on

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

ivHigher, 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

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 2sunny 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 3darkness 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 4with 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 5houses 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 6many 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 7their 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.

8Investigation 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 9had 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; 10Utah 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 11where 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.

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 16little 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 17some 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 18flames 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 19had 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 20portal; 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 21swarm 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.

22“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 23wise 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.

24The 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 25when 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.”

26Seeing 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 27from 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 28of 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.

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 29went 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:

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 30places 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 31expanding 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.

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 33puzzle 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 34been, 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 35her 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, 36in 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 37the 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 38the 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, 39so 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, 40and 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 41of 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 42from 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 43carefully 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 44and 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.”

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.

46We 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 47we 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 48force 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 49on. 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 50the 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 51oftener 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 52to 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 53therein. 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 54of 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, 55and 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 56refuse 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: 57“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.

58Margaret, 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! 59“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 60good 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:

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 61think 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.

62René 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 63passes, 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 64corbeille 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!

65September 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.

66We 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 67always 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 68by 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.

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 70at 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, 71and 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 72have 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 73“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 74reasons 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 75same 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 76to 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 77of 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 78which 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.”

79“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 80“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.”

81“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 82tone. 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.

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,” 84he 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 85an 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, 86who 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 87able 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 88so 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, 89nothing. 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.”

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, 91and 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 92of 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 93order 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 94with 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.”

95These 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 96that 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 97of 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 98uniformity 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 99mind 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 100before 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?

I.

II.

102III.

IV.

V.

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 104which 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 105to 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 106years 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 107found 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 108of 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 109danger, 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 110Catholics 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 111they 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 112and 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 113made 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 114last 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 115the 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 116compelled 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 117nations 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.

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,

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 119and 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:

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—

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

This was published in 1832, a 120period 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:

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:

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 121grinning 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

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 122up 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:

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:

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

“O civic muse,” cries Tennyson,

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.” 123This, for instance, is eminently civic:

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:

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

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:

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

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

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:

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

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, 124however, 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:

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 125is 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 126unity 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 127around 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:

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 128sure of his place beforehand, the king informs them:

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:

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:

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:

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 129money which he keeps concealed at the other’s service, to be asked for at his “most need,” in the following eloquent style:

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:

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:

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

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 130terrible 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:

“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:

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

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

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.

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:

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, 131to 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 132holding 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 133downwards 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]

134Upon 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 135courts 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 136faith”; 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, 137after 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 138ritual 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.”

139At 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.

140On 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 141way 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 142communion, 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.

The Master.

The Disciple.

The Master.

Ash Wednesday

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, 144and 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 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 146or 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, 147philosophy, 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 148career 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 149France, 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 150higher 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.” 151Second, 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 152himself 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 153with 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 154democratic 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 155ascendency 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 156William’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 157of 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 158taught, 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 159genius 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 160itself 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.

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:

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 162two 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

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 163we 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, 164says 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 165bares 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, 166and 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 167walls 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:

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 168of 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 169were 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:

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,

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 170at 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 171that 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.

DANTE’S PURGATORIO.
CANTO FIFTEENTH.
TRANSLATED BY T. W. PARSONS.

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 176do 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 177like 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 178will 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 179awhile 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 180good 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 181silhouettes; 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 182knowing 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 183is 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 184restored 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 185into 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 186would 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 187of 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 188many 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.”

189The 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.”

—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 192above 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. 193If 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 194this 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. 195The 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 196and 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 197no 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. 198I 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 199away 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, 200François 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.”

201After 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 202to 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 203at 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 204of 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 205of 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 206time 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 207and 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 208check 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 209Catacombs (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 210told 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 211peace 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, 212perhaps 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 213when 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 214this; 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.

215But 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 216Christ, “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.

DARKNESS.

LIGHT.

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.

219November 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 220underneath 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 221pages 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 222Christian, 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 223wish 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:

224And this cry of the soul:

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; 225reassure 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 226souls, 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.

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 227one 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!

228Everywhere 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, 229the 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 230so 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, 231and 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?

232From 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 233apartments 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.

234René 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 235white 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.]

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 237girdle, 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 238me 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 239the 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 240small 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 241temple 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 242proposed 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 243that 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 244our 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 245row, 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 246strained 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.

B. D. H.

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 248whom 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. 249On 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 250walls 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.”

251M. 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. 252Towards 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 253French 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.”

254“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, 255a 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 256of 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 257ornament 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, 258comforting, 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 259in 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 260shall 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 261afterwards 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.

While he is soliloquizing Gardiner enters with Elizabeth. Fakenham has requested the latter’s presence.

Elizabeth answers:

But she is mistaken; for presently the queen, on recognizing the “veiled mourner,” says tenderly:

The weeping revives Mary’s energy, but that energy takes a shape in which we see the old despair combined with a new fanaticism.

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.

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:

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”:

And again:

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.”

The way Gardiner sneers at Fakenham’s candidate, and then introduces his own, affords us an opportunity 263of 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:

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

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, 264follows 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:

Mary’s reply is of surprising force and beauty:

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

but for her clemency.

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:

Here Bridges, Lieutenant of the Tower, enters with a sealed warrant.

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.”

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:

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:

Gardiner may well wince as he replies:

Yet poor Queen Mary fondly looks forward to the coming of her affianced as (to borrow Byron’s exquisite metaphor)

Neither does she betray any foreboding in consequence of the storm that ushers in her wedding-day. The bridegroom, on the contrary, peevishly exclaims:

266He does not see in this conjugal union

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:

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

In the next scene, when the cardinal has congratulated the queen on the return of England to the faith—telling the nation:

and Mary has joyfully responded:

Philip interjects:

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:

Gardiner urges Pole to retire; but the hero answers:

And again he warns the monster:

—“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 267new 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:

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

springs up, and exclaims wildly:

And again, though his Majesty enters “moodily,” she can actually greet him thus:

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:

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.

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 268relief 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.

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!”

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:

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.

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:

Then Reginald teaches her what it is

She offers him the archbishopric of Canterbury. He answers musingly:

Then he accepts, and presently the queen observes:

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 270really 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:

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—

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 271of 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 272soon 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.

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 274a 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, 275is 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 276to 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 277epistle—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.”

278With 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 279loves—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 280annals 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 281works 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! 282For 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 283kindness. 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.

284In 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 285See (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 286is 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 287on 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,

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 288expect 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 PAPAL JUBILEE.
SONNETS BY AUBREY DE VERE.

I.
THE GREAT PILGRIMAGE.

III.
THE CONFESSOR PONTIFF.

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 292his 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 293the 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 294memorable 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 295courage 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. 296As 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 297their 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 298Christ, 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, 299the 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 300of 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 301opinion 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. 302He 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 303French 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 304time 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 305(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 306and 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 307the 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 308the 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 309with 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 310are 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 311the 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, 312therefore, 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 313are 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 314carried 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. 315In 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 316give 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, 317where 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.”

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.

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 325his 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 326chickens 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 327and 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 328picture 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 329model; 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 330to 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 331be 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 332age, 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 333interval 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; 334one 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.

335“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 336intended 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 337mass 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 338blow 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.

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. 341Once 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 342that 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—

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 343the 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 344transgressor of the sort is as futile as the

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 345for their perpetuity. They forget that—

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:

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:

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 346it 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 347the 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 348church 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 349cemented 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 350consequence 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 351in 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.

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, 352and 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 353its 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.

ANTISTROPHE.

EPODE.

“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 355forward, 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.

356“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 357said; “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 358many 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 359chapel, 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——

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 360they 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.

361“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 362in 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.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

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, 366subject 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 367which 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 368they 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 369or 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, 370and 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:

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 371Jews 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 372to 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 373fulfilment 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 374nor 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 375any 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 376destroy 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.”

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 378France! 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?

379August 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 380was 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 381our 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 382the 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 383in 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 384troops; 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 385France? 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 386awaken 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 387requisitions, 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, 388repentant 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 389Veuillot 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. 390O 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 391him, 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!

392January 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]

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 393other. 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 394to 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, 395and 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.

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

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

But Christian writers believe that Adam, the first man, being endowed 396by 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:

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 397of 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

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:

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:

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

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 399to 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 400Apollo 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:

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 401the 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:

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:

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 402length 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 403the 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 404seek 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 405Square 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.

406“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! 407This 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 408she 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 409although 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 410number 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, 411but 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. 412To 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 413her 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 414her 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 415Howth 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—

“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 416en 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, 417Dawkins?” 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 418coffee-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 419ledge 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 420devoutly 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.

III.
ST. AGNES.

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 423as 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 424by 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:

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 425Catholic 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:

not half as charmingly as Longfellow describes Evangeline as most beautiful

Then, a few lines lower down, Lady Capulet, in the same scene, says:

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:

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 426England—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:

and Buckingham:

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:

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 428despises 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.”

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 430such 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

or

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 431of 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 432disdainful 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 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 434is 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:

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 43510,874 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.

FROM AMERICA.

436FROM CONTINENTAL EUROPE.

FROM THE ORIENT.

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, 437Norway, 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:

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.

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, 438North 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: