardly dare ask or expect that Millicent would break from her mother and her own occupations regularly every day for this purpose, or that Mrs. Gray would allow it. I told her of my trouble, and the next morning she ran in looking quite radiant.

“Mamma says she will allow me to go every morning from eleven to twelve and sit with Mme. Martin and do all she wants; is it not good of her!” she exclaimed, embracing me.

“It is!” I cried, “and very good of you, dear Milly. You can’t think what a relief it is to my mind! I was miserable at the thought of leaving her without some one to take my place of a morning; and she is so fond of you, poor soul! She is so touched by your charity—above all in a heretic!” I added, laughing.

“Charity covereth a multitude of sins,” said Millicent. “I suppose the sin of heresy is included?”

It was quite true: Mme. Martin was wonderfully taken with her. She admired her grace, the quiet distinction of her manner, the subdued elegance of her dress—a Frenchwoman has an eye for la toilette so long as the breath of life is in her—and most of all the gentle kindness with which Millicent performed the little services of the sick-room. It was quite beyond her comprehension that so much sweetness and goodness should exist in anybody who was not a Catholic; it was most amusing to see her naïf wonder at this phenomenon, and her surprise that I did not abolish it.

“But, mademoiselle, why do you not explain to her how dreadful it is not to be in the true church?” she would urge again and again; and to my answer, “I have tried, but she cannot see it,” she would return the same wondering exclamation, “Est-il-possible!”

She evinced as much pleasure as surprise when I told her that Millicent was to come every day during my absence, and read to her and put things tidy in the little room.

“Now,” I said, “you must pay back all this kindness by getting the grace of the faith for her.”

“Oh! if I could but do it,” she exclaimed heartily.

“You may do a great deal,” I said; “your prayers ought to be very powerful with our Blessed Lord, because you are on the cross.”

She shook her head.

“If I lay on it lovingly, as he did,” she said; “but I don’t—not always, at least. I wriggle, and kick, and try to slip off it every now and then.” And she heaved a deep sigh.

“You are not a saint,” I said; “of course you have your ups and downs, but you would rather stay on the cross for any length of time than get off it, if you could, against the will of God, would you not?”

“Oh! yes, that I would,” she answered impulsively.

“Then you are all right,” I said. “Never mind the wriggling and the kicking; your heart is loyal to God, and that’s what he looks to. Set about asking for Mademoiselle Gray’s conversion, and he will not refuse it to you. Offer up all your sufferings for it from this time forth, and I feel perfectly certain our Lord will grant it to you.”

“Well, I will try,” she said, in an accent of simplicity and earnestness that sounded already like a guarantee of success; and then, looking at her Mater Dolorosa, she added suddenly: “I will ask her to get it!”

I had brought some fresh flowers, and was arranging them in a pretty vase that Millicent had given her, when my eye fell upon a new book that lay beside it. It was Notre Dame de Lourdes, which Sœur Lucie had brought her the day before.

“I will get Mademoiselle Gray to read me some of it every morning,” said Mme. Martin; “they say it is beautiful. Do you think she will mind reading it?”

I thought not, and was delighted with the suggestion.

“I have a beautiful life of St. Francis de Sales which I will bring you,” I said, “and you will ask her to read it to you when this is finished. He was a charming saint, and had a great deal to do with converting Protestants; ask him to help you.”

We consulted what other books it would be advisable to get, and what snares were to be set in other ways for Millicent. Sœur Lucie was, of course, to be actively established in the service, the orphans were to be set to pray—nothing was to be left undone, in fact, for the capture of the unsuspecting soul. Of course this was all very treacherous and base, and we were no better than a pair of designing Jesuits—so our Protestant friends will say, if they should happen to light on my little story. I cannot help it if they think so.

We left Paris, my mother and I, and during the three months of our absence Millicent devoted herself like a real Sister of Charity to the service of our poor friend. The weather became intensely hot, but she never let this deter her; she never missed a day. She was inexhaustible in her devices for amusing and comforting the poor paralyzed invalid: she made her bed, and dusted her room, and kept it fragrant with flowers; she brought her little delicacies of every sort; she read to her by the hour—for, though it had been understood that she was only to devote from eleven to twelve to this visit of charity, she managed generally to spend double that time there. All this kindness called out passionate love and gratitude from Mme. Martin. She longed with the most intense longing to requite it by drawing down a blessing upon Millicent; she told me afterwards that the yearning to obtain the faith for her grew to be a kind of thirst that never left her day or night. She offered her sufferings—and they were manifold and terrible—her weary, sleepless nights, her long days of feverish loneliness, every pain and trial of soul and body, not once nor many times a day, but constantly, for her dear benefactress’ conversion, till it became an idée fixe that was never absent from her mind, and found vent continually in interior aspirations or ejaculatory prayers; waking or sleeping, there it was, a part of herself, something that never left her. If she lay awake at night, restless and throbbing with pain, she comforted herself with the thought that it was so much suffered for this dear object; she fell asleep praying for it, and woke up to pray for it again.

We returned to Paris just as Mrs. Gray and Millicent were getting ready to start for some watering place, from which they were to proceed to the south and not return until the spring. Their departure was a real sorrow to me. I had grown sincerely attached to Millicent, and she to me. I had struggled at first to keep my feelings within the proper bounds, not to let myself slip into bondage and so prepare the day of reckoning that waits on all human affections; but the chains had coiled round me unawares, and when it came to saying good-by I found myself hopelessly a captive. We parted with full hearts and promises of mutual remembrance. Millicent was afflicted with that common vice, hatred to letter-writing, which so many of our friends make us suffer from, so we exchanged no vows in this respect, I steadily refusing to write unless my letters were answered. Our separation was therefore likely to be complete.

“You will pray for me, at all events?” she whispered as we embraced.

“Yes,” I said, “but on condition that you pray for me.”

Sybil went with me to the railway station to see the Grays off. She was sorry to lose Millicent, but I could see at the same time that she was glad to have her out of the way.

“I never expected to see Milly come so safely out of it!” she exclaimed as we turned away, after watching the train puff out of the station. “I could have staked my head on it that you would have made a Romanist of her by this.”

“You would have lost your head, then, and, such as it is, you would be worse off without it,” I answered crossly. “One really would imagine, to hear you talk, Sybil, that the faith was a disease that people caught like measles or the small-pox.”

“And so it is—that is—I don’t mean exactly that—but it certainly is contagious; everybody says it is, and that there is nothing so dangerous as living amongst good Catholics. I was terrified out of my life for Milly; I told her so over and over again, and did my very best to protect her. But I must say you have behaved very honorably, Lilly; I suppose there is hardly a Roman Catholic you know who would have behaved as well.”

“You mean to be complimentary, so I suppose I ought to say 'thank you,’” I replied, while I could not but laugh at her impertinence. “Just tell me one thing, Sybil,” I said: “You admit the right of private judgment, don’t you?”

“Do I? Why, I admit nothing else!” screamed Sybil.

“Then if Protestants, in right of their private judgment, choose to believe in the Catholic Church, what have you to say against it?”

“Only this: that in becoming Catholics they don’t exercise their private judgment, they renounce it,” said Sybil.

“After they become Catholics; but in the first instance? The act of renunciation involves an exercise of the judgment, does it not?”

“Oh! if you are going to be metaphysical, I give in,” said Sybil; “I hate and detest metaphysics!”

“Well, just answer me this much,” I pleaded: “Do you think Catholics are all certain to be damned?”

“Good gracious! I don’t believe one of them will be damned. Not the good ones, at any rate—not such as you, Lilly!” replied Sybil with extraordinary vehemence.

“Then why, in the name of wonder, should you have such a horror of any one becoming a Catholic?” I asked.

“Why? Why, because it’s a dreadful thing to ... change one’s religion, and the Roman Catholic religion is full of superstitions, of mistakes of all sorts.... But look! I declare that’s Mr. Halsted on the other side of the street, and he sees us and is coming across!”

“In time to rescue you from metaphysics,” I said. “I hope he won’t stand and speak to us; do you think he will?”

“I won’t let him; I’ll make him walk on at once with us,” said Sybil.

“O Sybil!” I cried, “you must not do that; mamma would be very angry if I were seen walking with him alone.”

“What nonsense! You’re not alone; I'm here,” said Sybil.

“You don’t count,” I said; “you know you don’t.”

“Well, you talk of being complimentary,” protested Sybil, “but that beats all I ever said in the way of polite compliments.”

“You must dismiss him at once,” I said hurriedly, for he was close on us now; “if you don’t, I’ll call a cab and go home alone.”

Mr. Halsted, serenely unconscious of being a cause of terror or contention, approached, smiling, with his hat in the air. He rather affected the extreme of French courtesy in his demeanor towards ladies; which was a mistake, for his native American urbanity, frank and free from grimace and palaver, was much more formidable, if he had but known it. Strange to say, it had not occurred to me before that he was here on invitation; but this fact flashed on me suddenly as I noticed Sybil’s embarrassment. It was certainly hard on her to have to turn him away after inviting him to meet her. I saw but one way to rescue her and myself.

“I am so glad you have come; you will accompany Miss Segrave,” I said. “I am rather tired, and shall be thankful now to drive home. Will you kindly call a cab?”

There was a little pretence of protest, from Sybil, of offering that we should both drive, but I overruled this and had my own way. I was glad to be alone. I wanted to think about Millicent, to look back over the short history of our intercourse, to look forward to its possible issue. I felt disappointed. I had hoped to find her, if not a Catholic, at least very near it, on my return; I had built so much on Mme. Martin’s prayers, on the example of her patient piety, and the living triumph of the faith which she presented. Then I began to reflect that after all I was quite in the dark as to how far these hopes had been disappointed. I had had scarcely any opportunity of judging. Millicent and I had not been once entirely alone since my return, and it was impossible to enter on the subject in a room where others were present. By the time I reached home I had cheered up, and began to take a more hopeful view of things. God works slowly, I said to myself; what are three months to his eternal patience? Mme. Martin was full of hope, though, like myself, the delay seemed long to her.

Her own day of trial was drawing to a close. I found her very much weaker, and altogether more worn and exhausted than when I left. Her soul, on the contrary, seemed to have risen to a higher and purer region, and to be breathing the air from the heavenly hills; her spirit of detachment, her love of the cross, had reached those heights where I could only follow her with a gaze of wondering, awe-stricken admiration. I had always felt a poor creature by the side of her, but I had felt justified in offering her sometimes what little help I could, reminding her of consolations and truths that temptation or overpowering physical pain had momentarily obscured. From this time forth I never dared to do so. Indeed, the opportunities which she herself had formerly furnished for it never occurred. That folly of the cross which had been a source of mild scandal to Millicent on the occasion of their first meeting had come to be her normal state. She had chewed the bitter wood until it had become sweet. The winter wore on and brought no change in her condition, except the gradual, almost imperceptible decay of strength which foretold the approaching close of the struggle. She continually asked for news of Millicent; I was able to tell her that she was well and happy. There were some American families at Cannes who wrote now and then to the Segraves, and generally reported of mutual friends; but Millicent herself perversely refrained from writing to me. I half suspected that there was a motive in this. I said so to Mme. Martin, and it consoled her greatly.

“Yes, it is very possible,” she remarked. “I often fancied Mademoiselle Gray wished to speak more openly to me than she did; the life of St. Francis of Sales evidently made a great impression on her. Sometimes, when she was reading to me, she would stop and look up as if she were going to ask a question, but, after hesitating a moment, she would go on without saying anything.”

“You must pray harder than ever,” I said; “there is nothing else to be done.”

“When I am in purgatory, please God, I will pray for her,” she replied.

“I hope you may go straight to heaven without going through purgatory at all,” I said; “you have suffered so long and so patiently!”

But she shook her head, and answered, with a look of austere humility I shall never forget:

“What are my sufferings compared to my sins—compared to the holiness of God?”

“Do you long very much to see heaven—to know what it is like?” I said, after we had been silent a while.

“No; I can’t say I do,” she replied. “I only long to see God.”

“Do you realize at all what the vision will be?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and her black eyes, so deep-sunk in their sockets, were lifted up with an expression of eager, tender yearning that was indescribable. “I realize nothing; but when I try to do so, I feel the most wonderful peace stealing over me—a sense of safety, of rest, of happiness. I can’t describe it; but it is like a foretaste of the bliss of Paradise—to see God! That is what makes Paradise!”

She was speaking rather to herself than to me, in a low voice, scarcely above a murmur. I felt that God was very near to her; the low-roofed attic was filled with an august, unseen Presence that touched us with a thrilling solemnity.

Presently I said: “You will remember me when you see God, will you not? You will pray for me by my name?”

“Oh! yes, that I will,” she answered, with a loving smile; “after my mother, you are the first person I shall name. I shall tell our Lord how kind you have been to me for his sake; I shall beg him to pay it all back to you.”

“There is very little to pay,” I said; “it has been a privilege and a delight to me to come and see you. But I will ask you to do some commissions for me the first thing when you get into heaven.”

I gave her the commissions. There were three. Millicent Gray’s conversion was the second on the list. She promised me solemnly that she would execute them, either in heaven, if she was so happy as to go there straight, or else in Purgatory, if this were possible.

It was wonderful to see the calmness with which she lay there discussing the prospects of the life beyond, the simplicity and childlike fearlessness with which she watched the approach of death, while at the same time her soul was filled with a sort of awful reverence at the thought of appearing before God. It was impossible to witness it without having one’s faith quickened.

Christmas came. The winter was unusually severe, and the intense cold, from which it was impossible to protect her fully in her miserable room close under the thin roof, brought terrible aggravation to Mme. Martin’s sufferings. It interfered, too, with my daily visits; when the snow came I was compelled to limit them to one or two a week. This was a privation to both of us. I had grown not only deeply interested in her, but sincerely attached to her, and she, on her side, had come to love me with a love of sympathy as well as gratitude that was very precious. It was like being in the companionship of a soul in purgatory; she seemed so loosened from this life, so lifted up, as if the nearness of God were all but a visible reality to her. The more the shadow of death closed round her, the more fully the light from the heavenly mount seemed to shine upon her. My visit was the solitary break in her long day—the only little breeze of human sympathy and comfort that came to refresh her. I knew it was a great trial to her to be deprived of it; she had often said the sound of my steps on the stairs was like a drink to her when she was parched with thirst; sometimes she greeted me playfully with the salutation, “Bonjour, mon verre d’eau fraîche!” But she had now grown so strong in sacrifice that it was difficult to trace the slightest symptom of regret in her. She would reproach me for coming out in the severe weather, declaring that she would rather never see me than have me take cold; that it was wrong of me to run such risks; and that there was no necessity for it, because she wanted for nothing, her mother came up twice a day to look after her, and so on.

One day she asked me if I had any news of Millicent. I had heard that very morning from Sybil that she was figuring with great success in some private theatricals at Mentone. But I did not like to tell Mme. Martin this; I feared it might shock her, or at least jar painfully on her present mood.

“She is very well,” I said. “You know she is very bad at writing letters; I only hear of her through friends.”

“I was dreaming of her last night,” she answered musingly. “How I wish she might become a Catholic before I die! It would be such a consolation to me to hear of it!”

“You will hear of it in the next world, please God,” I said.

“You think souls know what goes on on earth?” she inquired.

“Of course they do!” I said. “How could there be joy in heaven for the return of the sinner unless they heard of it?”

“Ah! yes, in heaven, to be sure; but I was thinking of purgatory. Do you think they know there what happens here below?”

“I see no reason for not believing it,” I replied. “Many saints and doctors have believed it; why should not our guardian angels carry messages from us to the angels of holy souls, if not to themselves direct, and tell them when we are helping and praying for them, and ask their prayers for us in return? It is a belief that fits in perfectly with the doctrine of the communion of saints.”

“It is a most consoling idea,” she said. “I shall be longing for a message from your guardian angel to tell me I have obtained all your requests.”

“Pray hard, then, that you may not have long to wait,” I said, kissing her face, that was looking up at me with a smile. I smoothed her pillows once more, and fussed about the bed and the room, with a pretence of busily setting things to rights, but in reality to hide an emotion that I could neither explain to myself nor master. I remember turning back, as I was closing the door, to have a last look at her. She made a sign with her head, and answered me with an affectionate smile.

On the stairs I met Sœur Lucie.

“She seems just the same, ma sœur,” I said. “How long do you think it will last like this?”

“Oh! not very long now,” she replied. “This cold will soon bring it to an end. She may be carried off at any moment.”

My heart gave a great thump against my side. I could not realize it, and yet it had been borne in upon me that this was the last visit I should pay her. The longing to kiss her once more, to say good-by with the full consciousness that it was to be for the last time, was so strong that I could not resist it. I turned back with Sœur Lucie, and went up again to her room. She did not seem surprised—at least, she said nothing about my reappearance. I waited a moment while Sœur Lucie questioned her, and then kissed her and said good-by.

“Au revoir,” she said, “au revoir. I will not forget your commissions; and mind you pray for me always.”

I was laid up with a violent attack of neuralgia for several days after this. One afternoon, about four days after I had seen her, a messenger came from Sœur Lucie to say that Mme. Martin was dying; she was to receive the Viaticum and Extreme Unction in an hour, and had expressed a wish that I might be present. The doctor was in the room when the message was delivered. I entreated him to let me get up and go, if it was possible.

“You will do as you wish,” he replied, “but you will do it against my emphatic prohibition. I won’t answer for the consequences, if you attempt it.”

Of course this settled the question. Had I been rash enough to try to disobey him, my mother was there to prevent it. I was greatly distressed. I had looked forward for so long to being with her at the last, to receiving her last kind word of farewell, and helping her with my love and my poor prayers through the great passage. My mother saw how pained I was, and volunteered to go and take my place, and tell Mme. Martin how grieved I was at being prevented. She just arrived as the room was being made ready for the coming of the priest. The dying woman had insisted on being taken out of bed and placed sitting up in a chair, that she might receive our Lord more befittingly on this his last visit to her; this was done accordingly with great difficulty and immense suffering to herself. She insisted, too, on being washed, and dressed in her best clothes, and, what struck me as still more characteristic at such a moment, she entreated her mother to put on her Sunday clothes, and to wear a cap which was only taken out on very great occasions. When all was ready, and the three assistants sat praying in silence, Mme. Martin signed to my mother that she wished to speak to her. “Give my love and thanks to Mlle. Lilia,” she whispered, “and tell her I will not forget her commissions.” Then, after a short silence, she said, as quickly as she could gasp out the words: “He is coming! Make haste! Light the candles!”

They did so, but waited still full ten minutes before the tinkle of the silver bell was heard on the stairs. Sœur Lucie told me this incident was not such a rare occurrence with the dying; that frequently they announce the approach of the Blessed Sacrament when the priest is yet a long way off, as if their senses were quickened by some spiritual faculty that is only awakened in death. The solemn, magnificent rite was performed, but it was too late to think of Holy Communion. The priest gave the last absolution and began the prayers for the dying. Before he had finished them the long struggle was over. Mme. Martin was at rest.

About five weeks after her death I received a letter from Millicent, informing me that she had become a Catholic. “It has been all so quickly done; I seem to have been so completely taken up and lifted into the church,” she said, “that I cannot help thinking some powerful supernatural agent has been at work all along overruling my own will. I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than I had of turning Mohammedan—although all my sympathies had been quite gained over to the church by you and Mme. Martin—when one evening I went to act Racine’s Athalie at the house of a friend here. When it was all over, and the people were crowding round me with compliments and congratulations, a gentleman, a Catholic priest, came up and spoke to me; he thought I was a Catholic, and began at once to discourse on the grandeur of the Bible narrative and Racine’s interpretation of it. I undeceived him as soon as I had the chance; he seemed sorry and surprised, but went on talking very pleasantly, and, when we were saying good-evening, I said: 'My mother will be happy to see you, M. l’Abbé, if you would not object to call upon a heretic!’ I cannot to this day tell what moved me to say this. The next moment I thought I must have been out of my mind. He replied good-humoredly that he was not afraid of heretics, and was very glad when they were not afraid of him. My dear Lilly, if the heretics only knew, they would fly from that man as the devil does from holy water! He came to see us next day; it so happened mamma was out, so I saw him alone. I met him several times again, and—well, dear, before the month was out I was a Catholic. When I look back on it, it seems to me that I was in a dream, and that I was led on and on without any conscious will or action of my own, but just let myself follow the lead of some invisible attraction, some magnet that drew me in spite of myself, and here I am safe in St. Peter’s net and happily landed in his bark. Are people often converted in this way? Tell me if the church has invisible fishermen who go about casting nets and catching wayward, silly souls thus, or is it a special dispensation of mercy invented for me?”

“Dear, grateful Mme. Martin! How quickly and well you have executed my commission! Make haste and fulfil the others now!” I cried out to my dead friend on reading Millicent’s letter. She has kept me waiting for the other two; but I have not a doubt they will come in good time.

You can imagine Sybil’s feelings on hearing of this event. I shall certainly not attempt to depict them. Yet, in the midst of her genuine displeasure, there was a high note of satisfaction—the exultation of a prophet who had lived to see his prophecy fulfilled. I am sure this was a great comfort to her. We did not quarrel, though she let me plainly see she looked upon me as a kind of spiritual murderer. On the other hand, she took a more merciful view of it: It was to be, it was written; I was the appointed, or the permitted, instrument of Millicent’s destiny, and if I had not come some one else would; Millicent was doomed from the beginning.

In the spring my fears were realized: the doctor and Mrs. Segrave and Sybil sailed away to New York.

A few days before they left Paris Sybil burst into my room in high excitement.

“Will you believe it!” she cried. “Mr. Halsted has taken his place in the Tiger and is going back with us!”

“Well, and why not?” I said. “You and he will have delightful opportunities for discussing life on deck every day.”

Soon after their arrival I had a letter from her informing me that they had discussed it to the issue I had long since foreseen: she was to be married to him in a month.

THE MADONNA-AND-CHILD A TEST-SYMBOL.

Among the most beautiful of American lakes is one in the northern part of New York State. The old Indian name for it was Horicon, or Holy Lake—called so, perhaps, from the transparency of its water. Its banks abound with historic memories. They have been a battle-ground for English and French, and again in the war of Independence. But what specially endears it to Catholics is its consecration by the Jesuit missionary Father Jogues, who gave it, on the Eve of Corpus Christi, in the year 1646, the name of Lac du Saint-Sacrement—Lake of the Blessed Sacrament. Unhappily, the name it bears at present is the one conferred upon it by Sir William Johnson, who, courtier-like, dubbed it Lake George, after George I. of England.

May its Catholic name soon be restored! As an earnest whereof there now stands on the right shore—about a mile and a half from the head—a building known as “St. Mary’s of the Lake,” from which, through the summer months, a silvery bell rings out the Angelus at morning, noon, and evening. Strangers are informed that this building is “the monastery”; but a front view of it presents one feature which dispenses with all need of inquiry as to the creed of its occupants: not the cross upon the roof—for heresy has stolen that; but an unmistakable “encroachment of popery” in the shape of a Madonna-and-Child.

Among the curious who have ventured upon visiting “the monastery,” a certain good woman was one day discovered standing before the house and looking up at the statue. On being asked what she thought of it she replied, in the accent of Vermont: “Waal, it gives me a feeling as if something was crawling all over me to see the Virgin so big and the Saviour so small! It’s the Saviour that ought to be big.” Now, this sentence, absurd as it sounds, contains, we may say, an entire theology. To one who has never been a Protestant it is unintelligible, no doubt; but to one who has, or has had, that misfortune it expresses, though poorly, an idea of which he is, or has been, himself conscious. Our friend was sufficiently familiar with the Gospel story to know that the figures before her represented the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus. Her remark, too, evidenced her belief in that story. She meant to tell us, in her simple way, that we made almost everything of the Virgin and almost nothing of the Saviour. Perhaps, had she been better educated, she would have expressed a preference for seeing the Saviour alone, and not as a child but as a man. Such, at least, would have been the writer’s own sentiment, years ago, when he was a Protestant. Not but that we should have felt more at ease had there been no image there at all; for the genius of Protestantism dislikes images: it is essentially iconoclastic. But, certainly, we would rather have seen any image than a Madonna-and-Child.

Here are two points for investigation: Why Protestantism is essentially iconoclastic; and why it is particularly uneasy and bitter in the presence of a Madonna-and-Child.

The heresy of the Iconoclasts, or Image-breakers, was Eastern, and raged in the eighth and ninth centuries; even reviving, for a time, after its condemnation by Pope Adrian I. and the Seventh Œcumenical Council. It sought to abolish sacred images and pictures, on the ground of their being idolatrous. Originating with an ignorant soldier, Leo the Isaurian, who had become Emperor of Constantinople, and “manifesting itself” (to borrow the words of Döllinger) “as a blind and senseless hatred of the imitative arts,” we wonder that such a fanaticism could gain footing at all. But, in fact, it developed into a persecuting heresy which “shed more blood,” says the same writer, “than any which had preceded it.”

Now, Protestantism has been said to partake of all the previous heresies; and we, for one, can testify to the truth of the accusation; for, after becoming a Catholic, we discovered, in the course of study, that our mind had entertained, at some time or other—though not always culpably, we trust—nearly every heresy ever known. But that Protestantism has especially distinguished itself by its iconoclastic zeal will be questioned by no one who is acquainted with its history.

We say, then, that Protestantism, as such, is necessarily iconoclastic. And, first, from the negative attitude which its very name implies—from its principle of asserting the right of private judgment to the rejection of extrinsic authority. Man, having a body as well as a soul, and living in an order of the visible and the palpable, naturally seeks to image his ideas—to place them outside of himself in a representative form. And particularly does he feel this need in matters of religious belief. Whence we find the use of symbolic representations in all the ancient religions. The Egyptian, Greek, and Roman minds were peculiarly fertile in symbolism—most so the Greek (the word “symbol” is Greek). But a creed, if it can be called a creed, which consists of negations—which finds its vitality in protesting against authority—cannot consistently use symbols; for, obviously, it has nothing to symbolize. Protestantism, therefore, instinctively dislikes images, seeing in them the symbolic representation of what is positive, affirmative, dogmatic.

Again, Protestantism started with another principle which gave it a tradition of iconoclasm—the principle of a false supernaturalism. The supernatural was exaggerated, to the destruction of the natural. Our nature was declared to be totally depraved, so that even free-will was wanting to us. Consequently, instead of being able to co-operate with grace and acquire merit, we had to be justified by “faith only”; the righteousness of Christ had to be “imputed” to us—thrown over our depravity like a cloak over a leprous body. Now, of course, as an immediate result of this doctrine, away went the saints; for they were no better than ordinary mortals—possessing no merit of their own and nothing to be venerated for. And with them away went their images.

Furthermore, this exaggerated supernaturalism involved elimination of the visible and the material from the economy of grace. For the natural being evil, the visible and the material were evil too, as a part of the natural, and therefore incapable of forming a system intermediary and sacramental between the soul and grace. Hence, away went the idea of a visible church, and away went sacraments and sacramentals. Now, images—representations of any kind—come under the sacramental system, inasmuch as, by raising our thoughts to their originals, they help us to commune with the unseen, and put us in mind the more constantly to invoke that mercy or intercession from or through which graces flow to us. Therefore, again, away went images with the rest of the sacramental system.

But, now, does not all this hostility to the visible and the material as elements of religion look very much like a misunderstanding on the subject of the Incarnation? If Christ is God-Man, he is God made visible—God with a human soul and a material body. Surely, then, to maintain that Christianity has nothing to do with the visible or the material is to betray an unfamiliarity with the meaning of the Incarnation.

This unfamiliarity will become the more apparent when we shall have considered an objection to what has been said on the iconoclastic tendencies of Protestantism. We may not unreasonably be reminded that Protestantism has passed through various important changes in the course of its career, and especially within the last half-century; that the doctrine of total depravity has long gone out of fashion and is practically extinct; and, again, that Protestants do use symbols now—such as the cross and the triangle—while some of them encourage painted windows, and even images, in their churches. Very true. And the change is not surprising—what with unnaturalness of doctrine on the one hand and conflict of principle on the other. “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret,” says Horace—“You may drive nature off with a pitchfork, yet she will keep running back.” Then, as to principles, logic, like murder, “will out.” The doctrines of the Reformation, though negations of Catholic dogmas, took a positive aspect for themselves; and the right of private judgment, which had made them, was only consistent in destroying them. Within the last half-century—and particularly within the last quarter—the principle of self-sufficiency has found its extreme in the complete rejection of the supernatural. Its votaries who have not reached that terminus are drifting thither, if unconsciously. And hence a reaction, in favor of what are called “orthodoxy” and “churchmanship,” is perceptible among all earnest Protestants who retain belief in Christianity as something more than philanthropy, something with a divine meaning. Not that they at all suspect (except those in the front ranks of the movement—the Ritualists, who openly avow it) that they are going back upon the Reformation. But they are. And as they advance they take in ideas which are less and less compatible with genuine Protestantism. One of these ideas is symbolism, the representation of doctrines by signs or images—as the triangle signifies the Blessed Trinity and the cross the Redemption.

Our argument, therefore, that Protestantism, as such, is necessarily iconoclastic or hostile to images, holds good in spite of the fact that modern Protestants are returning to the use of symbols. This return means that they have abandoned the position taken by the Reformers, and have set their faces—how little so ever they think so—Romeward and homeward.

Here, then, comes in a very appropriate question. If Protestants are gradually relinquishing their old iconoclastic spirit—if nowadays they set up the cross to express their faith in the Atonement, and use the triangle as an affirmation of their belief in the Trinity—where is their symbol for the Incarnation? Of course they acknowledge the Incarnation. They bracket it with the Trinity as a fundamental doctrine of Christianity. Then why do they not equally symbolize it? Evidently, their not even attempting to do so—their having no symbol for it—is abundant proof of what has been just said, that, while they profess to receive the doctrine, they are strangers to its meaning. They understand by it merely the divinity of Christ, and beyond this keep it in the background and give it no practical bearing. The Atonement is everything with them; the Incarnation nothing. But Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation. For call it, if you will, the religion of the cross, that term does not designate it as a whole. The truth expressed by the cross depends on the truth of the Incarnation; and so does every other Christian dogma. Christianity, therefore, is either the religion of the Incarnation or it is nothing. As that it must stand or fall. And if we would express it as a whole, we must symbolize the Incarnation. Now, the crowning proof (were any needed) that the Incarnation, rightly understood, has no place in Protestant theology lies in the fact that, besides not attempting to symbolize the doctrine themselves, all Protestants agree in a common aversion (not to say abomination) to the only symbol possible, which is—the Madonna-and-Child.

And why is the Madonna-and-Child the only symbol of the Incarnation? Because the Incarnation means that God is man; but how can we express the truth that God is man, except by showing that he has a Mother? In his divine nature he has no mother; then, if he has a mother, he is man. Whence the creeds do not merely say that Christ is the Son of God, or that the Son of God was made man, but affirm that he was “born of the Virgin Mary”; “Incarnate of (or from) the Virgin Mary”—thus setting forth the same divine Person as at once the Son of God and the Son of Mary. That is, they show us Incarnate God as a Child in his Mother’s arms; they symbolize the Incarnation (a creed is called a “symbol”) by the Madonna-and-Child.

Thus far, then, we have seen that the genius of Protestantism is hostile to images in general, and to the Madonna-and-Child in particular, because it is out of joint (so to speak) with the genius of the Incarnation. We have here a very singular spectacle: a vast body of professing Christians, who hold, with us, the doctrine of the Incarnation, and have not formulated any heresy about it in their “confessions of faith” (we are not including Unitarians among Christians; for they have no more right to the name than Mohammedans); a body of Christians who say with us that they “believe in Jesus Christ ... born of the Virgin Mary”; who keep “merry” Christmas, too, with us—Christmas, the feast of the Madonna-and-Child—who yet, for all this, instead of dwelling with delight on a representation of the Infant Saviour in the arms of his Blessed Mother, invariably show that they are not at home with it as a religious symbol.

Can it be that they are insensible to what is beautiful and touching? No; their hearts are as human as ours. Any other mother and child by an artist of moderate skill could scarcely fail to interest them. Moreover, it is fashionable with cultivated Protestants to admire this Mother and Child where the question is one of art, not of religion. They display a very creditable taste for the Madonnas of Raphael and other great painters. Or if the association of religion add a charm, it is nothing more to them than the glamour which invests a symbol of pagan superstition. And in saying this we speak from experience. When, as a school-boy, the writer became acquainted with the mythologies of Greece and Rome, he found them full of poetry, and soon came to envy the religion of those old pagans—a religion so much in contrast with the aridity of his own. So, too, when, a year or two later, he first saw Catholic worship (it was Benediction, of all lovely rites), he remarked as he came away: “That religion is full of poetry.” “Yes,” was the answer—“of pagan poetry.” And then he was told how all the “corruptions” of Rome had been introduced from paganism; and, as an instance, the Madonna was cited. “They call her the Mother of God,” said the informant (a clergyman of the Church of England, who had learnt his lesson well). “You remember Cybele, the 'mother of the gods’? Well, there’s their Madonna—the Virgin Mary in place of the goddess Cybele.” He was told this and other things of like nature, and so became imbued with the idea that the Catholic religion was a paganized Christianity. Still, for this very reason (as we are free to confess), it had a fascination for us; and the greatest charm of all was its supposed goddess-worship.

At sixteen, again, our attraction to the Madonna was greatly increased by some stanzas of Lord Byron, in which that most wonderful of poets, inspired by the beauties of the Mediterranean twilight, and with some famous painting in his mind, thus apostrophizes Our Lady:

“Ave Maria! Over land and sea,

That heavenliest hour of heaven is worthiest thee!

“Ave Maria! ’Tis the hour of prayer!

Ave Maria! ’Tis the hour of love!

Ave Maria! May our spirits dare

Look up to thine and to thy Son’s above!

Ave Maria! O that face so fair!

Those downcast eyes beneath th’ Almighty Dove!

What tho’ ’tis but a pictured image strike,

That painting is no idol—’tis too like!

“Ave Maria! Blessed be the hour,
The time, the clime, the spot, where I so oft
Have felt that moment in its fullest power
Sink o’er the earth, so beautiful and soft!
As swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
And the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft:
While not a breath crept thro’ the rosy air,

Yet all the forest leaves seem’d stirred with prayer!”

Perhaps, too, we were even more impressed by a single stanza in another canto of the same poem, where, in his description of Norman Abbey (his own Newstead), he recalls a solitary Madonna-and-Child which had been standing amid the ruins:

“But in a higher niche—alone, but crown’d—

The Virgin-Mother of the God-born Child,

With her Son in her blessed arms, look’d round:

Spared, by some chance, when all beside was spoil’d.

She made the place beneath seem holy ground.

This may be superstition, weak or wild:

But ev’n the faintest relics of a shrine

Of any worship wake some thoughts divine.”

Lord Byron, it is true, was not a Protestant, but a deist. But this makes it all the more evident how full of poetry the Catholic religion is—and particularly in its worship of the Madonna—when it could so attract a mind that rejected Christianity altogether. Other non-Christian poets have proved the same thing, and none more so than our own great Unitarian poet, Longfellow, whom, when we first read “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” we supposed to be a Catholic. But Protestant poets, too, and of various persuasions, have evinced a sympathy with particular features of the Catholic religion as it appears to those outside of it, and especially with the Madonna. These see an ideal in our Virgin-Mother. And none has expressed this higher view so well as Wordsworth in his celebrated sonnet—to which, perhaps, we are indebted for our own first glimpse of her as an ideal. It is one of his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and comes among a series in which, as a true poet, he is forced to lament the destructive work of the so-called Reformation.

“Mother, whose virgin bosom was uncrost

With the least shade of thought to sin allied:

Woman above all women glorified—

Our tainted nature’s solitary boast!

Purer than foam on central ocean tost:

Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn

With fancied roses: than the unblemished moon,

Before her wane begins on heaven’s blue coast!

Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,
Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,
As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mix’d and reconciled in thee
Of mother’s love with maiden purity—
Of high with low—celestial with terrene!”

Clearly, therefore, it is not an obtuseness to the beautiful, or even to the ideal, that alienates the Protestant mind from our symbol of the Incarnation. No; the key to the puzzle is this: that the system of Christianity known as Protestantism cannot see in the Madonna-and-Child a symbol of itself—has nothing in it capable of being symbolized by either Madonna or Child.

The Incarnation, once more, is God made visible. As such it must needs create for itself a visible kingdom on earth: a kingdom over body as well as over soul—a kingdom in the world of mind, and equally into the world of sense and matter. The kingdom thus created will, of course, be in harmony with that which created it—the Incarnation—and, therefore, with the symbol of the Incarnation—the Madonna-and-Child; and so will find in the Madonna-and-Child the symbol of itself—the mould upon which it was cast.

Here, then, the reader will perceive what we mean by calling the Madonna-and-Child a test-symbol. Whatever system of Christianity is not at home with this symbol, or not entirely in harmony with it, is thereby convicted of being false, as not the kingdom of the Incarnation. So that, to demonstrate the true Christianity, out of all existing systems calling themselves Christian, we have only to confront them with the Madonna-and-Child.

Let us do this. And, first, we will call up all the Protestant communions, and particularly the two most important and respectable—the state church of England and her daughter in America; excluding on the one hand whatever sects deny the divinity of Christ, and on the other that party in the said Episcopalian churches which is working, more or less consciously, to bring back “popery without the pope.” Neither of these extremes is genuine Protestantism.

All classes of genuine Protestants, when confronted with the Madonna-and-Child, acknowledge it, of course, the representation of an historic fact in which they believe—the birth of Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary—but instinctively feel that it means a great deal more. They principally object to the Madonna, as giving the Blessed Virgin too much prominence. “We all know,” they argue, “that she is the Mother of our Saviour; but, beyond this, what is she to us?” They are not accustomed to speak of her, except when they mention her in the Creed; or even to think of her, except when they pity or abuse their “idolatrous” fellow-Christians. At the same time neither do they care to see the Child, particularly in Mary’s arms or by her side. “He did not remain a child all his life,” they say. “It was not as a child that he came out in public to work miracles and preach the Gospel; it was not as a child that he suffered and died. Then what is his childhood to us?” In a word, our symbol of the Incarnation reminds them of nothing with which they are familiar.

The secret is, they are not within the visible kingdom of the Incarnation; they are outside the visible church. Each sect will call itself a church, no doubt; and the Episcopalians have something to show for theirs, because, in its outward form, it is a fair imitation of a real hierarchy. But when they say in the Creed, with us, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” they do not mean at all what we mean. To them the Catholic Church of the Creed is the collective multitude of omnigenous believers in Christ, instead of signifying a visible institution divinely endowed to teach and govern, and standing to them in the relation of a mother—carrying them in her arms and feeding them at her breast. If they did mean this by the Catholic Church, they would recognize at once in the Madonna-and-Child a symbol of that church with them in her arms, and would, so far, feel at home with the Madonna-and-Child.

Neither, again, have they the Blessed Sacrament—that lovely “second infancy” of Jesus—or they would joyfully acknowledge in the Madonna-and-Child an image of the church with the Blessed Sacrament in her keeping.

But especially would their attitude towards Our Lady be different from what it is now. Believing in a visible church, they would not insist, as now, on having nothing between themselves and Christ, who, by instituting the church, chose to place an entire system between himself and them. And, seeing the type of this church in Mary, they could not vituperate our doctrine of the latter’s maternal mediation; not only because of the church’s mediation, but also because Mary, as the type of mother church, must needs be Mother Mary.

Now, to the writer this is all the more clear because it is the history of his conversion. Having come—and, thank God! not so late as it might have been—to feel the necessity of a visible church as a mother and guide, at whose feet we could sit child-like and learn from her “the words of eternal life”—to hear whom would be to hear Christ; to go to whom, to go to Christ—we gradually discovered that the Church of England, in which we had been reared, and to whose ministry we were looking forward, was no such mother and guide, nor ever could be. We found that she did very well as a state church, a moral police, a “part of the civil service”; but that her success in being fashionable was owing—not to any divine commission, not to her speaking “as one having authority,” not to her teaching one definite body of doctrine—but, on the contrary, to her being the creation of Parliament; to her disclaiming all authority to teach, except as a fallible human witness; and to her leaving the utmost latitude for every variety and contradiction of opinion, so that her clergy were equally at liberty to hold or deny such vital doctrines as baptismal regeneration, the Real Presence, sacerdotal absolution, and apostolical succession. Added to these doctrines—which we had come to believe from joining first the moderate High-Church party, and then the extreme, or the Ritualists—was a parallel attraction to the Blessed Virgin, whom we had discovered to be truly the Mother of God. And the two ideas of a mother in the church and a Mother in the Blessed Virgin rose together and grew together, till we found them both realities in the kingdom of the Incarnation.

And now we may let Protestantism go. Its votaries are loud in exhorting us to return with them to the purity of primitive Christianity. But when we take them back with us over the centuries to the very cradle of Christianity—to the cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem—and enter that sanctuary on the first Christmas morning, are they or we more at home there, in the presence of the Madonna-and-Child? So far, then, from establishing its clamorous pretensions to be the only unalloyed Christianity, Protestantism is ruled out of court by our test-symbol, as neither the kingdom of the Incarnation nor any part of that kingdom, and therefore—virtually and logically—not Christianity at all.

The Catholic Church, however, has not the field all to herself yet. There is the Russo-Greek, including some half-dozen independent communions. Is not she in harmony with our test-symbol?

While on the road to Rome we were much attached to the Greek Church. Most Anglicans of the “High” school are—because they know very little about her. (A case where “distance lends enchantment”—and a very hazy distance, to boot.) There is one thing, though, which Anglicans ought to know about the Greek Church, and which we did know: the fact that her worship of the Blessed Virgin is more “excessive” (to use their own phrase) than that of the Roman Church. We say we knew this, and confess that, instead of being repelled by it, we were the more attracted. So far, therefore, the writer was consistent, at least—unlike other Anglicans, who protest especially against our “Marian system” (as they call it), and at the same time babble and dream (for dream it is) of union with the Greek Church. What we were afraid of in the Roman Church was not the Blessed Virgin, but the Pope. We had been so thoroughly imbued from boyhood with the notion that the Pope was “Antichrist” and the “Man of Sin,” that the influence of this monstrous superstition haunted us, in some shape, to the very eve of our conversion. We say in some shape. We had come, since a Ritualist, to believe that Antichrist was yet to appear, and that the Pope could not possibly be he. Nevertheless, we took it for unquestionable that the Papacy was a usurpation; had caused the separation of the Greek Church from the Latin; and was also to blame, in a great degree, for England being out of communion with the other western churches. While under instruction for reception into the church we read Mr. Allies’ See of Peter; and our amazement at the evidence for the Papacy was only equalled by our indignation at the unblushing impudence which had assured us, and with such pretence of patristic learning, that there was not a single proof from the first six centuries for the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome.

Well, then, the Greek Church is in harmony with our test-symbol to a certain and considerable extent. In the first place, she holds the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, and by no means keeps it in the background, but gives it due prominence in her catechism and liturgy. And since she teaches the devotional use of representations, particularly of pictures, her people are no less familiar than we are with the Madonna-and-Child as the symbol of the Incarnation. Secondly, although (as must be the case) they have not the same tender mother in their church that we have in ours, still, all who are in good faith being by intention Catholics, they can speak, with us, of “our mother the church.” And, again, though they are made much less familiar with the Blessed Sacrament than we are, yet, having a true priesthood (not a sham one like the Anglican), a true altar, and a true Mass, the Real Presence is a living fact with them. So that they may see in the Madonna-and-Child the church and the Blessed Sacrament as we do.

The Madonna-and-Child, however, being, as we have said, the mould upon which the church is cast, makes a law which must not be violated in any single particular. If, therefore, this self-styled “orthodox” Greek Church be found out of harmony with our test-symbol in even one point, she is no more the kingdom of the Incarnation than if she were in harmony with it at no point.

Now, she does fail to correspond with it in one most important point: viz., in her theory of the church as a whole. She holds, like the Anglican Ritualists, the theory of a divided church. But the Madonna can no more represent a divided than an invisible church, and those who say, with us, in the Nicene Creed, “I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church,” yet maintain that she need not be visibly “one,” are more illogical than those who use the words in the sense of an invisible church. That a visible church, of which oneness is a mark, need not be visibly one!—could absurdity, in the shape of theory, go further?

Again, if this theory of the church as a whole—that she is no longer visibly one as her divine Author made her—renders it impossible to see the type of such a church in the Madonna separately, what meaning will it find in the Madonna-and-Child together? It beholds in the Madonna a unity which it denies; and in the Child—either nothing at all, or something which it consciously rejects.

What makes a church, according to the apostolic constitution? All churches which have that constitution agree that the essentials of a church are a bishop with a clergy and laity in his communion. The bishop is its nucleus, and makes the church in the sense in which the head makes the body. A bishopless church is a headless body. We say this is what all Christians agree upon who believe in apostolical succession. So that even the recent contemptible sect calling themselves “Old Catholics” were bound to procure a bishop for their schism, albeit they set at defiance both authority and logic.

A bishop, then, and the church in his communion are the normal or representative church. Now, we see in this representative church the form of the Madonna-and-Child. To some this may seem fanciful. It is not. Every priest is “another Christ”—in the celebrated words of St. Bernard; and the bishop is the complete priest, as having the power to confer the priesthood. If, then, the Madonna typifies the church, the Christ-child typifies the priesthood, and, if the priesthood, still more the episcopate. Again, as Christ has in Mary not only a Mother, but a Daughter and a Spouse—for he is her Father by creation (whence Chaucer and Dante exclaim, “Daughter of thy Son!”) and her Spouse as the Spouse of all elect souls, among whom she is “as the lily among thorns”—so, too, has the priest in the church at once a mother, a daughter, and a spouse; and therefore still more does the bishop stand in this threefold relation to the church. And, once more, as Christ is “the first-born among many brethren,” his Mother being ours also, so is the priest an elder brother, ruling his brethren from the arms of their common mother; and, if the priest, much more the bishop.

There is nothing fanciful, then, in our view of the Madonna-and-Child as a symbol of the normal or representative church. But what does this mean, if not that the collective church, consisting as it must of a multitude of single churches, has equally the form of the Madonna-and-Child—is equally capable of being symbolized thereby? or, in other words, that all single episcopates must be subordinated to one universal episcopate? Now, the Russo-Greek Church, while affecting (at least in theory) the principle of hierarchical subordination from the bishop up to the patriarch, stupidly contradicts her own assertion of this principle, and destroys the church as a whole, by rejecting the supremacy of the Pope. She is, therefore, in this all-important point, as much out of harmony with our test-symbol as the Anglican and the other Protestant sects; and is ruled out of court, in her turn, as neither the kingdom of the incarnation nor any part of that kingdom.

So at last we have only the Roman Church to contrast with the Madonna-and-Child. And small need have we to show how harmoniously at all points she corresponds with our test-symbol. The Catholic recognizes in the Madonna-and-Child not only the Incarnation but its kingdom. He sees there the church with the Blessed Sacrament in her hands; and, again, the church our mother with her Christ-child at her breast; and, lastly, this same mother as our lady and queen, with her eldest son the Pope ruling his brethren from his throne on her heart, the Sancta Sedes.

With regard to this last point we think it strange that controversialists have made so little use of the Madonna-and-Child of the Apocalypse.[164] We proposed to conclude our subject with a proof of the Papacy from this vision, but must reserve it for a separate article.

COLLEGE EDUCATION.

The schools of the country have held their days of exhibition or of graduation, the young men are enjoying their holidays, and the teachers are preparing themselves for a new year of work. It would seem to be a favorable moment to say a word about the question that more or less occupies all who think seriously of the future—education. This word, so often used, conveys different ideas, according to the person who speaks. Its etymology undoubtedly gives it a certain definite meaning: educo, erudiri are two words that signify the bringing forth from a negative state to a positive one—from ignorance and rudeness to knowledge and culture. But this general idea does not cover the whole matter. We have to consider the end to which this process is directed in order to have an adequate idea of what it should be. Now, this end we shall have clearly before us if we call to mind the end for which man is here on earth. Christians all acknowledge and teach that man is here to know, love, and serve God and save his soul. These two, therefore—redemption from ignorance and a rude state, and the end for which man is here—give us the right idea of what education ought to be. The appreciation of both will enable us to avoid two fatal obstacles—presumption and error. The proper state of mind of any one beginning a course of education is the recognition of his want of knowledge. There is nothing so hurtful as a spirit of pride; for this blinds the mind, makes one overweeningly confident of his powers, attached to his own opinions, and loath to receive instruction. We have heard in our day young people discussing the question whether a man were not able to work out the most difficult problems of human science of himself; whether he absolutely stood in need of the guidance of others; and whether there were any branch of human knowledge or achievement of past times any one might not be able to attain to or accomplish, provided he turned his attention to it, and circumstances were favorable. And when a young man had succeeded in mastering a certain amount of learning or science, we have been witnesses of the very remarkable phenomenon of seeing him set himself up as one whose opinion should cut short every discussion, and form the law of belief or action for those around him. Any one having had any experience of truly learned men, who even may not have been models of virtue, must have been struck at the humility of mind they give proof of. They, more than others, appreciate how little they know of what it is possible to know; they see the vast field of knowledge of which they individually can but cultivate a part, and common sense keeps them from thinking themselves possessed even of all that can be known of what they are actually engaged in. They agree in spirit with the celebrated master of Plato, whose saying is familiar to us: “I know only this: that I know nothing.” The first requisite, therefore, for sound education is a humble state of mind, a disposition to be taught and receive the lessons with docility—a disposition not only needful in a beginner, but required even more the further one advances into the domain of knowledge. When one adds to the original and relative ignorance of us all the further fact of the ease with which we go astray, fall into error—a facility so great as to have given rise to the adage in universal use, “Humanum est errare”—it is impossible a man of sense should not recognize the necessity of keeping down the spirit of pride and self-confidence, and confess that, in not having controlled himself in this respect, he has given the most complete proof of the adage in his own case. We are therefore all in the same condition, all in need of learning, and stand in want of a teacher to instruct us and lead us in the path of truth. What is the truth we are to seek after, who the teacher we are to go to, results from the study of the end to which education is to be directed. We have seen that the end of man is to know, love, and serve God and save his soul, and this tells us what education should be. Anything that conflicts with this end is to be rejected; whatever aids us in attaining it is to be embraced; and as all truth is in harmony with that end, it follows that education can embrace all sciences that are truly such, while it must eliminate all error; for error has a logical effect of keeping us from the attainment of that end, especially where that error regards the higher branches of speculative education.

Here, then, comes in the most important element in the education of man—religion; religion, that is, to teach his head and train his heart. If, as is most certainly the fact, man was made for God and for immortal life hereafter, education that would exclude this element—religion—which regulates the relations of man with God, and teaches him how he may gain that everlasting state for which he has been created, is wanting most deplorably in the one thing needful. Such an education fits a man only for matter; is of the earth earthy. It has no higher aim than the objects around him; it is a guide that does not bring into the presence of the King, but takes one no further than the domain over which the King’s power is exercised. However much it may delight the eye with grandeur of scenery, proofs of power and of wisdom, it has no right or ability to introduce into a close communion with the Sovereign, the source of all it beholds. It is simply an unworthy servant banished for ever from the face of his Master. This kind of education, which we shall style secular, professedly excludes all religious control of any kind whatsoever, and it consequently relies only on reason and scientific examination. Now, reason has been found wanting. In the brightest examples of pagan times, familiar to students of history, are to be found not only actions nature itself condemns, but principles laid down by them subversive of natural society and of all Christian virtue—pantheism and immorality. And we owe it to Christianity that we have been rescued from the social life in which such principles prevailed and were in practice. Any one nowadays who knows something of men will bear witness to the fact that both the one and the other—pantheism and immorality—are on the increase and show themselves publicly in the speech of the men and women of to-day. This can be owing only to one cause—the divorce of religion from education. And because this is so, because secular education does not lead us to God, but takes us from him, a dividing line must be drawn between religious education and secular education; an insuperable barrier exists between them, which must and ought to keep all that believe in revelation on the side of a training under the eye of religion. And if this be the case with regard to all who profess belief in Christ, how much truer is it with reference to those who have given their names to the Catholic Church and look to her infallible voice for their guidance! In saying this we do not wish to speak disparagingly of the learning, the ability, or the zeal of those engaged in the cause of education who are not with us. We respect all those who are striving to increase the treasure of human knowledge or dispense it to their fellow-men. We join hands with all who are earnest in their study of true science, and rejoice in their success. We have no right to question their sincerity. But between their efforts and success in discovery, or in acquiring and imparting learning, and the way in which they educate, there is a difference most vital and essential. The one investigates the works of the Creator, while the other leads men practically, where it does not absolutely tell them as much, to ignore the Creator himself. Godless science can only fill a man with himself, while it offers no guarantee for the preservation of his morals and the attainment of his last end.

On the other hand, religion goes before the education which is allied with her. With her torch of faith she illumes the darkness of men’s minds. She shows them how much more beautiful is the Author of all the beautiful things they contemplate than are the objects themselves. She makes them behold in him the original essential beauty of which the universe is only a faint participation, and yearn for the possession of that Beauty and sovereign Good she tells them is within their reach; and she shows them how, under her direction, they may not be carried away by transient allurements, by what they see around them, but attain to an indissoluble union with that Beauty and sovereign Good—with God himself.

But it may be said religion has nothing to do with natural science; it cramps man’s mind, fetters his intellect, stops his investigation. It will do well enough in its sphere, but its action is hurtful to scientific pursuits.

Is this true? It is not true; and we can refute the charge by principle and by fact.

All that exists belongs to God. All science, all truth comes from him, the great First Cause, from whom all things proceed, in whom there can be no contradiction. His works, therefore, cannot contradict him nor contradict each other. Natural truth and revealed truth must, then, be in harmony, and we do not fear a conflict between them. The Catholic student of science is as fearless an investigator as is his rationalist confrère; but the former will not rashly give himself up to speculations the other’s further experience will oblige him to retract. The facts of science will never be in opposition to revelation, though the interpretation of scientific men may be, to their discomfiture later on. Even if the teacher of revelation, the church, should by any possibility, as is asserted in the case of Galileo, fail in a disciplinary decree with regard to scientific research, such decrees not being infallible utterances of the Holy See, there remains always the remedy of a reversal when the incontestable proof of the contrary, such as he did not bring forward, shall be produced. So spoke Cardinal Bellarmine, one of Galileo’s judges. Though we may safely say that those in charge of the interests of the church do well in being exceedingly careful how they interfere with scientific investigation, it nevertheless may become necessary at times to curb the license of those who undertake to interpret the truths of revelation according to their ideas or appreciation of science. How many scientific theories fall to pieces every day! And is it not reasonable that those who believe in a revelation should not be left at the mercy of every clever scientific man who is pleased to have a tilt against it? Let any scientific truth be fully proved, and the Catholic Church will be the first to applaud, for it redounds to the glory of her Head.

We need not, however, confine ourselves to this negative way of advocating the cause of revelation as friendly to science, for there is no dearth of positive proof of the fact.

Revelation is positively of advantage to the study of science. It is clear that any one who keeps me, when on a journey, from going out of my way saves me an amount of time and trouble. Instead of wandering in the woods and bypaths, I am enabled to keep the highway and so reach sooner my destination. This is one of the important services revelation renders science. It tells us: Don’t direct your attention hither or thither; for you will find out you are wrong, after losing precious time and making yourself a laughing-stock. Don’t go in search of the “missing link,” for you won’t find it. Don’t divide the unity of the human race, for it is one—of one man and one woman. Don’t grovel with the materialists; for man has a spirit, and he is destined for a better life hereafter. Such like warnings we have from revelation, and, instead of going astray with evolutionists and so-called philosophers, we employ our time and talents on points that are serious and practical in science and nature; and Heaven knows there are plenty of these to engage us. The result is useful knowledge that does not undo but builds up society and perfects civilization. For this our grateful thanks are due revelation.

Then, again, revelation opens up to us new fields of thought. It gives us an insight into what we could not otherwise know. It is as if chance discovered to us some principle of art or science no one had before suspected. Once presented, reason can occupy itself on it, explore it as far as possible, make deductions and applications. How much human ethics have gained in clearness and usefulness by the light of the command to love our neighbor, and by the example of the Redeemer of man! How much speculative philosophy with regard to personality, responsibility, good and evil, and the future life! The crude theories of pagan times excite our compassion nowadays, though we honor the ability of their original propounders; yet these same theories we see now broached by those who have cast aside revelation, but often with less depth and less wisdom than the pagan in whose mind not all the light of natural religion was quenched. No! revelation is the friend of science; science divorced from religion, the vaunted glory of to-day, is the enemy of progress; retrograde in all save the energetic talent that is lost in its service.

A few examples will show what revelation or the church has done and is doing for the cause of education; whether it has checked the development of man or favored it.

We will go to the “dark ages,” in which those who oppose the church as an educator are wont to find their cheval de bataille, their bugbear to frighten off those inclined to trust her. We say nothing of the unfairness of Protestants who wilfully ignore the sad state of the Roman world consequent on the barbarian invasions of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, and the struggles with the Saracens, who penetrated even into Italy—a condition of things most inimical to the quiet requisite for study; who pass over the conquest of those barbarians and their civilization by the church; who pretend to know nothing of what was done by the monks to preserve learning in their monasteries, to whom the preservation of the classic, philosophic, and ascetic works of antiquity and of the early church—the Bible among them—is due. We come to the thirteenth century. There we see, burning with a light that is celestial, a luminary not of the church only but of human reason—St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. There was hardly a branch of intellectual pursuit of which he was not a master. His works are wonderful, and have always been a precious and useful legacy in every subsequent age. His great work, the Sum of Theology, has remained the text-book of theologians. In fact, no theologian is master of his subject who has not made St. Thomas the object of his constant study. Though at times somewhat neglected, we may safely say that at present there is an increasing appreciation of his works. Certainly this is true of his philosophical treatise Contra Gentiles. There is now a wide-spread movement in all civilized nations to return to the use of the metaphysical and ethical teachings of St. Thomas, and it will be the means of regenerating such philosophical studies in this epoch of individual self-assertion, of ipse dixits, when every man of talent who lists puts forth his own hazy speculations as the truth, and strives to force down his deductions as the ne plus ultra of science. Domenico Soto, at the Council of Trent, defined scholastic theology to be reason illumined by faith; we may, like him, style scholastic philosophy reason kept in its right path by the torch of faith. In the works of St. Thomas will be found the refutation of the pantheism of Spinoza and the present German school, of the materialism of Hobbes and Büchner, of the utilitarian ideas of Mill, Spencer, and others of the followers of Puffendorf. We shall find, too, in his writings the ablest defence of revelation, and the sound principles that will enable us to put to flight the whole host of mythical theorists of the age. So much for theology, metaphysics, and ethics.

If we wish to speak of the work of the church in poetry, science, and literature, we have a monument of what she could do, even in the middle ages, in Dante. We hardly know which to admire most in this extraordinary man—his native genius, his extraordinary powers of imagination, the beauty of his imagery, the remarkable knowledge of theology and philosophy he exhibits in his writings, or the beauty of the language he created. His culture was due to the church; his inspiration was drawn from revelation; and his science he drank in at the great schools established and carried on by the church in Italy, in France, and in England. So pre-eminent is this writer, philosopher, and poet, that even in the nineteenth century our own poet whose works are read and justly appreciated wherever the English language is spoken—Henry W. Longfellow—has deemed it well worthy of his own genius to be his translator. Yet Dante is the product of the Catholic Church.

But the fashion to-day is to extol physical science. Of a truth, physical science does not hold, and should not hold, the first place. If man were only matter, it might and should; but he has a soul, and the spiritual and intellectual world is his proper sphere. Scientific knowledge is useful for the arts that serve to make commerce prosper, and should be sought after; but to make commerce and what pertains to it, and the material comforts of man, the main object of his thoughts and aims is a monstrous disorder.

However, even in this sphere of physical science the church is not afraid of her competitors. We leave to one side old Friar Bacon and other patriarchs of science, and we come to our own day. The church can point to Angelo Secchi, one of the first of living astronomers and physical scientists, and a member of a society that counts among its members men distinguished in every branch of human knowledge—the Society of Jesus. So great is the pre-eminence of this distinguished savant in his native Italy that, since the city of Rome has been in the hands of the present rulers, they have left nothing undone to gain him over to their side. And it is a pleasure to us to pay this public tribute to the noble fidelity he has shown to his faith, his church, and his society, giving as he does a splendid example of the alliance between the most advanced physical science and the Catholic Church.

As faithful adherents to revelation, though not Catholics, we may mention the late Prof. Faraday and the no less distinguished Dr. Carpenter, who show that revelation and science do not war against each other.

But we need not content ourselves with showing that the church is not hostile to human learning. It is easy to bring forward facts that put her before the world in her true character as the real friend of man, the guardian of his dignity, the zealous protectress of the truth of his intellect and of the freedom of his will. In medio stat virtus—Virtue avoids extremes. Our tendency to go wrong is by doing too much or too little, and we need something to keep us from either of these two extremes. It is here the church comes in to fulfil this friendly and much-needed office.

There was in the fourth and fifth century an intellectual movement that attributed more than its due to human nature. The Pelagian errors gave to man a power he does not possess, and those errors are very widely spread in this nineteenth century. They ignore the efficacy of grace, or the help the will stands in need of to serve God. Grace, according to their most favorable view, was only a light for the intellect. Here was an excess; too much was claimed for human nature. Such doctrine is contradicted by Scripture and by the Fathers. Our Lord tells us: “I am the vine, and you are the branches; without me you can do nothing.” And St. Paul says: “We are not able to think of anything [conducive to salvation] of ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God.” And St. Augustine, against those who spoke of some of the precepts as impossible, writes: “God does not command what is impossible; but commanding [thereby] counsels us to do what we can, to ask for aid to do what is beyond our power, and aids us that we may be able to do it.” In this case we have the church curbing human pride and keeping the intellect and will within its true limits.

In the sixteenth century there was a movement, resulting from pride and rebellion, that had its own punishment in the degradation to which it reduced man’s nature. Luther’s dogmatic system had, and has—for it lives in Protestantism—the effect of so debasing human nature as to deny light to the intellect and power to the will to do anything that was not sinful; for he held that the will of man is essentially changed, so that it depends on who directs it, God or the devil; and, besides, whatever it does is sinful, though covered by the merits of Jesus Christ, which, like Esau’s garments, prevent the knowledge or sight of the true state of things and the imputation of sin.

Here was a defect; human nature was denied some of its powers.

The church fulminated this doctrine, and taught formally that man’s intellect and will, though weakened by sin and passion, are not essentially changed, and that all man’s acts are not sinful. She recognized something of his original dignity in man. Hers is the spirit of the great St. Leo, whose eloquent words made the Christians and Romans of his day remember their origin, and the height to which they had been raised by the Incarnation. He exclaims: “Remember, O man! thy dignity, and, having been made a partaker of the divine nature, return not by degenerate conversation to thy former vileness.” She bade man remember that his nature, never essentially corrupt, had been purified by the grace of God, and that “in those that please God there is nothing defiled.”

Luther’s teachings shed a sinister influence far and wide that tainted even Catholic universities and affected writers who still professed to be in union with the church.

In the former University of Louvain Jansenius went so far as to say that some of the gospel precepts were impossible, and that no grace was given to fulfil them. The words that were used by St. Augustine to refute the Pelagians were turned against Jansenius, and the voice of the church was heard anew vindicating man from the necessity of committing sin. Later on came Baius, of the same university, teaching also a doctrine of universal depravity; and the Sovereign Pontiff proclaimed that negative infidelity—that is, idolatry in good faith—is not a sin; that consequently those who have not grace or the illumination of faith can do many good actions, though such actions have not the merit of those which are made available through the merits of Christ. Thus again did the church prove herself the friend of human dignity.

Further on we meet those who, suffering the infection of the air caused by the doctrines of universal depravity, deny to the intellect the power of discovering the truth by itself. The traditionalists wish to trace everything to an original revelation; man has nothing he has not received from outside. Even his knowledge of God comes from tradition. And this doctrine the church, through her supreme teacher, discountenanced. She bade them recall to mind the words of the Book of Wisdom and of St. Paul, where we are told that God can be known from the contemplation of this visible world.

We will crave indulgence if we go so far as to venture the assertion that the doctrines of Malebranche and his school had their origin in this same depreciation of the powers of the human intellect. It may be said that the idea of intuition is a nobler one than that of painful analysis and deduction; that intuition—vision—is the lot of the blessed, and therefore a higher state. But this is a state above nature, for the blessed; not a natural state in our present condition. Moreover, there are reasons to make us believe that Malebranche did not escape the infection of the world of thought prevalent in his day—the disesteem of human nature; an infection not, indeed, logically connected with the system of Luther. It was, if we may be permitted so to speak, a psychological effect—a habit of mind being induced, whereby one was led so to think. This would appear to be evidenced by his doctrine of occasionalism, which made God always acting because man could not—a doctrine the authority of the church obliged him to modify, for he would thereby have made God the author of sin. Though no official condemnation of the theories of Malebranche, regarding the primary mode of knowing truth, has ever been given by the church, or is at all likely to be given, the deductions of certain of his followers have been condemned; and it is well known that the weight of the influence of the Holy See has been cast in the scale of the psychological theories of St. Thomas, whose principle, clearly laid down, is: “Operatio intellectus præexigit operationem sensus”—“The operation of the intellect prerequires the operation of sense”—I. 2, quæst. iii. art. 3, resp. And in his first part, quæst. xviii. art. 2, he writes: “Intellectus noster qui proprie est cognoscitivus quidditatis rei ut proprii objecti, accipit a sensu; cujus propria objecta sunt accidentia exteriora. Et inde est, quod ex his quæ exterius apparent de re, devenimus ad cognoscendam essentiam rei”—“Our intellect, that properly takes cognizance of what a thing is (its essence) as its proper object, receives of the senses, the proper objects of which are external accidents. Hence it is that from what appears externally in a thing we come to know its essence.” Of course sense is to be taken in its widest meaning, so as not to exclude the perception of the modifications going on in our internal being, which are the accidents of our spiritual essence. Man, therefore, has no natural revelation, but he arrives at knowledge by the essentially inherent powers of his mind—perception, abstraction, generalization. God sees by intuition everything in himself—this is essential in him; created intellects see what is, or intellectual truth, the archetype in God, reflected from creation as from a mirror.

From these instances, then, it is evident that the church has always been the friend of human nature, asserting for it the possession of faculties denied it, protecting it from error, and guiding it in the search of truth. She is, therefore, worthy of the gratitude of mankind for what she has done in the cause of education, as well as of the confidence of men as an instructor of youth in the future.

We come now to a more directly practical part of our assumed task, and shall consider it our duty to speak plainly, and perhaps in a way to be censured by some; but we do it in what seems to us the interest of our people and country. The Rev. Father. T. Burke, O.S.D., while in this country some years ago, addressing a society of young men, told them that Americans could not expect to take their position among the civilized nations of the world unless they studied, and studied not superficially but well. For our part, we thank him for this word. It is time to put out of our heads that we are the most cultivated, civilized, well-informed people of the world. We are not. Alongside the generality of the educated men of Europe the generality of the educated men of America do not appear to advantage. Who and what is to blame for this?

In the first place, we blame parents. They ought to know better; they have had experience of the world. They are the natural guardians of their offspring, and should provide by their experience a remedy for the inexperience of youth. Yet they, and especially Catholic parents, are those who put the greatest obstacles in the way of those engaged in teaching. They want their boys hurried through school; they can’t see the use of Latin, much less of Greek. As for philosophy, a man can make a fortune without philosophy; as if a fortune were the only thing worth living for! If that were the case, your California stage-driver who has struck a “bonanza” is the type of what a man should be intellectually. Heaven save the mark! We have had such men say to us: “I assure you, sir, it is a very great misfortune my education was neglected; I have wealth and don’t know how to enjoy it.” There are numbers of unhappy wealthy Americans travelling in Europe whose children are looking forward to brilliant futures, but who themselves rush from one place to another, tortured by the necessity of having to come in contact with educated people and learn daily their own inferiority. We have met such people, and, out of sheer pity for their unhappy lot, have done what was in our power to make them forget for a while their troubles.

The fact is, no greater boon can a wealthy parent bestow upon his child than a thorough, careful education, and every effort should be made to secure such education. And one of the first steps to be taken is that parents second the efforts of zealous educators in our Catholic institutions. These institutions have their defects, but those defects can hardly be remedied without the co-operation of parents. What that co-operation should be will be seen further on.

There are defects in our institutions of education. This is our next point. These defects are in the manner of teaching and in what is taught.

We acknowledge that there have been great improvements in the manner of teaching since we were boys; but with all this the want of uniformity, scarcely attainable in this country, will always leave the door open to defects in teaching. As a rule, the mind of a boy is too much taxed with speculative matter, and his memory comparatively neglected. The memory is one of the first faculties to show itself active, and it is also capable of wonderful development. In the earlier education of the child the exercise of the memory should predominate; as little strain as possible should be put on the mind yet tender. As the education progresses the exercise of the memory should be kept up; choice extracts from the best poets and writers should alternate with the useful storing in the mind of facts and definitions. The preliminary education should consist in the learning of languages, which are means of acquiring further knowledge by intercourse and reading, not by any means the sum total of education. We wish our Catholic parents would understand this; for when a boy succeeds in knowing a little French and German they seem to think everything done. These languages are only the keys to the treasures locked up in the writings of other nations. They are principally to be acquired by memory; and, in fact, this is the way the most successful and generally used method—that of Ollendorf—adopts. There is no reason why the boy should not be put at a very early age to learning foreign languages. There is, too, one great advantage in this: that his work at such languages will be lighter and less absorbing when he comes to be engaged in scientific study. Again, care should be taken not to put into the hands of a child books of an abstruse or relatively difficult character; for excessive caution against straining the mind of such a scholar can scarcely be taken. A great deal of harm is sometimes done from the too high standard exacted by school-boards of the various categories of boys. We have never ceased to praise the judicious interference of our father, who, finding us with an analytical arithmetic put into our hands at seven years of age, took it away and placed it on the highest shelf of his closet.

When a boy is well under weigh in the languages—we do not speak of religious education, which we take for granted—he may very properly be introduced to the study of experimental science and the more difficult problems of analytical arithmetic and mathematics. But these branches should not be arranged in such a way as to compete, as it were, with that much-neglected study, so lightly thought of—mental philosophy. If one visits our different Catholic institutions of learning, and examines their system, still more looks into the practical working of it, he will find that the year of philosophy, much talked of, is employed in a most perfunctory manner. We would not be understood as attributing any culpa theologica to the instructors. We consider this state of things owing first to parents, and consequently to their children, and in part to the want of appreciation of the need of such philosophical training on the part of the teachers; though also, sometimes, to want of competency in the teachers themselves, whose previous education has been on the old plan. We conceive that too great attention and zeal cannot be expended in the correction of these defects. Corrected they can be, and they must be, if we wish to take and keep our proper standing. We cannot have a university for the present, and therefore it is all important that the one essential thing a university can give—a higher mental training—should be given to our young Catholic men. They must receive this in our colleges; they will not have it elsewhere. Of the need of it there can be no question. The great number of able, educated Europeans who, from political causes, have had to leave their native country and come to us, and the large number of Americans who nowadays study in European universities, all of whom, in conversation and through the press, retail to us the wildest phases of infidel, metaphysical, and social doctrine, is a sufficient argument to decide the matter, should any one hesitate. The church, to be sure, is our infallible guide, but there are many questions she does not treat, or, if she has treated them, her decisions can be understood only by careful study and explanation in the language of philosophy. So far from discouraging the study of philosophy, of metaphysics, and of ethics—possibly the more important of the two—she encourages us to make a good use of this handmaid of theology. It is therefore a duty incumbent on those in whose hands is placed the education of our young men to pay more attention than ever to this kind of instruction. We know of efforts in some instances that have been made in this direction, but which have failed. We are afraid they were not very numerous. In some instances a tincture of metaphysics was deemed enough; ethics were wholly neglected. How this could be has always been a puzzle to us. But it should not be any longer. A careful course of metaphysics that would embrace particularly the refutation of pantheism and materialism, besides establishing thoroughly the existence of God and the spirituality and immortality of the soul; and an equally careful course of ethics that would refute the utilitarians and socialists of the day, while making clear the claims of authority, the nature of law, the origin of right in the eternal fitness of things as seen in the divine Mind, and such kindred questions, should be the object of the most earnest solicitude of the superiors of our Catholic colleges. The young students should be made to apply their knowledge thus received either by short compositions in addition to the repetition of the lessons taught; or, far better still, by academic exercises in which one student defends in the school-room before his teacher and fellow-students a thesis or proposition already explained, while one or two others object against it all they can think of or learn, and this, too, in strict syllogistic form. Exercises such as these would be of the greatest advantage in training the mind to the ready use of logic, and to refuting the arguments possible to be urged against sound doctrine. Nothing better than this would tend to take away the reproach so often, and perhaps in some cases most unjustly, made against our educational institutions, of incompetency for thorough education. Did it depend on us to have the recasting of the system of education, we should be inclined to add on a year of further study as a requisite for graduation, and during the last two years of a young man’s course we would employ him entirely in the study of metaphysics and ethics, including the principles of political economy, of the philosophy of history—in which the great questions of history, as far as possible, might be reviewed—and in the further polish of his literary English training. The philosophy of history is most important, for it is a powerful teacher. History is not to be studied as a bare narrative of facts; the facts have a language of their own which needs an interpreter. The polish of literary education is of great necessity, as it is the one thing those educated in the non-Catholic colleges may be said to excel us in. We do not dwell much on scientific education, because that is really of secondary importance, and it is impossible to give boys more than an elementary training in this branch, which may serve as a ground-work for further pursuit of it, if one is destined to turn his attention in that direction. To enable the superiors of our colleges to carry out such a plan would depend upon the parents of young students having the fortitude to oblige their sons to remain the requisite time and make a diligent use of their opportunities. Herein lies their co-operation in the great work of the future education of the young Catholic men of America; and our word for it, if they follow this counsel, they will never have cause to repent. They will give us, too, far abler champions of truth than our young men have shown themselves to be in the past.

THE DANCING PROCESSION OF ECHTERNACH.
FROM THE REVUE GENERALE.

In the year of our Lord 690 a vessel from the island of Britain left upon the coast of Catwyk, in Holland, twelve young Anglo-Saxons who had abandoned their newly-converted country to carry the blessing of the Gospel to their brethren of the Continent. Chief among these young men, several of whom were of noble birth, was Willibrord, predestined from his mother’s womb to be a glory to the church and famous in the estimation of men. The young strangers separated, to work, each in his own way, in the vineyard of the Father. Willibrord began that very day the long and heroic apostolate of fifty years which ceased only with the pulsations of his heart. If we except his two journeys to Rome, where the great servant of the Papacy twice received the blessing and encouragement of the Sovereign Pontiff, he did not relax for a single day his labors in the vast region which stretches from the mouths of the Elbe and the Rhine to the banks of the Moselle. At his voice nations sitting in darkness rose up to behold the light, idols crumbled before the amazed eyes of their worshippers, churches arose from the soil and gathered about their altars multitudes of Christians, lay society organized itself little by little after the model of spiritual society.[165]

Tradition and history show us by turns the great Anglo-Saxon apostle in Friesland as the master of St. Boniface; in Denmark, preceding by more than a century the famous St. Anscarius; in the island of Helgoland, destroying the idol of Fosite and braving King Radbod’s wrath; in the Isle of Walcheren, where he nearly fell a victim to his heroism and apostolic zeal; in Campine as the friend of St. Lambert, another untiring athlete of Christ; and, finally, in Luxembourg, where even more than elsewhere his name is glorified and revered. For half a century he stood with Lambert and Boniface in the breach, the father of civilization in Western Germany and one of the most signal benefactors of mankind.

The common people, though they forget great poets and great generals, preserve the memory of saints. Seventeen churches in Belgium and fifty-eight in Holland are under his patronage, without counting those in the valleys of the Moselle and the Rhine, where his fame is equally wide-spread. Sixty-three leagues apart, a small section of St. Willibrord’s vast itinerary, two villages to-day preserve in their own names the undying memory of his works: Wilwerwiltz on the sterile moors of the German Ardennes, and Kleemskerk on the low, fertile plains of maritime Flanders.[166] Drawn, as it were, from nothingness by this great man, these two localities, were other witnesses wanting, would tell to later ages the glory of their sublime founder. Answering one to the other across the whole extent of Belgium, they testify to his vast labors and his devotion to the Roman Church, which we unworthily defend to-day against the barbarism conquered by him twelve centuries ago.

I.

During his apostolic missions through the forests of Luxembourg Willibrord remarked one of the most charming and romantic spots in that fine country. It was at a turn of the Sûre, which even to-day flows on beneath the shade of savage rocks and deep forests. The valley, widening at this place, must at that time have presented a most imposing aspect, while it offered every facility for a settlement of human habitations. Indeed, the dwellings were even then of ancient date. The place bore a name recalling incontestably its first Celtic occupants: Epternacum. There, too, the Romans had left traces of their passage. A short league from Echternach archæologists may still read beneath the great shadowy oaks and thick brushwood that half hide it the following inscription engraved on the base of a monument:

DEÆ DIANÆ
Q. POSTVMIVS
POTENS. V. S.

The upper part of the monument is gone, but enough remains to show that it represented two persons—no doubt the goddess and her worshipper, with a hunting-dog crouched at Diana’s feet. He who overthrew the false gods of Helgoland and Walcheren must have crushed in holy ire this monument of the paganism he had just destroyed.[167] At all events, the image of Diana, once proudly throned above the valley at the edge of the wood, now hides, degraded and mutilated, in the dank gloom of brambles and brushwood—an eloquent emblem of St. Willibrord’s work in this country. Echternach, where even then two little Christian oratories stood on the site of the two churches of to-day, attracted the great man’s attention and heart. He built there a Benedictine monastery, which was favored from its foundation by the bounty of two royal families, the Merovingians and Carlovingians. Around this focus of Christian life habitations gathered, and, as always happened, the monastery expanded and became a town. Such was the origin of the commune of Echternach, one of the most flourishing in that happy country of Luxembourg which knows neither great cities nor great miseries.

The monastery of Echternach was always dearer to its founder than his other foundations. There he loved to pass his rare hours of repose. There, on the 6th of November, 739, at the age of eighty-one years, he reached the term of his mortal career. His remains were laid in the basilica of the abbey among his monks and his people. Even in the tomb he continued to be the father of that country and to exercise over men the sovereign authority which his virtues and labors had won. Death has no hold upon the saints; when we lower their bodies into the grave we rear their images upon our altars. St. Willibrord, more than any other patron of the country, is one whose sepulchre may be called glorious. Few tombs have inspired a veneration so extraordinary, attracted the faithful in such crowds, excited acts of faith so intense. No sooner was he laid in his grave than multitudes came to invoke the apostle of Luxembourg, and frequent miracles bore witness to his powerful protection. A century had not elapsed when this wonderful devotion was spoken of by the greatest writer of his time—Alcuin, the biographer of our saint.[168] His festival was celebrated by an immense concourse, who filled the air with his praise. “See, brethren,” says St. Alcuin. “Behold the glory of serving God. Our holy patron, for love of Christ, left his native country and led the life of a pilgrim. He trampled under foot the riches of this world; he loved, he clung to poverty. And you know the glory he acquired among men. But preferable far is that which he possesses for all eternity among the angels.”[169] And the illustrious friend of Charlemagne, speaking to his contemporaries of facts of which he had been an eye-witness, told of the iron fetters on the wrists and ankles of devout pilgrims which burst asunder when they came to do penance for their sins at the venerated tomb.[170]

Two centuries afterward the voice of Theofrid, St. Willibrord’s successor and later biographer, echoes the powerful voice of Alcuin and tells of the ceaseless devotion which brings crowds to Echternach every year. He, too, bears witness to the saint’s miracles—so numerous, he says, that a yoke of oxen could not drag the chariot that would hold the votive offerings of wax and metal. And among these wonders, as in Alcuin’s day, were to be seen broken chains and instruments of torture worn by slaves, which were shattered into splinters.[171] No miracle is oftener recorded of our saints than this one. I confess I never read the record in the quaint and simple narrative of our ancient hagiographers without emotion. Wherever they went the breakers of idols were also breakers of fetters; that word which called men to the knowledge of the true God called them also to the enjoyment of true liberty. Christus nos liberavit. Therefore the church has been honored by the opposition of all the tyrants who have wished to subjugate nations. They have felt that liberty could be easily destroyed, if they could destroy her who is the fertile mother and the fearless guardian of freedom. But nothing can avail against the church nor against the liberty which is her offspring, which her voice called into life, which she has bathed in the blood of her idol-breakers.

It was St. Willibrord’s destiny to see crowned heads bow among the crowds that pressed around his altars, and the imperial purple of Germany trailing in the dust before his coarse robes of haircloth. In the imposing procession of generations marching towards the saint’s tomb it is difficult to distinguish the royal forms mingling with the crowd of pilgrims, so petty seem to him who gazes from the altar the earthly grandeur which sets them apart from other Christians.

Many a time in earlier days the Carlovingians had come to pray and humble themselves in the sanctuary at Echternach. They came with hands filled with gifts, and, by one of those strange vicissitudes which the finger of Providence points out, it was one of their number who, blind, outcast, and bereft, came later to eat the bread of St. Willibrord and seek refuge in the shades of his monastery. History hardly mentions the wretched Carloman, rebel son of Charles the Bald, whose eyes were put out by his father’s orders, and who received in charity from his uncle Louis the Abbey of Echternach ad subsidium vitæ.[172] The families who succeeded the Carlovingians in Germany never forgot the saint or the duty of paying him homage. In the year 1000 the list of imperial pilgrimages was opened by Otto III., the young and brilliant prince who planned so many great expeditions, and whom death had already marked with his mysterious seal. Lothaire of Saxony, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen, came in their turn to pray before the saint’s relics, the one in 1131, the other in 1145. Then, in 1512, Maximilian joined in the procession, and in memory of his visit gave to the town the bell which bears his name and still rings on feast days. Thus, except the sacrilegious house of Franconia, all the dynasties of the German Empire seem to have been represented at Echternach, and to have paid court to this prince of peace, greater and more respected than they.

Echternach was always the capital of St. Willibrord’s peaceful realm. There was his tomb; there rose convent and basilica, perpetual heralds of his great deeds. The convent was a city in itself, and the basilica is a most precious relic of eleventh-century architecture—a veritable pearl which alone would make the reputation of a town. I will not be drawn into further details, for fear of leaving my subject.[173] It suffices to remember that this wonderful monument, a victim of revolutionary vandalism, had been sold as national property, and was falling into decay, when the piety and patriotism of the people of Echternach snatched it from certain destruction. They formed, under the name of Willibrordus Verein, a society whose aim was to recover the basilica and restore it to worship. This society, founded in 1862 by a few citizens in a little town of four thousand souls, now numbers its members by hundreds. It has already devoted more than one hundred thousand francs to the basilica, and will soon crown its work by bringing back the shrine of the saint, now preserved in the parish church. All reverence to the intelligent Christian people who guard their honor so faithfully and understand so well the interests of their own glory! Inspired by the three-fold love of religion, country, and art, the Willibrordus Verein is one of the finest institutions that I know. It does honor to the whole of Luxembourg, and will leave a lasting memory. Of how many associations of our day can as much be said?

The entire town of Echternach has retained that stamp of antiquity so eagerly sought by artists, and so much despised by our petty, material generation. Surrounded by the fantastic hills that form the valley, whose strange summits look like crumbling castles; still enclosed by three-quarters of its ancient fortifications, with here and there a ruined tower, it strikes the beholder with a surprise which only increases as he penetrates to the interior of the town. Passing through crooked and narrow streets, where each house has an architecture of its own which is often very impressive, he reaches the public square, where stands the antique town-hall, known by the more ancient name of Dingsthal, an interesting building which rests on Gothic arcades. The parish church is equally worthy of attention for its old Romanic architecture and its beautiful position upon the summit of an eminence overlooking the town.

What especially tends to give to Echternach its peculiar character is the habits of its population, so in harmony with the tranquil, cheerful country and its mediæval monuments. Here more than elsewhere Catholic faith has impregnated the life of the people. All their actions reflect its powerful simplicity, its generous hardihood, its customs of ten or fifteen centuries back. The poetry of the past, that exquisite influence of ancient times which we inhale with delight, is here an incense ever ascending from this happy valley. In this respect nothing can equal the dancing procession of Echternach, which takes place always on Whit-Tuesday, in honor of St. Willibrord, and attracts those who come especially to invoke his aid for nervous diseases. This procession has taken place for more than five hundred years. It can be traced back to the fourteenth century, and may be perhaps of even earlier origin. The dance has been explained in various ways: sometimes as expressing the joy of a Christian people coming to venerate the relics of their patron saint; sometimes as a symbolical representation of nervous attacks, epilepsy, and other maladies of the kind, from which the country was delivered by St. Willibrord’s intercession in the fourteenth century.

It is this ceremony, whose original and picturesque character is quite unique in the Christian world, which I am about to describe to the reader.

II.

When Whit-Sunday comes an amazing animation rouses the little town from its habitual tranquillity, and the excitement only increases on the Monday. Hotels and private houses are thronged with guests; many travellers, unable to get lodgings, camp out in the neighboring villages or go back to die Kirch, to return by railway the next day. The streets are thronged with dusty tourists: gentlemen of leisure regarding everything with a patronizing smile, peasants in rustic garb, rich strangers arriving in spruce equipages, and respectable jaunting-cars with three rows of seats, conveying the opulent farmers of the neighborhood. Booths are planted everywhere, blocking up the streets and setting their backs against every available corner. Mountebanks and charlatans, who come to levy their tithe on public piety, stun with their piercing outcries the busy folk running about to look for lodgings. Religion preludes the imposing solemnities of the following morning. The faithful flock to religious offices and sermons. All day long they are at prayer before the sarcophagus where lies the body of the saint. There you will see the most fervent; and by their attitudes, the expression of their faces, and the ardor of their gaze, it is plain that they have some great favor to implore and hope not to go away unsatisfied. Prostrate before the altar, these rude laborers from the Eyfel and the Ardennes, with their great horny hands and tanned faces, opening their whole hearts to God and absorbed in prayer, are beautiful to look upon. They seem to symbolize the destiny of mankind, born to labor, to suffer, and to pray. It is pleasant to ponder and pray in the stillness of that little Romanic church, beside the greatest man of the country.

It was an humble church with vaulted roof,
The church we entered in,
Where for eight hundred years the sons of men
Had wept and prayed ’gainst sin.

There, on the hill sacred for so many ages, under the shade of the lindens that screen the courtyard of this modest edifice, in the presence of the wide and peaceful landscape, the heart feels at ease, the mind is in repose. It is like a haven of rest or like some enchanted country. The hideous, infernal tumult of the church’s enemies dies away in this Catholic oasis. Man and nature are in harmony; the serenity that reigns in this lovely country sinks into the most stormy heart. Here Dante would have found the peace he sought under the vaulted roof of the monastery at Monte Corvo.

Evening fell; the chants for Benediction rang through the church as I entered. Thousands of voices, accompanied by the grave and solemn tones of the organ, were singing the beautiful litany of St. Willibrord, which is like the national air of Echternach, and has a peculiar sweetness in a language that admits of saying thou to God and to the saints:

St. Willibrord, shining star of our country,

St. Willibrord, ornament of the Roman Church,

St. Willibrord, breaker of idols, Pray for us.

I cannot describe the effect of this chant, rising on so many voices in accents of plaintive supplication, penetrating the heart with its expression of love and trust. These people love St. Willibrord and treat him with a sweet familiarity. “Who and what was he that men should come every year to kneel before his relics and pay him honors so exceptional? What had he more than others, and by what was he distinguished? By beauty, genius, science, riches?” Such was the idea of the sermon which followed Benediction, and was heard by that whole multitude in breathless attention, some standing, others kneeling on the flags—for all the chairs had been taken away. The sacred orator developed his theme with remarkable skill, and, after proving that St. Willibrord had shone by none of these gifts, he concluded that he had reached this exceptional glory on earth and in heaven because he had understood and applied better than others the divine command, “Love God above all things, and thy neighbor as thyself.”

O grandeur of Christianity! O eternity of the church! A thousand years ago Alcuin said the same in his panegyric; the modern preacher’s noble words were like the lingering echo of the same Christian voice sounding through ages—of that voice which ever repeats itself, and yet is always fresh, for it is the voice of truth. Thus, at the two extremities of this decade of centuries, the friend of Charlemagne and the young priest of Luxembourg were the two ends of a chain whose every link is an extinct generation, and which brings down to our own day the unchangeable, immortal tradition. One thousand years hence other pilgrims will come to contemplate these great lessons of time and pray before the sacred tomb, treading beneath their feet the ruins of our civilization and modern society.

After Benediction I went to walk on the heights above the town. The night was clear and the moon hung calmly serene in the heavens. Every time I pass through Echternach I climb these hills; the place is full of calm and refreshment, and I always feel happy there. Looking down upon the town, with its spires and ancient roofs mirrored in the peaceful river, I listened to the last sounds dying away in the streets; for the town went to rest as early that night as on any other. Heaven and earth seemed so quiet, so infinitely peaceful! If at that hour propitious to dreams you would evoke in spirit the memory of the past, it would rise like a gigantic phantom. One glance cast into the domains of fancy would show the wild valley heaped with Druidic stones, crowned with altars and Roman monuments, and traversed by the swift, silvery flood of the Sûre, which seems to pierce like a dart the mysterious depths of the ancient Ardennes. On the summit of the height appears a wonderful man, who breaks the Gallic and Roman idols, and with their fragments builds Christian oratories; he levels the forest and cultivates the valley; builds dwellings around the church, calls men, and they come at his bidding; and this new Orpheus, with no lyre but his voice, leads in his train Barbarism, conquered, charmed, converted.

The next day I breakfasted between five and six o’clock in one of the many pretty pleasure-gardens of the town. The evening before had been very warm; the day dawned under the same auspices, but perfectly clear. The people of Echternach declare that it cannot rain on the day of their procession, or, at least, that the rain must stop before they enter the church. On all sides resounded clear and full the voices of pilgrims coming in procession from villages near by and chanting the litany of St. Willibrord. These aerial tones, coming to us in the freshness of dawn through blossoming trees, opened the day very pleasantly. I went out. Through every street there poured a stream of country people, preceded by crosses and banners. Whole parishes came with their pastors; they had left home at daybreak and walked several leagues, with prayers and chants rousing the wondering birds, unused to hear human voices praise the Creator in advance of them. The nearest villages came in procession; others, who could not send a solemn train, furnished a large number of pilgrims, who marched in isolated groups. Without counting the pilgrims of the Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and Russia are represented every year. The number of devout Christians whom each anniversary brings to the sacred tomb varies from 12,000 to 15,000, leaving out those who come without having made a vow, some from religious feeling, others from mere curiosity. About 20,000 strangers in all crowd into the narrow precincts of the little town every Whitsuntide. For whole hours you see the flood of humanity ascend and descend the steps of the parish church; for all the pilgrims on their arrival go first to kneel at the saint’s shrine. About eight o’clock the multitudes pass over to the other bank of the Sûre, where the procession is to begin. The Sûre forms the boundary between the territory of Luxembourg and Prussia. Just there the procession falls into line of march. At the foot of the hills, beside a little stone cross, they erect a temporary pulpit, from which a priest addresses the people before the ceremony begins. Thousands had collected to await the coming of the clergy. Some walked about, others sat along the edge of the road or leaned against the parapet of the bridge. The crowd, scattered in picturesque confusion and disorder, buzzed like a hive of bees. The throng increased; along every road came hosts of pilgrims ploughing their way. From afar came vague, indistinct sounds of singing, and along the valley, through the narrow road traced between the Sûre and the hills, there advanced a long column. Banners floated in the sunshine and gleamed through the trees; the procession undulated and unrolled its length as it followed the windings of the river. The voices, as they drew nearer, became distinct, and soon the head of the procession appeared. They were pilgrims from Prüm, in the Eyfel, more than twelve leagues from Echternach, coming to make their annual devotions to St. Willibrord. These good people had set out on Sunday evening; they had walked part of that night and of the next day, praying and chanting. On Monday evening they had disbanded, scattering about through fields and in barns a few leagues from Echternach, and had resumed their march early in the morning. Tanned, heated, dusty, clad in coarse raiment, they came on in good order, forming an almost interminable train. It seemed as if the whole village had come. Their accoutrements were rustic, fantastic even; the men carried crosswise over their backs an umbrella fastened by a string which passed over their breasts, crossing the strap of a large leathern valise hanging on the other side. The women had baskets on their arms. These valises and baskets held the provisions for that journey of four or five days. It is remarkable that this pilgrimage of the people of Prüm is voluntary and a popular movement; the clergy take no part in its organization, and seldom join it, the parishioners making it their own affair. On this occasion, indeed, a priest was with them, but the order of march and the devotions were directed by a certain number of men placed at intervals in the procession. They carried, as the insignia of office, a red staff surmounted by a little copper cross. The priest, who closed the procession, walked between two young men clad in quaint and antique garb, with hats turned up and trimmed with flowers. One carried the cross, the other a large votive candle adorned with emblems, the annual gift of their village to the patron of Echternach. The procession advanced in perfect order. Indifferent to curious looks, turning their eyes neither to the right nor to the left towards the human hedge that lined their path, they passed on, saying their rosary aloud and repeating after each Ave this familiar salutation, full of simplicity and grace: “St. Willibrord, we are coming to thy tomb!” I loved to see and hear them. Their fervor in prayer and contempt of fatigue, their rustic dress and primitive manners, their indifference to all but their one object, made these peasants a people set apart, and their pilgrimage a type of the pilgrimage of human life as it ought to be made. I watched the pious train until it entirely disappeared on the other side of the bridge; for, before returning to the Prussian bank to take part in the sacred dance, the people of Prüm were going to kiss the shrine and pray before the relics of the saint.

At last, about nine o’clock, a numerous band of clergy appeared, and the ceremony opened with the accustomed sermon. Fancy the scene: the lovely morning and beautiful country, the vast host of listeners intent on the words of the priest. For a frame there were the high hills on one side, on the other the silvery course of the Sûre, and below the spires of the town.

Not less wonderful was it to hear on Prussian ground a Catholic voice calling upon thousands of the faithful to pray for the Holy Father and the persecuted church. And while the priest was speaking there came from all the heights belated pilgrims hastening to the ceremony. They were seen afar off, coming down the steep paths bordered with flowering hedges; and the bells rang out full peals, and the word of God was scattered among the multitude with the song of birds.

When the sermon was ended, the clergy, in white surplices, formed in line of march and opened the procession. Behind them came the musicians, and afterwards the immense throng of those who were to join in the dance. At first there was much crowding. Leaning against the parapet of the bridge, I had to ply my elbows lustily to prevent the multitude from suffocating me, and farther on, when the train began to defile through the narrow street which leads to the Sûre, the pressure was quite frightful. There were not ushers enough to preserve order. A few firemen and policemen had to be everywhere at once, and were swallowed up in the billows of the confused crowd. The cause of the disorder was the impatience of some people, who, instead of waiting until the street should be cleared for the beginning of the dance, went forward to post themselves higher up in the procession. This choked the way in some places, and there was terrible pushing. Women screamed; several were nearly suffocated. I saw some men, who, as they awaited their turn with philosophic patience, set their backs against walls and rowed with their arms against the human flood to save themselves from wreck. A hospitality, as unexpected as it was welcome, rescued me from the tumult to become a peaceful spectator in a neighboring house instead of an actor in the scene. “It is sweet,” says Lucretius, “when the sea is swollen and tossed by rough winds, to look from the shore upon the distress of others, not finding pleasure in their troubles, but in our own exemption from them.” I felt, in selfish enjoyment, the spirit of these lines, gazing at my ease from an upper window upon the undulation of several thousand heads floating apparently upon a liquid expanse. Actually, a needle thrown from above would not have reached the ground.

Order was soon restored. The police got angry and used their fists unsparingly to force back into their places the intruders, who continued to leave the ranks and insinuate themselves in among the front rows of the procession. All this went on while the head of the cortége disappeared at the turn of the street, dancing to the traditional air played by the musicians. It was a quaint tune, rather quick in measure and old-fashioned. It was hard to say whether it expressed joyful excitement or the emotions of grief; for music, with its wonderful suppleness, may sometimes speak to us of our joys and sorrows, according to the mood in which we listen. And now this melody, centuries old, set in motion a dancing multitude. The sight was strange, striking, indescribable. To an unaccustomed spectator the first moment is of stupefied amazement. His fancy enters a new world; the movement of all these heads bending and rocking in a rhythmic measure produces a fantastic effect that no words can convey. I do not know whether I can tell exactly what I saw, or if my sketch will give even a faint idea of a scene which defies analysis and description.

Think of a stream of twelve thousand persons in a street where only eight can walk abreast; fancy all these people, in rows of four, six, or eight, advancing, held together by handkerchiefs or staves to keep order in the ranks and measure in the dance; fancy them, I say, executing a dance which consists of three steps forward and two back, and which moves the whole multitude from end to end with one unceasing action of ebb and flow. The interminable train stretched over about fifteen hundred metres from the bridge of the Sûre to the parish church. It took not less than four hours to accomplish that quarter of a league by dancing, and under the direct rays of the sun, without a moment’s rest. It is easy to imagine that order and regularity were sometimes disturbed, but what was lost in symmetry was gained in picturesque originality of detail. There were almost as many different styles of dancing as there were various groups, everybody managing his own affairs. The groups just behind the musicians succeeded best, being kept in step by the music; and in general the people of Echternach danced more harmoniously and correctly than the others. As the bands were few and stationed quite far apart, the pilgrims who could not hear them hopped about in utter confusion, while the rest had a certain harmony of movement. These eccentricities of choreographic movement were worth seeing; here they glided with light step, elegantly and smoothly; there they jumped about with heavy tread and immense exertion. Watching carefully those who seemed to have best preserved the tradition, I thought that the most pure and “classic” rhythm consisted in five steps of a dance, quite slow and without turning, three forward and two back, made by gliding rather than bounding. The whole character was grave, solemn, and suited to a religious dance. A band from Echternach opened the march and played the tune for the first pilgrims. The others danced to the strains of a few isolated instruments. Each cortége had its own musicians, and, as each parish danced separately, they had their local players. It is needless to say that variety reigned among the instruments—drums, violins, flutes, clarionets, and hautboys—all hard at work and producing combinations hardly grateful to musical ears. But the good fellows did not pretend to be artists. They worked for conscience’ sake; they piped and they blew, they beat and they scraped, with all the accumulated force of lungs, fists, and bows. St. Willibrord is not fastidious; he takes the will for the deed, and if there be here and there some cockney scandalized by this cacophony, so much the worse for him. Ill though they play the melody, it is a good work to make the attempt, and the worthy pilgrims accommodate themselves to circumstances. Formerly no fiddler was allowed to play in village fairs, if he had not paid for the privilege at the procession of Echternach that same year. This custom, with many others, is obsolete, but many musicians remain faithful to tradition.

This year, while the procession was crossing the town, there came marching through a cross-street a brilliant band of music preceded by a banner; it was a philharmonic society from Remich on the Moselle, and was received with acclamation. It joined the procession, and its fine execution came as a welcome reinforcement to the poor musicians, who were nearly exhausted.

I could not take my eyes off the wonderful scene, sometimes taking in the whole picture at a glance, sometimes pausing to examine details in all their picturesque variety. Most attractive of all was the sight of the children of Echternach, dancing at the head of the procession just behind the village band; they put such life into the affair, and felt it such a festive occasion. It was refreshing to watch the rosy-cheeked, laughing rogues, usually in their shirt-sleeves, bounding merrily “for St. Willibrord.” Then came the grown folk of Echternach, then the various parishes, each, as I said, forming a distinct group with its own musicians. The sexes were separated. Formerly the pilgrims from Prüm and Waxweiler, who came from the most distant points, had the right of opening the procession, while the inhabitants of Echternach, through courtesy, took the last place. Now there is no fixed order; the parishes take their places at hap-hazard, and many people leave the ranks to join the front rows at the risk of throwing the whole procession into confusion. I saw the good people of Prüm, with their monumental green and blue umbrellas capable of sheltering whole households. Now they were unstrung from their proprietors’ backs, and, bound two and two, served as a balustrade to be grasped by three or four persons to keep them even in the ranks and regulate their step. Here and there, amid the rhythmic movement of these thousands of heads, I descried some unhappy being afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance, shown by wild, spasmodic springs, violent excitement, and the pitiful rocking of all the limbs. They were usually women, young girls stricken with this terrible disorder. I noticed one in particular whom every one looked at with earnest sympathy. She leaped in a wild, feverish way, supported under the arms by her mother, whom I knew by the look of anxiety and sadness imprinted on her face. The kind people of the town stood ready at their doors with refreshing beverages for these poor creatures; but they hardly stopped to drink before continuing their dance under the whip of the sun, as the great Alighieri says, whose words came to my mind more than once at sight of these miseries. So drawn along by this weird dance, the pilgrims appeared and vanished, as wave follows wave, and the monotonous melody carried on ten thousand people to the sound of its fantastic cadences. Add one or two thousand pilgrims who, not joining in the dance, followed the procession, saying their beads or reciting the litany, and you have in all twelve thousand Christians of both sexes and of every age and rank, who, through four whole hours, formed St. Willibrord’s triumphal procession and visited his sacred tomb.[174]

All the energy of the vigorous Luxembourg sinews is required to bring to a successful close this long and fatiguing pilgrimage, whose difficulties increase as they near their end; for I forgot to say that the procession danced up the sixty-two steps which lead to the parish church. Not every one can go to Corinth, says the proverb. The same is true of Echternach, though in a different sense, thank God! But it would be a mistake to think that the famous ceremony demands anything excessive or superhuman. The calm, grave character of the dance, and the numerous pauses which are made necessary by the blocking of the way, suffice to husband the pilgrim’s strength. Their vow, though hard and laborious, is not impossible or dangerous. The proof of this is that many children in the procession dance the whole length of the way twice over. No sooner do they reach the church at the head of the procession than they scamper back to join the rear and begin the exercise over again. Pilgrims who, on arriving at Echternach, do not feel equal to executing their vow, and yet wish to contribute to the brilliancy of the festival, give a few sous to one of these children, and the indefatigable little fellows acquit themselves of their task with imperturbable seriousness and charming grace. But prodigious people are again the people of Pürm. They arrive at the town, to use a familiar expression, with twelve leagues in their heels; and at once they set to work and dance four long hours. Then, when their devotions are ended, they take barely time to eat their modest fare out doors or at an inn table, and go home singing and praying to the high table-lands and extinct volcanoes of their wild country.

One should be in the church when the procession pours in by traditional custom through the left aisle, to pass round the altar in the choir and go out through the right aisle. The dance does not cease an instant as they pass through the sanctuary; the orchestra goes on playing the quaint, archaic melody, the dancers make the old Romano-vaulted roof ring with the clang of their measured steps. The pilgrims do not think their vow fulfilled until, after making the tour of the church, they find themselves in the courtyard before an old wooden cross, where they break ranks. Nothing can be more fantastic than this irruption of dancing and music in the house of God. The spectacle in the church is beyond description; you feel as if you were dreaming, and your spirit floated in the domain of the impossible. What do the people mean? Have they come to pillage and destroy? Is this tumultuous throng the prey of a sudden delirium, of a dancing mania? Or, if it be worship, does it not revive the solemn orgies of ancient Greece, where certain deities of Oriental origin were honored by the leaps, the cries, and the races of their idolaters? No; to the first instant of amazement there succeeds a more correct and complete judgment. Beneath the external agitation, beneath the noise and movement, you see the religious calm which fills these souls, and the solemnity pervading the expression of their inner feelings. It is this contrast which gives to the singular ceremony its character of deep originality. No doubt we have lost the sense of mysterious symbolism in the sacred dance; we no longer see its true motive or significance; we only know or divine that the devout thought which first inspired it animates it at the present day.

Among various ideas suggested by this astonishing experience, there was one that I could not get rid of, and which returned to me on the festival and its eve again and again. While multitudes knelt before the altar, kissed the shrine, touched it with objects of devotion, and filled the church with their prayers, you would have said that the great man must be there, present among the faithful, speaking to them and listening to them. What glory equals that of the saints? What other son of Adam enjoys such honors? Those whom the Catholic Church has crowned with eternal palms do not reign only in heaven; the human glory which they despised is given to them abundantly, and these little ones, who passed through life obscure and despised, see themselves suddenly surrounded with an amazing glory with which Cæsar, Homer, Archimedes, and Plato do not shine. The world rings with their name, and the least and most ignorant of human beings know, love, and revere them. They are not only illustrious, they receive solemn veneration, they share in a certain way the honors of God himself. Their names are uttered with bended knee, nations flock to their tombs, and they are gloriously enthroned in Christian hearts. Beside such a destiny is it worth while to try to immortalize one’s name and to flutter, as the poet says, upon the lips of men? What is the greatest name on earth, unless it be encircled with the aureole of sanctity? Ignored by the crowd, uttered coldly by most of those who know it, respected by a few, but invoked by no one with clasped hands and heart uplifted to him who bore it. The name of the least saint prostrates in the dust all human generations through the long succession of ages, and resounds like a word of life on all lips. The church alone is the dispenser of glory, and even among secular names the noblest and most lasting are those of Catholic associations.

III.

The reader asks, no doubt, what is the final impression produced by the spectacle of the dancing procession, and how we should estimate this strange ceremony? I will try to answer the double question clearly. In the first place, one must see the procession with one’s own eyes to judge it fairly. The public must beware of newspaper reports, which are numerous and usually wholly incorrect, not to use a more uncivil term. There is no name which certain papers have not applied to the subject; for correspondents of a farcical turn amuse themselves every year at the expense of a credulous public. We may say, en passant, that no class of beings can be more contemptible than reporters hunting for a sensation—travelling bagmen of the press who are allured by scandal as the vulture is by a carcase. It is easy to fancy what the ceremony at Echternach must have become under their pen. The very name of dancing procession makes them scent a topic, and, devoid of all religious feeling, they describe first and judge afterwards a spectacle they are incapable of understanding. Their descriptions are so unfaithful that you doubt whether the good people ever saw the procession, or whether they did not write the account before going to the ceremony. They give caricatures of a mass of humanity entangled in frightful confusion and bounding with all their strength to the sound of a gigantic hubbub. The ranks get mingled; the dancers crush each other and spring about, regardless of the toes of their neighbors, who scream for mercy. With rubicund faces streaming with perspiration, and with eyes starting from the sockets, these wretched fanatics would die rather than pause. On all sides numbers give up in despair and drop breathless among their barbarous companions. Sometimes they are drawn out of the crowd by compassionate persons and restored to life, but no one in the procession stops for anything, and the pitiless Catholic bamboula goes on and on, sowing devastation at every step. I spare the reader further details and give only the canvas of an embroidery more or less varied according to the imaginative powers of the correspondent. In short, despite the diversity of some details easy to add, this fancy sketch has appeared in nearly all the anti-religious papers in Belgium, and will end in being stereotyped. It is needless to say that it is false throughout. Among ten thousand persons who were dancing I did not see one give out. Also, contrary to another assertion, the number of epileptics and other invalids in the procession is very small. I saw in all five or six persons evidently afflicted with nervous diseases.

After reading this high-toned description, flavored with a few Voltairean jests of the old type, it is natural to pronounce the procession of Echternach an absurdity. The sarcasms of free-thinkers annually assail the venerable ceremony, but without injuring it. In fact, it is irreverent enough in this nineteenth century to increase in importance. Eye-witnesses of the strange spectacle always retain an impressive memory of it. I confess to having been rather prejudiced against the grotesque scenes I expected to see. At the end of a quarter of an hour I was convinced of the powerful religious character of this great public act, and I remarked that all the spectators shared my feeling. Any one must have a singularly empty mind and heart not to be struck by the grandeur of the scene. Those who always take a petty view of things, because they can take no other, may laugh at the discordant music and the clumsy dancing of some of the pilgrims. For myself, when I see the same belief, centuries old, translated by thousands of men into bold, spontaneous action, I cannot restrain my admiration. Before the intrepidity with which these men, trampling under foot all human respect, honor with consecrated rites their patron saint, I feel moved and impressed. Where is there such faith left in Israel? “When I hear the old tune,” said one of the most honorable bourgeois of Echternach to me, “and when I see the first pilgrims arrive, I feel something circulate between my flesh and skin that makes me fairly shiver.” A young student of the town said to me very prettily: “I do not care much for the dancing of the grown people, but the sight of the dancing children carries me back to my own happy childhood, and my eyes fill with tears.”

These feelings are unanimous. You see once in a while in the crowd a travelling clerk on his vacation hazarding a timid and colorless sarcasm which a generous public passes over unnoticed. Beyond dispute, the sight of the procession exercises a moral and religious influence. Like incredulity, faith is contagious; timid spirits feel strengthened in this region where the breath of Catholic life circulates so freely; sick hearts come out renewed from the spectacle of thousands of Christians revealing the true remedy for human woe. The people of Luxembourg, essentially serious and meditative, understand the aim of the ceremony; its quaintness does not prevent them from seeing it as it really is—a great and solemn affirmation of faith, at once an act of penance and a prayer, to be preserved in the original form out of respect to their ancestors and veneration for the saint. Whatever the origin of this ancient custom,[175] it deserves to be preserved not only because it fosters and develops religion in the people, but because it revives before our eyes, in the most picturesque way, the manners of our fathers, whose least traces historians and archæologists are jealous to discover. A Luxembourg writer says well on this subject: “We preserve with scrupulous fidelity old monuments and objects of antique art. Why not do our best to preserve in its original type this remarkable procession, this monument graven in the living hearts of our brethren?”[176]

The intelligent town of Echternach perfectly understands that it is incumbent upon its honor to respond to this wish. It has neglected nothing in the cause, and at various times has had to surmount great obstacles. The administrative prohibitions of Joseph II., the brutalities of the French Revolution, the petty opposition of the Dutch government, have not discouraged them; they have held faithfully to their patriotic tradition, and have no cause to repent it, for they find in this devotion a source of great prosperity. Their unalterable attachment is the more remarkable because even the clergy have often been opposed to the procession. In 1777 the Prince Elector of Treves, Clement Wenceslaus—under the reign of the Febronians, I should add—actually forbade the dance, and thus furnished excuse to Joseph II. to forbid it also a little later. To-day quite a number of the clergy look unfavorably on these extraordinary demonstrations of faith. They think religion is compromised by associating it with practices which, without being bad in themselves, may provoke the mockery of the incredulous and alienate them farther from the church. This opinion, based, of course, on a sincere devotion to religious interests, appears to me an unconscious and useless concession to the petty spirit of the age, which is never satisfied with half-measures. Anti-religious fanaticism will not be appeased by our throwing to it as a sop a small portion of Catholic treasure. What it wants is the entire suppression of religion. To yield any point whatever will only serve to whet its appetite and augment its pretensions.

Far from sharing these fears, I think that in these days of struggle it is important to oppose the faith as a whole to unbelief as a whole, and not yield an inch of ground, unless we wish to lose all. From the earliest days of Christianity there have been people who took scandal at faith which goes beyond what is strictly necessary; among Christ’s apostles there were those who blamed Magdalen for anointing the feet of her Master with precious ointment. It is instructive to remember that it was Judas who showed himself most shocked by what he called useless expense. We may be sure that, as a general rule, the enemies of the church detest all her practices and would like to see them every one abolished. Give them the dance of Echternach to-day; to-morrow they will demand the suppression of the procession itself, and soon after they will wish to close the church where the saint’s relics are venerated. We know something of this in Belgium. Because we submitted to the proscription of jubilee processions last year, we have had to resign ourselves this year (1876) to seeing God in the Eucharist confined to the temple; and we shall see worse things still, if we do not guard against them in time. It would, therefore, be mere folly to sacrifice to interested claimants a venerable custom, dear to whole populations and full of poetry and originality. “But why dance?” you ask. “Cannot faith be shown in some other way?” Of course it can. Do not let us kneel down to pray, or stand uncovered before holy images, or make the sign of the cross, or do a hundred other things equally useless, strictly speaking. Yet who would propose to give them up? There is in the heart of man a powerful, mysterious tendency to express the inner feelings of the soul by symbolical actions. Thence come these many ceremonies which have no sense in themselves, and all owe their worth to a hidden significance. The dance of Echternach has no other origin; it is the symbolical representation of the sentiments of joyful confidence which the people feel in the holy patron of their town. In every age joy has been expressed by dancing, and among those who blame the custom of Echternach may there not be some one who has danced for joy at hearing good news? Many examples could be cited since David danced before the Ark of the Alliance down to our own days, so readily do these impetuous emotions of the soul translate themselves into movements of the body.

Still, the church, while introducing into her ceremonies a rich and varied symbolism, has never admitted dancing; and this prudent reserve is to be admired because dancing, harmless in itself, is one of those dangerous things which can, according to time and place, produce deplorable abuses. With the same wise moderation she has not absolutely forbidden it; and where the practice has been introduced naturally, and has become a part of popular devotion, she has tolerated it, as at Echternach, and even encouraged it because she saw in it clearly a religious element. Nothing is more wonderful in the church than this perfect wisdom, this superior good sense, with which she regulates great social and political questions and decides the petty details of individual life. Her attitude towards this ancient ceremony is as clear and correct as possible; she mildly favors it in spite of its strange forms, and refuses to blame these unless they become an occasion of scandal. From the moment that the dance should lose its traditional character of austere and respectable devotion, and become a pretext of pleasure and disorder, it would be at once condemned by the church and would fall into discredit. Thank God! that day is not near, and the procession of Echternach will still outlive many a kingdom and empire.

As a matter of course, it will be discussed as long as it lasts, and will always have adversaries and partisans. Prose and poetry will for ever dispute over human society, and will seek to model it after two opposite fashions. We live to-day in a prosaic age. Prose triumphed with the French Revolution and has passed through western Europe with a hammer, destroying, together with works of art, all the flower of Catholic institutions and habits. They will revive, but slowly, and this generation will not see their complete restoration. Now, despoiled of all which lent a charm to existence, society languishes in a desert of monotony. Rhythm, so to speak, has disappeared from our lives with that glorious succession of festivals, customs, memories, and hopes which surrounded us from the cradle to the grave. All that was Catholic poetry; it enlivened the existence of the poor laborer, and made of a peasant, attached to the soil and toiling for his master, a happier man, more contented with himself, than workmen in the cities who get a good salary and enjoy their independence. There is in the human soul a sublime aspiration after beauty and poetry which nothing can destroy, and its wings grow strong as they meet with resistance. Does not the tedium which has devoured the last generation betray a sense of want and an aspiration after Catholic life with its artistic magnificence and poetic influences? Humanity is tending in that direction, and has already met the enemy who would bar the way. Thence comes the loud and terrible struggle which tears the whole earth, and of which we may, without presumption, hope to see the close.

The procession of Echternach, like the mysteries of Oberammergau in Upper Bavaria, is a precious relic of the old popular poetry of Catholicity translated into the habits of life. That is its true and complete meaning. It is neither more nor less; it is not an act of worship nor a vulgar profanation. It stands on that boundary line where the church condescends to popular feeling and makes the hard road through life easier by her help. It is the natural fruit of popular devotion which sprang from a religious feeling and has been preserved with respectful piety. It could not be imitated or transplanted; like generous wine, it would lose the flavor of the soil if it were cultivated on strange land. It is only possible there where all is harmonious with it. One must have a studied hostility towards religious things to fail to see its æsthetic character, even without recognizing the sincerity and the venerable tone of the old custom. Some people fall into ecstasies over Grecian theories and the beautiful religious dances sculptured on the metopes of the Parthenon. Others devote their lives to the study of the chorus in ancient tragedies and its evolutions on the stage. I do not say that the dance of Echternach, as such, is comparable to these choreographic works of art, but why refuse to a Christian practice in use among our fathers the benevolent attention lavished on pagan society? Has it not a double claim to study in the fact that we received it from our Catholic ancestors? For five centuries, at least, it has lived and flourished among the populations of the Ardennes and its surroundings. Every year it draws from their homes thousands of these sedentary peasants; it furrows with the steps of pilgrims the long, white, desert roads of Luxembourg; it draws together in fraternal relations men far removed from each other, by the same prayers and the same emotions; it lifts towards heaven in unalloyed joy their faces bowed pitilessly earthward all the rest of the year. It teaches them to know beyond their own fireside and parish the great Christian family of which they are members, and leaves in their memory for all the rest of the summer and through the long winter evenings ineffaceable impressions of peaceful happiness. That is poetry, it seems to me, and of the best kind; more is the pity for those who cannot feel it. As the name of pèlerinard is not one that frightens or mortifies me, I will assert that the ancient procession of Echternach inspired me with unlimited admiration, that it edified, moved, and consoled me, and appeared to me a most charming episode in the great, mournful epic of human life.

THE PAN-PRESBYTERIANS.

After two years of careful preparation the great Pan-Presbyterian Council has assembled; has eaten seven luncheons in public and at the public expense, and a corresponding number of breakfasts, dinners, and suppers in private and at private cost; and has dispersed; its members talked much—but these were their only deeds. The labor of the Pan-Presbyterian mountain brought forth not even a mouse. Its promise was large; its performance was ludicrously small—so small that the leading journals of England appear to have been almost unaware of the existence of the Pan-Presbyterians, while the principal organ of opinion in the Scotch city where the council was held—“close to the grave of John Knox, the founder of Presbyterianism”—gave to the record of its proceedings not so much space as it often devotes to the report of a local synod, and dismissed it at its close with good-humored but contemptuous ridicule. Here, however, the ingenuous reader may inquire, “Who are the Pan-Presbyterians, and for what purpose were they in council?” The question would be a natural one, and he who propounds it need not blush for his ignorance. The people of Scotland may be presumed to know all that is worth knowing about Presbyterianism in all its forms; but it appears that in certain rural districts of that very Presbyterian land the impression prevailed that Pan-Presbyterian was the title of a new sect indigenous to America, and recently smuggled into Scotland like the Colorado beetle; while in the more learned circles of Edinburgh this bucolic delusion was derided by erudite philologists, who explained that “Pan-Presbyterianism is a learned form of stating that Presbyterianism is Everything, and that a Pan-Presbyterian is a person who holds that comprehensive yet exclusive doctrine.” In point of fact, however, the Pan-Presbyterians were simply three hundred and twenty-five gentlemen, most of them with the handle of reverend to their names, who claimed to be the delegated representatives of the various Presbyterian sects throughout the world. From time to time some of the almost innumerable Protestant sects show that they are ashamed of their sectarianism. Those of them who recognize at all the fact that Jesus Christ established one church in the world are uneasy when they remember that they are members only of a sect which has a human origin. This feeling, if rightly nurtured and obeyed, would lead those who entertain it into the fold of the church; but prejudice, pride, ignorance, and self-interest too often stand in the way, and lead to attempts to satisfy the natural Christian yearning for unity by projects for the amalgamation of a few of the sects into one body. Thus we have had a Pan-Anglican Congress, a Bonn Conference, and an Evangelical Alliance; and now this Pan-Presbyterian Council. Presbyterianism has a history of about three hundred and twenty-five years, and in this period it has succeeded in dividing and subdividing itself, until even its own doctors do not know with exactness how many different kinds of Presbyterians there may be, or in what manner the points of doctrine which separate them should be formulated. It was suggested at the council that accurate information upon this subject was desirable, and the task of obtaining it was entrusted to a committee, who hope they may be able to report in three years’ time. The project for the Pan-Presbyterian Council was originated by an eminent American Presbyterian minister—President McCosh, of Princeton (New Jersey) College; and it took definite shape at a meeting held in London in 1875, when “the alliance of the reformed churches throughout the world holding to the Presbyterian system” was organized. Before the council could be summoned, however, careful precautions had to be taken in order to prevent the assemblage, which was to meet for the promotion of unity, from breaking up in a row and resulting in the establishment of one or more new schisms. A charm of novelty was thus imparted to the undertaking; every one felt that a Presbyterian synod which could hold its sessions without a free fight would indeed be a new spectacle. The harmony of the council was to be assured beforehand by forbidding it to exercise any authority whatsoever. It was especially prohibited from attempting to “interfere with the existing creed or constitution of any church in the alliance, or with its internal order or external relations.” Thus the door was opened for the admission of the representatives of sects who are almost as wide apart from each other in what they believe and teach as they are from the church. So long as they called themselves Presbyterians, or “held to the Presbyterian system of church government,” it was enough. There is a Presbyterian sect in Holland whose pastors, at least, teach that the Bible is not an inspired book, and who deny the divinity of Christ; there is a Presbyterian sect in France which avows the boldest rationalism; there are Presbyterian sects in the United States who rejoice with exceeding great joy in the belief that there are millions of infants not a span long frying in hell; and there are others who have recoiled so far from Calvinism that they have fallen into Universalism. In Scotland itself bitter strife prevails between the various Presbyterian sects on such questions as the connection of the state with the church, the binding force of the “Standards,” and the extent and nature of the Atonement; and there is a large party which is declaring that if a certain reverend professor, who has written to prove that parts of the Bible are forgeries, myths, or fables, is disciplined for that expression of opinion, they will revolt and help him to set up a sect of his own. But the Pan-Presbyterians resolved to concern themselves with none of these things. Everything unpleasant was to be avoided; unity was to be talked about, but no attempt to effect it by defining truth or denouncing error was to be made. Even with these restrictions the promoters of the council realized the danger of their experiment, and at the last moment they diminished its perils by enacting that no one should speak twice on the same subject, and that the discourses should be limited from twenty to ten minutes each. The latter provision, which was stringently enforced, more than once saved the council from painful scenes. We had occasion, when writing in these pages six months ago,[177] to show that in the Presbyterian body in Scotland theoretical infidelity had made such headway and had obtained so firm a foothold that to deny the inspiration of the Bible, and to cast doubt upon the authenticity of the miraculous events recorded in its pages, was regarded by a powerful section as an evidence of profound scholarship and of a fearless love for truth, rather than as a proof that the advocates of these opinions had ceased to be worthy of the name and position of Christian teachers. In a word, the condition of the Presbyterian sects throughout the world was such that a general council of its leading men was highly desirable, provided that there remained in the sects anything worth saving, and they possessed in themselves the power of saving it. For ourselves, we believe that the mutilated fragments of Christian truth still retained by the majority of the Presbyterian laity and by a considerable number of the Presbyterian ministers are well worth saving; but we fear that the Presbyterians themselves will not, or cannot, save them. If these Pan-Presbyterians were truly representative men, then, we should say, it is all up with Presbyterianism. The spirit which conceived the council and which governed its proceedings was the spirit of cowardice, of temporary expediency, of prophesying smooth things, and, if we must speak with entire plainness, the spirit of utter and base unfaithfulness to God’s revealed truth, even to that version of his revealed truth which the Presbyterians profess with their lips, and which they have formulated in their own creeds, confessions, and catechisms. In the face of the fact that on the Continent of Europe their co-religionists are rapidly becoming Unitarians, rationalists, and infidels; that in Scotland German rationalistic philosophy has won its way into their theological schools and poisoned the very fountains of their ecclesiastical learning, so that it has now become notorious that a large share of their ministers either do not believe what they preach or else preach that which is in irreconcilable antagonism to the “Standards”; and that in America the Presbyterian bodies are drifting into Socinianism on one hand, and back into the hardest and most repulsive form of Calvinism on the other—in view of all these undeniable facts, or rather with assumed and predetermined blindness to them, the chosen representatives of the Presbyterian sects assemble, spend seven days in talking with each other, and separate without uttering a word or performing an act in affirmation or defence or vindication of absolute and divine truth. No! That was not in the programme; it was only on condition that nothing of the kind should be attempted that the council was got together at all; it was only because this promise was observed that the council managed to do its talking and to disperse in peace. At one of its meetings a curious scene occurred. A woman—an earnest Presbyterian of the old sort, a spiritual descendant of Jennie Geddes—had made her way into the council, and had listened to the debate for some time in silence; but her emotions at last overcame her, and, rising to her feet, she politely informed the chairman that she hoped God’s lightning would come down and strike the assembly for its unfaithfulness. This irate lady was indiscreet; but she only expressed, we suppose, the feelings of many an honest Presbyterian. The council, however, was wise in its generation, and it must be confessed that it acted upon strictly Protestant principles. The essence of Protestantism is a revolt against supreme authority; it is the affirmation of the idea that one man’s opinion is as good as another’s, and perhaps better. An attempt to provide means for an organic unity of the sects represented would have ended in a free fight; the affirmation of positive truths condemnatory of the heresies which honey-*comb the sects was impossible so long as the bargain by which these heresies were to be ignored was carried out.

The official programme of the work of the council was thus conceived:

“To consider questions of general interest to Presbyterians; to strengthen and protect weak and persecuted churches; to explain and extend the Presbyterian system; and to discuss subjects of church work—evangelization, training of ministers, use of the press, colportage, suppression of intemperance, observance of the Sabbath, systematic beneficence, and the suppression of Romanism and infidelity.”

We must here record, with a grateful heart, that “Romanism” came off very lightly. We are not certain that for this crowning mercy we are not indebted to those wily fellows, the Jesuits. For it was observed that, whenever one of the speakers began to adduce evidence that the Pope was Antichrist, the chairman suddenly discovered “that time was up”; and it was likewise remarked that more than one soul-stirring revelation of the diabolical seductions of the Scarlet Woman was cut short by the announcement that “the luncheon hour had arrived, and that Bailie McTavish would preside”—an intimation which never failed to empty the hall. Now, there are Jesuits in Scotland—no less than a score of them—and that they are quite equal to the task of devising means like these for their protection cannot be doubted by any enlightened Protestant mind. As for the twin sister of Romanism—infidelity—that escaped almost scot free. The learned and pious delegates fought shy of the subject; it was felt to be a dangerous one.

The council began its sessions in the Free Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, on the 4th of July. It was found to consist of 325 members, of whom 238 were regularly-appointed delegates, and 87 were honorary, or associate, delegates. Thirty-one of the delegates were from the Continent of Europe; Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland sent 92 delegates; the colonies 30; and the United States 85. The American delegates had brought with them 32 “associates”; and it was, perhaps, in order to guard against bulldozing on the part of the Americans that the Scotch delegates appointed on the spur of the moment 48 “associates” to sit with their delegates and thus maintain a proper balance of power. The precaution was not unnecessary; even after it had been adopted the Americans did far more than their share of the talking. The established church of Scotland, in appointing its delegates to the council, had instructed them to take a high and mighty attitude, and to refrain from doing or saying anything which would imply that they had been sent there to treat on terms of equality with the representatives of the other sects. The American delegation was respectable for its ability, and the ultra-orthodox element was dominant in it. The two hostile camps into which the handful of French Presbyterians are divided were both represented; and so were the two Presbyterian sects of Holland. There were enough Presbyterians in Belgium to send one delegate, and no more. The German Presbyterians declined to be officially represented, and the three German members of the council came as volunteers. Bohemia and Hungary had their delegates; Switzerland sent some gentlemen who were rather sat upon; the modern inheritors of the old Waldensian heretics were the constituents of a delegate who had little to say; and the remainder of the thirty-one European delegates were representatives of “the missionary churches” in Italy, Spain, and Greece. As nearly as could be ascertained, there are about fifty different Presbyterian sects, and it was estimated that more than half of these were represented in the council. But the delegates were not endowed with any power to act, or even to speak officially, in the name of their respective constituents. Those of the sects in Switzerland, Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary which have a connection with the state had either refused to be represented at all or had permitted their members to attend only as individuals. This complete absence of everything like legislative or judicial power in the council is a sufficient apology for its failure to promulgate new decrees or to define any dogma. But had the Pan-Presbyterians been of one mind and heart, they might at least have lifted up their united testimony, in some shape or other, in defence of those cardinal truths of Christianity which are now assailed, all the world over, by men in their own ranks. This they did not venture to do, for the reason that, had they tried to do it, their congress would have ended in a row.

The opening sermon of the council was preached by Professor Flint, who took for his text the prayer of our Lord for the unity of his church, and whose discourse was an argument to the effect that when the Founder of the church prayed that his followers “all may be one,” he intended that they should be all divided. “A universal church,” says Professor Flint, “was as grandiose and diseased a dream as was a universal empire”; and he warned the council against striving after organic unity even among the fifty separate Presbyterian sects. The adoption of the rules of order, which provided that the meetings “should be opened shortly with prayer,” caused a member to complain that it was very awkward to use the word “shortly” in connection with prayer; but the chairman replied that while it was awkward it was very necessary, else they would have nothing but praying. The first subject of discussion was “Harmony of Reformed Confessions,” which were divided into three classes—ante-Calvinistic, Calvinistic, and post-Calvinistic. These originally were not intended to be formulas, but only apologies—“vindications of the Protestant faith against Romish misrepresentation and slander.” For a while these confessions maintained their supremacy, but now “they have lost their authority in almost every country except England, Scotland, and the United States”; and each church interprets the Scriptures to suit itself, even upon such grave questions as “reprobation and infant salvation.” Should the council@ leave this matter in its present indefinite state, or should it undertake to formulate a new confession to which all Presbyterians should subscribe? A Swiss delegate ventured the startling suggestion that if such a confession were formulated “the Divinity of Christ should be the central stand-point in it”; and another delegate produced the draught of a new dogmatic constitution, in thirty-one articles, which had been obligingly formulated by Professor Kraft, of Bonn, who had patched it up from the various confessions and had sent it to the council with his compliments. Principal Brown, of Aberdeen, remarked that it would be extremely desirable that this or some other similar constitution should be adopted, or something else done, chiefly “in order to silence—no, it would not do that—but to put to shame the calumny of the Church of Rome, which said that the Reformed churches were divided into as many distinct and conflicting religions as there were sects of them. The more intelligent Romanists knew this was false” (then we cannot be classed among the more intelligent Romanists), “but it suited them all the same to say it and repeat it, because it had a certain pithy and plausible sound. And Presbyterians were there to testify that it was false, and that in all that was substantial and vital in Christianity the Reformed churches were practically one.” After this bold declaration it would have been naturally in order to take the step necessary to prove it. But canny Professor Brown hastened to add that, on second thoughts, he was of the opinion that the council had better leave the matter alone and not attempt any unity save that of “sympathy.” Professor Candlish lamented that “there was not now that lively sense of the unity and harmony of the Reformed confessions that there once was.” In fact, no one knew exactly what changes the various churches had made in the “Standards,” and he thought it would be interesting, at least, to collect information on that point, so as to ascertain how many different Presbyterian beliefs there were. Dr. Lang, of Glasgow, warned the council that it was treading on dangerous ground. “There were deeper issues involved than merely touching the surface of their confessions: there was the whole question as to the authority and place of the Bible, and behind that the whole question of the supernatural.” The widest differences of opinion existed on these questions—every one knew that—but as long as possible let them be kept in the background. By covering them up, and avoiding “a restless and continual nig-nagging at the matter,” a sufficient degree of harmony could be maintained, at least for the present. A lay delegate, a lawyer, said that if the council once ventured to deal “with the very complicated, delicate, and difficult question of creeds,” there might be found many who would propose to solve the difficulty by dispensing with all creeds. Dr. Begg at this point boiled over, and read the council a severe lecture, expressing the disgust with which he had listened to some of the statements which had been made and apparently accepted.

“Every age had its own theology!—(laughter and applause)—he did not in the least believe that. Theology had been the same since the days of Eden. The idea of having a new theology at every stage was a blunder. (Laughter.) They heard of discoveries being made; but these discoveries were only resurrections of old errors. (Laughter.) He found a revolt against the divine authority and the divine Word—and the rebels were the discoverers of these new theologies.”

The discussion was now growing warm, but as it was announced that “the hour for luncheon had arrived, and that Mr. Stevenson, M.P., would preside,” the threatened fight was averted, and the subject was disposed of at a subsequent meeting by the passage of the following resolution:

“That this council appoint a committee with instructions to prepare a report to be laid before the next General Council, showing, in point of fact—1. What are the existing creeds and confessions of the churches composing this alliance, and what have been their previous creeds and confessions, with any modifications thereupon, and the dates and occasions of the same from the Reformation to the present day. 2. What are the existing formulas of subscription, if any, and what have been the previous formulas of subscription used in those churches in connection with their creeds and confessions. 3. How far has individual adherence to those creeds by subscription or otherwise been required from the ministers, elders, or other office-bearers respectively, and also from the private members of the same. And the council authorize the committee to correspond with members of the several churches throughout the world who may be able to give information; and they enjoin the committee, in submitting their report, not to accompany it either with any comparative estimate of those creeds or with any critical remarks upon their respective value, expediency, or efficiency.”

There was an unhappy and heated controversy concerning the appointment of some of the members of this committee, but this excitement was unnecessary. The information can all be obtained by the purchase of a few books and pamphlets; and as the committee is forbidden to accompany its report with “any critical remarks,” the presence upon it of a few rationalists or Universalists can do no mischief.

The remainder of the time of the council—and it sat thrice a day for a week—was occupied with talk. Nothing was done that was worthy of the name of action. Extracts from scores of religious essays were read; hundreds of little religious or semi-religious speeches were made; and that was all. We do not know what the Presbyterians here and elsewhere expected; but if they expected anything practical they have been sadly disappointed. Some of the little speeches were comic—as, for example, that of “the Rev. Mr. Robinson, of Louisville, U. S.,” who seems to have pursued antiquarian researches with startling results, since he has ascertained that Presbyterianism began with Abraham; that Moses was a member of the presbytery of Egypt; and that Elisha and Ezechiel were the moderators of the Presbyterian synods of Samaria and Jerusalem. Presbyterianism was the true form of government in the Jewish Church, and it was the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Judea that passed sentence of death on Jesus of Nazareth. Nay, according to this sprightly Kentucky divine, heaven itself will be a Presbyterian community, governed by a presbytery of four-and-twenty members. To listen to such excellent fooling as this; to read the essay laboriously prepared at home in Peoria or Dundee, and carefully rehearsed to admiring wife and wondering bairns for months before starting; to discuss, even in ten-minute speeches, such thrilling and novel themes as the uses of elders, the sinfulness of Sabbath-breaking, the advantages of assemblies, the wickedness of the Pope, and the unquestionable mental, moral, and religious superiority of Presbyterians in general, and Pan-Presbyterians especially, over all the rest of mankind—all this, no doubt, was pleasant enough to the participants; but it was scarcely the entertainment to which the outside world had been invited. True, there was voted, at the close of the council, and after an unusually hearty luncheon at which the brethren tarried long, “an address to the queen,” accompanied by what an Edinburgh journal irreverently describes as “unanimous votes of thanks to the Deity, Mr. A. T. Niven, C.A., and the lord provost.” Probably her majesty will never read the address, as it is a long one and does not call for a reply. But if she should peruse it, she will scarcely thank its authors for suggesting that she, too, is a Pan-Presbyterian, or that she changes her religion every time she crosses the Tweed. It appears something like an impertinence in the Pan-Presbyterians to write thus to the queen:

“We venture to indicate the deep interest which we take in the circumstance that, while residing in Scotland, your majesty joins in the Presbyterian worship and communion.”

The queen goes to a Presbyterian church when in Scotland because Presbyterianism is the religion of the state in Scotland, of which she is the head; and she goes to an Episcopalian church when in England because episcopacy is the religion of the state in England. If she were in India, and Mohammedanism were the state religion there, she would probably go to a mosque with the same good grace that she displays when sitting under the parish minister near Balmoral. The council also appointed a committee to see whether money could be raised for the publication of a mass of old treatises and essays upon Presbyterianism which no private publisher has ever thought of reprinting; and another committee to “consider” what could be reported to the next council—which, by the way, is to be held at Philadelphia in 1880, if the world and Pan-Presbyterianism be then in existence. That portion of the programme which promised “the suppression of infidelity” was not carried out; a day was spent in talking about the best methods of getting the better of Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Bradlaugh, and the like, but the matter ended with the acceptance of the remark of Prof. Cairns, that disputation with such people is rather worse than useless, since they are well skilled in argument, and that the only thing to be done with them is to pray for them. As Americans we record with justifiable pride the encomiums bestowed upon the American delegates by the great Dr. Phin, and the still greater Dr. Begg. “Sound Christian doctrine,” said the first, “in this land has received a most powerful impulse from the addresses of the American brethren”; and Dr. Begg “rejoiced because of the firm tone which had characterized the addresses of the American speakers, as we require in Scotland an ecclesiastical tonic to brace us up to a firm maintenance of our own Scriptural principles.” The firm tone was not backed up by firm action, nor by any action at all; but, all the same, Dr. Begg is of the opinion that if the orthodox Presbyterians in Scotland could talk as their American brethren do, there would soon be an end to the croaking of “the frogs of infidelity that are coming into our churches like the frogs that went into Pharao’s bed-chamber.” But it may prevent some disappointment in the future to our American Presbyterian friends if we convey to them the warning uttered by the Edinburgh Scotsman at the end of the council—a journal whose opinion on the affair is all the more valuable from the fact that its editor is a Presbyterian clergyman of renown who has abandoned the pulpit for the press:

“Meanwhile,” says the Scotsman, “what with choking 'frogs’ and covering up disputable subjects, the appearance of a complete, if not a completely beautiful, harmony was unquestionably produced. But it is only right to warn the Pan-Presbyterians that if they leave us with the notion that, because all is peaceful now, unity is established, they are the victims of a delusion. They may depart to their Swiss hamlets or their Transatlantic cities with psalm-tunes sounding peace within Jerusalem ringing in their ears, and imagine that after this most refreshing time the millennium has come when Dr. Phin and Dr. Blaikie will lie down together, and Dr. Marcus Dods and Dr. Moody Stewart will kiss each other. But, alas! shortly after they have told their deeply-affected flocks at home of the harmony which prevails in Bible-loving Scotland, some morning when Dr. Rufus Choate examines his Chicago Trumpet, and Dr. Brunnelhanner lays down his meerschaum to take up his paper, they will find that all the old dissensions have broken out again with alarming violence; that ministers who agreed on a platform of wood can agree upon no other; that Dr. Blaikie has attacked Establishments from love of their members, and has Dr. Pirie’s head in Chancery; that Dr. Phin has a new scheme to 'dish’ the Dissenters; that those who led the devotions are now leading the fray; that those who were at peace are not on speaking terms, or on terms in speaking which are very bad indeed; while those who lauded the agreement between confessions cannot agree amongst themselves as to what these confessions mean to say. The visit of the Pan-Presbyterians may, after all, share the fate that generally overtakes the other numerous excursionists who appear among us about this season. For the moment we may be struck by their numbers and their banners with their strange devices, and be moved to the heart, or even deeper, by their bass-drum and their instruments of brass; but when they have gone, if any memory of them remains, it is only of something that was loud and singular, but what it was or what it did there is nothing palpable to show.”

The Pan-Presbyterians repeated very often that, while they did not expect, or even desire, to effect “organic unity” between their various sects—that unity being, in their opinion, opposed to the will of God—they were, all the same, “one in spirit and in sympathy.” But the hollowness of even this pretence was manifested when an attempt was made to induce them to unite in what they call “partaking of the Lord’s Supper.” Toward the close of the council it was announced that “Dr. Moody Stewart and his session invited the members of council to communion at half-past twelve on Saturday.” Now, from a Catholic, or “Romanist,” point of view, it is rather surprising that a convention of eminent Christian ministers, assembled for what they professed to regard as the most important purposes, should have already spent several days without performing this supreme act of Christian devotion. But Pan-Presbyterian ways are not as our ways. Nevertheless, one would have supposed that, being thus invited to do what they had neglected, they would at least have received the invitation kindly. On the contrary, a most unhappy scene followed. The Orthodox Pan-Presbyterians were willing to talk with their unorthodox colleagues; they would eat luncheons with them, make speeches and read papers to them, and even listen to their speeches and papers in return; but when it came to “partaking of the sacrament” with them, they would not do it at any price. Dr. Phin at once protested against the idea that he, for one, could thus be yoked unevenly with unbelievers. “He happened to entertain certain old-fashioned ideas with respect to the dispensation of the Lord’s Supper” which would prevent him from joining in it unless he knew his company. For instance, there should be “the fencing of the tables”; and this fencing would surely shut out either the sheep or the goats. The “fencing of the tables,” it appears, is a curious custom prevalent in Scotland, and may be thus explained: an invitation to “the communion” is given, and then every one who wishes to receive it is scared off either by terrific denunciations of the awful guilt incurred by those who partake unworthily, or is compelled to pass a severe competitive examination as to the soundness of his faith and his acceptance of the “Standards.” Dr. Phin was, no doubt, correct in supposing that the application of these tests would produce unpleasant results, and his conscience would not permit him to assist at a communion where they were not applied. Dr. Begg took the same view, and “regretted that the invitation had been given.” The chairman—who on this occasion happened to be Dr. Ormiston, of New York—sought to get over the difficulty by suggesting that “it would be understood that nobody was committed except the gentlemen who took part in it,” and he added the remarkable declaration that “as members of council not one of them had any responsibility to the weight of a hair.” A lay member “protested against any administration of free communion in connection with the council”; and Dr. Blaikie said the committee had “taken every precaution that the council should not be committed in any way.” With this assurance the subject “was allowed to drop,” and when the time for the communion arrived only one hundred and thirty of the three hundred and twenty-five Pan-Presbyterians presented themselves to receive it—and among these neither Dr. Phin nor Dr. Begg was seen.

The Continental Pan-Presbyterians made a pitiful show for themselves during the council. Few of them could speak English; and the linguistic accomplishments of the majority of their colleagues being limited, they were compelled, when they spoke at all, to express themselves through an interpreter, which is not generally an exhilarating process. One of the French delegates said there were forty Presbyterian congregations in France without pastors, and he suggested that a collection might be made to aid in hiring men to fill these vacancies; but this hint was not taken. A volunteer member from Berlin read a sensible paper upon “missions,” in which he ridiculed the present system of Protestant missions, and said that their only fruits were the inculcation of hypocrisy and of pauperism among the so-called converts. On this same subject, by the way, one of the members put forth the novel idea that the conversion of one Jew was worth more than the salvation of a hundred pagans. Dr. Hoedemaker, of Amsterdam, said that the Presbyterians there had long been poisoned with the virus of rationalism, and that forty years ago “there were very few who preached the living Christ in his church”; but now, he hoped, there was some improvement. M. Decoppet, of the French Presbyterian body, complained that the sect could make no progress there, “because they were not allowed by the law to give a tract on the street or to deliver public lectures”; but still he was confident that “France would soon become a Protestant nation”—by the aid of M. Gambetta and the Reds, we presume. The representative of the Waldensian heretics apologized for the bad character of some of its ministers, but said that as fast as the false shepherds were detected they were expelled from the fold.

Politeness, perhaps, would command us to express our acknowledgments of certain courteous, sensible, and truthful things which were said about the church—as, for example, that “she was the mother of infidelity” and the fountain and origin of all civil, moral, and religious evil. But, on the whole, we think our readers will have had enough of the Pan-Presbyterians. Dr. Begg, at the last meeting of the council, said that “they saw the shadow of the great eclipse of Romanism again cast over the country.” We take this to be the Beggonian method of expressing the fact that the few Christians who remain in Scotland are on the way to return to the church of their forefathers—the church which civilized and Christianized Scotland, and which had the unhappiness to nurture in her bosom the apostate priest who was the father of Scotch Presbyterianism. Dr. Begg is not an infallible prophet, but such events as the Pan-Presbyterian council are calculated to hasten the event which he predicts. For the council has shown that the Presbyterian Church throughout the world, as represented by its chosen men, is undermined by infidelity, and that its existence, in their opinion, depends upon concealing this fact and pretending that no one has the right to proclaim it.

TRANSLATION FROM HORACE.
ODE 14, BOOK 2.

Eheu! fugaces, Postume, Postume!

Alas! my Posthumus, our years
Glide silently away; no tears,
No loving orisons, repair
The wrinkled cheek, the whitening hair,
That drop forgotten to the tomb:
Pluto’s inexorable doom
Mocks at thy daily sacrifice;
Around his dreary kingdom lies
That fatal stream whose arms enfold
The Giant race accursed of old;
All, all alike must cross its wave,
The king, the noble, and the slave.
In vain we shun the fields of war,
And breakers dashed on Adria’s shore;
Vainly we flee, in terror blind,
The plague that walketh on the wind;
The sluggish river of the Dead,
Cocytus, must be visited;
And Danaüs’ detested brood,
Foul with their fifty husbands’ blood;
And Sisyphus, with ghastly smile
Pointing to his eternal toil.
All must be left: thy gentle wife,
Thy home, the joys of rural life;
And when thy fleeting days are gone,
Th’ ill-omened cypresses alone
Of all those fondly-cherished trees
Shall grace thy funeral obsequies,
Cling to thy loved remains, and wave
Their mournful shadows o’er thy grave.
A lavish but a nobler heir
Thy hoarded Cæcuban shall share,
And on the tessellated floor
The purple nectar madly pour,
Nectar more worthy of the halls
Where Pontiffs hold their festivals.

S. E. de V.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Public Libraries in the United States of America; their History, Condition, and Management. Special Report. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education. 1876.

In 1874 the Commissioner of the Bureau of Education in the Department of the Interior at Washington began the preparation of a complete Report on the Public Libraries in the United States; on the 31st of August, 1876, the report was submitted; it was printed, and it makes a volume of 1,187 pages. A careful study of the contents of this unique work compels us to express, in the first place, our most cordial appreciation of the great labor which has been expended upon it, and of the value of the information which it contains. The size of the volume, we fear, has deterred many into whose hands it has fallen from more than glancing over its pages; we confess for ourselves that we shrank, for a while, from the task of reading it. But we have been amply repaid for our toil, which soon became a pleasure; and we may say here that we have seen in foreign periodicals and journals a number of highly eulogistic and discriminating reviews of the report. We propose to make our readers share in the satisfaction we have derived from our study of this work; but our space will permit us only to give a condensed summary of a portion of its contents.

No less than 132 pages of the report are taken up with a table giving the statistics of all the “public libraries” in the United States and Territories numbering 300 volumes or more, excepting common or district school libraries. The table is as complete as it could be made from the returns received in 1875-76; but it is incomplete, because many of the libraries named in it do not report the date of their foundation, their average annual increase in books, their financial condition, or their yearly expenditures. But with all these defects the table is extremely valuable. It shows, to begin with, that the total number of these libraries is 3,647, having as their total number of volumes 12,276,964. We pause here for a moment to say that the report also shows that in the district-school libraries, not included in the table, there are 1,365,407 volumes, and that in all the libraries there are about 1,500,000 pamphlets not classed as “volumes.” The census of 1870 showed that there were 107,673 private libraries, containing 25,571,503 volumes, exclusive of those which may be in the State of Connecticut, from which State no returns on this subject were received. Here, then, we have a total of 39,213,874 volumes of books in the public, private, and school libraries of the country—a mass of printed matter large enough, estimating each volume to weigh a pound, to fill nine merchant vessels of 2,000 tons burden each. Let us also in this place give the following list of the number of volumes in several noted libraries in other countries, with the remark that, as the statistics of these libraries differ widely according to different authorities, we have in each case taken the highest number given, and that this number relates only to books, and not to manuscripts or pamphlets, fugitive publications, etc.:

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris | 2,000,000
Mazarin Library, Paris | 160,000
Royal Library, Madrid | 200,000
Convent Library of the Escorial, Madrid | 130,000
Vatican Library, Rome | 1,000,000
Magliabecchíana Library, Florence | 200,000
Laurentian Library, Florence | 120,000
Museo Borbonico, Naples | 200,000
University Library, Bologna | 200,000
Brera Library, Milan | 200,000
Ambrosian Library, Milan | 140,000
University Library, Turin | 150,000
Royal Library, Berlin | 700,000
Royal Library, Dresden | 500,000
University Library, Breslau | 350,000
University Library, Göttingen | 400,000
Ducal Library, Wolfenbüttel | 300,000
University Library, Freiburg | 250,000
Royal Library, Stuttgart | 450,000
Royal Library, Munich | 900,000
Royal Library, Copenhagen | 550,000
Bodleian Library, Oxford | 700,000
Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh | 300,000
University Library, Edinburgh | 130,000
Imperial Library, St. Petersburg | 1,100,000
City Library, Augsburg | 150,000
University Library, Cambridge | 400,000
City Library, Frankfort | 150,000
Ducal Library, Gotha | 240,000
City Library, Hamburg | 300,000
City Library, Leipsic | 170,000
University Library, Leipsic | 350,000
British Museum, London | 1,020,000

In these 33 libraries in the Old World there are 14,110,000 volumes, exclusive of manuscripts, or 1,833,176 more volumes than we have in all of our 3,647 public libraries. We say nothing of the comparative value of the collections, for of course there is no comparison between a collection which has been accumulating for a thousand years and one which was made yesterday. But we have no reason to be ashamed of our American public libraries; on the contrary, as the report which we are reviewing abundantly shows, we have every reason to be proud of them. We take from this report the following table:

Whole number of public libraries | 3,647
Whole number of volumes | 12,276,964
Average number of volumes | 3,366
Yearly additions (1,510 reporting) | 434,339
Yearly use of books (742 reporting) | 8,879,809
Amt of permanent fund (1,722 reporting) | $6,105,581
Yearly income (830 reporting) | $1,398,756
Yearly expenditures for publications (769 reporting) | $562,407
Yearly expenditures for salaries, etc. (643 reporting) | $682,166

The 3,647 libraries are distributed among the various States and Territories as follows; and here we make our only complaint against the report—to wit, that its laborious and faithful editors have not furnished the footings, which we have been compelled to make for ourselves:

Alabama, 31 libraries; Alaska, 1 (the post library at Sitka, and now removed since the garrison has been withdrawn); Arizona, 3 (two of them being military libraries); Arkansas, 6; California, 87; Colorado, 8; Connecticut, 125; Dakota, 4 (two being military libraries); Delaware, 18; District of Columbia, 57 (31 of them belonging to the federal government); Florida, 6; Georgia, 44; Idaho, 1; Illinois, 177; Indiana, 133; Indian Territory, 4 (two of them military libraries); Iowa, 80; Kansas, 19; Kentucky, 72; Louisiana, 31; Maine, 85; Maryland, 77; Massachusetts, 453; Michigan, 89; Minnesota, 39; Mississippi, 23; Missouri, 87; Montana, 2; Nebraska, 14; Nevada, 6; New Hampshire, 86; New Jersey, 91; New Mexico, 4 (one of them a military library, and two of the others belonging to Catholic academies); New York, 617; North Carolina, 37; Ohio, 223; Oregon, 14; Pennsylvania, 367; Rhode Island, 56; South Carolina, 26; Tennessee, 71; Texas, 42; Utah, 5; Vermont, 65; Virginia, 63; Washington Territory, 2 (one of them a Catholic library); West Virginia, 23; Wisconsin, 73; and Wyoming Territory, 3.

These figures are suggestive in various ways, and many interesting and valuable inferences might be drawn from them. But a careful analysis of the other portions of the table would also be necessary in order to avoid mistakes; and the wholly unknown quantity in the problem—the comparative value of different collections—would imperil the accuracy of any deductions which might be made from the statistics in this table. For instance, the 31 libraries in Alabama contain 60,615 volumes—nearly 5,000 less than are in the New York Society Library alone. A library is a library, for the purposes of this report, if it contain 300 or more volumes, just as a book is a book although there may be nothing in it. Who is to say whether some of the smaller collections in the South are not really more valuable than the larger and newer libraries in the North? We fear it is not so; but there is no test by which to decide the question. If we leave this point, and turn our attention to the statistics relating to the principal libraries, we shall come upon more satisfactory ground.

The thirty-eighth chapter of the report, filling 273 pages, is devoted to a review of the public libraries of ten principal cities—Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, Charleston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and San Francisco. In these ten cities there are 471 public libraries with 3,447,628 volumes, viz.:

Name of City. | No. of Libraries | Volumes.
Charleston | 6 | 26,600
Chicago | 23 | 141,910
San Francisco | 30 | 164,228
Brooklyn | 21 | 165,112
St. Louis | 31 | 170,875
Cincinnati | 30 | 197,890
Baltimore | 38 | 230,342
Philadelphia | 102 | 707,627
Boston | 68 | 734,741
New York | 122 | 906,203
| —- | ————-
Total | 471 | 3,445,528

To this list we add, in order that the South may have justice done to her:

Name of City. | No. of Libraries | Volumes.
New Orleans | 15 | 94,080
Louisville | 6 | 65,897
Richmond | 17 | 63,526

A library containing 10,000 volumes or more, if well selected, may be said to be a respectable collection. Now, there are no less than 266 libraries of this class in the United Slates, and they contain a total of 6,984,882 volumes—an average of 26,259 volumes in each. These 266 libraries, it will be seen, account for more than one half of the total number of volumes in all the public libraries, and they reduce the average number of volumes in the remaining 3,381 libraries to 1,565. But even a library with 1,500 good books is not to be despised.

The largest library in the United States is that of the National Congress at Washington, which has 300,000 volumes; and then follow:

Social Law Library, Boston | 299,869
Harvard University | 227,650
Mercantile, New York | 160,613
Astor, New York | 152,446
Mercantile, Philadelphia | 125,668
House of Representatives, Washington | 125,000
Yale College | 114,200
Athenæum, Boston | 105,000

These are the only libraries which have 100,000 volumes and more. Those which have 50,000 and less than 100,000 volumes are the

State Library at Albany | 95,000
New York Society, New York | 65,000
Antiquarian Society, Worcester | 60,497
Peabody Institute, Baltimore | 57,458
Apprentices’, New York | 53,000
Dartmouth College | 52,550
Mercantile, Brooklyn | 50,257
State University, Baton Rouge | 50,000

There are 10 libraries having more than 40,000 and less than 50,000 volumes; 23, with more than 30,000 and less than 40,000; 49, with more than 20,000 and less than 30,000; 52, with more than 15,000 and less than 20,000; 100, with more than 10,000 and less than 15,000; 264, with more than 5,000 and less than 10,000; 156, with more than 4,000 and less than 5,000; 236, with more than 3,000 and less than 4,000; 362, with more than 2,000 and less than 3,000; 762, with more than 1,000 and less than 2,000; and 925, with more than 500 and less than 1,000.

Of the whole number of 3,647 public libraries mentioned in this report, we find 221 which we recognize as those of Catholic institutions. There are no doubt others in the list, but there is no mark by which they can be certainly recognized. Of these 221 distinctively Catholic libraries the following are the chief:

Place. | Name. | Origin. | Vols.
San Francisco, | St. Ignatius’ College, | 1855 | 11,000
Santa Clara, | Santa Clara College, | 1851 | 10,000
Georgetown, | Georgetown College, | 1791 | 32,268
Washington, | Gonzaga College, | 1858 | 10,000
New Orleans, | Libraire de la famille, | 1872 | 15,000
Baltimore, | Archiepiscopal, | .... | 10,000
Baltimore, | Loyola College, | 1853 | 21,500
Baltimore, | St. Mary’s Seminary, | 1791 | 15,000
Hagerstown, | St. James’ College, | 1842 | 11,000
Worcester, | College of the Holy Cross | 1843 | 12,000
St. Louis, | College of the Christian Brothers, | 1860 | 22,000
Brooklyn, | St. Francis’ College, | .... | 13,970
Fordham, | St. John’s College, | 1840 | 15,000
New York, | St. Francis Xavier’s College, | 1847 | 21,000
Cincinnati, | Mount St. Mary’s, | 1849 | 15,100
Cincinnati, | St. Xavier’s College, | 1840 | 17,000
Latrobe, Penn., | St. Vincent’s College, | 1846 | 13,000

In these 17 Catholic libraries there are 264,838 volumes. It is a very respectable number, and, when the probable quality of the books contained in these collections is taken into account, the value of such comparatively small libraries will be seen to be great. The number of volumes in the other 204 Catholic libraries, as we have ascertained by a laborious examination of the tables, is 448,688, so that the total number of volumes in the distinctively Catholic libraries is 713,526. It is a large number of books; but one might complain that it was not larger. We are not sure that these complaints would be well founded. As Catholics we establish our own libraries, but as citizens we aid in the labor and share the cost of forming the general libraries, and we have our part in the advantages which they afford. It will always be our duty, of course, to exert our influence in preserving these collections of books from the contamination of the works of authors whose aim is to undermine morals and to destroy faith; and to introduce to their shelves the writings of the best and most able defenders and advocates of truth and religion. But this duty being well performed, we are free to aid in the work of building up our general libraries and in enjoying the pure intellectual delights which they may afford.

Thirty-eight pages of the report before us are devoted to a chapter upon Theological Libraries. A table is given of 44 of the principal theological libraries in the United States; they contain 528,024 volumes. Eight of them belong to Catholic theological seminaries and contain 71,600 volumes. The two largest of the theological libraries are those of the Union Theological Seminary of New York, and the Andover Theological Seminary, each of which contains 34,000 volumes. The report states that, with a few exceptions, the public theological libraries in this country are the libraries of theological seminaries. The exceptions are the General Theological Library in Boston, established in 1860, and now containing 12,000 volumes; and the library of the Congregational Association in the same city, which contains 22,000 volumes and 80,000 pamphlets. None of the theological libraries are 100 years old. The eldest of all of them is the library of St. Mary’s Theological Seminary of St. Sulpice in Baltimore, founded in 1791 by the Sulpician Fathers. It now contains 15,000 volumes. The report devotes considerable space to a dissertation upon “Catholic Libraries,” and its remarks upon this head are conceived in a kindly and enlightened spirit. “All learning,” writes the reporter, “is welcome to the shelves of Catholic libraries, and nothing is excluded from them that should not equally be excluded from any reputable collection of books. Nor will anti-Catholic works be found wanting to them, at least such as possess any force or originality. The history of the church being so interwoven with that of the world since the days of Augustus Cæsar, there is no period which is not redolent of her action, and consequently no history which does not have to treat of her, either approvingly or the reverse. In regard to general literature, she preserved ... all that has come down to us from classic sources, and therefore works of this character can be no strangers to shelves of Catholic libraries. Still less can the Sacred Scriptures be, which Catholic hands collected, authenticated, and handed down for the use of the men of our time. Nor will the sciences be overlooked by ecclesiastics in forming their libraries; for in past ages it was the care of their brethren, with such limited facilities as were at their command and in days inauspicious for scientific investigation, to cultivate them.” No new truths these; but they are well expressed, and it is worth something to have them set forth in a volume prepared by federal authority and published with federal approval. The report goes on to speak of the general characteristics of Catholic theological libraries. They contain, it says, abundant versions of the Sacred Scriptures in all languages, with copious commentaries and expositions; and the writer adds that the professors of our Catholic theological institutions “are generally graduates of the best theological schools in Europe.” He thus proceeds:

“Next in authoritative rank come the Fathers and Doctors of the church, from those who received instruction from the apostles themselves and committed their doctrine to writing, down to almost our own day; for St. Alphonsus Liguori, the latest on whom the Holy See has conferred the title of Doctor of the Universal Church, died only in the latter part of the last century, and his authority is that which is principally followed in the treatment of moral questions. Works also by later writers, principally on dogmatic subjects, are constantly appearing. The study of dogma embracing an investigation into all revealed truths, and therefore essential to those who are to instruct others authoritatively, involves a reference to many learned books in which proofs and illustrations are elaborated to the last degree of exactness, side by side with every possible difficulty or objection that can be brought to bear against each doctrine treated of. Some works are occupied with the discussion of but a single point; others take in a wide range, and some voluminous authors have published an entire course of dogma....” “The study of moral, the other great branch of Catholic theology, embraces a scrutiny into every question of morals that needs to be investigated by those who have the direction of consciences, or whose duty it is, in the tribunal of penance, to adjudicate upon matters affecting the rights of others. As solutions in these cases are sometimes attended with considerable difficulty, and a grave responsibility is attached to the delivery of an opinion, authorities for reference must be ample and exhaustive. Such authorities will be found in the theological libraries, and are relied upon in proportion to their world-wide repute, as representing the opinions of prudent, learned, and experienced men.”

The report goes on to speak of the reasons why every complete Catholic library must have copies of the published acts of the general councils of the church, and of national and provincial councils, as well as of the decisions and solutions of the various congregations at Rome, and other documents emanating from the Holy See. The supply of “works on ritual,” and those necessary for a thorough course of rational philosophy, must be ample, and there must be works on mathematics, physics, astronomy, meteorology, chemistry, and other sciences. We again quote:

“The attention given in these schools to sacred eloquence—for practice in which students are required to prepare and deliver sermons in presence of the community—calls for the best models of sacred oratory, besides works on rhetoric and elocution. As models of composition, arrangement, and intrinsic solidity, the sermons of the ancient fathers share equal attention with those of the great French orators of the last century, and no library for the use of ecclesiastics will be without a copious supply of the works of those and others of the best pulpit orators in the church. Catholic libraries in general—and not those alone which are attached to theological schools—will be found amply supplied with controversial works written by Catholic authors. These are needed, however, not so much for the use of the owners as for that of non-Catholic inquirers who wish to be enlightened in regard to some controverted point, or who desire to learn the evidences upon which the Catholic Church bases her claims to the credence of mankind. Catechetical works, of which there are a great number, answer this purpose still better when the polemic spirit has been allayed, and it is impossible to conceive of a Catholic library, large or small, without an abundance of both these classes of books. The controversial works discuss every objection which can be alleged against the church or the practice of members of it, and are necessarily very numerous. Every age has left behind it these testimonies to the controversies that agitated it, and the present age is no less prolific than its predecessors, though the grounds of dispute are shifting now rather from dogma to historical questions and matters of science, indicating the lessening hold which doctrine has on the non-Catholic mind.”

And again:

“Ecclesiastical history, of course, forms an important element in Catholic libraries; but this history not only includes the exhaustive tomes of writers who take in the whole history of the church, but of others who illustrate a particular age, country, event, or transaction. Works concerning the history of the church in the United States, or in particular States, form a growing collection. The current of contemporary Catholic history is well shown forth through the monthly and weekly publications which appear in many countries and languages. The Catholic quarterlies, however, and some of the monthly publications, are devoted chiefly to literary or scientific criticism. The Catholic weeklies in this country are now so numerous that their preservation in libraries is seldom attended to. If this apology is needed for the absence from such libraries of publications that will form an important reference hereafter for others besides Catholics, it ought to be coupled with the suggestion proper to be made in a work which will be placed in the hands of persons of all religions: that a general Catholic library ought to be established at some central point where every Catholic publication, at least among those issued in this country, may have a place. Materials for history would gather in such a collection that might not readily be found combined in any other.

“Having thus touched upon the more important characteristics of Catholic libraries, it would be well, perhaps, to observe that while the leading ones in this country are attached to seminaries, colleges, or religious houses, there are many private collections of considerable value, especially those in episcopal residences, or belonging to gentlemen of the clergy or laity who, together with literary tastes, possess the means to gratify them. Catholic libraries are also beginning to be formed in cities and towns, chiefly under the auspices of associations that seek to provide a safe and pleasant resort for young men in the evenings. In these libraries will be found the lighter Catholic literature, to which no reference has so far been made in this paper—travels, sketches, poems, tales, etc., a few of which are by American and some Irish authors, but the majority by English writers, chiefly converts, or translated from the French, German, Flemish, and other Continental languages. Finally, it would be well to observe that Catholic libraries are accessible for reference, if not for study, to all inquirers. In most cases non-Catholic visitors would doubtless be welcomed to them with great cordiality. Those who have these libraries in keeping rather invite than repel scrutiny into whatever is distinctively Catholic in their collections.”

We regret that the limits of our space forbid us to dwell further upon the contents of this really fascinating volume. To use such an adjective in speaking of a “Blue-Book,” or an official report, may seem extravagant, but in this case it is not so. Its chapters upon the growth of libraries in the United States; college libraries; law, medical, and scientific libraries; libraries in prisons and reformatories; libraries of the general and State governments; libraries of historical societies; and upon “catalogues and cataloguing,” are crammed with useful and important information; and whatever may have been the sins of omission or commission that may be laid at the door of the “Department of the Interior at Washington,” we are willing to bear witness that its Bureau of Education, in the preparation and publication of this report, has done much to atone for them.

Elements of Geometry. By G. M. Searle, C.S.P. With an Appendix containing Problems and Additional Propositions. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 1877.

The object of this work is to place geometry on a more perfectly logical basis than it has been usually considered worth while to adopt in text-books. Geometers at the present day generally agree as to the unsatisfactory nature of the axioms usually adopted, some being superfluous, and others, especially the famous one about parallels, not being clearly self-evident.

The reduction in the number of axioms has of course introduced some complexity into the reasoning in this book, and the difficulty about parallels is not completely removed; nor does the author pretend completely to remove it. Some new views, however, are presented which may be worthy of consideration.

Elements of Ecclesiastical Law. Adapted especially to the Discipline of the Church in the United States. By Rev. S. B. Smith, D.D., formerly Professor of Canon Law, author of “Notes,” etc., etc. New York, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Einsiedeln: Benziger Brothers, Printers to the Holy Apostolic See. 1877.

This work of Dr. Smith’s cannot fail to be a welcome addition to any theological library. There are a great many works on canon law, it is true, but very few which give much information on the discipline of the church here, which is what priests in this country and those who are preparing for the priesthood principally need to understand.

The present volume goes far to supply this deficiency, and the author promises to supplement it soon by another, for which we shall look with interest. He has made a good choice in writing in English; there seems to be no need of choosing Latin for a book on this subject, and intended for this nation chiefly.

Footnotes

1.  Meline, Two Thousand Miles on Horseback, pp. 225-226.

2.  Noticias., pp. 15, 16.

3.  Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 173, 174.

4.  Piron, L’Ile de Cuba, pp. 48-52.

5.  Hist. de la Louisiane, i. p. 335.

6.  Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico.

7.  Thus in the Mass she asks that the offerings be carried on high by the angels; in the Asperges, and Complin she begs God to send down his angels to cherish, guard, and protect all within the building; in the Itinerary she calls St. Raphael especially to protect all who travel; in the baptismal service she asks God to send an angel to guard the catechumen and lead him to the grace of baptism; in Extreme Unction, to give all dwelling, in the house a good angel guardian; the Commendation of the Departing Soul is a constant appeal to the holy angels; and the prayer after death asks that the departed soul may be received by the holy angels and brought to Paradise, her real country. She even asks that an angel be deputed to guard the grave.

8.  La Sœur Natalie Narischkin, Fille de la Charité de S. Vincent de Paul. Par Mme. Augustus Craven. Paris: Didier et Cie., 35 Quai des Augustins.

9.  Our Protestant readers will excuse, we trust, a want of precise accuracy in some of these expressions, very easily accounted for by the fact that Madame Craven is a Catholic Frenchwoman, to whom all the various phases of Protestantism are confused in one vague and indistinct form.

10.  Filioque.

11.  Language which comes from heaven, limpid and beautiful, And which the world understands, but does not speak.

12.  Ah! my soul would fain cling to her wings, and keep her still!

13.  “He who is well off stays where he is.”

14.  Thomas McCrie, minister of the Gospel, Edinburgh.

15.  Moreover, the favor with which that parody of Catholic ceremony and Catholic truths known as ritualism has been received in England, especially among the common people, is an evidence of the imperfect manner in which the Reformation there has done its work.

16.  See The Catholic World for February, 1877, page 616.

17.  The English in Ireland, vol. ii. p. 453.

18.  Tone’s Memoirs, vol. i. p 205.

19.  The English in Ireland, vol. iii. p. 348.

20.  Harold: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1877.

Queen Mary: A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1875.

21.  The following from the London Weekly Register may tend to show whether this doubt is reasonable or otherwise: “The vicar of St. Barnabas, Leeds, is fatigued with parochial work and wishes to take a little rest. He asks his Lordship of Ripon to let him name a clergyman who shall take his duties for a few weeks or months. His lordship replies that he cannot do so, because—but the language is too episcopal to be misquoted: 'If there is truth in the reports which, from time to time, appear in the public papers, you are in the habit of breaking what you must know to be the law.’ His Lordship of Ripon reads the papers, and, finding it inconvenient to leave his palace at Ripon and make a call upon a clergyman in Leeds, he refuses leave of absence to that clergyman, on account of newspaper reports.” The church-wardens take up their vicar’s cause, and, in a very proper “memorial,” represent the needs of his case to his paternal diocesan. But all is useless. “The law, the law,” says the bishop, and remains comfortably in his palace, while he forbids his hard-working vicar to take a holiday, though he does not even condescend to specify his offence. And yet the Anglican bishops do not apparently object to a due amount of repose for themselves, if we may judge from the fact that at the very time we write there are no fewer than fifteen of the “missionary bishops” of the Establishment who, after a few years of absence, and even these years agreeably diversified with visits to their friends in England, have returned thither “for good,” and are now settled with their wives and families in comfortable rectories at home—an arrangement more convenient for croquet-parties than “conversions.”

22.  See Christianity in Erastianism. A letter to Cardinal Manning. By Presbyter Anglicanus.

23.  Hentzner furnishes us, by the way, with a singular testimony to Elizabeth’s “goodness” when, among other things of the same nature, he tells us that, in the latter years of her reign, executions for high treason (this being the term applied to denial of the royal supremacy in the church fully as much as in the state) were so frequent that he counted at one time on London Bridge no fewer than 300 heads. She herself on one occasion pointed out to the French ambassador the same ghastly trophies adorning the gates of her own palace.

24.  A writer in the London Times gives the following answer to the ecclesiastical assumptions of Mr. Tooth: “I will enumerate some of the acts on ecclesiastical matters which have become law without the consent of the priesthood, and which therefore the present agitators bind themselves to disallow and disobey: The act of Edward VI. on the Sacrament, on Chantries, on Images, on Fasting; the Acts of Uniformity, both of Edward VI. and Elizabeth; the Act of Toleration; the act abolishing the burning of heretics, under William III.; the acts, both of Charles II. and William III., for the observance of Sunday; the various Marriage Acts of William III., George II., and Queen Victoria; the various acts both for the repression and the relief of Roman Catholics during the same range of time; the acts during the late and present reigns against pluralities and against non-residence; the acts suppressing the Irish bishoprics, suppressing half the cathedral dignitaries in England, and, finally, revolutionizing the Irish Church; the act for abolishing the services drawn up by Convocation for the political anniversaries of the seventeenth century. These and many other laws, many of them of unquestioned beneficence, most of them of unquestioned obligation, all of them passed by Parliament, and by it alone, must be set aside by those who make it a point of conscience to disobey any law which has been imposed on the church by secular authority.”

25.  Certain evicted Ritualists, however, do not appear to be much affected by the measures taken to repress them, if it be true that the Rev. R. P. Dale, who has been suspended for three years, and his former parish merged into another, takes the matter very philosophically, and, in default of his own parish, finds every Sunday in one place or another a complaisant brother-clergyman, who lends him his church and his pulpit, from which he braves the pseudo-episcopal thunders.

26.  Two Chancellors, etc. By Julian Klaczko. Translated by Frank P. Ward. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

Pro Nihilo and other pamphlets on the Arnim question.

27.  Hail, holy face of our Redeemer, in which shines the image of the divine Splendor, imprinted on a veil white as snow, and given to Veronica in token of his love!

Hail, glory of the world, mirror of the saints, whom the celestial spirits long to behold. Purify us from the stain of every vice and bring us to the society of the Blessed!

Hail, our glory, in this rough, uncertain life, so soon to pass away! Lead us to our true country, O blessed symbol! that with a pure heart we may behold the face of Christ.

Be to us, O Lord! a sure help, the sweet refreshment and consolation of our woes, that the efforts of the enemy may not injure us, but that we may enter into the fruition of true rest. Let us say: Amen.

28.  This article is condensed from one which appeared in the Revue Canadienne, by M. de Bellefeuille.

29.  The author writes: From this excellent and faithful priest I have obtained the greater part of my information on this subject. In addition, M. Gauvreau has allowed me free use of his notes and documents.

30.  Hist. Nat., l. xxvi. c. i. proem.

31.  The Catholic World, Dec., 1876, p. 371 Jan., 1877, p. 523.

32.  Father Newman has, I think, remarked that in the Protestant scheme there is not room for Mary.

33.

Yes, this our life is plentiful in tears.

Though I am young, still I have suffered much.

My God, I thirst! and this world’s weary ways
Are but an arid desert unto me.
But at thy feet my soul finds her repose,
O tender Friend and Comforter Divine!
What matters it to me if I lose all,

But still keep thee, my dearest Saviour’s love!

34.

Jesus, for my sole happiness, oh! give me tears

Which thou wilt wipe away.

35.  The mother of the young wife who died.

36.  Maia, or Majesta: not to be confounded with Maia, the mother of Hercules.

37.  Cybele was the “Mater Deûm” of the Greeks and Romans.

38.  L’Héroïsme en Soutane. By General Ambert. Paris: E. Dentu, Palais Royal. 1876.

39.  Tu l’auras maigre et non pas gras (grasse—grâce).

40.  At Ménilmontant a woman named Lefêvre proposed, amid cheers and bravos, to undermine the Cathedral of Notre Dame, fill it as full as it would hold with priests and nuns, and blow it up. At a club-meeting another woman—Leblanc—cried: “We must flay the priests alive and make barricades with their carcasses”; and at Trinity Church a woman argued thus on the existence of God: “Religion is a farce got up by men, and there is no God; ... if there were, he would not let me speak so. Therefore he is a coward, and no God....” And there were other and even more revolting things said and done.

41.  The Catholic World, March, 1877, p. 777. We regret to be informed by the publisher that this really great drama is now out of print.

42.  In the Roman triumphs a captive slave was bound to the car of the conqueror, into whose ear his office was to whisper of fortune’s instability.

43.  Pie IX.: sa vie, son Histoire, son Siècle. Par J. M. Villefranche. Lyons. 1876.

Rome: its Ruler and its Institutions. By John Francis Maguire, M.P. New York. 1858.

Italy in 1848. By L. Mariotti. London. 1851.

The Secret Societies of the European Revolution, 1776-1876. By Thomas Frost. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1876.

44.  For a full account of this mission see The Catholic World for January, 1876.

45.  The Jew of Verona. English translation, 2 vols. 12mo. Baltimore. 1854.

46.  Villefranche.

47.  When the Pope launched a bull of excommunication against the spoliators of his territory, Napoleon forbade its publication in France. He allowed the official and radical journals, however, to publish a forged bull, and to ridicule and denounce at pleasure the extravagant language which it imputed to the Holy Father. The bishops tried to expose the forgery, but the press was closed to them.

48.  The Examiner (London), March 31, 1877.

49.  The Nineteenth Century (London), March and April, 1877.

50.  Petri Privilegium. London. 1871.

51.  If any one cares to know what became of the picture, he may be interested to hear that it hangs now over the altar of a private oratory in the same city where it was painted. The Greek merchant took it to Constantinople, where it remained in his family till the siege, twenty-eight years later. It was then given by him for safe keeping to his Venetian friend and transferred to Venice, whence the Greek himself, having become a resident of that place, took it back to Bruges and offered it to the canon, on condition of no further mention being made of the circumstances connected with it. The offer was gratefully accepted, and it remained till the priest’s death in his private collection, the Greek having declared that, what with having paid no price for it and its being a Scriptural subject, he preferred that it should in some way belong to the church rather than to the world. At the canon’s death it was sold to a dealer, who sold it again for a high price to an Italian collector, whose descendants, in “hard times,” parted with it to a rich Englishman. It happened, strangely enough, that it returned to the native city of its unlucky author by an intermarriage between the family of the English connoisseur and that of a passionate lover of art in Bruges, and this time it was transferred as a gift. It has been freely shown to any and every one who asked to see it, and the story attached to it made it one of the “sights” of the old city.

52.  Ps. ci.

53.  Ps. cxxi.

54.  Ps. cxxvi.

55.  Gabourd.

56.  Ps. xliii.

57.  Louis Veuillot.

58.  In the cathedral of Orleans.

59.  A few hours after tracing these lines Georgina learnt of the death of René. Of the five brothers, two had given their lives for France. Adrien and Gertrude rejoined each other in heaven.

60.  The Abbé Perreyve.

61.  “Could you but know how small a thing is life, and also by what sweetness death is followed!”

62.  More is naught to me; naught is aught to me more.

63.  After religion there is certainly no greater means of civilization than commerce; and commerce in the middle ages began with fairs, at which merchants employed the seductions of minstrelsy and music to draw numbers together, and thus be able to display and sell their goods.

64.  This plaintive Psalm was turned into most musical English verse by Donne, who makes it touchingly suggestive; and later, and better still, by Aubrey de Vere in his beautiful drama, Alexander the Great.

65.  A person who was present has feelingly described the deep effect produced on some of our poor wounded soldiers who had been brought to a church in Fredericksburg on their way North, after one of the battles in the Wilderness, when some person sat down at the organ and played “Home, sweet Home.”

66.  Blessed Peter Claver, Apostle of the Negroes, used to contrive that the sufferers in the hospitals at Cartagena, in South America, should be solaced with music; and for centuries it has been a custom at Santo Spirito, in Rome, to have the magnificent organ which is set up in the main ward play three times a week for the patients.

67.  The adventure of Ulysses and the melodious Sirens was a subject early seized upon by Christian art within the Discipline of the Secret to convey an idea of the cross (Ulysses attached to the mast of his vessel), the church (under the figure of a ship), and the seductions of the world (of the flesh particularly) in this voyage of life. See De Rossi's Bulletin of Christian Archæology for 1863, page 35, in which a curious monument bearing on this strange rapprochement is described.

68.  One of these old statues having come to light in good condition while the palace of Monte Citorio, designed by Pope Innocent XII. for the seat of the higher tribunals of law at Rome, was being built, it was appropriately placed on the landing at the head of the great stairway. The Italian Deputies have doubtless removed it, as too significant of divine vengeance.

69.  We find in this story the origin of the Phrygian cap which came to be a symbol of slavery and degradation among the Romans, by whom the Phrygians were considered a stupid people—whose rulers even had asinine qualities; and it never quite lost this character, but was used in France up to the time of the Revolution by galley-prisoners, and it is well known that an irruption of escaped convicts into Paris during the Reign of Terror, carrying one of their caps at the end of a pole and singing the Marseillaise, gave rise to the absurd custom of the liberty-pole and cap now so common.

70.  Dr. Burney, History of Music, vol. i. p. 436, has a note which bears too quaintly on this part of the subject not to be reproduced. He says: “Master Thomas Mace, author of a most delectable book called Musick’s Monument, would have been an excellent Pythagorean, for he maintains that the mystery of the Trinity is perspicuously made plain by the connection of the three harmonical concords 1, 3, 5; that music and divinity are nearly allied; and that the contemplation of concord and discord, of the nature of the octave and unison, will so strengthen a man’s faith 'that he shall never after degenerate into that gross subbeastiacal sin of Atheism.’”

71.  Shakspere, from an American Point of View: including an Inquiry as to his Religious Faith and his Knowledge of Law; with the Baconian Theory considered. By George Wilkes. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. 1877. 8vo, pp. ix. 471.

72.  Of whom 24,452 landed at New York.

73.  Of whom 13,314 landed at New York.

74.  What part not stated.

75.  Conf. de Notre Dame, tome i. conf. iv. at the end.

76.  Dante, Disc. Prelim., sec. v.

77.  Hist. Univ., ep. x. epilogue, tome ix. p. 478.

78.  Zacharias i. 10, 11.

79.  See Mr. Ticknor’s Life, vol. i. p. 436.

80.  We make here our acknowledgment of indebtedness to the series of articles in the Civiltà Cattolica entitled “I Destini di Roma,” which was begun Aug. 19, 1871, for a great part of what is to follow in this article.

81.  A dispensation may have been granted, but Hugo afterwards disavowed the marriage on the plea of the ecclesiastical impediment.

82.  Virginity and Maternity, long at variance, have made peace in the womb of the Virgin.

83.  Strew this sacred tomb with flowers. Here, near Virgil, lies Syncerus, his brother in the Muses.

84.  Farewell, adored Parthenope; sweet siren, farewell! Farewell, enchanted gardens of the Hesperides! Farewell, Mergellina, be mindful of me; accept these tears of regret from the master who has naught else to offer thee! Farewell, shade of my mother; my father’s shade, farewell!

85.  Let me be depicted in the immortal works of my glorious Sannazzaro, so worthy of the name of Sincerus, and I shall be exalted to the very stars.

86.  Audin.

87.  See essay of M. de l’Epinois.

88.  Frederick Leopold, Count Stolberg, since his return to the Catholic Church, 1800-1819. From hitherto unpublished family documents. By John Janssen. Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder & Co.

89.  The disease of the age.

90.  Servant; meaning here a second-rate chronicler.

91.  Adel, nobility, from edel, noble, our Saxon Ethel and Atheling. The word is here translated by aristocracy rather than nobility—the former being a word of wider signification, and embracing the class of untitled gentlemen (which of course Stolberg included), as well as that of strictly so-called noblemen.

92.  The italics are ours.

93.  See The Catholic World, July, 1877: “Marshal MacMahon and the French Revolutionists.”

94.  See Count von Arnim’s pamphlet, Pro Nihilo.

95.  If any of our readers wish authentic information on this point, they will find it abundantly in a book entitled Les Libéraux Peints par Eux-Mêmes. Par G. Lebrocquez. Paris: Victor Palmé, 1876.

96.  An Exposition of the Church, in view of recent Difficulties and Controversies and the present Need of the Age. London: Pickering. 1875. The Catholic World, April, 1875, p. 128.

97.  Letter of Pope Pius IX. to Mgr. Lachat, April 27, 1876.

98.  Cesar Cantù’s Univ. Hist., French translation, vol. vii. p. 418, vol. viii. p. 214.

99.  The term exarchate is here used in its restricted sense.

100.  “The Iron Age of Christendom,” The Catholic World, July, 1877.

101.  Eastlake, p. 5.

102.  History of the Gothic Revival, p. 6.

103.  History of the Gothic Revival, p. 71.

104.  Eastlake, page 88.

105.  Page 122.

106.  P. 145.

107.  An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, p. 12.

108.  History of the Gothic Revival, p. 153.

109.  A sol Morlaas was worth about 2.4 francs.

110.  Read the monarch’s usual menu in the memoirs of the Princess Palatine, who seems to look with a certain naïve admiration on the trencher prowess of her august kinsman: “The king devours with ease at a single meal four basins of different kinds of soup, a pheasant whole, a partridge, a dish of salad, two slices of ham, some mutton with gravy, a plate of pastry, and for dessert (O dura messorum ilia!) a quantity of hard-boiled eggs and fruits of every sort, the whole washed down with abundance of wines.” Here, at least, he might justly claim to be nec pluribus impar.

111.  It should be said here that the main incident on which this tale is founded is true, and that this sacrilegious disguise was in those days frequently assumed by French robbers the better to disarm suspicion. The fact is in itself a striking testimony to the implicit confidence which the clergy of France have always inspired, and deserved.

112.  These figures, as far as they relate to the institutions of the church in England, are probably not entirely correct. The Register from which we have quoted contains no tabular statement of these institutions, and we have been compelled to arrive at the totals by an enumeration of our own, the accuracy of which has been rendered doubtful by the confused manner in which the statistics of each diocese were given. However, our figures cannot be very greatly at fault.

113.  A very ingenious statement was published some time ago in one of our journals, setting forth what was believed to be “the constituent elements of the population of the United States in 1870.” This statement may be thus summarized: In 1784 the entire white population of the United States was 3,172,000 persons; of these 1,141,920 were of Irish birth, 751,280 were of other Celtic races, 841,800 were of Anglo-Saxon extraction, and 427,000 were of Dutch and Scandinavian birth. The total immigration to the United States from 1790 to 1870 was 8,199,000 persons, of whom 3,248,000 came from Ireland, 796,000 from Anglo-Saxon races; and 4,155,000 from all other sources. The total population in 1870 was 38,500,000; and this vast number was thus analyzed:

Joint product in 1870 of Irish colonial elements and subsequent Irish immigration, including that from Canada | 14,325,000
Joint product in 1870 of Anglo-Saxon colonial elements and subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration | 4,522,000
Joint product in 1870 of all other colonial elements and all subsequent immigration, including the negroes | 19,653,000
| —————
| 38,500,000

From these figures was drawn the somewhat startling deduction that the population of the United States in 1870 was composed of 24,000,000 of Celtic birth or origin (Irish, Scotch, French, Spanish, and Italian), and that of these 14,325,000 were of Irish birth or origin, 4,522,000 of Anglo-Saxon birth or origin, and that the remaining 9,978,000 were of neither Celtic nor Anglo-Saxon extraction. We are not in any way responsible for the accuracy of these figures; but that they express at least an approximation to the truth we do not doubt.

114.  “The European Exodus,” The Catholic World, July, 1877.

115.  During the year ended December 31, 1876, 157,440 immigrants arrived in the United States, of whom 102,960 were males and 54,480 females. Their ages were: under fifteen years, 26,608; fifteen and under forty, 111,764; forty years and upward, 19,068. The countries of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were: England, 21,051; Ireland, 16,506; Scotland, 4,383; Wales, 294; Isle of Man, 8; Guernsey, 1; Germany, 31,323; Austria, 6,047; Hungary, 475; Sweden, 5,204; Norway, 6,031; Denmark, 1,624; Netherlands, 709; Belgium, 454; Switzerland, 1,572; France, 6,723; Italy, 2,980; Malta, 2; Greece, 24; Spain, 597; Portugal, 816; Gibraltar, 16; Russia, 6,787; Poland, 854; Finland, 22; Turkey, 59; Arabia, 13; India, 22; Burmah, 9; China, 16,879; Asiatic Russia, 83; Japan, 6; Asia, not specified, 14; Egypt, 3; Liberia, 14; Algeria, 9; Africa, not specified, 17; Quebec, 15,545; Nova Scotia, 3,200; New Brunswick, 1,494; Prince Edward Island, 437; Newfoundland, 58; British Columbia, 484; Mexico, 532; Central America, 14; U. S. of Colombia, 20; Venezuela, 37; Guiana, 3; Brazil, 28; Argentine Republic, 6; Chili, 20; Peru, 11; South America, 10; Cuba, 880; Porto Rico, 17; Jamaica, 23; Bahamas, 559; Barbados, 32; other West India Islands, 43; Curaçoa, 14; Azores, etc., 960; Bermudas, 29; Iceland, 30; Mauritius, 3; Sandwich Islands, 20; Australasia, 1,261; East Indies, 16; and born at sea, 23.

During the month ended April 30, 1877, there arrived at the port of New York 7,353 immigrants, of whom 4,553 were males and 2,800 females.

The countries or islands of last permanent residence or citizenship of the immigrants were as follows:

England, 1,500; Scotland, 191; Wales, 46; Ireland, 1,364; Germany, 2,184; Austria, 286; Sweden, 415; Norway, 67; Denmark, 171; France, 241; Switzerland, 183; Spain, 58; Italy, 350; Holland, 60; Belgium, 26; Russia, 35; Poland, 34; Hungary, 37; Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, 25; Cuba, 19; Sicily, 18; India, 14; Mexico, 8; U. S. of Colombia, 4; Venezuela, Bermuda, and born at sea, 3 each; Greece, China, and Peru, 2 each; Turkey and Iceland, 1 each.

116.  Song of Solomon viii. 8, 9.

117.  The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes. London: George Bell & Sons. 1877.

118.  “The Angel in the House,” The Espousals, p. 61.

119.  The Espousals, p. 73.

120.  The Unknown Eros, pp. 63-65.

121.

“Even as the ilex, lopped by axes rude
Where, rich with dusky boughs, soars Algidus,
Through loss, through wounds receives
New gain, new life—yea, from the very steel.”

—Horat. Carm. iv. 4, Lord Lytton’s Trans.

122.

“Constant I praise her, but resign
With equal mind her gifts.
When, swift deserting me and mine,
Her ready wing she lifts,
And, wrapped up in my virtue, wait
Fair Poverty’s undower’d estate.”

—Horat. Carm. iii. 29.

The original of the line italicized Pitt modestly omitted.

123.

“Conscious of no wrong done, no crime to pale at remembered.”

—Horat. Ep. 1. i.

124.

“Rise from our ashes thou unknown, the predestined avenger.”

125.

“Was there no dead man’s place for you on that Sigeian plain?

Had ye no might to wend as slaves? Gave Troy so poor a flame

To burn her men...?”

—Æneid, vii. 294 seq., Morris’ Trans. p. 175.

126.  “And Rome reads Ennius while Virgil lives!”

127.  See Warton, Hist. E. P. sec. 1.

128.

“My piece you’ve been spouting! I ne’er should have known:

Next time, if you love me, do say it’s your own.”

—Mart. Epigr. i. 39.

129.  Carm. i. 12.

130.

“Nor word for word translate with painful care.”

—Horat. De Arte Poet., Francis’ Trans.

131.  Horat. Carm. i. 9. One of the best versions of this ode is that of Allan Ramsay, in the Scotch dialect.

132.  Gave is the general name of these mountain streams.

133.  V. Le Rédempteur et la Vie Future, dans les Civilisations Primitives. Par M. l’Abbé Ancessi. Paris: Leroux.

134.  The Catholic World, Nov., 1876, p. 213.

135.  Job viii. 2. Take, for instance, the description of the papyrus (Job viii. 11); the allusion to the rush-boats which are used on the Nile (ch. ix. 26), and to the hippopotamus, under the name of Behemoth, the Hebrew translation of the Egyptian pihémout, or river-horse, and which is described as “sleeping in the shadow of the lotus, in the covert of the reeds, and in the marshes;... compassed about by the willows of the brook” (Job xl. 16). Again, in ch. xxviii. 1-11, there may be an allusion to the mines worked by the Egyptians on Mt. Sinai, where also are numerous inscriptions left by that people on the rocks.

136.  Job iii. 13-15. In the papyri of Neb-Qed in the Louvre, in a gallery parallel to the great hall where the sarcophagus is placed, we see a coffer, a mirror, a collyrium-case, a pair of sandals, a cane, a vase for unguent, another for ablutions, a third for perfumes. The kings and queens took with them into the tomb also their jewels and richest garments, so sure were they of their resurrection. The ordinary dwellings of the Egyptians were small, built of wood or unbaked bricks, but their tombs, the “Eternal Abodes,” were of granite. Not a house, not a palace of ancient Egypt is now standing, but their tombs and sepulchral pyramids will probably last as long as our planet. The Hebrews, after the example of the Egyptians, appear to have had treasure buried with them. Josephus relates that Herod, being in want of money, made a nocturnal descent into the tomb of King David. He found there no money, but “aurea ornamenta multumque supellectilis prætiosæ, quæ omnia abstulit.”—Ant. Jud. lib. xiv. cap. vii. p. 724, Ed. Oxford.

137.  The faithful in the middle ages were frequently interred with their profession of faith, the Credo and Confiteor, or sometimes also the very text from the Book of Job which we are about to consider.

138.  Bunsen, Egypt’s Place in Universal History, vol. v. p. 110.

139.  Catalogues des MSS. Egyptiens, p. 51.

140.  Notice des Princip. Monum. Par M. Mariette.

141.  As this formula recalls the Lux perpetua liceat eis of the Catholic, so also we find on the tombs of Egypt the Requiescat in pace.

142.  An historical fact which exercised considerable influence on the religion of Egypt, and which helps to explain the multiplicity of the names given to the Deity, was that the whole of Egypt which Menes united under his sceptre was divided into nomes, each having its capital city; and each of these regions had its principal god, designated by a special name, but under these different names the same doctrine always remains of a divine unity. Thus by the side of the political there was also a kind of divine feudality. Tum reigned at Heliopolis, Osiris at Theni and later at Abydos, Ammon was over Thebes, and over Memphis Phtah. Each of these gods, identical in substance with the gods of the other nomes, easily allowed this fundamental identity. Ammon of Thebes gave hospitality in his temple to Min or Khem of Coptos, to Tum of Heliopolis, and to Phtah of Memphis, who on their part received Ammon with equal readiness into their own sanctuaries.

143.  “The habit of reuniting in one worship the different forms of the Divinity continually led to their fusion into one personality. Sevek, of Fayom, associated with Ra, became Sevek-Ra; Phtah was fused with Sokari under the name of Phtah-Sokari, and Osiris, being afterwards joined to these, made Phtah-Sokar-Osiris. All the divine types were reciprocally interpenetrated and absorbed into the supreme deity. The names and forms of God were indefinitely multiplied, but God, never.”—G. Maspero, Hist. Anc., ch. i. p. 29.

144.  See papyri in the museum of Boulag.

145.  Conf. Job xxxviii. 39-41.

146.  At Heliopolis the divinity appears under three forms: Atoum, the Inaccessible God; Choper, the Creator (the scarabæus God); and Ra, the Manifestation of God—the visible sun. It was not until later that we find a feminine divinity.

147.  We seem to have here a vague idea of the Holy Spirit, with his Seven Gifts, which are resplendent in the world of nature as well as in the world of grace.

148.  “And the spirit of God moved over the waters” (Gen. i. 2). “And God saw the light that it was good” (Gen. i. 4).

149.  Hymn to Ammon-Ra.

150.  This fact, which appeared inexplicable temerity on the part of Tertullian, is justified by what has of late years been discovered from original documents, which correct the classical misrepresentations of Egyptian theology.

151.  It is of these innumerable names that the Egyptians formed their long litanies, which are, as it were, the type of those of the Catholic Church. M. Ancessi mentions having heard at Cairo some wandering musicians chanting under his window an old legend in the simple rhythm in which the melodic phrase, incessantly repeated, has a close resemblance to the Catholic litanies.

The following is a comparatively small portion of the papyrus of Neb-Qed, where the departed, arrived in the hall of Supreme Justice, enumerates the faults which he has avoided, proclaiming, at the same time, some of the titles of Osiris:

“O thou who marchest, [who art] come forth from An! I am without fault.

“O consumer of shadows! come forth from the double retreat; I have not slain any man.

“O purity of the face! come forth from Rastou; I have committed no fraud on the measures of corn.

“O Two Lions! come forth from heaven; I have committed no fraud in the dwelling of justice.

“O Flame! come forth in turning backwards; I have told no lie.

“O Rampart! come forth from the mysterious abode; I have done nothing worthy of condemnation.

“O thou that vivifiest the flame! come forth from Hat-Phtah; my heart has had no evil intentions.

“O thou that turnest back the head (etc)!... I have been no detractor.

“O mystery of the leg! come forth from the night; I have not given way to anger.

“O light of the senses! come forth from the mysterious region; I have had no intercourse with a married woman.

“O blood! come forth from the chamber of the lotus; I have not been depraved.

“O thou who perpetually renewest that which is! issued from Khem; I have not been violent....

“O thou who hidest words!... I have not been prodigal of words.

“O Nofre-Toum in Ha-Phtah-Ka. I have not committed abomination.

“O thou who art unchanging! issued from Dadou; I have done no outrage against the gods.

“O thou who sendest forth the heavenly river! come forth out of Saïs; I have not made the slave to be maltreated by his master.

“O thou who vivifiest intelligent beings! I have not defrauded the loaves in the temple.

“O beautiful Neb-Ka! I have not profaned the meat of the gods.... I have not taken off the wrappings of the mummies.... I have not taken away milk from the mouth of the infant.

“O thou whose eyes are like a sword! I have committed no fraud in the abode of justice.”

Each title given to Osiris alludes to some mystery or teaching in the Egyptian theology.

152.  Music amongst the ancients was, far more than it is with us, an agreeable pastime. Socrates declares that philosophy is nothing but a sublime music: ὡς φιλοσοφίας μεν οὔσης μεγίστης μουσικῆς. In the third book of his Republic Plato goes much further, and affirms that the musician alone is truly a philosopher: ὄτι μόνος μουσικός ὁ φιλόσοφος. The chanted poems and traditions were for ages the depositaries of the laws, ritual and history of a nation.

153.  It has hitherto been difficult to discover the circumstances of the death of Osiris, or the primitive tradition of his sufferings, about which several legends have successively prevailed. The one given by Plutarch cannot be of great antiquity. In the Isle of Philæ, which, if we may so express it, had a special devotion to Osiris, the history of his life is given in a series of bas-reliefs in a small sanctuary on the west of the great temple, his death and resurrection forming the principal subjects.

There is a splendid passage relating to this god in Plutarch, ch. lxxix., Treatise on Osiris and Isis.

154.  Most nations of antiquity have known the traditional mystery of a god suffering, dying, and rising again. The worship of Adonis, long prevalent among the Syrian races, penetrated, under the name of Thammuz, even into the sanctuary of Israel (Ezek. viii. 14). Macrobius speaks of it also among the Assyrians, and of the lamentations of Proserpine; and the same belief is to be found in the long poems of India. It is also probable that the Moabite worship of Beelphegor was analogous to that of Osiris, Adonis, and Thammuz (see Numb. xxv. 2). Women are here, as in Egypt, at Byblos, and Athens, especially charged with his worship.

155.  In the papyrus Neb-Qed we find as follows: “Words, on entering the Hall of Double Justice to see the face of the gods, spoken by the Osiris Neb-Qed. He said: Hail to thee, great God, Lord of justice! I come into thy presence to behold thy beauties ... on the day of the giving account of words before the Good Being. I place myself in your presence, my lords; I bring you the truth.”

156.  Cf. Job xxix. 12-17, and xxxi. 16-22.

157.  M. Deveria has given a summary of this book, in his Notice des Manuscrits du Musée du Louvre.

158.  It is also a panther that Dante encounters at the entrance of the forest which is the commencement of the mysterious realm of Death. The Egyptian texts mention also the lion, of which the Catholic liturgy retains the remembrance in the Offertory for the Mass for the Dead: Domine Jesu Christe, libera animas defunctorum ... de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas Tartarus.

159.  Each hour of this night has a name, according to the mystery accomplished in it. The eighth hour is characterized by the defeat of the great serpent, cast into the abyss. One of his names is Apep—he who lifts the head, the proud one, represented by a serpent pierced with arrows.

160.  “In that day, fear ye before the sword; the vengeance of the sword is burning; that ye may know that there is a judgment” (Job xix. 29).

161.  Cat. of Egypt. MSS., Book of the Lower Hemisphere, p. 15.

162.  Osiris surrounded his children with so much solicitude that he is represented as even sending his attendants to visit their sepulchres. We find, for instance, the following in papyrus 3283 of the Louvre: “Said by Osiris to the gods of his suite: Go, then, and see this dwelling of the departed, that it may be thus constructed; hasten it for the moment of his heavenly birth with you; respect him; salute him, for he is honorable.” It is curious to find so early the dies natalis of our martyrologies.

163.  “How often would the Catholic faith have hopelessly foundered amidst the innovations which the heretics and sectaries of all times have attempted to foist upon her, had not an infallible authority watched over her and secured her integrity! I know nothing more convincing as to the necessity of this doctrinal magistracy than the incessant variation of the religions of antiquity. From a distance, and at first sight, they seem to have changed the least; whereas, on the contrary, their history has been nothing but a gradual and perpetual change, the laws of which it may not be impossible some time to discover.”—Le Rédempteur et la Vie Future.

164.  Chap. xii.

165.  V. Alcuin in Vita Willibrordi ap. Mabillon. Acta Sanctorum, Ord. S. Benedicti, t. iii. p. 567, Venetian edition.

166.  Wilwerwiltz is a contraction of Willibrordswiltz. As to Kleemskerk (Clement’s Church), we know that in Rome Willibrord received the name of Clement, as did Winfrid that of Boniface, under which he is venerated.

167.  This, at least, is the plausible conjecture of a scholar of the first rank—F. Alexander Wiltheim—in his fine book, Luxemburgum Romanum.

168.  Ibi usque hodie divinâ operante misericordia signa et sanitates ad sancti viri et sacerdotis reliquias fieri non cessant.—Alcuin O.C., iii. p. 571.

169.  Id. in Mabillon, iii. p. 575.

170.  Id. ib. iii. p. 572.

171.  Theofridus vita S. Willibrordi, c. 24 (sæc. xii.) This life of St. Willibrord is still unpublished; only a few fragments having appeared in Mon. Germ. Hist., t. xxiii. Script. The fact I mention is taken from M. Krier’s pamphlet, Die Springprocession, p. 33, from the MS. life.

172.  M. G. xxiii. Script., Catalogus abbatum Epternacensium primus.

173.  On the basilica of Echternach read a good notice by Prof. Namur inserted in t. xxii. of Annals of the Archæological Academy of Belgium; and another by M. Bock, in Rheinlands Baudenkmale des Mittelalters.

174.  According to the Echternachter Anzeiger of June 5, the number of dancers was 10,600; of other pilgrims 1,800. This does not include 188 musicians, 72 priests, 1,100 chanters, and various corporations. There were, moreover, 14,000 or 15,000 spectators, making a total of about 30,000 people. Comparing these numbers with those of former years, we shall see that the ancient ceremony increases in importance and éclat. This conclusion is correct, as M. Krier’s statistics show, Die Springprocession, p. 148. Since the beginning of this century the number of dancers had not before reached 10,000.

175.  I have given the two current opinions on the origin of the dancing procession. I share neither, and hope my different explanation clear by weight of proof.

176.  Krier, Dancing Procession, p. 55. This author wrote his work first briefly in French, then in German with more details. The latter is a serious and interesting work as regards the ceremony. It is also an edifying appeal from a Christian priest to his brethren.

177.  See The Catholic World for April.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.

Typographical errors were silently corrected.

Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.

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Table of Contents

The Catholic World, Vol. XXV

CONTENTS

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 145.—APRIL, 1877.

- NAGUALISM, VOODOOISM, AND OTHER FORMS OF CRYPTO-PAGANISM IN THE UNITED STATES.

- ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI.

- SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XI. A MORNING WITH ST. PETER.

- NATALIE NARISCHKIN.[8]

- UP THE NILE. III.

- LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER. FROM THE FRENCH.

- PRESBYTERIAN INFIDELITY IN SCOTLAND.

- HOW PERCY BINGHAM CAUGHT HIS TROUT.

- PROF. YOUMANS v. DR. W. M. TAYLOR ON EVOLUTION AND THE COPERNICAN THEORY.

- A WAIF FROM THE GREAT EXHIBITION, PHILADELPHIA, 1876

- ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND.

- II.

- TENNYSON AS A DRAMATIST.[20]

- ANGLICANISM IN 1877, AS AFFECTED BY THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

- THE ASHES OF THE PALMS.

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 146.—MAY, 1877.

- THE PRUSSIAN CHANCELLOR.[26]

- VERONICA A LEGEND OF MÉDOC

- DANTE’S PURGATORIO. CANTO FIFTEENTH. TRANSLATED BY T. W. PARSONS.

- SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XII. “TO BE, OR NOT TO BE.’

- “MAY-FLOWERS.”

- THE LEPERS OF TRACADIE.[28]

- TESTIMONY OF THE CATACOMBS TO SOME OF THE SACRAMENTS.

- TWO MAY CAROLS. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

- DARKNESS.

- LIGHT.

- LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER. FROM THE FRENCH.

- UP THE NILE. CONCLUSION.

- MAY.

- THE FRENCH CLERGY DURING THE LATE WAR IN FRANCE.

- DE VERE’S “MARY TUDOR.” PART II.

- NANETTE. A LEGEND OF THE DAYS OF LOUIS XV.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- IV.

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 147.—JUNE, 1877.

- THE PAPAL JUBILEE. SONNETS BY AUBREY DE VERE.

- I. THE GREAT PILGRIMAGE.

- II. THE JERUSALEM OF THE NEW LAW.

- III. THE CONFESSOR PONTIFF.

- POPE PIUS THE NINTH.[43]

- I.

- II.

- A VISION OF THE COLOSSEUM, A.D. 1873

- THE DOOM OF THE BELL.

- WILD ROSES BY THE SEA.

- DIVORCE, AND DIVORCE LAWS.

- FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES. A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

- SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XIII. “OUR LADY OF SNOW.”

- TO POPE PIUS IX. A JUBILEE OFFERING, JUNE 3, 1877.

- THE PRESENT STATE OF JUDAISM IN AMERICA.

- LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER. FROM THE FRENCH. CONCLUSION.

- PROSE AND POETRY OF ANCIENT MUSIC.

- THE ROMANCE OF A PORTMANTEAU.

- THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

- I. ST. DOROTHEA.

- II. ST. CECILIA.

- III. ST. AGNES.

- SHAKSPERE, FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW.[71]

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 148.—JULY, 1877.

- THE EUROPEAN EXODUS.

- ALBA’S DREAM. BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC. PART I.

- HIGHER.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- IV.

- V.

- VI.

- VII.

- VIII.

- IX.

- THE IRON AGE OF CHRISTENDOM.

- SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XIV. THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE. CONCLUSION.

- DOUBTS OF A CONTEMPORARY ON THE DESTINY OF MAN.

- SANNAZZARO.

- A BIRTH-DAY SONG. TWENTY-ONE.

- JANE’S VOCATION.

- COUNT FREDERICK LEOPOLD STOLBERG[88]

- FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES. A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

- THE TRUE IRISH REVOLUTION.

- THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

- IV. ST. CATHERINE.

- V. ST. MARGARET.

- VI. ST. BARBARA.

- MARSHAL MacMAHON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS.

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 149.—AUGUST, 1877.

- THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN FRANCE AND ITS BEARINGS.

- I.—QUESTION STATED.

- II.—TWO MOVEMENTS IN THE WORLD.

- III.—FIRST MOVEMENT.

- IV.—SECOND MOVEMENT.

- V.—THE LINES OF BATTLE.

- VI.—THE ISSUE OF THE BATTLE.

- VII.—ERRORS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

- VIII.—MISTAKE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.

- IX.—NEW UNITED CHRISTENDOM.

- X.—THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.

- XI.—THE CATHOLIC IDEA OF HEAVEN.

- XII.—FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF MODERN INFIDELS.

- XIII.—PROMISES, FALSE AND TRUE.

- XIV.—CONCLUSION.

- PHIL REDMOND OF BALLYMACREEDY.

- THE BEGINNING OF THE POPE’S TEMPORAL PRINCIPALITY.

- “THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.”

- ALBA’S DREAM. BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC. PART II.

- MAGDALEN AT THE TOMB.

- FROM THE MEDEA OF EURIPIDES. 'A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

- THE STORY OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL.

- ALONG THE FOOT OF THE PYRENEES.

- “CATHEDRAL WOODS,” MANCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

- JULIETTE: A NORMAN STORY.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- IV.

- TO AUBREY DE VERE. AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

- COLONIZATION AND FUTURE EMIGRATION.

- A THRUSH’S SONG.

- THE CONGREGATION OF CLUNY. TRANSLATED FROM SCHOEPPNER’S “CHARACTER-BILDER DER GESCHICHTE DES MITTELALTERS.”

- THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

- VII. ST. AGATHA.

- VIII. ST. LUCIA.

- IX. ST. URSULA.

- THE UNKNOWN EROS.[117]

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXV., No. 150.—SEPTEMBER, 1877.

- AMONG THE TRANSLATORS. VIRGIL AND HORACE.

- ALBA’S DREAM. BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC. PART III.

- ITALY. WRITTEN AFTER READING “POEMS OF PLACES—ITALY,” EDITED BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- IV.

- V.

- VI.

- VII.

- VIII.

- THE SEVEN VALLEYS OF THE LAVEDAN.

- JOB AND EGYPT.[133]

- MILLICENT.

- I.

- II.

- THE MADONNA-AND-CHILD A TEST-SYMBOL.

- COLLEGE EDUCATION.

- THE DANCING PROCESSION OF ECHTERNACH. FROM THE REVUE GENERALE.

- I.

- II.

- III.

- THE PAN-PRESBYTERIANS.

- TRANSLATION FROM HORACE. ODE 14, BOOK 2.

- NEW PUBLICATIONS.

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